Maragana Girl
Copyright 2004 by EC
EC's Erotic Art & Fiction - http://www.ecgraphicarts.com/
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(warnings: judicial corporal punishment, forced public nudity, sex between adults, 
references to drug use, references to violence)

Post Script 02 - Notes on the History of the Grand Duchy of Upper Danubia 
(more stuff that didn’t make it into the novel)


King Vladik and the Judicial Reforms of 1524

Prior to the rule of King Vladik the Defender in the early 16th Century, an 
offender was convicted of a crime by his local village council, collared by the 
village blacksmith, and then became subject to the person who had accused him. 
Village elders who, in many cases were handpicked by the area’s most important 
landlords, issued the convictions. 

It goes without saying that such a system was vulnerable to abuses. It was 
common for wealthier persons to falsely accuse villagers or tenants of crimes, 
have them convicted and collared, and then utilize them as slaves. The abuse 
became worse in the late 15th Century when the custodians of convicted criminals 
began selling them as real slaves to neighboring countries. As the abuse became 
more common, the Royal Family became concerned that the country could 
become depopulated if too many criminals were sold abroad. There was debate 
within the Royal Court over how to stop the practice, but given the power of the 
southern landlords, nothing much could be done until 1502, the year of the first 
invasion from the Ottoman Empire.

The first Ottoman invasion completely altered the balance of power in the 
kingdom. Upon finding out that a large Ottoman force was marching northward to 
attack the Danubian Kingdom, King Vladik and his small army rode south. Their 
purpose was not to confront the Turks on open land where they faced certain 
defeat, but instead to organize a massive evacuation of the entire southern half of 
the Danubian Kingdom to the comparative safety of the north. Prior to the King's 
arrival, the southern part of the kingdom had been panic stricken about the 
pending invasion. The tenants and villagers were more than happy to join their 
King and flee northward, as were many lower caste knights who knew anything 
about Ottoman warfare. Under the leadership of the King, the lower classes 
revolted against the landlords, burnt their property, and fled into the forest. The 
evacuation of Lower Danubia destroyed the southern landowners as a social class 
within days. The southern landlords were left with neither land nor tenants, and 
thus their power was completely eliminated.

As the southern refugees crowded the valley around Danube City, the question 
arose over what to do about all the convicted criminals among them. The King 
now had his opportunity to put an end to the de facto slavery system. He simply 
declared that all displaced criminals were under the custody of the Crown, since it 
made no sense to keep them accountable to landowners that no longer had any 
land and to the elders of villages that no longer existed. During the brief interlude 
of peace following the first Turkish invasion, the King ordered all displaced 
criminals from the south to be rounded up and sent to live in guarded dormitories 
near Danube City.

With nearly half of the criminals in the country now under his control, the King’s 
next step was to figure out which ones were wrongly convicted of crimes and 
order them freed. He asked the Danubian Church to assign 20 priests to interview 
criminals and separate innocent people from ones who had truly committed 
crimes. King Vladik's purpose was not entirely altruistic, because he desperately 
needed more soldiers for his army. Any criminal wrongly convicted and willing to 
fight in the impending campaign against the Holy Roman Empire would be 
offered freedom. When the Turks invaded a second time, the offer of freedom was 
extended to any displaced criminal willing to fight in the Danubian Army.

By 1520 King Vladik had successfully fought four military campaigns, but with 
each war the number of men available to defend the kingdom had diminished. He 
needed more soldiers, and realized that criminals in the custody of the country's 
northern landlords could provide him with a much-needed group of new military 
recruits. He set about creating a new legal system to justify taking control of all 
remaining criminals in Upper Danubia, but his effort was interrupted by yet 
another invasion.

King Vladik finally issued the new judicial code in 1524, which was a far-
reaching set of laws that consolidated power under the Crown. Among the 
reforms was an edict stating that the private custody of criminals had been 
abolished throughout the kingdom, and that all criminals had to travel to Danube 
City to place themselves under the custody and protection of the King. He 
appointed 10 advisors to replace the 20 priests to interview the newly acquired 
criminals to determine guilt or innocence. Those 10 men became Upper Danubia's 
first Spokesmen for the Criminals. They rode with detachments of soldiers to 
enforce the edict, and long columns of naked, collared criminals streamed towards 
the capitol and King Vladik's dormitories. The edict also created the national 
Danubian judicial system, abolishing the right of village counsels to conduct trials 
and issue sentences. After 1524 the only person who had the right to issue a 
sentence or order a criminal collared was an authorized representative of the 
Crown.

