Praetonia

Praetonia

Flag of Praetonia
Motto: Pro Rege et Patria.
Map of Praetonia Map of Segmentum Praetonialis
Region	Haven
Capital	Praeton
Official Language(s)	Latin and English (UK)
Leader	Imperator Sarius Publius [Head of State]; Prime Minister Lucius Agrippa [Head of Government]
Population	3.1 billion +
Currency	Praefeli
NS Sunset XML

Introduction

The Democratic Imperium of Praetonia is a Liberal-Imperialist Constitutional Monarchy with Socialist economic leanings. Her capital, Praeton, is the centre of an Empire that streches from Manium to Roach-Busters, and commands one of the most powerful navies in the world. The Imperium is based on values of liberty and democracy, but this does not exclude the possibility of bringing other, less well governed peoples into the light of Praetonian civilisation. In fact, the doctrine of Liberal-Imperialism that is currently so popular strongly encourages it. The people of Praetonia are hardworking, well educated and politically active. They are heavily taxed, but water, food, housing, education, transport and healthcare is provided for free by the state, along with an excellent pension based on how long the person has been in work. The Imperium is a land of supposed contradictions brought together in politics to forge an outstanding nation and Empire which is currently only rising in power and influence.

History

In the following chapter the history of the Democratic Imperium will be revealed, and the reasons that things are as they are now shall be explained.

The Isolationist Period

Before Praetonia emerged onto the world scene she was an Isolationist nation with a population of over 3,000,000,000. She was ruled over by a series of Fuedal Monarchs who controlled the land via a series of regional governors. The Fuedal Kings, who became more and more isolated on the Praeton Peninsular, largely lost direct control over the provinces beyond the mountains and Praetonia fractured into a multitude of Princedoms and city states, with their rulers taking titles that still upheld the myth of unity. Praetonia faced invasion several times in her pre-emergance history, and each time the invaders were crushed by massive, unwieldy armies of peasant spearmen led by noblemen who could be euqitated to Knights.

Praetonia was largely non-progressive, and whilst there was no threat from overseas the individual Princedoms fought each other, with the main "Kingdom" on the Praeton Plateatu doing little other than issuing the occassional edict. This situation of a fragmented state eventually led to its own downfall. Traders from abroad eached the Praetonian continent, and unrestricted by the central government stance of death to foreigners, some of the smaller Princedoms allowed trading posts to be set up. From these trading posts ideas were spread of revolution and political change aboard, notably in Britain (English Civil War) and France (French Revolution).

The Fuedal serfs that made up the majority of the Praetonian population became increasingly disgruntled with their lives which had no social safety net, and revolved largely around farming to make enough food to eat after the Fuedal landlords take most to sell other Princedoms. Several of the Feudal Princes realised that if the people were stirred to anger, there would be little the central government in Praeton could do to stop. They, therefore, led a rebellion of peasants which swept through most of the outlying Praetonian provinces, burning crops, picking up supporters and causing the Feudal Princes to flee inwards through the mountains to the Praeton Peninsula.

Within years, the Praetonian "Revolutionary Army" had managed to destroy almost all of Praetonia's agricultural capability and force millions of displaced citizens to flee to the Praeton Plateau, where agriculture was still managing very well and was infact benefitting from the increase workforce. It was the original intention of the Fuedal Revolutionaries leading the peasants merely to take over the outer portions of Praetonia and there slowly introduce a "tyranny by majority" disguised as a working democracy / republic. The demand from the proletariat first to take the whole of Praetonia and complete their victory for liberty and secondly to secure working agricultural land before thier supplies ran out forced the Fuedal Princes to change their stance. The exact date is uncertain, but in the Winter months of a year around 1652 the Army of the People began the long march through the only pass through the Praesummitas Mountain range.

The Battle of Praesummitas Pass

The Feudal Royalist Army was also assembled, and knew of their plans through various sources, including several spies placed quite high up in the Revolutionary chain of command. At the summit of the Lupina Valley, half way through the mountain pass, snow fell upon the two armies. Facing each other across the wide valley, the two armies stayed in place through the entirety of the first day.

During the night, the Revolutionary Army decided to make its first move. Eight Companies of Musketeers advanced through the darkened valley, but one of the loaded muskets went off and the flash and bang of the powder was detected by the opposing side. A detatchment of cavalry was despatched to cut down the Revolutionaries, and a small skirmish took place between several cavalrymen and a single Company of musketeers. The action was indecisive, and both sides beat a hasty retreat in the confusion, taking only light casualties.

