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House Marik – Free Worlds League

"The Free Worlds Parliament shall make no law to regulate or control the form of government maintained or adopted by a member province and shall not interfere in the affairs of provincial governments, except as they touch upon or interfere with that collective security and harmony of the Free Worlds League."

Origins and History

The Free Worlds League grew from a loose union of three major powers, each markedly different in ethnic makeup, cultural heritage and political outlook. The Marik Commonwealth formed through conquest, the Federation of Oriente through diplomacy and the Principality of Regulus through the connections between its merchant princes. The delicate balance between these three founding states permanently shaped the politics and character of the Free Worlds League, creating a nation whose diversity gave it unmatched vitality, but also frequently threatened to tear it apart.

The Marik Commonwealth was born in 2238, when Terran Alliance senator Charles Marik declared his homeworld independent of the bitterly polarized Alliance government. The planet Marik, settled and developed for mining operations in the mid twenty-second century, belonged to a wealthy family of East European origin from whom it took its name. By the time Charles re-christened it the Republic of Marik, this mining colony had grown into a thriving center for manufacturing and trade. Independence was a heady prospect, but also a frightening one. The Alliance's shift toward isolationism threatened to disrupt Terran and colonial markets for Marik ores, minerals and manufactured goods. Trade ties could be forged anew, but only through the agency of a strong central government. The people of Marik turned for guidance where they always had-to the Marik family, whose vast fortune and talent for leadership had kept them in a prominent position throughout a century and a half of social change.

Charles Marik became the new republic's leader almost by default, a position on which he was swift to capitalize. Within the first five years of independence, he ensured the survival of a strong central authority through the Marik Constitution and persuaded three neighboring planets to ally with the infant republic for mutual defense. In symbolic recognition of his new allies, Charles Marik renamed the four-world federation the Marik Commonwealth. He then shored up Marik's economy by turning its formidable manufacturing capacity toward military production. At a time when many other former colonies were self-destructing or struggling for survival, the Republic of Marik was building an army-not merely for defense, but also for conquest. Between 2249 and 2271, Charles Marik and his two sons took control of twenty worlds, extending their territory sixty light-years from the edge of Terran Alliance space. Through the military acumen that achieved this success, the Marik family would play an increasingly dominant role in what would become the Free Worlds League.

Like the Marik Commonwealth, the Federation of Oriente owed its beginnings to a declaration of planetary independence by a former Terran Alliance senator. In 2241, the famous statesman Tomàs Allison took his homeworld of Oriente out of the shrinking Terran fold and began to forge diplomatic ties with several neighboring worlds. Over the next three decades, Oriente expanded its web of alliances across twenty planets. Oriente's original settlers were a polyglot collection of Terran nationalities united by mutual devotion to progressive ideas in politics, science and the arts. By the first year of its independence, the planet had developed into a bastion of scientific and artistic achievement. Highly educated and cosmopolitan in outlook, the people of Oriente-world and Federation-were determined to preserve their freedom and make their mark on humanity's emerging interstellar society.

The Principality of Regulus grew from trade contacts between several rimward Terran colonies, centered on the five-planet mini-empire of the wealthy Selaj family. Among the earliest emigrants to what were then the rimward worlds, the Indian-born Selajes soon dominated almost every business in the region. When the Terran Alliance began its long, painful collapse in the mid twenty-third century, the heads of the Selaj trading conglomerate lost no time consolidating power over their client worlds. Jittery at the loss of their Terran lifeline and concerned with their own survival, a dozen planets in the Selaj trading network gladly agreed to a political union that would give them both the goods the Selaj could deliver and the protection of Selaj armed merchant ships. By 2270, the Selaj Empire had expanded from five worlds to seventeen.

Birth of the League

The Free Worlds League was the brainchild of Tomàs Allison, leader of the Federation of Oriente. As the 2260s drew to a close, Oriente was one of three emerging multi-world confederations in its region of space. The other two were the Marik Commonwealth and the Principality of Regulus. All three realms had spent the past several years slowly expanding their borders, edging ever closer to one another's territories. A scholar of history and a farsighted man, Allison realized that sooner or later, Oriente would clash with one of these neighboring powers. The only hope for avoiding a potentially ruinous war was to forge a mutually profitable alliance first.

Other considerations played a role in Allison's decision as well. The Terran Alliance had limped along for more than seven decades after the shakeup of 2237, but its demise as a political power was only a matter of time. By the 2260s, it was clear to Allison that the Alliance government was dying. He was convinced that its successor would be a military regime, given the status of the Alliance Global Militia as one of the few Terran institutions not discredited by shady backroom dealing. Any new Terran government would need to consolidate its power; what better way to do so than to take back former colonies? Against the large and well-equipped AGM, the smaller militaries of independent worlds could not hope to prevail alone, union seemed the best hope for survival.

The Marik Commonwealth, with its sizable territory and strong military, made an excellent prospective ally. The Principality of Regulus offered distinct advantages as well, with its robust economy and large, armed trading fleet. Blending Marik's military might and Regulus' economic strength with Oriente's diplomatic skills promised to make an unbeatable combination on all three fronts. In 2266, Allison sent his most trusted envoy to the leaders of the neighboring powers with a proposal to form a federation.

Sir George Humphreys of New Delos was a proud upholder of his family's long tradition of public service. A lifetime spent in politics had honed his natural eloquence and given him unmatched skill at the art of the deal. When Tomàs Allison approached him with the framework for the fledgling Free Worlds League, Humphreys gladly agreed to back it on Allison's behalf. After five years of negotiations, Humphreys brought Detlev Marik and Raju Selaj together with Tomàs Allison for a pivotal conference on Oriente in 2271. Over the next four months, the three leaders hammered out the Treaty of Marik that created the Free Worlds League. The treaty granted internal autonomy to the founding states, gave the leader of each a prominent role in the League-wide government and provided for the appointment of an overall military leader-a Captain-General-in times of crisis. In keeping with Allison's vision of a profit making as well as a defensive enterprise, political representation was allotted according to economic strength rather than population.

The Treaty of Marik was written down, argued over, rewritten, amended, nearly thrown out and rewritten yet again in English, the one language spoken by all three heads of state. The wrangling and the choice of language both hinted at a feature of the Free Worlds League that would become a leading source of trouble over the centuries. The three nations that made up the early League represented a dazzling array of different peoples and cultures: Indian, Pakistani, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Mongolian, Kazhak, Uzbek, Spanish, Italian, Basque and English, just to name a few. Many of these different populations spoke only their own tongues and had little understanding of their neighbors, linguistically or otherwise. The three founding states were also markedly different in political structure: the Marik Commonwealth military-oriented with a powerful (though not absolute) central government, the Principality of Regulus an oligarchy controlled by a small number of wealthy families, and Oriente a British-style parliamentary democracy. All these differences were a source of tremendous vitality for the new nation, but also frequently bogged down the League government in squabbling over where the line fell between federal authority and provincial autonomy. The desire to be left alone, a social force in almost every former Terran colony, had extra resonance in the Free Worlds League, where individual regions jealously guarded their traditions and prerogatives against "outsiders" who could not understand them.

More than once in the League's history, cultural and political tensions led to threats of secession or even total collapse. The League survived by finding a precarious balance between these potentially opposing forces-a balance forged by the knowledge that none of its component parts could prosper half so well alone as they could together.