Ch.68Side Story – Beatrice Dandolo, Lion of the Rose Garden

# “(…) (1) Wealthy, (2) small, (3) nations. These are the words that describe the Eastern Alliance. Those three words contain the Alliance’s past, present, and future.

The Alliance’s geographical position is quite unfavorable. The west is blocked by the Empire, and the remaining three sides form a peninsula surrounded by sea. Most of it consists of islands. How could such nations accumulate so much wealth?

Through oceanic trade.

The Eastern Alliance nations have grown by trading between this large continent where the Empire is located and another continent across the unknown sea. This explains their wealth.

This leads to another question: ‘Why doesn’t the Empire conquer the Eastern Alliance or make them vassal states?’ The answer can also be found in their ‘wealth.’

The Eastern Alliance is the Pope’s greatest sponsor and backer. Each Alliance city has at least one knightly order branch. Attacking the Alliance would automatically be equivalent to attacking papal territories.

What does the Pope gain? Gold. The Alliance ‘donates’ enormous sums to the knightly orders each year. The Pope earns substantial funds to operate the knightly orders, while the Eastern Alliance gains security.

That’s not all. Although the Papal States and the Southern Kingdom deny it, historical Popes have had closer ties to the Eastern Alliance than to the Southern Kingdom. One in three Popes comes from the East, another is under their massive influence, and the last is a product of election manipulation by the Eastern kingdoms.

In this situation, the Empire has no reason to invade the Eastern Alliance and upset the Pope and the Papal States. No one would appreciate the Emperor being excommunicated.

Why does the Eastern Alliance go to such lengths? This is based on point (2): they are small.

Being small has advantages and disadvantages. Military power is inevitably weak, meaning it’s difficult to defend against external threats.

In previous lessons, we learned that the Empire’s standing army is an inconvenient system requiring not only manpower but maintenance costs. If even the Empire struggles with a standing army system, it would be meaningless for the sparsely populated Eastern Alliance nations to create one.

Before forming their honeymoon relationship with the Pope, when the Eastern Alliance was fragmented, each nation purchased mercenaries.

Theoretically, mercenaries are attractive. They’re verified, skilled warriors with good teamwork and unity. They can be deployed immediately without additional training and are economical since contracts are only needed when necessary.

From a national perspective, this seems highly efficient. So why doesn’t the Empire purchase mercenary groups? Because the drawbacks became evident through the Eastern Alliance’s example.

Before unification, they purchased mercenary groups to devour other countries. However, the mercenaries weren’t particularly active.

The reason is simple: from the mercenaries’ perspective, having more Eastern nations was better.

There aren’t many places that hire mercenary groups. Unlike during the Great Holy War era, in today’s implicit truce and exchange environment, mercenary groups could only go to Eastern Alliance nations.

Attacking another Eastern Alliance nation? For mercenaries, this was equivalent to eliminating their own customers.

Recent research has revealed collusion and secret dealings among mercenary groups. Deciphered coded letters showed agreements not to accept deals below certain amounts, to share attack plans and defense strategies before battles, and to avoid unnecessary human casualties.

In this situation, battle horns would sound, but neither attackers nor defenders would do anything, wasting time and provisions.

The Eastern nations couldn’t protest these abuses. There was precedent that if a mercenary captain’s feelings were hurt, the mercenary group would invade and devour a country as soon as their contract ended.

That country was Venelucia.

Cesare Dandolo, head of the Dandolo family and captain of the Dandolo mercenary group, killed the king of Venelucia.

He was reportedly a handsome man with charisma, fair dealings, and excellent eloquence, earning the support of Venelucian citizens, nobles, and merchants, as well as respect within his mercenary group.

Venelucia’s last king was incompetent and jealous. His most outrageous policy was imposing heavy taxes on galley oars and sailing ship masts.

Wealthy merchants with large ships were enraged by this policy and approached Cesare Dandolo, who was in charge of Venelucia’s defense.

As soon as his defense contract ended, Cesare Dandolo assassinated the king. It wasn’t really an assassination but a public execution, beheading him in the middle of the grand plaza.

The king’s last words were reportedly, “Spare me! I’ll give you Venelucia and the throne, just spare my life!”

However, Cesare Dandolo took neither. He officially declared, “There is no more king.” Instead, he raised his bloodied sword to the cheering merchants and citizens and proclaimed, “You are the kings of Venelucia!”

From the moment he killed the king, Cesare Dandolo was no longer a mercenary captain. He had to become a politician, and he did so very skillfully.

He knew that if he ascended the throne, he would become a puppet of the wealthy merchants, and if he used mercenaries to confiscate their property or harm them, he would lose public trust.

So Cesare summoned the six guilds that ran Venelucia: Architecture, Masonry, Maritime, and others. Each guild had its role. These guilds checked and undermined each other but maintained an ideal system where none wanted any single guild to fail.

Cesare instructed the six guilds to “elect your own leader.” The six guilds chose Dandolo. None of the guild leaders wanted to become the leader themselves, but they disliked even more the idea of someone else becoming leader. The potential repercussions from the still-active mercenary group also played a role.

Thus, Cesare Dandolo became the first lifetime elected leader, the Doxe. The six guilds evolved into a 15-member committee. Each guild recommended two committee members, and the Doxe entered the committee with himself and two people he recommended.

The Dandolo family then conquered other Eastern nations one by one. Not by force or violence, but by encouraging powerful merchants in those countries to successfully transplant Venelucia’s system.