By the late 1520's the Danubian government became completely unconcerned 
about the criminals' pasts. Worried about another invasion, King Vladik simply 
ordered all criminals, even recently convicted ones, to train as soldiers while 
Danubian scouts nervously patrolled the forests bordering the now lost provinces 
of Lower Danubia. The feared invasion finally came in 1531. Nearly all of the 
country's remaining criminals, along with the King, his heir, and 80 percent of the 
country's men of military age, died in the forests south of Danube City fiercely 
defending the kingdom. The country itself survived, but just barely. However, the 
legal system created by King Vladik remained in place, as did the idea of keeping 
all criminals under the custody of the Crown.

The dormitory system for housing criminals remained in place throughout most of 
the 16th and 17th Centuries, due to fears of more invasions. However, over time 
the government tired of having to house and feed large numbers of criminals if 
there was no military necessity for doing so. In 1710, the Grand Duke established 
the Danube City collar-zone and allowed criminals to live with their families, but 
under the supervision of their Spokesmen. In 1780 the dormitories finally were 
torn down and the stones used to construct a new Parliament building.


A Duke instead of a King

King Vladik the Defender was killed in battle in 1531, during the final and most 
serious invasion of the country from the south. Nearly 70 percent of King 
Vladik’s soldiers died in a series of fierce battles as the invaders slowly made 
their way through the forests towards Danube City. Finally, the king’s only son, 
together with his son-in-law, rallied the survivors of the Danubian Army for one 
last attack to prevent the invaders from escaping the forests and besieging Danube 
City. King Vladik’s son was killed, and his son-in-law crippled, but the 
Danubians won the battle.

The nation was stricken with grief, given that King Vladik and his only son were 
dead. The only living heirs to the throne were the King’s daughter and her 
wounded husband. When offered the crown the dead King’s son-in-law 
responded:

“I will rule, if that is what you wish. However, I have no right to be called King. 
Our true King has died defending our people, and I will leave his throne vacant so 
perhaps he can watch over us from the land of the dead.”

King Vladik’s son-in-law took the title of Grand Duke of Upper Danubia. From 
that point on the Danubian Royal Family always referred to themselves as Dukes 
instead of Kings.


"Wood Nymphs" - 16th Century female guerilla archers

In 1531, following the six military invasions that were successfully repelled by 
King Vladik, the Danubian Kingdom was a very different place than it had been 
prior to 1499, the year he took the crown. The most obvious change was the loss 
of the fertile manors of Lower Danubia and the transfer of nearly half the 
country’s population to the much less fertile Eastern Valley. Another obvious 
change, especially in the region surrounding Danube City, was the absence of 
men. King Vladik’s six military campaigns had decimated the male population, 
leaving barely 10 percent of all men of military age still alive. Of the survivors 
many, including the Grand Duke, were so badly crippled from battle that they 
were unable to perform normal chores. The situation was so extreme that the area 
around Danube City became known as “The Valley of Women”.

The Grand Duke, quite reasonably, was concerned about yet another attack from 
either the Ottoman or the Holy Roman Empire. Were such an attack to take place 
there was almost no one available to defend the kingdom except a few Royal 
bodyguards and the women of the Central Valley. The new ruler felt unable to 
rely on the villagers of the Eastern Valley, who were in the process of 
reconstituting the society they formerly had in Lower Danubia. The crippled 
Grand Duke and his female subjects were largely on their own.

Like his father-in-law, the Grand Duke was a shrewd military planner who was 
willing to discard social rules and long-held assumptions to defend his kingdom. 
He understood that the Central Valley would be most vulnerable for about a 15-
year period, the time needed for a new generation of boys to grow up and re-build 
the Danubian Royal Army. That meant the women of the Central Valley would 
have to do two things to save the country that were taboo for European women in 
the 16th Century: take up arms to defend the Kingdom, and bear children without 
husbands.

In 1533 the Grand Duke issued several edicts. The most important was to open a 
series of government positions to women, including city guards, tax collectors, 
scribes, horse breeders, and archers. The next edict allowed women to buy and 
inherit property. A third edict eliminated the legal stigma of having children out 
of wedlock. A final edict, issued by the now ex-communicated Danubian Clergy, 
opened the Priesthood to women. 1533 marked the year that Danubian women 
achieved a temporary legal status that came very close to that of Danubian men.

