[Under construction]
The strong control of the Northern Church and the imperial administration in the Tiberian Empire quelled any organized exploration of republican thinking throughout the northern lands. The University of Tricolles and its lesser children focused nearly exclusively on philosophy, theology, and the law. The strong emphasis on logic was entirely devoted to justifying the status quo.
But in the south, especially at both the University of Khartras and The Academy of War, the presence of so many different cultures and the wide variety of different statuses among both faculty and students seemed to feed a more free-ranging and experimental orientation. All of the arts and classical fields, like history, music, and rhetoric, were valued, and their practitioners swirled around each other in the dance that Randolph of Khartras called “unleashed but disciplined curiosity.”
As has now become clear, several powers also were quietly advocating for and advancing ideas that led one’s thinking toward republican forms of political arrangement. The Disclosure changed the way the history of the past five hundred years must appear in future treatises, and its full ramifications will only appear in texts over time. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, the serious student of history should spend some time at The Academy of War, Paradise University, Ravenwood University, or the University of Khartras; some teachers at those places understand from firsthand experience how and why some of the new republican thinking exploded some old certainties.
The Academy of War–helping its Queen keep the People’s great secret and working to train competent, ethical military leaders, the Academy apparently would not have much surplus time for other endeavors; yet a significant portion of its graduates sympathized with reformers after they returned to their homes, and many graduates eventually joined the Southern Republic’s Army, although debates still rage about whether some officers simply saw the Republic’s Army as a quick route to independent commands.
The Celdon Monks–Over time, the monks endured so many failures of hierarchies that many of their brothers radicalized in their politics; Brother Caedmon was perhaps the most extreme example, but not the only one.
Exiles from the Northern Church and the Tiberian Empire–The Northern Church has a long history of persecuting its radical reformers, while the Tiberian Empire often exiled dissenters for one-year punishments; a certain percentage in each category either fled to or stayed in the southlands, often adding to the boiling cauldron of revolutionary thinking in the south.
Paradise–several notable scholars established residency in Paradise and started a small university; many of the city’s students and several of the city’s lawyers become known as leaders in the revolution that led to the founding of the Southern Republic
The University of Khartras–many of the University’s faculty were reflexive supporters of the monarchy; after all, the University owed most of its resource base to the kings and the nobles; yet the presence of some scholars educated at The Academy of War, the small cohort of female scholars, and several daughters of faculty who lectured in their fathers’ absences all tended to support various versions of republican thinking.
