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The Grand Alliance, Volume I
Throughout Tamriel, the tumult of the Imperial Simulacrum had an almost uniformly fractious effect on the political institutions of the provinces. In Morrowind, the longstanding stability of the Heartlands District was torn asunder by rival usurpers in Ebonheart and Mournhold, who proceeded to wage war upon each other. In High Rock, the lapse in Imperial authority reignited long-frozen conflicts between Iliac statelets, killing thousands in bloody, destructive vendetta wars. In Valenwood, stabilizing internal alliances collapsed, abandoning the kingdoms of Arenthia and Woodhearth to be savaged by foreign foes. Nearly everywhere in Tamriel, dissolution and disintegration were the political order of the decade.
Western Skyrim, however, proved the exception to the rule. Debate continues in academic circles about what unique circumstances allowed the kingdoms of Solitude (or Haafinheim), Falkreath, and the Reach to escape the far-reaching political rifts that elsewhere divided men and mer. Perhaps Tharnite conspiracy never reached the inner circles of the court of Markarth Side, which proved to be the nucleus of what would become the Grand Alliance. Or perhaps the Lady Hania, distinguished cousin of the true line of the Emperors, steered what forces she could muster towards the advancement of a unified bloc. One way or another, a great deal of diplomatic and military action was collectivized between the three kingdoms into a coalition that would prove one of the most dominant political forces of the Simulacrum.
Modern scholars agree that the seed of the Grand Alliance was planted with the childhood bond between Vorngyd, future King of the Reach, and Eyrfin, the future king of Haafinheim. Sent to foster in the court of Solitude as a youth by his aged mother, the late Queen Hellne, the irrepressible and boisterous Prince Vorngyd quickly struck up an unlikely friendship with the dour Prince Eyrfin. The latter, some four years older, was said to have smiled only rarely while observing the duties of a young nobleman, but often when in the company of his friend, the young prince of Markarth.
The boys grew close as brothers during Vorngyd's seven-year fostership, and by the time King Tolftur of Solitude died in the winter of 3E 381, the new King Eyrfin's love for Vorngyd was enough to ensure that several longstanding trade disputes between Haafinheim and the Reach were settled amicably. In fact, the historian Ulla Once-Warned asserts that Vorngyd himself first introduced Eyrfin to his future wife Hania (the young noblewoman having once visited Elfstone Keep as a child). By the time of Jagar Tharn's treachery in 389, the two kingdoms were in nearly perfect accord.
With the outbreak of chaos from Tharnite conspiracy throughout Skyrim (and Tamriel at large), this amity proved a light in the darkness of those tragic early years. The brutal catastrophes that wracked White Hold and Hrothgar, the collapse of the Winterhold Exchange, and the bitter ferocity of the imposter king Bjis' horrific purges in the Rift are the subject of separate volumes all their own, and combined they threatened to tear asunder the Old Kingdom of Man. Besides the tragic assassination of Queen Hellne in 3E 391, however, Western Skyrim avoided most of the calamities.
The Grand Alliance, Volume II
Though many today in High Rock and Hammerfell point to the bloated egos and territorial ambitions of Eyrfin and Vorngyd to explain their first flirtations with what would become the War of the Bend'r-Mahk, there is little evidence to suggest that such self-aggrandizement motivated the initial steps towards war. Indeed, shortly after his crowning, King Vorngyd is known to have hosted a delegation from the Crown rulers of Karthwasten at Markarth Side, where both parties agreed to share information on bandit activity in the eastern Reach and cooperate to prevent a future uprising of the irascible native Reachmen. Of course, this cooperation eventually did break down, and the toasts of 391 gave way to ferocious bloodshed only a few years later.
Some attribute the outbreak of war, instead, to the influence of King Bjeld of Falkreath. Older than Vorngyd and Eyrfin, Bjeld – called "the Watchful" by admiring later Nords – was in his early thirties by the time of the Simulacrum. King Bjeld and his advisors were convinced as early as 394 that war with Hammerfell was inevitable, given the rapidly-deteriorating state of the Imperial Law in Skyrim. Four years before the first blood was shed in the War of the Bend'r-Makh, a company of rogue Crown troops attempted a raid on the Reach fortress-city of Beorinhal, which failed. In response, a party of Bear Clan warriors sworn to Markarth Side staged a counter-raid on Karthwasten, across the Hammerfell border. Though King Vorngyd and the old Prince Kinnal of Karthwasten quickly disavowed the attacks, King Bjeld clearly saw these events as portents of much more violent conflict to come.