By 1534, groups of raiders from neighboring countries were attacking some of the 
country’s outlying villages to test the Kingdom’s defenses. The Grand Duke 
responded by ordering several newly-ordained Priestesses and survivors of King 
Vladik’s military command to organize the villagers to defend themselves. 

The Priestesses and ex-soldiers decided to ignore any women who had children. 
Instead they concentrated on recruiting teenaged girls and organized them into 
bands of guerrilla archers. The girls were organized into squads of about eight 
fighters each, taught how to shoot arrows in rapid succession, live in the wild for 
extended periods of time, and move about quickly in the forests.

Officially the female guerillas were called “Daughters of the Crown”, but 
unofficially they came to be known as “Wood Nymphs”, or simply “Nymphs”. A 
Nymph always began her service at age 15, immediately after mother braided her 
hair. Priestesses pledged the girls secretly, and once a group of eight girls was 
sworn in, they left their village to spend the next three years of their lives in the 
woods. Before they departed their home village, the girls were sworn to complete 
secrecy; not even parents were allowed to know about a Nymph’s pending 
service. Nymphs always served away from their home village, to prevent their 
families from interfering with their military duties.

The Nymphs relied on fast movement through the trees and very sudden hit and 
run attacks against foreign raiding parties. Nymphs usually attacked at dusk, 
although they could attack anytime their squad leader thought there was an 
opportunity to inflict casualties on an enemy and escape. The most common 
attack was to fire a bunch of arrows from an ambush and then quickly disappear 
into the woods. After attacking the girls immediately fled. Hand-to-hand combat 
had to be avoided if at all possible, since the Nymphs wore no armor and were not 
expected to match the strength of their male opponents. Often several squads of 
Nymphs set up a series of ambushes, hoping to goad raiding parties to pursue 
them deeper and deeper into the forest. Sneaking up on sleeping opponents or 
distracted sentries and stabbing them was also very common, but much more 
risky. 

Nymphs usually wore nothing but a short leather skirt, boots, and wristbands. To 
minimize detection during combat they often painted their faces and upper bodies 
green. They carried nothing with them except a dagger, arrows, and either a long 
bow or a crossbow. Traveling as lightly as possible was crucial to escaping their 
armored opponents. They quickly dodged through trees, jumped into streams or 
lakes, scampered up rocks, or fled into caves and tunnels, so they had to keep 
their hands free and their bodies unencumbered. Even the longbows were 
designed to aid in a quick escape, because they could easily be broken and 
discarded if their owners needed to drop them to flee. Each longbow had a small 
lever embedded in the center frame that, if pressed hard enough, split the wood 
and rendered it useless to the enemy.

The Nymphs understood that under no circumstances could they be taken alive. If 
a Nymph thought she was about to be captured, she was trained to quickly slit her 
wrists or her neck with small sharp blades embedded in each wristband. If a 
Nymph saw that a companion had been captured, she was trained to shoot an 
arrow into her fellow Nymph before fleeing. The Nymphs' squad leader always 
carefully planned the escape route before launching an attack, so forced suicides 
were relatively rare. As for capture, there was no recorded history of a Nymph 
ever being captured alive. 

A typical squad of Nymphs lived in the woods for a total of three years, from age 
15 to age 18. The Danubian Wood Nymphs were the closest thing Europe had to 
an Amazonian culture. They lived off the land most of the time, only occasionally 
going to a Priest’s house for food or to pick up winter clothing. The teenagers 
were entirely self-sufficient and their lives revolved around constant hit-and-run 
attacks during the summer and trying to survive in the wild during the winter. At 
the end of three years the squad returned to its members’ home village and each 
young veteran received the title to a plot of land as a reward for her service.

For about 10 years the Nymphs were the Grand Duke’s only line of defense 
against both foreign raiders and rebellious village elders from the Eastern Valley. 
However, the Grand Duke never intended to have women fighting for him any 
longer than was absolutely necessary. The Nymphs’ importance diminished over 
time, along with the temporary leading role of women in Danubian society. As a 
new generation of boys grew up and began receiving formal military training, the 
Grand Duke reconstituted the Royal Army. Armored soldiers again patrolled the 
southern woods while other teams of young Danubian men retrieved the huge 
Turkish siege cannons abandoned during King Vladik’s attacks and mounted 
them on Danube City’s walls. Within a generation Upper Danubia was ready to 
defend itself in a more traditional manner. By 1555 far fewer girls were being 
recruited to fight for the Duchy. By 1565 the Nymphs as a military force had 
vanished completely and became nothing more than a memory and a source of 
stories for older single women in the villages to pass along to their families. 

