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Rel Astra is one of the major port cities of the Great Kingdom. It is an old city of the Aerdy, the original seat of the early Aerdian Church of Law and once a capital of an Aerdi kingdom until the crowning of the Overking. Once the Great Kingdom was declared in Rauxes, control of Rel Astra was given over to a ministerialis who served as constable and mayor in the Overking's name. The post continues, but it now belongs to a hereditary noble line whose interests have diverged from those of the Malachite Throne.
Like the lords of the Iron League region, the Constable's financial interests lie with the burghers and trade, and he resents the grasping and peremptory ways of the Overking. He is also wary of the covetousness of Medegia's Holy Censor.
While the more fierce-tongued members of the city's council urge swift action, the Constable chooses to slowly build his forces and bide his time.
The original Folio had an apparent editing mistake that listed Rel Astra as the capital of Medegia, so a thought it was worth making a nod to that in the history. Though the Folio never mentions it, the title of Overking suggests their were (at least once) subordinate kings. I figure there must have been multiple, petty Aerdian kingdoms that were united.
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I wonder where all those cargo ships go and come from when most of the setting feels so landlocked. It's almost as though Gygax recognized the romantic power of open water "trade routes" but then projected his regional understanding of Great Lakes industrial freight (somewhere a Gordon Lightfoot song starts) across all his free cities . . . everything feels more like Milwaukee and less like Singapore.
My first guess would be that Rel Astra was originally the northeastern end of a long route all the way around back to the Keoish coast, which is why the Iron League is such a strategic nightmare for everyone. It might have originally been a pilgrimage route. However in this scenario I would expect the Tilva Straight [sic] to have at least a few hardened coastal colonies to protect the choke point . . . in their absence, the Lord of the Isles seems to work better as a defensive pin preventing anyone from the western sea from getting at the Aerdi coast, and in that case the question is who were they afraid of and why the proto Iron League on the Gearnat side gets left hanging.
The text suggests that the Lords of the Isles got started preying on a rich southern route into Hepmonaland that we just don't know anything about, then bought their way into legitimacy. This trade is still going on but details are mysteriously scant . . . Gygax doesn't seem to care where the money comes from. I always wondered if the Sea Barons weren't created to specifically protect a northern route to hypothetical "Aquaria" and only secondarily to keep the vikings from raiding the coast, but it's unclear how good a job they do at that.
I don't think the vikings of Greyhawk are actually all that good at sailing open ocean. We don't know who invented ships in the setting . . . probably not the Baklunish unless they managed to circumnavigate the northern ocean or go an even longer way around, definitely not the Oerdians or (maybe surprisingly) the Suel who take the longest possible coastal route to get to Hepmona. If they had ships or could fly they could have just hopped from the Amedio and saved a lot of time.
But there's a lot we don't know about that era, a lot of lost records. Anyway, the italicized afterword is great . . . gives you a place to show your work and talk about how you engage (or don't) with post-folio worldbuilding.
Pondering the timeline again in the context of your "petty kingdoms" insight reveals that Gygax agrees with you and put at least a little thought into providing historical support, with about 200 years of warring oerid states leading up to CY 1. Interestingly Nyrond (like Texas) has an independent history but depending on how you interpret "east of the Nyr Dyv" might have been established before or after the Aerdii came through.
(Whichever tribe made it to the eastern coast would logically be the FINAL expansionist wave and so the youngest of the proto-oerid realms, which might make proto-nyrond (nyr dyv, "our water") older and even an oppressive neighbor at one point. On the other hand the original aerdii may have actually stopped immediately to the east of the inland sea, making what is now Urnst the original heartland and then the center of power shifts eastward over time.)
Speaking of Urnst, others have probably noted the similarity to the Holy Roman Empire in terms of a decaying central rump state (aestria or aerdia) surrounded by a more vibrant periphery of semi-independent former dependencies. But I'd never really thought about how this explains the variety of "palatinate" titles that persist to this day.
Super weird (to me at least) footnote to the vikings: "nomads appear in north" as late as 320 CY. These might not be the Thillonrian barbarians (the Bone March text suggests that they were already there early in the imperial phase) but it actually makes sense that the final Suel migration would have taken an extra couple centuries to push up through what is now the Theocracy (possibly catalyzing its formation in the first place!) up into the peninsula where they become our familiar vikingoids.
