Edifice

The Edifice or the Edificial period was a Vasarean civilization of the 12th to 16th centuries guided mainly by Instructionist influences. In the language of its own time, it referred to the great scientific project that Instructionist and Instructionist-influenced philosophies sought to establish, and saw the most sophisticated culture as naturally deriving from or in accordance with.

Origins
The Edifice originates in eastern Vasarea, in the landscape created after the Rudic dynasties. At the highpoint of the Reign of Urges the Wedric Houses of this previously peripheral and disorganized region embraced the Jangearean Missions, reforming its society through references to Pastism. This caused a wave of interest in religion and science which by the 12th century was dominated by the new philosophy of Instructionism. The academies where these inquiries took place, already a favored estate under cliobism, grew powerful through their co-optation by governments and carefully planned forays into liberal enterprise with their grants; with this the Instructionist academics conspired to overthrow the Wedric establishment's Pastism which they detested as sanctimonious, as well as to bring about a rational, visionary reconstruction of lay society.

Upclearing
The Edifice's decisive founding moment was the 1239 Mesulle Accession, in which Enipid Avelna was overthrown by Instructionist generals, entrepreneurs, and academics. In 1242 the Sede was established at the head of a universal Instructionist state, coordinating Instructionist academies and scholars in Vasarea in a great revolutionary uprising known as the Great Upclearing. Avelnian and Aluarian forces swept the Vasarean continent and the Confluent Seas, even raiding Hypocos and Ausarea in the Barcanerie, proclaiming the rise of a religion with ranks of rifles and ships of the line. College states were established by entrepreneurs across Vasarea and even in Carsa. Though by the 1290s scholarly disputes and schisms along with opposing powers forced the Sede out of its Vasarean conquests, and by 1299 the Sede itself collapsed into the Arrogation Wars between Aluarian and Avelnian academies, the new colleges established would have a lasting shock on social order even in the western Anamnestic lands.

Construction
In its eastern base Instructionism took on a much less radical character after the reflections of ordinalism and the establishment of Aluaria and Avelna as petitor-empires in the 1320s. Under a new superior authority, the academies focused on the development of more dogmatic teachings but at the same time inventions and discoveries contributing to the opening of the Reign of Gears. To the west, idealistic upheaval was taken up by the Pegadians, an Anamnestic reform movement nurtured in the Sede-established colleges who struck at the perceivedly archaic Stegamenian Order, though lacking in an entrepreneurial tradition theirs was one which focused more narrowly on intellectual agitation.

Industrialization spread out from the experimentations of the eastern Universalists, ushering in the Reign of Gears: steam power, railways, and machine tools diffused to both regions the petitor-empires desired to place under their influence and scientific magnanimity, as well as to wary powers like Pytarus keen to stay technologically caught-up in competition. Likewise, ideas about all sorts of areas deriving from Instructionist milieus went the furthest of all the ways the Edifice expanded. A form of syncretic dialogue championed by Phasmatism allowed the Instructionist worldview to claim currency within the framework of Anamnestism, though imported eastern norms of academic government made more everyday impact.

This is not to understate the immediate power of the petitor-empires as the centers of Edificial civilization, however. Much of Ausarea outside of Varasan was incorporated as political as much as cultural clients in the Silent Conquest, and large parts of Eremia were charted out by entrepreneurial efforts. In the Macrine Wars and the support of Pegadian uprisings, the Edificial world struck down the Nosatean empire as the last pillar of the Stegamenian Order and the vestiges of a pre-Instructionist Vasarea, while a quasi-civilizational opposition against the bloc of cultures protected by Pytarus as the only (albeit a very prodigious) non-Vasarean great power was as tangible in Vellikoppai's wars for Ausarea and Roscia as it was in the clash of ideas.

Culmination
With the decline of Nosatea and the rise of cosmopolitical anxieties in new ideologies such as dignism and formalism the petitor-empires began a final struggle for the title of successor to the Sede. The Great Autean War of 1405–10 developed from a proxy war of western Vasarean allies and clients, and was followed by the Titulature War of 1422–26, in which Aluaria defeated and dismembered Avelna. The Celitine system established a political and economic union over Vasarea and Ausarea, which under the Aluarian vision aimed to unify the Edificial world as resources for the Universalists, and to confront the Pytarene-led Great Path in the War of Protraction.

Facing resentment in the Celitine periphery, the Aluarian-led order gradually ceded agency and responsibility to more capable allied and satellite powers, which became increasingly less subordinate. In the Institution Crisis of the 1480s a restored Avelna championing formalist political ideas snatched hegemony from an Aluaria collapsing in the Muccorb Wars and the Exhamian Sublation. The Celitine system then acted as a council of states that now had scholastic governments re-focused on ideal Edificial academies. This iteration took on even greater fervor in treating the War of Protraction as a civilizational battle, aggressively confronting the Great Path and crushing it in the Hygienic War (1513–20).

Collapse
After this, however, tensions between Avelna and Triodontia as contenders for the bloc's leadership resulted in its disintegration, while all sorts of social tensions and economic or technical problems manifested. A wider 16th-century crisis, manifesting as a general depression, infrastructural collapse, civil unrest, and devastation in the Fifty Years' War saw the ideals of the Edificial civilization and Instructionist religion rebuked by new philosophies such as Anoratism. Thorough social restructurings created from the contenders for the Celitine mandate the Combinates of the Elpian Synthesis and Quirecia, whose new culture now largely abandoned the Edifice (even its academies), only preserving a skeleton of its technical fruits to sustain their unwieldy empires in the Reign of Locks. Most of Vasarea had been reduced to a warzone, at the mercy of Combinates based elsewhere.