On the second day the two armies assembled again, and faced off across the valley once more. The Feudal King, who had left strict instructions to have the army maintain position unless the Revolutionaries themselves attempted to cross the valley, was taken ill during the night, and his Son Prince Kimari of Rustica took command. According to contemporary sources, he sat atop his horse and stared, motionless, out across the valley for several hours. Then, for reasons that have not since been adequately explained, he suddenly ordered the entire army forwards.

The Royalists advanced in good order with spears and pikes to the fore and the King's Own pikemen on the flanks and in the centre. A thin line of heavy lancers advanced to the fore of the rest of the army, designed to hit the enemy lines with a single devastating charge to break the enemy formation and then simply to trust in their armour to keep them relatively safe for the rest of the battle. Any man of the line who survived the battle would receive a massive monetary reward, promotion and honours. On the flanks, lighter cavalry again with lances but also with vicious curved sabres prepared to run around the flanks once holes were created and cut down enemy troops from behind. Filling the gaps in the line between the elite troops stood line upon line of peasant spearmen equipped with only a spear, helmet and small shield.

The Revolutionary Army immediately had the musketeers set to the fore, a line 3 men deep and strecthing from one side of the valley to the other. Behind, a large mass of pikemen stood at ease to allow the musketeers space to run back through. As the Royalist Line approached, the Revolutionary musketeers gave fire. The line of knights was largely killed and the first two lines of the spear sections also took heavy casualties. The Royalist Army as a whole, caught by suprise by the new technology and utterly unprepared for such devastating fire at range, wavered, and the Prince of Rustica himself rode out in front of the line to steady his men.

The line quickly reformed and advanced in the face of further volleys. The Revolutionary musketeers, however, having made their devastating volley reverted to standard "fire at will" tactics generally employed by Praetonian missile troops of the age. Although taking a heavy toll on the enemy, the peasant casualties were nothing of major concern and the scattered fire was not effective at destroying cohesion and morale as volley fire had been.

According to contemporary sources, the time was about 5pm when the two lines of pikes met. The musketeers had withdrawn through the ranks of pikemen and made ready to fire into the advancing royalist army should the Revolutionary pikemen break. In the very center and on the flanks, where the Revolutionaries met the elite royalist troops, the battle went badly for the Revolutionaries. Between the clumped strong points, however, the peasant spearmen which faced the Revolutionaries were held back and then worn down by the overall better trained and equipped Revolutionary pikemen, who carried longer weapons capable of striking from beyond the range of the Royalist peasantry.

On the extreme flanks, the Royalists had not placed any troops at all to allow their light cavalry, which so far had not been harmed throughout the battle, to charge the enemy flanks. The Revolutionaries seized their oppurtunity to beat the elite pikemen on the flanks and lapped around the sides of the Royalist line, causing heavy casualties. The Royalist cavalry also seized their chance, charging the flanks of the Revolutionary pikemen in turn and causing horrendous casualties. The Revolutionary pikemen broke, were cut down and in the style of the time, the Royalist cavalry decided it had done its bit and proceeded to move to the rear of the Revolutionary line and pillage the baggage train. The Royalists, however, clearly underestimated the quality of the Revolutionary musket line, which in the Royalist army was made up of peasants and irregular troops. The Royalist line attempted to put the Revolutionaries to flight with a feigned cavalry charge, but were met with a disciplined musket volley at close range which annihilated most of the cavalry and broke what was left.

In face of a battle which was fast becoming a simple war of attrition between the opposing pike forces the Revolutionary reserve cavalry, which had never up to this point engaged in combat in either this or any of the numerous smaller battles of the civil war, was thrown into the battle in a desperate attempt to force a resolution. Exploting the rapidly closing gaps at the extreme flanks, the light cavalry took the heaviest casualties proportional to their unit size of any other unit in the battle. The Royalist line, however, was rolled up over the next 2 hours and the battle slowly degenerated into several isolated fights between Company sized units, mostly involving completely surrounded and horribly outnumbered.

By 11pm the Royalist army had been slaughtered, along with its leader, Prince Kimari. The King and his bodyguard, observing the battle from the opposite ridge, slipped away at around 9pm. The King was to become increasingly paranoid, spurred on by ordinary illness, and many of the impressive defensive works he built around Praeton still exist today. The Battle of Praesummitas Pass was, however, clearly the beginning of the end for the Fuedal Dynasty.

The Fall of Praeton

Within the next 8 months, the farmland surrounding Praeton was stripped bare by the rampaging revolutionary army. The peasant farmers were withdrawn within the mighty walls of Praeton itself, and the Monarchist troops prepared for a lengthy seige. In the event, the revolutionary army did not seige Praeton for any great length of time.

