Empire of the White Sea

The Empire of the White Sea (mamlakat-i Rāyat) is the collective of territories in and around the White Sea Basin over whom the Emperor is nominally sovereign.[1] At the time of its disappearance, its capital is Laodicea (Lādik).[2] The original center of the Empire, however, was the city of Raia (Rāyat), eventually becoming more ruins than town.[3] Later on, the largest city in the empire is Tarshish (Taršīš), the city of a thousand balconies, on the Encircling Sea coast of the region of Arnea.[4]

  1. The Empire of the White Sea is the sum total of our world’s (Christian) Mediterranean thalassocracies, and their give and take with the peoples and states of the other shore: the Byzantine Empire of Arabic legend → thirteenth-century Toledo and Norman Sicily → early-modern Rome as well as Andalusia and Naples under the Habsburgs → collapse in the age of nationalisms.↩︎

  2. If the Empire is a Mediterranean take on the HRE, the August and Most Noble City of Laodicea is its Vienna. I imagine it to be a sort of Naples or Granada: fortifications in auburn stone and palaces with Renaissance façades in fresco.↩︎

  3. While the reference is clearly to Rome, I gravitate to its less Classical strata: relicts of the Bronze Age and Late Antiquity, today a field of rubble. Its name, folk-etymologized in Chaldean as rāyat, ‘banner’, has become synonymous with the Empire and the Summer Coast as a whole.↩︎

  4. For a long time a forgotten harbor at the end of the world; Tarshish turned into the first port of call when crossing the Encircling Sea following the colonization of the Tarana. The obvious referents are Cádiz and Seville.↩︎