the deep moans round with many voices

This is for rthstewart and animus_wyrmis, who asked, respectively, about my Calormene pantheon and my Calormene world-building in general.

So, what are your thoughts on Calormen, Liz? In brief, they are an attempt to elaborate on what Lewis wrote in his books while mitigating his racism, ethnocentrism, and religious... um... blinders, shall we say. Extra-canonical material, such as the Narnian timeline that Lewis wrote at some point, is incorporated or ignored depending on whether Lewis's ideas make sense or sound to me as if he was talking through his hat. Also, please bear in mind that I am not Christian, that I read the books in complete ignorance of Lewis's Christian allegory for most of my childhood, and that I have always fervently disliked the theological aspects of The Last Battle. With that basic framework in place, I will now sketch the history and culture of Calormen.

-----

The History of Calormen, in 2,900 words and 2,500 years

Sometime around the year 100 (counting from the creation of the Narnian world), the people who would become Calormenes fell through a gate between worlds. They did not come directly from Earth -- they had lived in at least one other world before reaching the Narnian world -- but I believe their distant ancestors came from the region between Iran and the Punjab, sometime after the Mongol invasions. They settled the broad, rich valley of the Shirush River on the southern edge of the great desert, pushing south and west as their population grew. Initially they organized themselves into a series of independent city-states, which fought over territory, over slights against their princes' honor, and over theological issues such as which god should take precedence in heaven. When one city defeated another, the victors imposed a tribute payment on the losers but made no effort to create a proper unified empire.

In the year 204, the losers of a civil war in Archenland fled south across the desert and ran into the feuding Calormene city-states. The Archenlanders had been fighting over the inclusion of Talking Beasts and other non-human beings as citizens, since a significant percentage of the people who followed King Col I over the pass to found Anvard did so because they were uncomfortable living in Narnia. The exclusionists lost, but the aftermath of the conflict led to the majority of Archenlandish beasts and beings moving back to Narnia or west into the Wild, which is why Archenland is a country of humans despite being Narnia's sister land. The Calormenes easily drove the Archenlandish exiles away from their lands, pushing them upriver into the then-unpopulated west, where the northerners settled and became uneasy neighbors with the westernmost Calormene city-states.

Matters continued in this pattern for roughly seventy-five years, until Jadis arrived in Calormen from the eastern islands. *evil grin* You see, I do not believe Tash is Aslan's opposite or his devil or whatever terminology you want to use. No. Tash is his own deity, and if he's ugly and vengeful and deceitful, what of it? Lots of gods are. (Heck, Aslan is downright inconsistent himself -- which is one reason I spent my childhood convinced he was a pagan lion god, and often wish I could go back to not knowing about Lewis's Christianity, because that way of thinking removes SO MANY ethical conundrums from the series.) In any case, if Aslan has a devil? It is Jadis. He left many things unfinished when he faffed off after singing the world into form, and I am 100% sure Jadis is the one who filled in a lot of the details. The magical islands in the Eastern Ocean? The giants of Harfang? Very much up her alley.

So Jadis arrived in Calormen, attempting to stir up trouble and find out the secrets of Aslan's power, and was promptly mistaken for an avatar of the goddess Acharith. She talked the ruler of Tashbaan into changing his strategy for dealing with defeated foes -- properly conquering them instead of just beating them and going home. That ruler, Idrath Tarkaan, took the title of Tisroc and the epithet "World-Conqueror," and set about building the empire of Calormen.

Meanwhile, Jadis was appalled to learn that the Calormene gods regarded her as a marvelously useful accident and were only too happy to have their people learn from her, provided she left as soon as Idrath got properly started on his path. (Acharith was annoyed that she suffered a name change from the mistaken identity bit, but deities often have many names; she took it in stride.) Jadis faffed off to the Western Wild and busied herself twisting Talking Beasts and beings to her will (in some cases reshaping them entirely, which is the origin of werewolves and hags, among other things), leaving the Calormenes to their own devices again. They promptly conquered the descendants of the Archenlandish exiles, but while Idrath was fairly successful at creating common cause among ethnic Calormenes, the new western provinces retained a greater sense of separate identity, which led to centuries of resistance and rebellion.

Around the year 300, Idrath led his armies into the highlands that formed the northern edge of the great desert. This was easy to do, since at the time only Archenland was a proper nation; the other areas were scarcely populated at all. Idrath moved his army across the desert piece by piece, building forts and transplanting civilians as he went, which is how Telmar was initially settled. He was about to invade Archenland when he had an accident with his horse on a bridge and died. Two of his seven sons both claimed his throne and Calormen descended into civil war for over ten years. This was later known as the First Brothers' War, and is remembered as the nadir of Calormene history.

The western provinces used the collapse of central government to rebel and declare independence. The people who had been forcibly settled in Telmar were largely driven back south across the desert by retaliatory Archenlandish raids, adding to the chaos. The two princes' armies frequently destroyed farms and storehouses in their enemies' territory, hoping to starve each other into submission. Plague broke out in the wake of overcrowding as refugees piled into the few cities still standing. Meanwhile, the people of the eastern islands began to raid the coast instead of trading, and the people of Kutu, who had stumbled into the delta of the Nandrapragaan River around the same time the Calormenes stumbled into the Shirush river valley, began their own territorial expansion. In short, the two decades after Idrath World-Conqueror's death were nearly the end of Calormen as a political entity.