The revolutionary army moved up in early July, and spent the next three weeks setting up a vast array of heavy guns in seige trenches. According to merticulous records kept by the Royalist side, the Revolutionary guns began firing at 12:12am on the 7th of July. The bombardment lasted until 5:06pm on the 15th of that month, during which time a thin strip of the Westerly Wall was destroyed.

As soon as the guns stopped, 12,000 Grenadiers of the Revolutionary Army advanced, byt this time all of them red-coated and armed with muskets, looking remarkably similar to British forces storming French fortress-cities in the Peninsular War, only with a much more formidable foe. Substantial Royalist bastions still jutted out of the 100m high walls on either side of the breach, and they subjected the advancing troops to whithering enfilade canister fire. It is estimated that around 4,000 men, 10% of the total casualties of the Revolutionary Army that day, were killed in the first five minutes of the battle and solely to cannon fire.

When the remaining men, a mere ~6,000 when accounting for those who were wounded and incapacitated, came within 80m of the walls, the Royalist musketry began, killing many more. The Royalist forces managed to fire 4 volleys before the first Revolutionaries reached the breach, and again inflicted considerable casualties.

Having reached the breach, the ~4,200 surviving troops entered the city, and many more horrific casualties were inflicted by the primitive barbed wire and gun-powder mines that the Royalists had layed in the breach as it was being blasted out. At the same time, another wave of 12,000 men was sent forwards, this time with scaling ladders and acting mainly as a diversion for the initial party. In this, these succeeded, drawing most of the Royalist fire, although the primary wave continued to be subjected to enfilade fire from the wall on both sides of the breach.

At 5:28pm a message was dispatched to the high command residing in the Obsidian Tower at the centre of the city that Revolutionary troops had entered the city. At 5:35pm scaling ladders were pushed up against the wall where they hooked onto the ramparts high above. At 5:42pm the first soldiers clambered onto the ramparts from their steel ladders and were immediately bayonetted back over the wall. The ladders had not been displaced, however, and there was now a steady stream of men moving up the ladders and forcing their way into the defences, despite enfilading fire which ravaged the column of men moving up the ladder and for the most part unable to fire back.

At 5:55 the Royalists managed to drag the guns in their bastions to fire upon the ladders, the closest of which were flayed clean of troops and some broken in several places despite their solid steel construction.

In the city, the Revolutionaries, who had been forced into the winding narrow streets of the city, were being funnelled into heavily defended Royalist positions, equipped with cannon and a sizeable barricade protecting troops. Sharpshooters lined the buildings both behind and in front of these strong points, ready to rain fire down on the enemy.

At the same time, another wave was dispatched the prop up the advance, news of the progress of which the Revolutionary general had not yet heard. At 6pm, the Royalists on the walls had been pushed back to the armoured bunker-like doors of their bastions, and Grenadiers began to throw their bombs down onto the thatched rooves of the peasant houses propped up against the inside of the wall. The advance quickly came to a halt, however, when it became apparent that the bastions had cannon loaded with canister and grapeshot pointing through armoured hatched out onto the ramparts as well as out towards the revolutionary army, the bulk of which the targetless cannons had been temporarily bombarding with roundshot, before moving onto the second breech-storming wave.

At 6:06pm, only an hour after the offensive began, the Revolutionaries had made excellent progress but their advance was beginning to bog-down in the face of hefty resistance from the growing Royalist forces both from other sections of the wall and from inside the city. In addition, the citizens of Praeton were rapidly being press-ganged into the army, armed with muskets and sent off to the front. At 6:15 this news reached the Revolutionary General who is alleged to have replied "By God, this city shall be the death of me."

A third wave was dispatched, meeting up with the previous two inside the city to find them bloody and ragged, ripped apart by illusiory snipers in the buildings and on the roof-tops; smashed by cannon-fire and massed musketry to their fronts. Where they broke through to threaten the cannon, they were quickly pushed back over the rapidly repaired barricades and shot bloody.

At 6:55, almost two hours since the beginning of the seige, news reached the General that his men had begun to rip furniture out of the surrounding houses and build a barricade of their own and were now refusing to advance. In some quarters there were rumours of the men shooting officers who were too insistant for them to advance and throwing their bodies into the rapidly emerging "No Man's Land" to make it appear as though they had been shot by the enemy.

