A History in Blood

[Tami]

A History in Blood

My dear Dracon,

“How will it end?”
You asked me this once, many nights ago, when Constantinople still stood, a simple question to which I did not have an answer. Yet your words have haunted me ever since and filled my nights with uncertainty. But what else could I expect from the ineffable Dracon, the phantom of Byzantium, rogue child of Tzimisce and inheritor of the dream that was Constantinople? Where were you when, twenty-six years ago to the night, it burned to the ground? Did you watch, as your lover the Patriarch Michael, became ash? What of your childe, the Cainite Saint Gesu? Did you save him or condemn him to darkness? What of your monasteries and books?

You asked, how will it end? Let me ask a better question, “How did it all begin?” What rough hand of fate threw our kind’s lot and cast adrift in a sea of blood and ashes? I finally understand that you were asking, not about the future, but about the past, the past that shackles our kind and condemns us to repeating the same mistakes for eternity.

Preamble

Our history is one of cities – have you ever found it curious how we mark time by the passing of great cities? First Enoch, cradle and birthplace of the clans. Then came the second city and the strife that destroyed it. Mighty Rome and its decadence. Carthage razed and salted haunting us to this night, and more recently Constantinople. All gone, all nothing but memories that only our cursed race remembers. What is our infatuation with cities, and why do our mystics – like yourself and even Caine himself – abandon them?

Another note before continuing. Throughout my treatise, I refer to our history in the plural even though I never walked in the Second City or even through Rome in its heyday/ I do this because I believe we inherit more than blood when Embraced as I am sure, in your mutability, agree. Like a hydra, our kind has many heads (the clans) and many gasping maws (our brethren) but a single body – Caine. There is one beginning and one end. All else is meaningless.

Roots

Of the First City, of the creation of our founders or of the righteous flood that washed away Enoch, no more needs to be said. The Legacy of the First Nights is our heritage. This we cannot escape. When we made ourselves gods of Enoch and Embraced without limit, it did not damn us in the eyes of Caine or God. We were already damned, damned by our very existence and our future writ in blood. The truth is that Enoch was only the first, and we have tried so hard since the time of the Great Flood to rebuild it from broken promises and memories only to destroy what we have built. Enoch is a memory to remind us that nothing more, a memory that drives us to destroy what we build, a memory to remind us that nothing we touch can last. It is the memory of Enoch – that promised land of our kind – that set us on our path. This is why Caine turned his back on Enoch as the rain fell and why he left us.

Our history begins with the Second City and not with Enoch. In Enoch our kind did not have a choice. Those of the second and third generation merely followed Caine. But after the flood, our kind did have a choice. The Antediluvians could have scattered to the darkest comers when the water receded and waited for that final night. Some did just that. Others chose to craft an empire in their image and build the Second City. And like Enoch, the Second City was doomed from the start. It was not the hand of God, or even Caine, that destroyed it this time, but the Antediluvian’s own jealousies and vendettas. By this time, the Second City teemed with our kind, and the clans grew fat and proud knowing no limits to their excess. How ever I hear whispers that you remember this time, so I will not pretend to know what that city must have been like. What I know is that the clans started bickering and this poison ran deep.

Whatever started it, I pray we never know, but the antediluvians first slew their own Sires and then warred with one another until the Second City was nothing more than ruins. Caine is said to have returned one last time in the wreckage and curse them all. Yet this was not enough for the Antediluvians. They vowed to have their vengeance one night, for they all blamed one another for the destruction of the Second City. And so the War of Ages began.

[Tami]

The Great Exodus and Early EmpiresAfter the fall of the Second City, many of our kind scattered far and wide. Of the Antediluvians little is known after this point, but their influence flowed from their broods (which would eventually grow into the clans), which they guided and coerced in the invisible pantomime that is the War of Ages. Still, the world was a different place back then, and a wide gulf separated the many Children of Caine. Our kind walked across lands that would one day be called Babylon, Egypt and beyond. The world was young, and in hundred of different places, a hundred different Enochs were crafted. In time, they all fell one by one.