His third son, Ziranool Tisroc, eventually defeated his brothers and began rebuilding the core of the empire -- first beating back the coastal raiders, then reconquering the west, and finally fighting a series of inconclusive wars against the Kutulese that resulted in a semi-official boundary midway between the Shirush and the Nandrapragaan that both sides frequently attempted to shift. Ziranool Tisroc's reign was a time of great bitterness and soul-searching among the Calormenes, as they recovered from the crash of their initial boundless ambitions and optimism and reassessed their place in the world. This is the beginning of Calormen's tradition of monumental architecture, and also the time in which the high priests and priestesses of Tashbaan finally won nominal authority over the entire empire and began to codify the rituals and myths of their pantheon.

Then there is a long period in which I do not have much interest. Suffice it to say that between the year 350 and the year 800 Calormen slowly expanded to the borders it had during Narnia's Golden Age: namely, the Tisroc held the coast from the Shirush south to the Nandrapragaan, excepting only the Nandrapragaan delta itself. That is about 450 miles as the crow flies, roughly the distance from Boston to Washington, D.C. (Rishti Tisroc is not kidding when he says Narnia is comparatively tiny!) The great desert formed the northern border, which creeps south as one heads inland from the coast, following the curve of the Shirush. A tribe of semi-nomadic people lived in the western desert and controlled access to the great oasis, but they were tributaries of Calormen rather than direct subjects.

To the west, Calormen reached the hill country and its long, narrow lakes (they stretch east-west, like fingers reaching to the distant sea). These restive provinces were originally settled by Archenlandish refugees and were now home to a defiantly Calormene-but-not culture that named Azaroth king of heaven instead of Tash, and clung to a musical and poetic tradition halfway between that of Tashbaan and that of the north. The Tisroc's writ petered out before the pine-covered mountains that serve as foothills to the wall around the world. The mountains were inhabited by a mix of fiercely independent peoples, refugees who fell into the world through myriad gates and formed tiny nations in a harsh but beautiful land. The Calormenes found it more cost-effective to leave the mountain principalities under their own rule but bring them into Calormen's economic sphere via the fur trade and the purchase of metal and jewels from western mines.

The inland south was a land of rich, rolling plains between the marshy headwaters of the Nandrapragaan and the rougher hills of western Calormen. Successive Tisrocs had attempted to conquer the muddle of small nations that checkered the region, but those peoples did not anathemize magic the way that the Calormenes and the Kutulese did; they used spells and curses spectacularly in the first few campaigns against them, and then relied on legends of ill-luck to deter further attacks. As Kutu expanded its territory south of the Nandrapragaan, the southern countries also began to play the two empires against each other, allying with Kutu when Calormen's threat loomed large, and Calormen when Kutu's demands became too great.

After the year 800, Calormen ceased to expand territorially. The Kutulese fiercely resisted any incursions beyond the Nadapragaan and began to push the border back north; magic and superstition made the plains countries unpalatable to attack; difficult terrain hindered any attempt to expand into the western mountains; and the hill countries north of the great desert had been settled by people who had adopted Archenland's historic wariness and antagonism toward Calormen, which made anything more than lightning raids through the far western hills (or via the Winding Arrow into Archenland itself) impractical. This territorial stagnation was somewhat countered by economic expansion, as Calormen stretched trading networks into the surrounding lands and the eastern islands, and as its merchants and bankers developed a concept halfway between a classic partnership and a joint-stock company, but by and large Calormen turned inward. This fed another period of artistic and architectural flourishing, but also led to increased internal turmoil as soldiers were released from the northern and western armies and found themselves unfamiliar with rural and urban civilian life. Those who returned to the west formed the nuclei of the great rebellions -- the west had always been restive, but now it began to explode every generation.

Additionally, the years of conquest had seen relatively orderly transitions between one Tisroc and the next -- each king named his heir and was able to give his son experience in war by keeping him on the front lines, give him experience in civilian administration by making him govern the provinces in which he was stationed, and prevent him from launching coups or falling to assassins by keeping him well away from the morass of court politics in Tashbaan. Without the constant wars of expansion, that system fell apart. The chaos of the First Brothers' War returned, with princes battling each other for their inheritance and sometimes killing their fathers as well. The armies of various portions of the empire often supported different candidates for the throne, thus exacerbating regional tensions that each Tisroc in his turn spent his reign attempting to defuse only to have his would-be successors inflame them again.

The constant civil wars led to increased external pressure, as Kutu reclaimed more and more of its ancient lands north of the Nandrapragaan and the plains and mountain principalities grew bolder and began their own wars of conquest, gradually combining into fewer and stronger countries and nibbling at the edges of Calormen's border provinces. Additionally, in the year 900 the northern country of Narnia was conquered by a sorceress who plunged the land into magical winter, thus blocking its borders, destroying its trade, and sending waves of refugees fleeing into the surrounding lands. That destabilization on Calormen's northern borders is all that prevented Archenland and its neighbors from joining the general assault on the empire... and even Archenland got in near the end, by way of commissioning privateers to attack Calormene shipping under the guise of reclaiming children illegally stolen to feed the slave trade.

