you got fucking kings, Torygg, Helseth, living gods of the Tribunal… under an “Emperor”? who puts some garrisons around but does… what exactly?
theres an “East Empire Trading Company”? whats that do?
it kinda seems like a holy roman empire, kinda seems like a regular roman empire. they’ve got knights, dukes, but a Legion…
yes i know the answer is technically “these jackoffs just made it up as they went” and don’t care a lick about political theory but this is exactly the kind of excercise that makes fun speculative historiography
In Morrowind they’re en explicitly expansionist empire teetering on the edge of their decline. Tiber Septim’s force of personality and military strategy got him conquest of everything but Morrowind and Summerset, and activating Numidium got him those. From there it was just the material interests of those who make up the machinery of Imperial government carrying it along, and then the Oblivion Crisis damaged things enough that new political changes were possible. That’s when shit started falling apart at the seams. By the time we’re in Skyrim the “Tamrielic” empire has been reduced to three provinces, one of which it’s about to lose to civil war.
As fictional empires go you could write worse.
(i havent played morrowind so take away my gamer card now) but i thought the empire was relatively healthy in the early installments? whats decline-y about it during morrowind?
The events of Arena have made it so that everyone doubts that the Emperor’s heirs are legitimate, and at one point your crackhead handler gets recalled to Cyrodiil to help out with the situation. There’s grumblings of secession/rebellion as always, but nothing ever happens. Mostly though it’s got the vibe of an empire that’s run out of territory to conquer. The colossal failure of the efforts to invade Akavir set back the Empire a ways, and by the time Uriel and his heirs are dead in Oblivion it’s just the final nail in the coffin. Later on the Thalmor rises up and absorbs Valenwood and Elsweyr, Hammerfell breaks away, Morrowind just basically stops answering the phone after the Red Year, and the Black Marsh expanded into Morrowind as vengeance for centuries of being enslaved.
The empire doesn’t exist yet before and during the events of Morrowind. At the time the game takes place, the Tiber Wars are ongoing, as Tiber Septim is still unifying the human realms before trying to face Black Marsh, Elsweyr, or the Mer kingdoms.
:agony-shivering: damn you got me real confused but UESP got my back
Tiber septim 2E828–>3E38
Morrowind is in 3e 427.
im pretty sure Tiber Septim is in like… Redguard? and maybe Daggerfall? but Morrowind he’s won and theres an imperial garrison on Vvardenfell
The Political Economy of The Empire of Tamriel (7h45m)
I think the more important question is how come there are no rocket powered horseless carts driven by mages using fire magic.
The Elder Scrolls canonically had space travel (mananaughts) exploring the aetherium. Elder Scrolls isn’t a story about how people work through class struggle to achieve higher levels of technology or magic, it’s a story about decay and things getting worse and worse.
Mage’s GUILD. we know how actual guilds stifled economic progress, its not hard to stretch that to magick ones.
also most the industrial applications of magicka make no sense for a feudal economy. literally no purpose for a really fast carriage except the army & civil service.
commerce? you mean the thing those flea-ridden catfolk do?
In Oblivion, necromancy was still legal in Cyrodiil. However, it was also somehow legal for the Mages Guild to uh, root out and kill necromancers in the countryside because uhh, I don’t know because nobody would find out or care either way I guess
heres a lil secret. Necromancy was only illegal becuase undead laborers completely bankrupted liege lords who had to feed & maintain their laborers. so they got with the religious freaks and violently suppressed them
:stuff: i do not have a real opinion on undead labor idk if theyre sentient but if they are :john-brown:
That’s a good question, actually. Usually the answer to “why is this dumb and incoherent” with Elder Scrolls stuff is “the games are executive-meddled into bland mush and while the lore is better, that doesn’t make it in except as in-game books,” but here I think the lore is also pretty lacking.
It’s basically just mimicking the aesthetics of historical empires without really understanding what’s happening or why people don’t like those things, it’s a deeply liberal rendition of imperial systems as just “sort of like a big state that’s bringing people and places together with trade and stuff and the only opposition is from established power figures who want more for themselves” which is almost entirely backwards from the reality that an empire is a system of extraction and hegemony that favors some regions over others, while local power figures are comprador fucks reaping the benefits of this arrangement themselves while the populace suffers. And where the Empire is shown as “also bad” it’s usually something watered down or downright sheepish, because the games try to avoid anything too harsh in general and stick to “fantasy bad” instead of “actual bad.” ESO does that last bit much better than any mainline game, but is still overall pretty toothless.
roman empire looking organization that is unaccountably the abolitionist faction in morrowind :scared:
although im way more generous in that i think the toothlessness of critique makes it a bit more like Chinese dynasties (complete with multiple iterations). like noone denies the Ming were an empire but they weren’t terribly extractionist because there wasn’t much periphery to exploit. besides the Orismer and Reachmen i cant think of imperial periphery, though argonia was peripheral to morrowind and morrowind to skyrim in skyrim’s timeframe.
its very strange that the setting has 1 political center so any kind of compelling political threat has to come from within it? and undermine the concept of a united state. actual China had the steppe peoples to destabilize them, and was like a fourth, at best, of the Old World
roman empire looking organization that is unaccountably the abolitionist faction in morrowind
It does have the tenuous justification in that the Empire’s civic cult was literally founded by an abolitionist revolutionary movement, although in practical terms one would imagine that would have been weakened into tolerating first serfdom, then indentured servitude, and then full-fledged chattel slavery again. Though thinking about it, I believe it’s gone back and forth on the issue over the millennia so it’s probably more just the abolitionist bloc being on top at that time.
although im way more generous in that i think the toothlessness of critique makes it a bit more like Chinese dynasties (complete with multiple iterations). like noone denies the Ming were an empire but they weren’t terribly extractionist because there wasn’t much periphery to exploit.
