Man is Born Free and Everywhere he is in Chains – 1778-1796
The decades before and after the year 1800 were defined by a single idea of incredible power – liberty. The liberty of the aristocratic to his ancient privileges, the liberty to have a say in the running of the state through constitutional government, liberty of trade, thought and religion, the liberty of the individual from outside oppression, the liberty of the downtrodden from outmoded social stratification, liberty from foreign and distant rule. With stunning speed and incredible scope, this idea would surge through every inhabited continent in the world, touching Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Confucian civilisation to one extent or another, and permanently reshape the world.
While ideas of liberty had existed as long as complex human society, the origins of modern liberalism can be traced to two very different points of origin – a Catholic Imperium in the heart of Europe, and an Islamic colonial society on the edge of the world. In the years after its final defeat in the Wars of the Italian Succession, the Holy Roman Empire was an unhappy and unstable place. Ravaged by invading armies, heavily indebted and politically humiliated – all her classes were in a riotous mood. The Empire had been a pioneer of absolutist monarchy, yet the foundations of the regimes were cut away by the need to service its massive war debts – accumulated over the course of half a century of warfare against Poland. The Emperor called the Imperial Diet three times between 1752 and 1756 in an effort to enact new measures of taxation, but on each occasion was dismissed the Parliament after failing to come to an agreement. On the third occasion, the Diet refused to be dissolved – declaring itself to be the sovereign embodiment of the German nation. With the streets of Vienna swirling with unrest, the Emperor feared an insurrection and, remarkably, agreed to relinquish much of his power to the Diet. In doing so, he became one of Europe’s very first genuinely constitutional monarchs. The assembly was elected on a very narrow franchise limited to the ennobled and the wealthy, at most one or two percent of the adult male population, yet nonetheless represented the grandest experiment in a constitutional government bound to the popular will the west had ever seen. As the Diet ensured that the Empire became an oasis if personal freedom, exiles and intellectuals from across the continent, who spread their liberal ideals far and wide.
On the other side of the world, the collapse of the Pasai Republic paved the way for Australian independence. While Pasai had been an oligarchic regime, dominated by mercantile and aristocratic elites, Australia was very different. Like many frontier societies, it was imbued with an egalitarian spirit that was lacking in the metropole. Importantly, the nation’s backbone was made up of landholding Malay settler-farmers rather than landless peasants and urban poor, and it lacked the sort of fabulously wealthy elites found in the East Indian islands. The Australians formed the largest mass democracy in history – with all Malay property holding men being entitled to vote. Naturally, many were left out of the new democratic regime – women for one, the poor and landless Malays and most prominently the Aborigines – who had been turned into slaves by their Asian conquerors.
The Australian Republic was an inspiration in the other great Islamic colonial society – on the eastern seaboard of North America. New Andalucia was by far the richest and most developed colonial society in the Americas. While the Abbadids’ Iberian motherland had stagnated through the late 17th and 18th centuries, New Andalucia had grown immeasurably. With a population swollen by Arab refugees fleeing the chaos that enveloped the Middle East after the collapse of the Caliphate and a bountiful economy, much of the colony was even richer than the metropole by the 1770s. Resenting the expensive taxes they were forced to pay to far off Cordoba, the Americans began to petition the Sultan for some degree of self-government. After a group of Americans attacked a government customs office in the city of New Almeria on the Potomac River in 1774, imperial troops entered the city and massacred hundreds of its inhabitants. This action provoked a civil war, with the colonists, who dubbed themselves the Mujahideen, fought against loyalists and the Sultan’s armies until they finally withdrew from the North American mainland in 1779 – allowing for the creation of the Republic of New Andalucia. Like Australia, it adopted a striking democratic constitution, which similarly shut out women, the poor, the indigenous and a vast population of black African slaves from a share of the spoils.
Like so many of the Ancien Regimes of Europe, the empire Radoslav II inherited from his grandfather in 1778 was wrought by internal tensions and bubbling anger. The peasantry were restless, chafing under the oppression of serfdom, disturbed by the government’s cosmopolitan ideals and threatened with poverty and even starvation by a dip in agricultural productivity in an empire whose population had never been higher following a climatic shift in the final quarter of the 18th century. The traditional elites in the nobility, urban burghers and clergy were had all seen political power flow away from them in the face of the absolutist monarchy, while also being clobbered by an ever heavier burden of taxation to fund the very centralising state that had robbed them of their influence.