Wherever our kind settled, strife and conflict followed. Cainite rivals would maneuver empires to defeat their age-old foes without a single thought to the mortals who perished or the civilizations that were destroyed. Although kine needed no help to start wars, our kind was all too eager to goad empires into battle, as we still do. Often, when the mortal fighting would end and night fell, Cainites would take to the battlefield. They would feed from the dead and dying, then continue the fighting with a ferocity and savagery that knew no equal. A mighty clash of titans shook the earth and drew storms from the heavens.

As mortals spread out and grew more numerous, however, our kind was forced into hiding – for protection from both overzealous humans and Cainite rivals. Although our numbers were small, our feuds and vendettas were not. From open ruler, we fell into the shadows where we discovered we had more room to maneuver. In this manner, we settled in Greece, among the tribes of Europe, in Persia and even in the unknown east. Memories of Enoch and the Second City are nothing but legends and we repeat the same mistakes. Wherever a city was born, our kind flocked to it – and nowhere was this more devastating then in the Eternal City, Rome.

What a wondrous place Rome was. Not the dirty shantytown of ruins that exists tonight, but a labyrinthine city of columns and temples that became a nexus for our kind, as if its very streets beckoned us. First the Ventrue and Lasombra came, then the Malkavians and Toreador, each taking turns whispering into the ears of the senate and then the Caesars. Out population swelled. Never, not even in Constantinople, had so many of our kind dwelled within the same city. We laird in the catacombs, in the hillside temples and luxurious villas that make the castles and cities of tonight seem like primitive abodes. And how the blood did flow.

Slaves died by the cartload, and no one seemed to notice. The coliseum held blood feast in the dead of the night, and this without our doing, though our brethren were all too happy to partake in the festivities. We just rode the wave of mortal excess and took it to new levels. Still, there was hope during the early nights of Rome. Perhaps, Rome, named by some mortal poet as the Eternal City, was the bastion that would outlast our wars and remain until the Final Nights. Many held this to be true, as I am sure your Companions Michael and Antonius did. But again, out jealousy and hatred would make sure that this was not to be. How many more times are we to repeat the treachery of the Second City?

[Tami]

Carthage

Carthage. The word still resonates, even for those who were not born when the Roman legions marched over its remains. Carthage. Writing that word echoes with the cries of the many who lie in torpor below its ruins, eternal witnesses to the highest of Cainite folly and pride. To this night, we’re still deeply divided over events that transpired more than a millennium ago. Its memory is still fresh and painful for those who survived those frightful nights.

Carthage. Damned city. I hear it was the Brujah that made Carthage their own under the shadow of the Romans. They built a mighty empire and sent their trading ships across the Mediterranean while Rome was in something of a decline. However this was not enough of an affront to warrant its obliteration. No, instead the Brujah and others who flocked to Carthage ruled as Caine himself had in Enoch. They did not hide or prowl the streets like wraiths. They ruled in the open, demanding blood tithes from the mortal who gladly gave their vitae in return for their protection. Many called Carthage the New Enoch, and this enraged Rome’s Ventrue and Malkavians. Accusations of sacrilege echoed across the Senate at night, soon replaced with Carthage delenda est[/b]: Carthage must be destroyed. And so the legions were unleashed, and the first great war between our kind came to pass. For close to 50 years Brujah and Ventrue, Carthage and Rome fought.

In the end it was Rome that won. I can only imagine what it must have been like to witness such a terrible destruction and I wonder if perhaps you witnessed it: To see the legions march across Carthage led by Ventrue and Malkavian ( and if the rumors are true, some Gangrel.) Generals. All life was extinguished, and it is said the Ventrue ordered the legions to salt the earth as morning came, trapping hundreds of our kind in Torpor eternity.

Rome paid equally, however. Once the legions and victors returned, hope seemed to vanish from Rome. No longer was it a magical place for our kind. It was a reminder of the terrible mark we carry and the fate that we seemingly cannot escape. Some turned their backs on Rome and left, including you and your lovers, the Toreador Michael and the Ventrue Antonius. Many more decided to stay, terrified of the dark worked that awaited beyond Rome. Although Rome and its empire last for a score of centuries after Carthage, its magic was shattered and all that left was decadence and petty intrigue. Rome had died for our kind, but many would ignore this until the beginning of the Long Night.

