Herald of Steel

The treaty between Philips and thus the Tibian royal family and Zanzan was officially signed in late June of the year 371 of the current Adhanian Royal Dynasty (AD) calendar, roughly four years after Alexander had taken over Zanzan.

The terms of the treaty remained largely the same as the ones Alexander and Philips had discussed prior, with only a few minor modifications here and there.

For instance, it was decided that the royal family would hand over 40% of its owned property to Alexander as his personal lands, but in turn, would get to keep most of their remaining cash gold, and other private valuables.

The borders denoting the exact boundary of territory over which Philips would get to administer his rule were also drawn up and along with it a detailed outline of the powers he would be able to wield within it.

This included nearly all his previous existing power with the exception of the ability to raise armies, mint coins, or pass new economic and military laws.

This Basically restricted Philips from arbitrarily changing the various tax rates or instituting new ones and from issuing orders to raise new levies to form armies.

If Philips wanted to do any of that, it was agreed that he would first need to submit a formal request to the Pasha of Zanzan and obtain his approval.

And those were really the only shackles placed on him.

The civilian laws, such as the determination of punishment for murder, stealing, thievery, and other crimes, fixing the times of night time curfew, laws regarding inheritance, the fine for throwing rubbish into the streets and littering, and every other regular aspect governing the Tibian everyday life were mostly left for Philips to decided on his own discretion.

Which might seem like a lot of power for a defeated prince.

And yes it was indeed so.

But Alexander had given Philips so much power because, for one, he basically had to.

Alexander's appointment of Philips as the head of the lands here was based on pragmatism as Alexander lacked the necessary mechanism to govern such vast swathes of territory from his home city.

And given the backwardness of technology and communication of the time, it was simply a fact that Philips needed these legal tools to function properly.

After all, it would be much too impractical to ask Zanzan for every single small thing.

And besides, Alexander even did not have enough time or resources to vet every single little thing that the man might do even if he wanted to.

Thus Alexander tried his best to curb as many of the more dangerous authorities from Philips as possible while letting him still keep all the useful litigation tools.

This was one reason for letting Philips retain a large part of his powers.

Another reason for this was that Alexander found Tibias's legal system to be actually quite superior to Zanzan's own legal code, with the former covering a lot more topics in far more depth than the latter, thus giving Alexander few reasons to change or modify it.

For instance, there were laws in Tibias that actually mentioned women, with two such examples being,

"Women shall not during a funeral lacerate their faces, or tear their cheeks with their nails; nor shall they utter loud cries bewailing the dead."

And much more critically this,

"Female heirs should remain under guardianship even when they have attained the age of majority, but exceptions can be made for priestesses."

Yes, Tibias law actually highlighted a woman's legal status and standing in society with women being considered to be under a form of guardianship similar to that of minors.

Which, although not anything glorific, was certainly much better than the laws of Zanzan, where the sections on ownership and possession clearly considered that women were to akin to pieces of real estate or property with the terms being used to describe them being "ownership" and "possession".

And this was only one of many examples of Tibias's more progressive laws.

The country also had quite comprehensive and advanced laws regarding business practices such as consumer protection in the form of punishments for merchants who produced substandard products, the employment of magistrates who would be tasked with catching such scoundrels, and a concrete limit on the interest rate and usury that loan sharks could charge based on the amount borrowed to name only a few.

Zanzan in contrast had very few such examples.

Alexander's capital also did not have what appeared to be a very early form of copyright protection where certain identified Tibians were granted the exclusive right to create and display images of their ancestors, although such a privilege was only granted to very powerful and wealthy individuals,

All these were very impressive.

And in addition to these, while Alexander was perusing through the catalog of Tibias's laws, he also found some that were quite unusual and funny laws.

Such as the one where it stated that whenever anyone residing on the second floor or higher was about to throw rubbish from their house out into the streets, they were legally obligated to shout, "Is anyone down here?" towards the streets below and then wait for some time to get an answer.

That one had most certainly gotten a good old chuckle out of Alexander.

He could of course understand the reason behind this law as given the dank, dark, narrow, allies of these ancient cities, it was very hard to see anyone passerby crossing the path even during the day..

So this 'sound alarm' was intended to act as a sort of warning for the passersby to quickly get out of the way.

But Alexander somehow doubted it worked as intended.

There was very little way to enforce such a thing and the people were likely way too impatient to do bother with it anyway.

And besides, given the congested nature of these ancient streets, any such shouts would likely be so distorted by the surrounding structure that the original intentions would instantly be lost.

But even then, despite the limitations of such a law, it also went on to highlight the Tibian royal family's attention to various small and still significant details of its people.

Something that was very much lacking in Zanzan's own case.

Alexander suspected the evolution of such a course of event was, other than being simply due to the result of his predecessor Pasha Muazz's gross incompetence, also caused by the difference in governance style.

Tibias, being a centralized government, was able to much more efficiently utilize its manpower pools than the fragmented ruling nature of Zanzan and by extension the country of Adhania.

For in the latter country, each noble got to rule over their fief in whatever way he liked, almost like a mini king, possessing almost total power to deal with most of the challenges they faced as they saw fit.

Hence a never coherent legal structure never got developed there.

Hence in there, a large part of a noble's everyday duty included simply attending to this, sitting on his throne and hearing the complaints and conflicts of his subjects, and then ruling out judgment based on the arguments.

And yes, it was one of Alexander's duties too.

However, he had found the entire thing to be very inefficient and so while on days he was too busy, he would often his head of the police Cambyses take care of it for him.

And if even Cambyses was found to be too busy with her own work, then she would redirect the people to the head priest Theocles at the Gaia Temple.

He would always make time for them.

And if all that failed, as the last line of defense there stood old man Menicus.

Alexander had of course intended to form a proper judicial system but at the time, had found to have no leftover resources to do so.

And it was because of all that Alexander found it not worth changing anything here.

Tibias had been running smoothly for decades before he came along and Alexander was quite confident that if he were to dip his hand haphazardly into its governance without any prior

knowledge and context, he would only be making things worse.

Alexander did not want to appear as too intrusive toward his conquered subjects, needlessly poking his nose into matters that did not concern him.

Rocking the boat here would only birth resentment from the Tibian people and elites who might misconstrue his efforts as Alexander destroying their forefather's legacy.

Due to that aspect, Alexander wanted to emulate his rule to be like the Romans, where the subjugated territories were not wholly annexed and assimilated like they were with other nations but instead allowed to still mostly keep their individual identity, with the promise they would continue to serve him with taxes, men and food as it was required of them.

Thus it was with that thought that Alexander put the familiar face of Philips on top and kept all the general laws and rules of the land as was.

And thus with that signing of the treaty came the official end to the year long conflict.contemporary romance

Now what only remained were only the formalities- the ratification of the treaty by the various influential nobles and lastly their and Philips's official swearing ceremony.

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