At 7:00, with the scaling parties at last beginning to break into the bastions, employing grenades to kill the gun crews facing them through the all-too-wide gun mantlets, the General dispatched his cavalry - all 6,000 of them - into the city. The remaining cannon and troops in the bastions smashed the beautifully arrayed ranks of cavalry to shreds, but the surviving mass continued into the city, smashing through their own forces' barricades and leading the now enthused troops to storm those of the enemy.

For a few precious minutes, it appeared as though the Revolutionaries would win. The Royalist barricades were smashed and Revolutionary troops pulled through. The irregular troops pressed into Royalist service began to melt away, discarding their muskets before melding with the rest of the general populace. As soon as the news reached the Obsidian Tower, however, the King ordered his lancers dispatched to the front. The Revolutionary cavalry, armed only with sabres and riding blown horses, were anihilated. By the time the battle was 2 hours old, it looked as though the Revolutionaries would be pushed back, and the war would be won.

It was not won. The remaining Revolutionary infantry took up positions in the houses once again and, having overrun the Royalist positions, settled in. These men were some of the first in the world to understand attrition first hand, having advanced only a few metres in exchange for thousands of casualties. The lancers, realising they could not defeat musket-armed infantry above street level, withdrew.

By 7:20pm news reached the Revolutionary General and, with beckoning, he ordered powder, oil and matches moved into the city, and at 7:30 he ordered Praeton razed to the ground.

The inferno raged all night, during which time the Praetonian breech storming parties withdrew to the safety of their own lines, and during which time the scaling parties were pushed from their positions on the walls by a mass of Royalist soldiers seeking sanctuary from the flames, who proceeded to push the steel scalling ladders back down into the field below. The scaling parties had not spiked the enemy guns, and so with the battle five hours old both armies were back where they started with the loss of thousands of men.

During the night vast swathes of the mostly wooden Praeton was burnt to the ground and, although little consilation to the battered army, the Revolutionary artillery succeeded in knocking most of the Royalist guns from their carriages due to the Royalist forces' failure to withdraw them from their firing positions back into their armoured gun houses.

At 5am, still 3 hours before the Praeton dawn, the sky was bathed in an unearthly twilight as buildings still burnt and smouldered throughout the city. Royalist attempts to suppress the fire were largely unsuccessful, but the Royalist army was as yet unharmed, with most of its troops taking refuge along the walls or in the stone centre of the city. At 5am, the Revolutionaries advanced once more. Two parties - a scaling and a storming party - were dispatched at the same time and, with all lights extinguished amongst the Revolutionary troops who were protected from the light of the fires by the high walls of the city, all 24,000 men entered the city unnoticed and not troubled by cannon or volley fire.

It would not last. Musketshots sounded from the walls as the half-asleep defenders were massacred where they stood. The bastions were stormed with relative ease aswell, although the defenders there, awoken by the gunshots from outside, at least put up a fight. The Revolutionaries began building up a barricade along the walls both sides of the breach using the defenders' own stores which had been used so effectively against the Revolutionaries earlier in the battle. In the city itself, the Revolutinaries faced none of the resistance they had experienced the night before. All Royalist troops, it seemed, had withdrawn into the deep stone centre of the city which would itself prove a veritable fortress.

At 5:42 volley fire was encountered for the first time. Smoke seemed to blossom from every crevice of every floor of every towering marble construct as the first of the Revolutionary troops emerged from the tangle of burnt wood and discarded possessions. The civilians had perceptively moved to other parts of the city where there were no breaches in the walls.

The first and second ranks of Revolutionary redcoats fell, but they were replaced by more behind them. Cannon were dispatched from the army outside, which was protected from ravages of elevated defender fire by the scaling party which was staunchly resisting fierce counterattacks along the wall.

In the centre of the city, men on both sides were falling by the second. As cannon began to come up and the first to unlimber smashed canister into the defender-lined walls and rooves, the defender fire stopped. Troops began to withdraw into the buildings, and a cavalry party left the courtyard of the Obsidian Tower, white flags raised above their heads.

The Fuedal King of Praetonia surrendered to Revolutionary forces, despite having enough infantry and cavalry to continue the fight and bloody the enemy. In return, he was allowed 48 hours to leave the city with his household. He was not persued, and his decendants have served as Kings and Imperators of Praetonia at Parliament's behest.

Today the breach in the wall is preserved as a gateway through which, when the Monarchy was first restored in the 18th Century, the Monarch was forced to enter Praeton despite its impractical narrow streets as a clear symbol that the days of Absolute Monarchy are over.

Economy

See also

• Haven
• Phalanx MBT

External links

• The Imperial Praetonian Navy
• Imperial Praetonian Shipyards