Although lacking the prestige and gravitas of his grandfather, the new Tsar would be just as stubborn and implacable in the face of calls to reform the absolutist state. For much of his reign, stubbornness coupled with the iron loyalty of the military and an admirable effort in rebuilding the decimated civil administration would be enough to hold things in place. Yet frustrations continued to seep through Polish society.
Political unhappiness was not limited to Poland’s own territory, many within its recently acquired vassal Kingdom in Pannonia were disappointed at just how far their existing reality differed from the promises of independence and liberation that Kiev had offered them during the Wars of the Italian Succession. Furthermore, the area’s native Ashkenazi Jewish population – one of the largest in Christian Europe – had acquired a privileged social position through Polish patronage, stoking further resentment among the Christian majority. In 1779 the Duke of Poznoy Theodosios Aram rose the flag of rebellion – seeking to drive out the Polish-aligned ruling elite, put the Jews back in their place and assert Pannonia’s independence. These Danubian patriots found mass popular support – quickly overrunning much of the Pannonian plain, and seizing the capital at Pest. Kiev was forced to deploy the imperial army to harshly crush the revolt and restore its allies’ authority within the Kingdom.
Like many governments facing dissent at home, the Tsar hoped to bolster his position with a short, victorious war. This he found through conflict the Serbs in 1790. The Serbian Kingdom had recovered strongly from its loss of Pannonia in the Wars of the Italian Succession, conquering eastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia and establishing a close alliance with the Emirate of Baku, the Middle East’s last independent Muslim state. After the Poles invaded Baku, the foolhardy Serbian government went to war to protect their ally despite the overwhelming odds against them. Unable to coax the other powers of Europe into assisting them, the Serbs were left to fight alone and were easily swatted away by the mighty Polish imperial army. Within two years the Serbs were beaten and agreed to a peace in which they surrendered some border territories to Pannonia, granted independence to an Armenian state around the shores of Lake Van and allowed Poland to annex the entirety of Baku – giving Kiev its first substantial holdings in the South Caucuses.
In the Far East, the largest and bloodiest revolutions of the era broke out in 1789. Beginning as one of a long line of massive Chinese peasant insurrections, crippling the powerful Central Chinese warlord state of Xi, the masses found intellectual leadership in the burgeoning urban middle classes – who directed them against their landlords, foreign merchants and government officials. The Xi Revolutionaries would proceed to upturn the social order with a level of revolutionary violence rarely seen in world history. A trail of blood ran through the villages of the countryside as peasants lynched the landlords and tax collectors and divided their properties among themselves. In the cities, urban mobs were directed by educated revolutionary demagogues who directed their energies against the old elite, and political rivals. The Grand Republic created in Central China faced attack from most of its neighbours, drawing it into more than a decade of warfare that repelled the invaders and seized much of the territory of the Wu, firmly establishing the Xi as China’s premier power.
Inevitably, the wave of unrest washing across the world would arrive in Poland, although in one of the most unexpected of places. In the two centuries since its colonisation, Siberia had been a land of freedom and independence in which Kiev’s writ more theoretical than actual. So long as a steady tribute of furs crossed the Urals, the locals were largely left to manage their own affairs. This had started to change from the middle of the 18th century as Radoslav the Great divided the land into provinces and appointed governors, with teams of civil servants, to assert greater imperial control. When the governor of Irkutsk intervened in a land dispute in 1794 – supporting the claim of a clan of Mongols indigenous to the Lake Baikal region to a rich hunting ground over Russian settlers – fury swept the Polish Far East. A band of Russian Siberians entered Irkutsk, lynched the governor and denounced the Zvenislava Tsardom.
These Siberian rebels instead announced their support for the Legitimist claimant to the imperial throne – Nikolai Lukovic, the great grandson of Vasilko II, who had the blood of Poland’s Tsars of old running through his veins. Lukovic was in many ways all things to all men – he would restore Judaeo-Slavic power, bring an end to the tyranny of absolutist rule, grant autonomy to the provinces and local elites and improve the lot of the common man. While the pretender himself remained in exile in Cordoba, where he lived among a Sephardic community, his devotees in deepest Asia would slowly expand their influence out from Irkutsk, critically weakening imperial authority in Siberia by 1796. While revolt beyond the Urals was little real threat to the regime, the Legitimists could count on substantial and growing sympathy in the empire’s European heartlands – where many were crying out for an opportunity to challenge the autocracy. With tensions approaching boiling point, Radoslav II suffered a heartattack and died aged 62 in 1796, handing over power to his 39 year old son Yaroslav VI.
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