With the return of men to lead Danubian society during the 1560's, women lost 
much of their temporary equality, not to regain until the 20th Century. However, 
the legacy of the Nymphs did have permanent benefits for Danubian women. 
After 1534, Danubians never regarded women as “the weaker sex”, because for 
nearly 30 years young women had the chance to defend the Duchy and prove 
themselves in combat. Danubian women also attained permanent property rights 
as a result of the Nymphs’ landholdings, centuries ahead of women in most other 
countries. Another legacy of the Nymphs was the Danubian custom of female 
Royal Guards, who later became female Police Officers during the judicial 
reforms of 1780.

A very important institution where women permanently attained equal rights was 
in the Priesthood of the Danubian Church. By 1560 the number of Priests and 
Priestesses was equal. In that year the Church mandated that all Clergy members 
had to be married to other Clergy members and work as husband-wife teams. 
Women became full participants in the Church hierarchy and from the mid-1500's 
onward the Danubian Church played a key role in raising the literacy rates for 
Danubian females.


Maritza's research and the Great Fire of 1755

In Danubian society professional historians are held in very high esteem. 
Danubian religious beliefs and the veneration of ancestors explain why a good 
historian is held in higher regard in the Duchy than in most other countries. 
Danubians are obsessed with understanding everything possible about the 
country’s past, because their Priests believe that it is necessary to have a complete 
understanding of the conditions under which a person’s ancestors lived to enhance 
the spiritual bonds between the living and the dead. Without being able to 
accurately visualize what life was like many years ago, it is impossible for the 
living to have visions, and it is through visions that the dead communicate with 
the living.

Maritza Ortskt-Dukovna spent her professional life as a historian and researcher 
of Danubian history. At the relatively young age of 30 she joined the Guild of the 
Ancients, which is the most competitive and highest-ranking group of historians 
in Danube City. She was a respected professional by the time her husband became 
Prime Minister, but there was nothing particularly exceptional about her work. 
Her main interest focused on the century following the death of King Vladik the 
Defender and examining how Danubian society evolved following the traumatic 
years of the Ottoman invasions.

About five years after her husband became Prime Minister, Maritza’s career took 
a dramatic turn when she traveled to Vienna. Her original goal was to research the 
lives of two Danubian barons who participated in defending Vienna during the 
Turkish siege of 1683. 

While looking though a collection of antique maps of city planners, she found 
several unpublished maps of Danube City in Viennese archives. When she 
examined them in detail she discovered something truly shocking. Among the 
Danube City maps were several drafts of the city plan of the Danubian capitol 
approved by the Grand Duke after the Great Fire of 1755. 

The problem with the maps was their date: 1753. Maritza realized the city plans 
had been drawn up at least two years before fire leveled the Danubian capitol. 
There was no doubt about it. Those maps clearly were early drafts the city plan 
later approved by the Grand Duke in the fall of 1755, less than a month after fire 
destroyed every wooden building within the city walls.

Maritza realized she had just made a discovery; that if true, would be a horrible 
shock to her country’s understanding of what happened during the Great Fire of 
1755. What the maps indicated was that the Grand Duke had been planning to 
rebuild Danube City years before its destruction actually took place. The question 
was; how could he have known in 1753 that the Danubian capitol would need to 
be rebuilt?

----------

The Great Fire of 1755 took place on a hot windy night at the height of harvest 
season, when most of the city’s residents were outside the city gates working the 
fields. The flames quickly swept through the tightly packed wooden buildings, 
blown downwind from rooftop to rooftop by hot gusts. As soon as the fire started, 
the Grand Duke ordered his soldiers to evacuate everyone still inside the city, 
instead of attempting to combat the flames. Most remaining residents escaped 
over the city walls, using ladders and supply baskets that just happened to be 
there. Others escaped by crossing the Rika Chorna River, in small boats that, once 
again, just happened to be tied to the shore. It was a true miracle that almost no 
one was killed in the fire, given that every wooden structure in the city was 
destroyed within three hours.