They launched a large, loose alliance of confederated states. That was the birth of the Eastern Alliance.

But in a situation where attacks from the Empire or Southern Kingdom seemed inevitable, Cesare Dandolo suddenly resigned as Doxe and walked barefoot to the Papal States to atone for his sins.

The Pope gladly forgave his sins. Moved by Cesare’s integrity, the Pope not only gave him a “knightly order” but the Dandolo family and Eastern Alliance nations began hiring “knights” like mercenaries. They only needed to maintain one or two knights.

From then on, an uncomfortable cohabitation continued between the Pope and the Eastern Alliance. If the Eastern Alliance didn’t do something, the Pope would withdraw knights or increase the number deployed. The Eastern Alliance countered with smear campaigns against cardinals around the Pope.

You’d be surprised to know how much the average cardinal’s term shortened after Cesare Dandolo’s rule, and how many cardinals were suddenly accused of unforgivable sins “even by secular standards.”

Concluding they couldn’t rely solely on the Pope, the Eastern Alliance gradually began targeting the eastern part of the Empire—their own west.

Initially, they targeted not Imperial territories but fiefdoms of nobles who had poor relations with the Emperor. Small conflicts soon evolved into localized wars. This was the decision of Niccolo Dandolo, the Doxe at the time.

There was some basis for this. The Empire was fighting the Great Holy War against pagans in the north and west.

Knowing the Empire’s weakness, Niccolo Dandolo intended to quickly occupy the east and negotiate later, but as you know, this plan was foiled by the sudden rise of the Demon King.

Unfortunately, the Demon King emerged in the northeastern wasteland, and if the Eastern Alliance forces advanced further into the eastern Empire, they would directly face the Demon King’s attacks.

Eventually, the Demon King was defeated through the efforts of the Seven Heroes. The Empire was victorious.

Although his gamble failed, Niccolo Dandolo wasn’t particularly shaken. The situation wasn’t bad. All the Eastern mercenary groups had been dissolved at that time.

He even turned the massive loan from the Southern Kingdom into an advantage. He calculated that if the Empire attacked the Eastern Alliance, the Southern Kingdom and the Pope wouldn’t stand idle as they would lose their loan repayments.

In other words, military security was virtually guaranteed. However, internal conflicts intensified. Political opponents berated Niccolo about how to repay the enormous debt.

Niccolo Dandolo responded quite flexibly to such claims until an unexpected political opponent emerged—his only daughter, Beatrice Dandolo.

Young, spirited, and intelligent, she was a woman with her father’s temperament plus boldness. Though young, almost childlike, she was reportedly so beautiful she was called the reincarnation of Cesare Dandolo.

She was said to possess charisma that not only fascinated but subjugated people just by looking at them—the lioness of the rose garden. Since this comes from an Imperial envoy’s account, it’s probably reliable.

Beatrice Dandolo’s proposal was revolutionary. Her argument shook the political system of the Eastern Alliance to its core.

In summary, she proposed distributing the Doxe’s power and duties to ordinary citizens. She developed Cesare Dandolo’s statement that the king of Venelucia was the people of Venelucia:

‘Every person in the Eastern Alliance is a king. A king determines his own destiny. The people of the Eastern Alliance should be able to decide their own destiny.’

Beatrice argued that all Alliance citizens should have the authority to elect leaders. Similarly, she made the radical claim that anyone had the right to be elected as a leader.

She didn’t stop there. If everyone was a king, and kings had a duty to protect what was theirs, she proposed that all men and women should receive military training.

‘Without depending on others’ hands, they protect their property and rights with their own hands. And politics guarantees this.’

This naturally raised the question: ‘But even combining all the people of the Eastern Alliance, they’re outnumbered by the Imperial army. How will they overcome this?’

She answered, ‘Cannons.’

Many of you probably don’t know about ‘cannons.’ They’re inventions from the East, from distant foreign lands, said to destroy even the strongest fortresses and overthrow even the most steadfast knightly charges.

Their power is stronger than a hundred catapults combined, and their sound louder than a thousand thunders combined.

Beatrice Dandolo proposed mounting these ‘cannons’ on ships. The logic was that while they couldn’t attack the Empire, they could always prevent an invasion.

Her proposal received massive support from nouveau riche, young people, merchants tired of the Pope’s greed, and the shipping and shipbuilding guilds.

However, opposing guilds—the masonry guild that supported her father Niccolo Dandolo and didn’t want other guilds to grow rapidly, along with merchants who already held great wealth—opposed her proposal.

Father and daughter became political opponents. The father represented the existing order, while the daughter symbolized emerging forces.

The confrontation between the aging male lion and the female lion with the rising moon at her back, however, came to an anticlimactic end.

Just five years ago, Beatrice Dandolo was assassinated after getting caught in a street thug fight, and Niccolo Dandolo, showing signs of mental breakdown after his daughter’s death, jumped from the top of Venelucia Castle.

No one knows why Beatrice Dandolo met such a death.

It’s suggested that she enjoyed meeting people, and the cause was identified as an argument between young men who wanted to impress her. But it seems rather anticlimactic for a woman who could have greatly changed the future of the Eastern Alliance.

As a result, the Eastern Alliance is still in massive political chaos(…)

– Excerpt from ‘Introduction to Imperial History’ Lecture 7, ‘The Past, Present, and Future of the Eastern Alliance’ by Professor Anna Kommodus, Imperial Capital Academy”