Rudic dynasties

The Rudic dynasties were polities in eastern Vasarea in the 7th to 13th centuries characterized by the domination of a Rudish-origin elite, the consequent promotion of Rudish culture (chiefly language), and distinct political institutions. This culture is sometimes also referred to as Ostrorudic, and Rudo-Geralic or Rudo-Avelnian depending on the region.

The dynasties originate with the wretch-houses, fugitive Rudish noble clans fleeing the Sletts during the Strifetide of the 6th to 9th centuries. They varied by the time and circumstances of their arrival. The early wretches started their life in Aluaria and Avelna as military vassals and retainers of Geral and Pracian hosts, through which they climbed the relatively level ranks of the aristocracy. Their culture, abilities, and strategy led quickly to control of powerful positions and favors, if not the outright usurpation of power (in Anchania as early as 655), provoking a divide with non-wretch nobility from the 8th century onwards and a general sense of confrontation. Whether as usurpers or competing interests, through the practice of Cliobism, their aberrant presence to local political conventions proclaimed it would be founded on the frustrating and subjugating the latter, legitimated by appeals to the didascalic system.

The late 8th and 9th centuries saw escalating competition of Rudish states on the Sletts spill over in full across the Scolt Mountains: empires such as that of the Gebbretids conquered parts of the coast, and others such as the Erlemundids fled to take power as fully Rudic rulers, the Walish Houses. With this the eastern elite's culture became formally Rudic, while the institutions of the wretch dynasties were formalized through new legislation, and cliobism became an open instrument of domination. However, the Walish era was short-lived, with the Anamnestic Sokolovid Empire's extension as far as Vemia, and the Borivukovid Empire which broke from it in the Antiphonic Wars, instituting a more prestigious Vadish high culture to be adopted by Rudic rulers, even in the Aluarian Baldmundian Tetrarchy, by the 11th century. Other cultural shifts among the Wedric Houses, such as the reach of the Jangerean Missions or the recognition of the Sletts polities as strategic enemies (later to be reduced to clients), led to attempts to suppress their Rudic pedigree.

Despite this intersection of events and influences leading to the forsaking of Rudic culture just as the dynasties' project had completed, eastern Vasarea had been reshaped by its Rudish rulers in ways that later scholarship often attributed to the peculiarities of Rudic culture. In any case this society had provided grounds for the Edifice, which in its own time would enthusiastically attribute the development of its spirit to Rudic 'transfusions'.