Tamriel Data:The Grand Alliance IV

Book Information The Grand Alliance IV
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The Grand Alliance IV

by Andreil of Falkreath

An account of an alliance between Skyrim's western kings

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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.