That sort of fits the closest, doesn’t it? A distant central bureaucratic hierarchy on top of otherwise autarkic regions that have only a tenuous connection to it apart from taxes and the provision of soldiers. That’s more or less how I’ve seen Chinese marxists describe the state of things under the various imperial Chinese dynasties, at least (also literally where I first saw the word “autarky” ever was in a description of historical China from Chinese marxists).
besides the Orismer and Reachmen i cant think of imperial periphery
Black Marsh, Elweyr, and Valenwood fit the bill the best, I think. I get a definite sense that they’re being subjugated and extracted from, although Valenwood is arguable there.
its very strange that the setting has 1 political center
I mean there are regional capitals and the regions themselves are pretty autarkic and more or less autonomous. The Imperial City is important for geographical and symbolic reasons, but in practical terms is distant and unimportant.
yeah the lore is consistent on the Empire being antislavery but its a mismatch when that’s paired with real-world roman iconography-aesthetics. and empire is not antithetical to chattel slavery, they can figure out other ways of exploitation
im not certain i can endorse your peripheries though, like argonians and khajiit got enslaved by dunmer but that was illegal so its difficult to fold into the continent-wide economy? not that the word of law renders reality impotent but we dont know the extent of slavery in other province at that time. be very easy for Elswyr or Black Marsh to be perifery if imperials/other empire aligned people were running plantations there but we dont know if they actually were
skyrim is a very poor reflection of a medieval economy, because it was made by people with no understanding of non-capitalist systems
but housecarls being non-compensated is, in a vacuum, completely real. Housecarls were not paid. you have your ‘Thegns’ being entrusted with some piece of land of the realm, and they’ve got a group of warriors in their household who benefit solely from war-loot and the gifts from the thegns and jarls. again, its not capitalist so feeding these guys and letting them keep what they loot, plus an odd gold bracelet and sword is all it took.
get a food/sleep mod with companion functionality for all the immersion required in skyrim’s housecarl system. they autonomously take weapons they want so it counts
ESO does that last bit much better than any mainline game, but is still overall pretty toothless.
In Elder Scrolls Online, the Aldmeri Dominion’s outright genocide attempt in Shadowfen where (CW: genocide details)
spoiler
they poison and attempt to mass murder an entire generation of Argonians before they hatch and attempt to psychically poison the Hist network to obliterate the entire species ever after
made me go :sus-soviet: at each and every Dominion apologist in the game that tended to have arguments like “well Argonians also fought back too sometimes all sides equally right and wrong” and/or “Kate Beckingsale is :awooga: so that’s the best faction.”
Any time altmer show up in a storyline there’s like a 90% chance the story is going to be “the dipshit altmer are extremely racist and stupid and are probably trying to cause the apocalypse for explicitly the reasons that they’re both very racist and also just the biggest dipshits in existence.”
The Thalmor, at best, tend to be Florida brained. They violently despise outsiders and are nostalgic for a mythical past that may have never quite happened the way they imagined it, and will kill and destroy whatever they please to try to crawl back to it.
doesn’t the empire barely function anyway? I’m pretty sure the provinces do whatever the fuck they want in practice, don’t they even tend to war with each other when they’re theoretically under the same wider empire?
Maybe something like the spring and autumn period (I think)?
this is precisely the contradiction. how we got an “empire” that seems to have a negligible effect on its subjects that is also omnipresent in the setting?
imagine if jesus was a warlord who conquered europe and called himself the roman emperor. so that even after he was long gone and the empire collapsed there was still a lot of inertia in favor of his empire
its basically that.
so the empire is the caliphate :thonk:
wait unironically this makes the most sense. the emperors are religious authorities. and even deified (this is not okay in islam fyi), but most the continent shares this religion, theres a feudal state attached… Imperial City is Baghdad, the Septims are the Umayyad and the Medes are Abbassid or Fatimid :galaxy-brain:
Also, he acquired a giant walking brass golem whose skin is made from a dead race that can “NOPE” things into non-existence. Why the tribunal agreed to give it up, I dunno.
exactly, doesn’t make sense that the imperial authority should be able to accomplish much in any province outside cyrodiil (except maybe skyrim since they willingly joined at the start)
Skyrim only joined the Septims, the other iterations it was conquered.
also this is a humans-indigenous-to-tamriel thread so dont bring that Septim propaganda in here abt atmorans bringing in all the men.