In this scenario I wonder if there was a Suel colony flourishing for a few centuries between the northeast shore of the Nyr Dyv and the Raker range . . . displaced in later oerid imperialism. These people might or might not have absorbed an earlier "barbarian" culture or cultures on the other side.
But I like this notion because it explains why the formation of Urnst county is important enough to make the timeline; as the boxed set later notes, people who stayed on the duchy side remain "nearly of pure suel race" and so their suel presumably stayed behind whereas in what becomes the county the suel influence didn't persist so much. Maybe these were the suel tribes who fought and lost and the survivors were forced across the mountains to get extremely tough. The ones who collaborated and stayed are still there and were incorporated into the overkingdom as a reward.
Haha me again, sorry for the "hat trick" of three comments in a row but you have me obsessing over those few folio pages and maybe the world can benefit from that. Looking more closely, I think the "nomads appear in north" (320 CY) probably refers to the Baklunish incursion that bounces hard off something in what becomes Rover Barrens in the migrations map but the text says at least some make it "eastwards as far as the Griff Mountains."
This tells us a little about what we would now consider the peripheral north . . . who might have lived around the northern Nyr Dyv basin (before Iuz, before the Horned Society, before the Bandits) and how their civilization collapsed under nomad pressure. They must have been important to the imperium because the stress of losing this territory is heavily implied as a factor in the disintegration that follows.
It's tempting to imagine an entire wing of civilization up there that got wiped out in the incursion . . . ruined cities, old magic, old truths, good adventure. But the sources focus on the settled nations so we just don't know. This is almost a century before the formation of Perrenland from warrior tribes and the history of proto-Iuz is in my opinion muddled by too many cooks so those later sources are unreliable.
We also don't know what got this particular Baklunoerid tribe moving or what was so special about the Rovers that they actually bounced off and retreat for a while. Maybe we can extrapolate some kind of Blackmoor intervention, wouldn't that be cool.
(As for my late viking hypothesis, the text states that "four of the strongest and fiercest clans managed to retail large stretches of ground as Suloise" in the far north, but this may still refer to a projected NE Nyr Dyv basin territory that they then get driven out of within the CY era. The thing about the migration maps is that it's easy to assume that the farthest paths started earliest and settled earliest . . . but this is not how migration actually works. The first wave goes until they get to the closest nice settling spot they find. Those who come after either fight these people and displace them or else are forced to keep looking, and so on. This makes the vikings one of the LAST suel tribal groups to find their eventual homeland.)
It is very landlocked, though if we believe the climate maps of Anna Meyer, there's a whole lot of basically American Southwest over much of the continent, and of course for some reason barbarians and humanoid tribes are allowed to squeeze in-between civilized lands, so I think it's fair to suppose a certain amount of coast-hugging maritime trade. Of course, there is no India or Far East reachable by ocean, but I imagine a lot of Baklunish goods come through the Azure Sea then through the straits.
Regarding land-locked Vikings and setting in general, Gygax seems to be following Tolkien's lead.
That's a great spin: they would prefer caravans (the Aerdii are "indifferent sailors" and even the Sea Princes got tired of naval adventures) but sometimes those barbarian tribes get in the way of a land route so they have to grit their teeth, pile all that stuff into a ship and go around. Poor seasick Greyhawkites!
I wonder if Ekbir traders go the long way around the southern coast to end up handing their cargo over to lucky Keolanders for distribution in the lands we know. Maybe there's a string of "Baklunish" outposts or even pilgrimage stations over there. There's definitely nothing on the north and unlike the oerids we know the people of Ekbir maintain a reasonable navy so they probably don't hate sailing. But what do they have? Rare gems? Material components? What we'd call in the Wilderlands "tech level 10?" Otherwise the big traders seem more focused on exploiting nearby jungle.
Back to Rel Astra, the editorial error in the Folio even has different population numbers so it's possible that the Holy Censor claims a district of the city as part of the "clerical state" whereas the rest is run as the constabular fief. This would make the overall urban complex bigger than Greyhawk (if you add the Medegia population to the free city population you get a little over the 90,000 claimed for Rel Astra as a whole, which makes shocking sense) and maybe more fascinating politically for people who like that kind of thing.
That would be interesting. A sort of Vatican City.
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