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[Tami]

The Long Night

When the barbarian hordes descended on Rome, a quiet fell across our kind. Broken and lost, we scattered once more. Some headed back to the sand of the Levant, others to the wilds of Europe. Rome became a silent city, its ancient Cainite masters either destroyed, in torpor or in hiding. The younger ones left Rome to carve out their own kingdoms; nothing more than a ruin remained. In a short century, they became lords of the so-called Long Night. All across the darkened land, Cainites prospered. Even the young, those only a few decades old became like kings and chieftains, ruling over domains that would bear witness to the rise of the kingdoms of England, France and Castile.

It was a grand time for our kind, and the Long Night seemed to stretch into eternity for those who walked under its veil. Vast insurmountable distances separated one domain from the next, and Cainites gathered in courts, not out of necessity, but for companionship. In this time of quiet, the War of Ages raged nonetheless, but had lost much of its vigor, which allowed many Cainites to craft new Kingdoms, but none on the scale of Rome. Some vanished while others grew to become jewels in the night, and here I speak of your city Constantinople – the Dream crafted by the faith of a Toreador, the pragmatism of a Ventrue and the vision of a Tzimisce. For close to a millennium, your city withstood the strife that eroded so many realms. Even after the death of Antonius, the dream infected all who walked its cobblestone streets. Perhaps Constantinople was the closet our kind will ever get to Heaven – and now it too is gone. Its shell remains, but like Rome; its essence is lost. But, there is more to speak about before mentioning that terrible crusade that ended your Dream.

The Night Shattered

The quiet of the Long Night was, upon reflection, a faced and nothing more. Our kind prospered because Europe was dark and few dared venture for from their domain, not because we finally learned how to coexist in peace. Perhaps fitting then, that it was the Kine who roused us from our sleep. Below our noses, the Church grew strong and unleashed the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from infidel and creatures of the night. To our surprise, the faithful (and misguided) sailed across the Mediterranean in unprecedented numbers. They flooded Jerusalem with blood, and still we ignored the signs. Battle after battle raged in those sacrosanct lands, and with each one, the ancients stirred in their slumber – including the Antediluvians themselves if we are to believe some of the tales. Many Methuselahs left the Holy Land and settled across Europe, eager to stretch their long dormant limbs. Yet they were not the only visitors. The Crusades provoked the ire of our Islamic brethren, and another great schism among the race of Caine ran red with hate.

But still out kind remained blind. We had our kingdoms and cities, we enjoyed the culture of the mortal and we were content. We had grown complacent and heavy, but we all heard the final scream of Saulot as Tremere himself, once a mortal magus, drew his life blood and obliterated one of our best. Not since the ancient Brujah Patricide in the days of the Second City had one of the 13 met final death to be replaced in blood, and the crime was far worse this time. This was no familial dispute but the usurpation of blood and heritage by outsiders. How blind must our kind have been to ignore the signs, and how much more desperate were we to ignore the rise of Tremere and stand idly by as one of our best was extinguished? It is true, your Tzimisce clanmates have fought the Tremere since the Usurpers earliest night, but this was never to avenge Saulot. The struggle is about pride and jealousy. After the diablerie of Saulot and the fall of clan Salubri, only the foolish failed to see that the Long Night was ending.

[Tami]

The Present

It wasn’t until the words “Constantinople burns” echoed, however, that the veil of the Long Night finally slipped away, and an uncertain century was revealed in its place. Again, our kind would want to claim credit for the fall of Constantinople – blame the jealousy of the Second City – but truth is our kind had little to do with its destruction. It was mortals who burned the Second Rome, and our kind could only stand by helplessly and watch the ashes fall. When the fired dimmed, a new world emerged, one where the night no longer offered us succor.