(Note: Archenland would tell that story very differently. The truth is somewhere between the two accounts.)

Around the year 990, Prince Rishti, the fourth son of Zarman Tisroc, began fighting two of his brothers and one of his cousins for the throne. He was aided by the counsel of Axartha of Irtaanir, and by the political maneuvering of Malindra Tarkheena, his second wife. In the year 1000 -- the same year as the end of the Winter in Narnia -- he captured Tashbaan and took the throne. Over the next fourteen years, his armies slowly and inexorably crushed the remnants of rebellion in all corners of the empire, until he had achieved peace. (No one else since the year 800 had managed this; there was always at least one conflict flaring at any given moment.) But Rishti Tisroc's court was still plagued by the same symptoms as his predecessors' had been, and his eldest son and presumed heir, Prince Rabadash, began to plan an assassination. This was stymied by a machination of the gods that eventually led to Rabadash trapped by a curse that forbade him to go more than ten miles from the center of Tashbaan.

Despite that handicap, Rabadash Tisroc duly inherited the throne and managed to play various factions against each other without letting them erupt into outright war. Because he did not dare let any of his relatives or generals gain renown at his expense, he was forced to deal with his subjects' complaints rather than simply suppressing them. His reign laid the foundations of Calormen's federal civil service and marked the end of army regiments composed of soldiers from a single province; henceforth the army was arranged on a more national basis. Because of these efforts he was officially titled Rabadash Peacemaker, though he is more commonly remembered by the unofficial epithet "the Ridiculous," in reference to the animal transformation that signaled the start of his curse. Calormenes tend to look down on him for that affliction and his seeming cowardice despite the many achievements of his forty-year reign.

Rabadash's second son, Ilmagin the Wise, took the united empire, sound economy, and well-organized army his father bequeathed him and began the long struggle that, after two centuries of intermittent war, crushed the Kutulese capitol of Angyoko and brought the Nandrapragaan delta under Calormene control, thus extending the Tisroc's writ all the way to the southern wall around the world. The remnants of Kutu split into three fragments: Yin in the inland jungles of the deep south, Ijezu on the upper Nandrapragaan, and Gekutu in the far southwestern plains. The new queen of Gekutu promptly made a marriage alliance with the largest of the plains countries, creating the double kingdom of Gekutu-Marya.

Gekutu-Marya took on Kutu's historical role as the chief rival of Calormen, though its landlocked nature was a notable handicap in terms of trade and wealth. The new Calormene provinces south of the Nandrapragaan proved as restive as the northwestern provinces once had; smuggling and rebellion ran rampant for generations. Also, in this period Archenland underwent something of a renaissance under the influence of King Ram the Great and his immediate successors, nearly monopolizing coastal shipping for several generations, while the eastern islands turned cold to Calormen in the wake of Angyoko's destruction and the resulting loss of their property and trade.

There follows another long period I am not much interested in. In the year 1998, a contingent of Telmarines invaded and conquered Narnia; they were fleeing both a famine and religious persecution. Narnia again turned inward and cut off external contact save for minor overland trade with Archenland and the coastal settlements that bordered Ettinsmoor. Meanwhile, Calormen had spent centuries engaged in a pattern of alternating war and peace with Gekutu-Marya and a slow trade war with Archenland that ended with Archenland's oceanic shipping industry nearly broken and the Calormene slave trade extended through the eastern islands, legally or otherwise.

Narnia remained self-isolated for another three centuries while Calormen again lapsed into a period of stagnation and internal disarray. Angyoko and the Nandrapragaan provinces were lost to Ijezu; Archenland regained control over northern coastal shipping; Gekutu-Marya swallowed many mountain principalities, thus taking their resources away from Calormen; and the eastern islanders began to buy controlling shares in many Calormene merchant firms and take control of the slave trade. When Narnia reemerged under Caspian X in the early 2300s, this pattern began to break as the islanders and northern hill countries worried once again about their northern borders and their shipping concerns.

The Calormene incursion into Narnia in the year 2555 was part of a pattern of resurgence that mirrored the resurgence under Ilmagin the Wise and his successors. The idea was to use Narnia as a way to encircle Archenland, Telmar, and the other hill countries, thus winning control of their resources without the expense and bloodshed that a war of conquest would require. The northern focus was a result of the strength of Ijezu and Gekutu-Marya in the south and west. Narnia fell more quickly than foreseen, as a result of weak government and a doomsday cult that the Calormene army attempted to coopt and turn to their own ends.

And then Aslan ended the world. Sometimes, you just can't win.

-----

I will talk about religion and culture in the next post, which will be written when my brain feels less like cottage cheese. *wry*

-----

ETA: Thoughts on Calormen, Part 2! (LJ crosspost)