Frank Empire

The Frank Empire is a great human power of the central continent, its capital at **Parisiorum** and its emblem the white lily — a deliberate mirror to the black lily of its hereditary enemy, the Kingdom of Bretagne. On paper it is one of the proudest realms of mankind, ranking itself an empire; in practice it is a hollow giant. For three generations its emperors have died young, and real power has rested with the dowager empress, **Catherine de Medici**, who rules as perpetual regent. Married in from a ducal house of the Kingdom of Sardinia, where city autonomy runs deep, she is privately warm toward republicanism, and under her tolerant hand royalists and republicans long coexisted even with the Batavia Republic on the doorstep.

**Seeds of civil war (ch 166-167).** That balance shatters with the young emperor **Henri III**. Healthy where his brothers died of illness, eighteen and burning with ambition, he resents that the state still revolves around his mother after three generations of regency. Worse, before taking the Frank throne he briefly wore the crown of Polithunia, where the nobility kept their king a mere figurehead — an experience that left him loathing republicanism. Returning to claim his inheritance, he finds republican sentiment already open within Frank itself. With no power base of his own, the manikin-emperor rises against his own mother. As the Liberation Alliance informants tell it to Dantalion, the civil war was preordained.

**The Lily War — Bretagne invited in (ch 197).** Rather than be bled white by the dowager faction, Henri III commits an act of madness no Demon Lord could rival: he secretly invites the realm's deadly enemy, Queen **Henrietta of Bretagne**, to invade. A forged imperial decree commands every Frank garrison to open the road and supply the invaders as 'allies', and three armies stand by like blind men while Bretagne marches on Parisiorum, disarming fortresses without a single battle. When dowager-faction commanders — generals Montmorency and Saint-André, Duke Guise — finally muster some fifteen thousand men, Henrietta crushes them with barely nine thousand: five thousand horse, nine hundred knights, her cavalry massed at the centre. Five thousand Franks fall, six thousand are taken; Bretagne loses about four hundred. The emperor then unleashes the royalists of Parisiorum to butcher the republicans of the capital.

**Dantalion's puppet war.** All of this is meat for Dantalion, who walks Frank soil under a noble guise, threading the Liberation Alliance and the dowager's faction alike. Frank is not a stupid nation — behind their bowed heads the surviving nobles spin schemes, betraying their own strongest allies (the High Priest of Lorraine, the Duke of Mayenne) to buy Henrietta's favour. Dantalion has no patriotism for Frank; he simply will not let the Crescent Alliance Army devour it and so tip the balance between man and demon. He keeps the Frank army alive only to feed it, later, into a single great war of mutual exhaustion.

**The pursuit and the reckoning (ch 300).** When the campaign turns, **Laura de Farnese** hounds the Bretagne army the length of the Frank north — past the Sequana river, the bridge of Pont de l'Arche, the fortress-city of Rouen — refusing pitched battle, harrying with three hundred wyverns and **Vassago**'s spirit kings until Henrietta and her guest-general **Agares** are cornered at the port of **Le Havre**. Bretagne, once called 'the army that knew no defeat', is beaten without ever fighting the open battle it longed for; Daisy is sent to take the wounded Agares' head with the Sword of Bael.

**Reform into a regent empire (ch 416).** In the aftermath the realm is remade as the **Frank Regent Empire**. By the **Gavre Treaty**, Frank and Bretagne swear never to invade one another; the southern Sardinian rebels bow to the central government; and power passes from the imperial line to a **regent** — Prosecutor-General Bercy — elected for life by every city council and noble house, each peer holding an equal vote. It is, in all but name, a noble republic that lets the towns share in rule. Through manipulation, treaty and bloodshed, Frank survives — reshaped into exactly the kind of state Dantalion wished it to be.

For three generations the throne of Frank has outlived its emperors, leaving the dowager empress Catherine de Medici to rule as regent. Sardinian-born and quietly fond of republicanism, she let royalists and republicans coexist even beside the Batavia Republic. Her son Henri III — healthy, eighteen, scarred by his powerless stint as king of Polithunia — loathes that the realm still turns around his mother and despises the republican tide. With no power base of his own, the manikin-emperor rises against her, and the white-lily empire splits into royalist and republican camps on the eve of civil war.

Rather than be ground down, Henri III invites the hereditary enemy — Henrietta of Bretagne — into the realm by forged decree, and her cavalry shatters a Frank army nearly twice her size before the royalists butcher the capital's republicans. Dantalion threads the whole war from the shadows, refusing to let the Crescent Alliance Army swallow Frank; Laura's pursuit then drives Bretagne to ruin at Le Havre. In the settlement the realm is remade as the Frank Regent Empire under the Gavre Treaty — a life-term regent, Prosecutor-General Bercy, elected by city councils and nobles: a noble republic in all but name, with Bretagne left dominant.