The Kine are claiming more and more of the night, pushing us into the shadows. Their Church, strong and united, knows of us and sends its hunters after us with their torches. Cities are becoming overcrowded, and the law of Domain is ignores as Cainties starve for blood. This is the first time of weak blood, and Cainites twelve times removed from Caine have appeared among us. Like mortals – how often do we ape their customs, their cultures and wars – our Princes fight for domain, waging terrible wars that echo the destruction of Carthage. Our elders hide, fearful of those who are creatures of this violent age. To neonates and ancillae of this age, Carthage, the Second City and even Rome are legends. They see the night as endless and are desperate to claim their chare. Everything is fraying. Prince fights prince, sire betrays childer, and childer sacrifices sire. Our time of ascendancy is coming to an end.

This age will be known as the War of Princes – our last stand before the uncertain future takes hold.

How will it end…?

Contancia of Eriyes
Childe of Japheth
Childe of Cappadocius

[Tami]

The detente of the Long Night has finally crumbled and given way to a time of conflict and strife for the Children of Caine, when young and old alike take to the battlefields. Across Europe and the Holy Land, the War of Princes rages. It rallies lords and their vassals to manuever against their rivals, to vie for power, to conquer or to settle ancient grudges.

At its most basic, the War of Princes is the intense conflict between a handful of powerful and active Methuselah, the so-called monarchs of the Dark Medieval. The conflict gets its name from the princes who direct many of the battles and the principalities that are the major prizes. Unlike the lords and monarchs to whom they swear fealty, princes control concrete domains. These domains can be attacked by force of arms, usurped through intrigues or swayed to switch overlords through enticements or threats. It is the princes who have the most to lose and the most to gain from the present conflict; therefore, it is their war.

As was the case in the Second City, Carthage and Constantinople, the War of Princes has already overflowed its bounds. What some thought would be just a settling of status between the monarchs has become a generalized state of conflict and strife. Cainite plotters and knights move from fiefdom to fiefdom taking what they can. Even the most conservative among the Damned must react, either by retreating into the shadows or by striking out before they are striken down themselves. The complacent feed the pyres while the bold seize what they can.

Origins

Like any storm, the War of Princes has been brewing for some time before some Cainite troubadour gave it a poetic name. No single event caused the war, but a series of happenings gradually fanned the flames of strife into the inferno that now rages across Europe and Outremer. Many of these preliminary conflicts seem minor at the time. French Toreador withdrawing support from the Grand Court in Paris, for example, seemed just like another Cainite scheme amidst so many others. But suddenly weakening the powerful Ventrue Prince Alexander led others whom he had held in check to move. In the Holy Roman Empire, the agents of High Lord Hardestadt suddenly had more freedom of action, and they were able to renew their expansion east. This led to greater conflicts between German Ventrue and the Tzimisce to the east, which sowed chaos in Hungary and give the Tremere blood-sorcerers room in which to grow into a power to be reckoned with. This process of isolated incidents building upon each other repeated itself time and time throughout the 11th and 12th centuries.

Of all events leading to the War of Princes, however, none can compare to the impact of the slaying of Saulot. Almost single-handedly, the magus Tremere changed the world of Caine's race, striking a deep and terrible blow that caused even the mighty Antediluvians to shudder in their sleep. For all the jockeying and intrigue of the War of Princes, never had an Antediluvian fallen to such a foe. The diablerie of Saulot sent shock waves through Cainite courts that stil reverberate in these nights.

It is hardly coincidental that the rise of the Tremere was soon followed by the reappearance of the monarchs--mighty Methuselahs stirred from torpor and hungry for power once more. Of course, some Methuselah had remained active throughout the Long Night. Michael, the Toreador Patriarch of Constantinople, had shephered his golden city since the third century despite growing religious mania, and Montano of Sicily had attended to his torpid sire, the Lasombra Antediluvian, for countless centuries. But starting in the 11th century, several of their contemporaries in the Blood rose from slumber or comtemplation to take a much more active role in the affairs of Dark Medieval Europe. In each case, mortal events built upon vampiric issues to lead them to activity.

