Sollan Empire
🌀 Ongoing Project: This wiki is a living archive that’s always growing! Some pages may still be incomplete or in progress. If you’d like to help expand and improve the wiki, we’d love to have you join the discussion on the Red Company Discord.
- Founded
- Capital Forum
- Ruled By House Avent
- Founded
- Capital Forum
- Ruled By House Avent
For more than sixteen thousand years the Sollan Empire had been expanding, its influence spreading across an ever-widening and lengthening wedge of the galaxy, spreading along the spiral arms until at last some brave pioneers made the leap across the gulfs that separated one arm from the next.
— Hadrian Marlowe[1]
The Sollan Empire is the largest and oldest single polity within human-controlled space.[2] As of the early seventeenth millennium ISD, the Empire encompasses half a billion habitable planets—as well as billions of airless moons and station outposts—across four of the galaxy's spiral arms.[3] Throughout its history, the Empire has been continually ruled by the Aventine House.
The Empire is comprised of innumerable ethnic groups, countless religions, hundreds of thousands of nobile families—palatine and patrician—and tens of millions of soldiers, and thus its population cannot be counted, but the best estimates put the number at more than one quintillion human souls.[3] Natives of the Sollan Empire are officially called Sollan Imperials, but more commonly referred to simply as Imperials.[4]
Culture
Religion
Holy Terran Chantry
The Holy Terran Chantry is the state religion of the Empire. It teaches of the icona—spirits or gods embodying an ideal, virtue, or natural law. Among these, the Four Cardinals—Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance—are venerated above all others. Central to its morality are the Twelve Abominations, the most grievous sins defined in the Chantry’s Index. Those who are found guilty of such transgressions are stripped of all legal privileges. Apart from being a purely religious body, the Chantry also functions as the judicial arm of the state, especially where the use of forbidden technology is involved.[2]
The highest ecclesiastic office of the Chantry is Synarch, whose most important function is the coronation of new Emperors. The Synarch also presides over the Synod—the ruling body of the Chantry.[2] Furthermore, the Chantry maintains a catalog of punishments—monetary, corporal, and capital—which are enforced by its judicial branch, called the Inquisition.[2][5]
Demographics
Languages
Politics
Government
Relations
Military
Command Structure
Equipment
Training
List of Planets
- Delos
- Forum (capital)
- Renaissance
Full series spoliers below, proceed with caution.
History
Preceding the Books
Founded approximately two thousand years after the development of space travel, the Sollan Empire began when William Windsor, King of Avalon, defeated the last bastion of the Mericanii Empire at Earth. Crowning himself Emperor of Man on the Aventine Hill in Rome, William Windsor launched the greatest dynasty in human history. The renamed Aventine House has ruled for sixteen thousand years in line unbroken, maintaining its control of the lesser nobility through a careful breeding program that has wrested reproductive control from the nobile houses and placed it in the hands of the Imperial Office. His line and Empire have endured several threats throughout its long history, none greater than the invasion of the Cielcin.