Carolus Vingrus was the leader of the Republican Rebels during the Gerovian Anarchy.

He was born circa 382-385 Conflict in the small town of Vistellus, south of Yeshtaburg, on the border with Danaen. The son of landowner, he was educated in the capital in his youth and returned to his village in his mid-twenties. His goal in life was to become an educated beacon for his small, poor town of craftsmen and farmers, and seek their betterment by involving himself in politics.

In 415 Conflict, just before the start of the Gerovian Anarchy, before the war had reached the small border towns, Carolus was elected headman of Vistellus. He left his town to petition the king for several boons that would ease the financial burdens on his people and allow them to prosper, that they may be of more value to the Crown.

But before Carolus could reach the capital, news that King Vedir I had been assassinated, and civil war broke out between the Royalists and the Gerovianists.

Carolus fled back home to ensure his people were safe.

The war did not reach Vistellus for four years, but when it did, people were slaughtered, homes were burned, and supplies were “requisitioned” for the war effort by both sides.

To protect themselves, the survivors of the Sack of Vistellus (419 Conflict) fled into the woods, under Carolus’s leadership, and hid from both armies.

While originally a staunch Royalist, the destruction of his town, slaughter of his villagers, and the cruelties inflicted by both sides of the conflict embittered Carolus to both causes. It was over the next decade that Carolus grew more disillusioned with the ideas of monarchies and empires, and instead began to muse on the thoughts and writings of he and his colleagues at the university.

Carolus began to write his thoughts down in a book known only as “The Republican”, of which no original copies are known to exist.

This book outlined his thoughts for the perfect government: a government of elected officials that sit in government for limited, preset terms of no longer than half a decade. These officials can be petitioned by the people, and are elected and assembled by the people for the people. These ideas were not new to Enayra, but many of them had been stamped out by strong, authoritarian monarchs that feared their loss of power.

Ironically, Carolus’s Republicanism found its inspiration in the Danaesh monarchy and its electoral structure.

In 429 Conflict, Carolus, fed up with the ongoing civil war, gathers an army of like-minded commoners as his followers, and enters the fray as a third faction, the Republicans, or Rebels, who seek to do-away with the other two factions and instill an elected representative government in Estion, and do away with monarchs all together.

While Carolus and his faction would not win the war, and instead were slaughtered and defeated by a united Gerovianist-Royalist front, Republicanism would never truly die in Estion, or in Enayra as a whole.

Eventually, copies of Carolus’s book were found in all corners of the continent, but they rooted themselves most deeply in Xiar, who, in 251 Ruin, a little over 800 years after Carolus first rose up for the cause, finally took up arms against their tyrannical King Antipausus III and deposed him in favour of an elected republic.

And in Estion to this day, the peace between the people, the nobility and the Crown is ever fragile, and always ready to crack and each side seeks to gain more power for themselves.