In Britain, the ancient Ventrue Mithras had slumbered since the Roman nights, but he woke shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. He rose to become Prince of London and gathered the Ventrue of England and France to his banner. Shortly after, as the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1096, Caliph Jamal of the warrior caste of the Assamites rose to action in the Levant, calling his clan to push back the Frankish vampires who accompanied the crusaders. Perhaps in response, Montano exerted subtle influence over his Christian clanmates in Iberia to commit more and more to their "Shadow Reconquists" looking to push Muslim vampires from that peninsula. In Germany, the Ventrue High Lord Hardestadt marshaled his forces to push east into Tzimisce homelands and secure domain across the Holy Roman Empire. To the west, perhaps fearing the influence of powerful Ventrue in England and Germany, the Toreador Matriarch Salianna's agents withdrew their long-standing support from Alexander, the Ventrue Prince of Paris. Other, more subtle Methuselahs played deeper in the shadows, including the Cappadocian Japheth (his sire's keeper) and the archfiend Yorak, high priest of the Tzimisce Cathedral of Flesh. With equal shares of cunning, coercion, and charisma, these monarchs crafted nocturnal kingdoms from the loose conglomerations of lords and princes that had characterized the Long Nights. In the process, old rivalries where re-kindled and new ones set ablaze. By the end of the 12th century, the powder keg of the War of Princes was in place; all that was needed was the spark to ignite it. That spark came with the Fourth Crusade.

The events of the crusade of 1202 through 1204 were traumatic enough; its implications were far worse. In the daylight, the crusaders ended up sacking Constantinople, the grandest of Christian cities, and never once faced Muslim opponents. The so-called Army of Christ ended up carving up a Christian empire and serving the interest of French nobles and Venetian traders. The New Rome was sacked, burned and parceled like a roast hog. For the scions of Caine, matters were even more chaotic, as faction after faction failed to exhert more than the slightest influence over the crusaders. Assasinations, petty wars and power-plays all failed to ride herd on the mortal masses. Constantinople, which had been the grand experiment of the Toreador Methuselah Michael, came crashing down as he met his end. Many of his powerful subjects, from the Ventrue tyrant Caius to the Tzimisce visionary Gesu met similiar fates.

Empires had fallen before, of course, and the ancients had all seen childer and siblings meet the Final Death. But with the tensions already in place, the debacle vampires would come to call the Bitter Crusade, made two things abundantly clear. First, a time of reckoning was coming. The mortal herd was hardy and angry enough to lash out madly and take down its predators. Second, no one's safety was assured. Michael had been among the most potent active Methuselahs, and in the end, all he had built turned to ash with him. If he could suffer such a fate, so could anyone else. Therefore, a potent vampire who wished to survive needed to both secure his own position and move against enemies before they had a chance to do so.
The war was on.

[Tami]

Battlefields and Intrigues

As the century marches forward, the princes and lords of Europe fight the War of Princes across a multitude of fronts, some as obvious as night shrouded battlefields, others as subtle as the play of influence over merchant houses and mortal kings. From the cloaked valleys of Transylvania to the courts of France and the cathedrals of Italy, the War of princes rages in conflicts both small and large. Vampires are competitive predators, and they have been warring with each other since biblical times, but the last 40 years have seen that conflict take on a whole new intensity. Where Cainites might once move with unloving patience, readying whole generations of agents and catspaws to bring down their rivals, they now marshal nocturnal armies to settle maters in blood. Intrigues and honeyed words still have their roles to play, of course, but the quiet game of the Long Night has become a cutthroat shadow war of murders and betrayals. Understandings that have kept the balance of power since the nights of Rome fall by the wayside as ambitious princes grab what they can before another grabs it from them

The most obvious sign of all the changes if the upsurge in all-out battle between Canite forces. The term “vampire army” is something of a fallacy, since even the largest vampire forces at battle rarely contain more than a few dozen of Caine’s brood, but these few can bring to bear terrifying destructive power. In the valleys and crags where they fight, only destruction reigns. Add to them their entourage of ghouls, thralls and catspaws, and the war of princes takes on a very literal meaning. But as always, for every unloving prince who leads his troops on the field of battle, there are five more who use guile and more subtle tactics to further their interests. Every nocturnal court in Europe sees its share of ambassadors and spies, of new alliances and betrayals.

Of the multiple intrigues and conflicts, the following are most active.