[hider=Muris]

[centre]
[colour=brown][u][h1]Principality of Muris[/h1][/u][/colour]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/olz97R5.png[/img]
[/centre]

[hider=City Description]

Muris is a somber city, famous less for its architectural marvels or grand industries than for one particular historical event: the Muris Massacre. The massacre destroyed much of the older buildings of Muris, including the former prince's palace, and even after the blood had dried and the fires had ran out, thick grey ash covered the city streets, giving it the new nickname of the 'Grey City'. Besides necessitating the newness of many of the notable buildings throughout the city, the massacre also gave it a reputation as a dark place, obsessed with mortality and decorated in dark tones of black and grey. This affects high fashion in Muris as well; Murissian nobility consider bright colours and loose fabrics gaudy and lurid, with the exception of the colour red: that colour which was most associated with Muris before the massacre.

An especially stable and orderly city, Muris' streets are defended from ne'er do wells and rival cities alike by the Greyguards: a small, professional gendarmerie force personally sworn to the Prince of Muris. The justice meted out by the Greyguards is infamously stark, more liberal with executing criminals than the guardsmen of other cities. They are also responsible for making monthly excursions to the neighbouring towns and villages of Muris, gathering the tribute they owe to the prince of the Grey City. As their names would imply, the Greyguards' uniforms are plainly decorated, the most notable aspect of their outfits a distinctive tri-horned helmet, meant to emulate the three shields on the city's sigil.

Like most Styrian cities, the main industry of Muris is trade and commerce. The city's port facilities are the last port of call before the Azure Sea, and the merchants populating it dominate the economic activity of many of the islands dotting Styria's southwest coasts. As for domestic production, Muris is notable perhaps only for its great quantity of fisheries; the currents running between Muris and the islands to her south bring in great schools of fish that fill the bellies of many Styrians. The great economic weakness of the city is in high culture: the restrictive sensibilities of Muris are damning to fashion and other artists, and great talents in those regards who hail from Muris tend to migrate elsewhere, where their abilities can be more appreciated.

[/hider]

[hider=Ruling Dynasty]
[b]Overview:[/b] Muris is governed as a hereditary princedom, ruled over by the incumbent noble House of Varro. The Varro family first came to prominence in Muris centuries ago, making a name for themselves as lawmakers and diplomats serving under the then-dominant Di'Olento family. After a pivotal moment in Muris' history—the infamous 'Muris Massacre'—the Di'Olentos were forcibly removed from power and brutally put to the sword by a peasant mob, supposedly riled up (according to folklore) by agitators sent from the city of Sipani. The devastated Di'Olento's only surviving mainline family member, the Lady Emily Di'Olento, third daughter of the deceased Prince, was married to the then-heir of the House of Varro, Giona Varro. Giona and his wife had escaped the massacre through sheer luck, by virtue of their presence in Westport on a diplomatic mission on the day it occurred. Giona's own father, Vittorio Varro, was also killed in the massacre.

Giona worked alongside those few remaining nobles of Murissian families to gather up an expeditionary force of mercenaries and attachés of foreign cities, sufficient to restore order to Muris. He then partook in the second part of the Muris Massacre, the reconquest of the city from the mob and the mass execution of those determined to have played a role in it. Unlike many of the other vengeful aristocrats, though, Giona had maintained some modicum of mercy in dealing with the rebels, and had both sustained the strength of his portion of the army as well as bolstered it with surrendered militants of the rebellion. Therefore, the night after the fighting in Muris had ended, Giona pressed his advantage and took personal command of all those fighting men left in the city that he and his wife Emily could oblige or bribe the loyalty of, to press his claim to Muris. The men of his rivals proved too exhausted and undermanned to prevail against him, and Giona emerged as the undisputed ruler of what was left of Muris.

The heirs of Giona Varro have ruled Muris to this day, governing the city as an unbroken line of nobility that have helped rebuild the city of Muris and keep it an especially stable and orderly example of a Styrian city-state. In fact, so secure is House Varro's hold over Muris that the principality's minor nobles are all considered to be of little political consequence; much too far beneath the Varro family to justify intermarriage. Thus, the Varros tend to marry into families of other cities, and enjoy an extended web of marriage alliances with nobles of the other Styrian cities: an appropriate state of affairs for a noble family descended from diplomats. An exception to this is Sipani, a state whose nobles have never before married into Muris' ruling family: House Varro would never debase themselves by mingling with a dynasty hailing from that despised rival city.

[hr]

[u][b]Notable Family Members[/b][/u]

[b]Prince Martino Varro, Aged 49;[/b] Martino is a man well past the middle of his life, but he has only spent the past three years of it as a ruler. His elderly father, Niccolas, governed for decades before him, and was renowned across Styria as a shrewd and wise political navigator. Even as an adult, years into his own reign, Martino still feels trapped within his esteemed father's shadow. His machinations—for Styrian nobility are always involved in machinations—mostly revolve around glorifying himself, and attempting to leave a legacy to match that of Niccolas. He is largely absent from the lives of his children, except as they are needed for the fulfillment of one or another of his plots to attain glory and prestige.