Bjeld decided to leverage his strong position astride the Skyrim-Colovia border into a guarantee that when war with Hammerfell did come, the Nords would win. Naturally, he looked to the two young kings to the north to augment this strategy. In a summit held at Markarth Side in 3E 396, the kings of Haafinheim, Falkreath, and the Reach agreed to a pact of mutual defense. The three regents additionally agreed to share intelligence on unrest in Western Skyrim, jointly patrol the Karth River and the Sundered Hills against banditry, and impose no restrictions on trade between their kingdoms - no small guarantee in those turbulent times. Thus was the Grand Alliance born.
War, of course, did come. Though many Redguards claim that the second Nordic attack on Karthwasten took place with the blessing of King Vorngyd – or even King Bjeld – there is little corroborating evidence of this in the historical record. What is known is that a Nordic warband struck ferociously, burning several farms to the ground, prompting an immediate Crown response and another siege of Beorinhal. The war initially looked grim for the Nord kings, especially following the catastrophe at the Battle of Julfnar's Cowardice and the entry of the Breton Kingdom of Jehanna into the war in early 398. By the spring of that year, the front, which had originally been limited to the fertile lands around the Karth River's headwaters, had expanded from the Jerall Mountains to the Falkheim coast. Throughout 397, Nord forces were pushed back almost everywhere.
While King Bjeld preferred to lead from the camps, Vorngyd and Eyrfin became renowned in the early days of the war for their front-line leadership of the troops. After routing the Breton forces outside Falkirstad in 398, Eyrfin was acclaimed with the moniker "the Warlike" from his war-chieftains. One may speculate that this exposure to the heat of combat may have sown the seeds of the first real conflict between the lifelong friends.
The Grand Alliance, Volume III
There are several theories for why the tide of the War of the Bend'r-Makh began to turn in 3E 398. Some historians point to the second uprising in Dragonstar – and its interruption of Crown supply lines – as the pivotal moment. Others point to the Battle of the Three Widows, in which a Haafingar marine force repulsed the siege by sea of Hraggstad, supported by defecting Nord troops from the Legion stationed idly at Fort Northwatch. Or perhaps it was the Massacre at Mount Casnar, where a Redguard strike force bound for Hal Norvold was utterly destroyed after accidentally wandering into the territory of a pair of local giants. At any rate, the tide of the war turned decisively in the Nords' favor by Mid Year of 398.
King Eyrfin, King Vorngyd, and King Bjeld agreed that Bretons and Redguards needed to be crushed decisively, lest peace give way to another war. But while Eyrfin and Bjeld were content to prosecute the war with the forces of the Grand Alliance alone (defectors from the Legions notwithstanding), King Vorngyd controversially made the decision to augment his warbands with volunteer forces from around Skyrim, outside the three kingdoms of the alliance. While the bulk of these troops served as individuals, several full clans from the east sought the glory and plunder of war in the west. Most notable of these clans, of course, was Clan Fire-Hand of Eastmarch, led by the bloodthirsty Jarl Jona "the Ansei-Ender". While the foreign forces were brutally effective on the battlefield, as demonstrated amply during the Second Battle of Dragonstar, they soon became known for their utter disregard for civilian lives and property. Indeed, some estimate that as many as two of every three villages in the eastern Reach were burned to the ground during the latter years of the War of the Bend'r Mahk, most of them sacked by these marauding foreign warbands.
King Eyrfin and King Bjeld objected strongly to the presence of these eastern troops, though for different reasons. Eyrfin, galvanized by his military successes in the north, was beginning to recognize the real possibility of a concentrated push into Jehanna proper, and feared that the presence of eastern warbands would dilute the hard-fought glory earned by Haafingar alone. Bjeld, meanwhile, rightly feared the damage these warbands were doing to the reputation of the allied kings, demands for titles and spoils the war-chieftains might make in the aftermath of the conflict, and the long-term economic damage to Skyrim's most productive lands by the foreign troops' ravages. But both kings were overruled by Vorngyd, who continued to field eastern troops through the end of the war.
To coordinate strategy between these eastern volunteers, Vorngyd hired mercenary generals from around the Empire. The most famous (and loathed, among Bretons and Redguards) of these was General Anton Duvais, a weathered Glenpoint man-at-arms who felt no qualms about accepting a hefty sum of Reach gold in exchange for leading a war against his countrymen.