[b]Hugo Varro, Aged 30;[/b] The next in line to attain the rank of Prince of Muris, once Martino passes. Hugo is a man cut from his own cloth, thoroughly disinterested in his father's attempts to match his grandfather's heights in such abstract matters as 'prestige'. Instead, Hugo cares for a more countable measure of success: wealth. He is a major investor in a great many merchant vessels and trade guilds both within Muris and beyond, and has a reputation as something of a cautious shareholder. It takes much convincing to pry the coin from Hugo's hands for anything but a guarantee of profit. He is married to Lady Ella (née Knightfall), a noble lady who is sister of the Grand Duke of Visserine. Their marriage was a practical one, enabling Hugo to earn intimate access to the market goings-on of that greatest city of the Azure Sea.

[b]Camilla Varro, Aged 27;[/b] Camilla is a woman of two faces. Her public image is carefully sculpted to fit in to her place as a noble lady of the esteemed House of Varro. She has a noble husband, a young daughter, is beautiful and graceful, and enjoys music and poetry and everything else she's supposed to enjoy. Privately, however, she is also interested in a great many hobbies unbecoming of a lady of her stature. Foremost among these is combat: her attendants are secretly women-warriors, with whom Camilla practices her talents as a duelist in private. The lady also enjoys hunting and archery, as well as reveling in the sort of political intrigue that is meant to practiced by noblemen. Her talents of deception, earned from disguising her masculine dispositions, have improved her abilities at this kind of backroom maneuvering so much that her father has entrusted her to serve as his spymaster—all under the table, of course.

[b]Cirillo Varro, Aged 24;[/b] The youngest of Prince Martino's three children and the most aggressively ambitious. Cirillo identifies himself with his household more than any other member of the House of Varro, taking especially personally any and all grievances and rivalries between the Varro family and their enemies. His zealous dedication to the hatred of his family's foes impresses his father and befuddles his brother and sister, and it is worsened by Cirillo's tendency towards violence and anger. On at least one alleged occasion he has killed a man for simply [i]being[/i] from Sipani. To cultivate these martial instincts, Cirillo was gifted by his father with captaincy over the Greyguard, the civic military of Muris. Cirillo personally is a great warrior, perhaps the equal of his sister, and is particularly fond of daggers and other easily hidden small arms.
[/hider]

[hider=History]
Muris is a city as embedded in history as any other in Styria, but the reality is that two major situations in particular are more responsible for forging the Muris of today than anything else in the city-state's long story. The first of these is Muris' rivalry with Sipani, which dominates the regional politics of both cities' environs, and has shaped Murissian politics for centuries. The second is the infamous Muris Massacre, which instilled the city with its current culture and current regime.

Sipani and Muris have been at each other's throats for untold generations. The cities have endured numerous wars and have a constantly fluctuating border, as frontier towns and villages are fought over for reasons of pride and revenge rather than any material benefit they provide to the city dominant over them. The origin of the rivalry is lost to both sides, but its intensity does not show any signs of wavering. House Varro has never married a noble of Sipani and has shown that they never will, and citizens of Sipani are despised in Muris and driven out of the city by the Greyguards whenever they arrive. Culturally, too, the citizens differ, the city streets of either state mirror opposites of each other; grey solemnity in Muris and colourful splendor in Sipani. It is simply an immutable part of being Murissian to hate Sipani.

Easily the most important event in the history of Muris is the Muris Massacre. The original source of the riots is hotly debated, with some emphasizing the role that rising grain prices in the city played, and others blaming the riots on agitators from Sipani. Whatever the cause, unrest among the peasantry reached a tipping point, and violence ensued. What began as protests in the city centre gradually began more violent, and the resources of the Muris City Guard—the precursors to the modern day Greyguard—were stretched too thin. As law and order eroded, opportunists from the countryside flocked into the city, taking advantage of the chaos of the riots to loot and steal with impunity. Vigilantes and criminal gangs brawled openly in the streets and bandits brazenly assaulted guardposts, slaughtering any man sworn to the Prince and using their gold and weapons to recruit more vagabonds from among the desperate populace. The city guard gradually withdrew to only defend the Prince's Palace itself, where the nobility hid from the peasantry underneath them that sought to extinguish feudal rule over the city. The ensuing massacre when the palace fell changed the history of Muris and brought the House of Varro to power in the city, turning Muris into the cultural and political entity that it is today.

Most recently, Muris was one of many participants illicitly involved in the Mortem Legio's capture of Westport. Though the Grey City is officially neutral in all matters concerning the Union, coin from the Varro family did somehow find its way into the coffers of the mercenary company that captured Westport away from the mercantile empire across the sea. Muris is an independent minded city and Prince Martino Varro an independent minded ruler, and would rather not have a powerful empire knocking on their doorstep, even if it means separately supporting the same cause as Sipani.
[/hider]
[/hider]