The choice to allow eastern volunteer warbands access to the front lines would come to haunt Vorngyd and his heirs. The Fire-Hands, the most prominent eastern volunteer clan fighting in the Reach, proved decisive in the Second Battle of Dragonstar, taking possession of the eastern half of that city unilaterally following the abrupt restoration of order by the Legions in 3E 399. Having been granted lordship over Karthwasten once it was occupied in late 398, the Fire-Hand clan became in an instant the most powerful vassal clan in all of Skyrim. But Jona's brutal rule over the majority-Redguard city prompted a desperate Crown counterattack in the war's final days. In the Battle of Vorngyd's Stand, the young king fought a desperate battle in the pass south of Karthwasten. Though the Nords won the battle, Vorngyd died of an arrow wound to the heart, leaving the crown of Markarth to his fifteen-year-old son, Barda.
Perhaps concerned by the ambitions of this new force in the region, or perhaps seeking a share of glory for Falkreath not tainted by the timely intervention of giants, King Bjeld took the war in the south further than either Vorngyd or Eyrfin had expected of the older man, pushing Crown forces past the provincial border and occupying the holy city of Elinhir. The vicious struggle for Elinhir culminated only days before the final end of hostilities with the pillaging of the city's greatest temple by Nord forces, an act which to this day stands as one of the war's most infuriating legacies to the defeated Crowns.
The Grand Alliance, Volume IV
With the restoration of Imperial order in late 3E 399, the War of the Bend'r Mahk came to an end. The Treaty of Chorrol confirmed the success of the allied kings. Fully one half of the northernmost Crown principality – the so-called County Karthwasten - was ceded to King Barda's Kingdom of the Reach, while Falkreath's indefinite occupation of Elinhir was confirmed. Eyrfin, for his part, came to terms with Jehanna, which agreed to enter a personal union with the Crown of Solitude. Though the Dragonstar question remained (and remains, at the time of publication) formally unsettled, the status quo of the Taurus Hall Concordat holds to this day. The Grand Alliance had won.
Peace would not herald the immediate end of the alliance, but the slow cooling of relations between the victorious kings soon began to chip away at the allies' shared purpose. It began in the aftermath of the Second Battle of Dragonstar, which saw an army from Markarth pursue defeated Redguard troops into High Rock territory near the town of Snowline. Though the Nords did not catch their quarry, they took the liberty of looting and burning several small villages on the Breton side of the border. King Eyrfin, having already concluded his peace with Jehanna, saw these provocative acts as an attack on his own newly-won domains. One rumor, though unsubstantiated, claims that only the intercession of Queen Hania on behalf of her childhood friend prevented the enraged Eyrfin from ordering an immediate counter-attack.
Eyrfin, meanwhile, considered King Bjeld's choice to occupy Elinhir dangerous and inflammatory, especially given the city's holiness in the eyes of the Redguards. While there were revanchist arguments in favor of acquiring the formerly Nord-ruled lands of County Karthwasten and Jehanna , Elinhir had never before been part of Skyrim. When resistance to Fire-Hand rule erupted in Karthwasten in 405, Jarl Jona publicly blamed the riots on Bjeld's mishandling of the occupation in Elinhir. Needless to say, faced with the vast swathes of new territory acquired by his northern neighbors, King Bjeld was loath to meekly release his single territorial acquisition.
But the Grand Alliance did not die a quiet death, as many expected, in the early decades of the fifth century. In fact, with the death of King Bjeld in 411, the friendly relationship between Markarth and Falkreath was quickly re-confirmed. The new kings Barda and Grovald, inheritors of their fathers' war spoils, have in the last two decades embarked on a rather remarkable project of solidification and stabilization. Though the Dragonstar ulcer still gnaws at the Reach, and the question of the Fire-Hand Clan's dramatic ascension to power still complicates regional politics, the stolid King Barda "the Builder" has proved as effective a regent in peacetime as his father was in war. Karthwasten, once a hotbed of Redguard unrest, has largely been pacified, in part thanks to the decisive action of King Barda in driving his genocidal vassal Jona from the city in 425. Still, the recent surge of Reachman activity in the Sundered Hills borderlands has become a source of tension between the two kingdoms, and it remains to be seen if the alliance will weather this latest storm.
King Eyrfin lived much longer than his counterparts, which perhaps explains Haafinheim's slow slide away from its old allies. While Barda and Grovald cemented their shared commitment to a peacetime continuation of the alliance and mutual suppression of the Redguard insurgencies, Eyrfin's Haafinheim never occupied Hammerfell land, nor faced threats from foreign warbands on its core territory. Following the incident outside Snowline, the king largely withdrew from the cooperative ventures of the alliance, and since his death in 3E 424, Solitude has largely focused its political and military energies north, rather than south, under the rule of its new sovereign, King Thian I.