In spite of the devastation, residents did not go hungry that winter, because the 
entire harvest was kept in new warehouses that had been constructed outside the 
city walls in 1754. As for building materials, that was not a problem either 
because there were huge piles of bricks, stone, and lumber that were being 
collected for a planned expansion of the city wall. As the smoke cleared from the 
ruined city, the Grand Duke announced that his subjects were free to take building 
materials for their own needs and that the wall project would have to be 
postponed. The only condition he set was that residents could not rebuild inside 
the old walled city because it needed to be cleared of debris.

The Danubians always thought that the Ancients had protected them in 1755. 
Their capitol lay in ruins, but they had plenty of food and construction materials 
to build a new and better city outside the old one. There was no starvation and the 
Grand Duke’s generosity with the building materials assured that most people 
were back in houses before the weather really got cold. How lucky that the fire 
took place precisely at the moment all those supplies had been collected! 

There was another “stroke of fortune” during the fire. The nation’s archives were 
being temporarily stored in the Temple of the Ancients, instead of their usual 
location near the main city cathedral. The Grand Duke recently had ordered all 
religious artifacts to be taken there as well, over the objections of the Clergy, who 
were offended at the thought of the Temple being used as a warehouse. Both the 
Temple and the cathedral survived the fire intact, but the wooden archive 
buildings were leveled. How lucky those buildings were empty and all those 
documents and artifacts weren’t lost! Or was it really luck?

While the residents were occupied with building their new houses, teams of 
Austrian architects laid out a new capitol and a grid-style street system for the 
area inside the Old City Wall. Those Viennese certainly knew what they were 
doing: they had a new city plan ready within days of arriving. The Grand Duke 
and his planners seemed to know exactly where to put the new buildings and 
could visualize what the city would look like once it was reconstructed. By 1756 
the new streets already were being laid out. 

By 1790 the new Danube City was completed. Wide boulevards and graceful 
stone government buildings had replaced the narrow streets and ramshackle 
wooden residences of the old city. There was no mention of building a new city 
wall, but most of the old one was kept intact to separate the government ministries 
from the businesses and residences outside. The new city was much more 
comfortable and spread out than the old one. Everyone agreed that the fire, and 
the way the Grand Duke handled it, had been a Gift from the Ancients.

----------

The more Maritza thought about it, the more she realized everything that 
happened during 1755 indicated the destruction of Danube City was deliberate. 
The miraculously low number of casualties, the fact that there just happened to be 
huge piles of building materials collected outside the city walls, the fact that the 
Grand Duke already had ordered the construction of several warehouses for grain 
on the other side of the Rika Chorna River, the preservation of the archives, and 
the timing of the fire were all suspect.

Maritza spent four months in Vienna instead of her planned two weeks, carefully 
sorting through correspondence and city plans. What she found was not 
reassuring, because apart from more sets of blueprints she found several letters 
from the Grand Duke written in 1754 and early 1755. One letter was an attempt to 
force the architects to lower their fees, and another asked how much stone would 
be needed for two planned ministry buildings. Then she found the following 
passage, in the Grand Duke’s handwriting, in a letter addressed to an Austrian 
friend in 1754:

This city is a pit of sickness and darkness, an offense to the Ancients and to the 
Creator. I trust that this is the last Christmas I must look out upon the unsightly 
rooftops and smoky fog that smother our people. I long for the day this foul 
landscape is swept from my vision, that I may look out from my window and see 
beauty and harmony, not chaos and despair. May the Ancients make this the last 
winter I behold this obscene labyrinth of rotting wood and garbage.

There was a final detail that convinced Maritza that the wall-construction plan 
was a ruse. She had found multiple blueprints of Danube City that predated the 
fire by two years, but no one in either Vienna or Danube City ever had seen a 
blueprint of the touted expansion of the city walls. She concluded that such a plan 
never existed.

By the time she returned to Danubia, there no longer was any doubt in Maritza’s 
mind. The Grand Duke wanted old Danube City destroyed and swept from his 
sight, but had to ensure that his subjects were available to build him the new city 
that he wanted. He spent two years planning the project, making sure he could rid 
himself of the old city, but keep his subjects healthy and content enough to build 
its successor. Hence the careful collection of food and building supplies, the fire 
at precisely the moment most residents were absent, the well-planned evacuation 
of those who remained, and the “generosity” that won him the hearts of the city’s 
displaced population. 

The Great Fire of 1755 was no accident. It had been carefully planned and 
deliberately set, for no other reason than the Grand Duke did not like the way his 
city appeared.

----------

Master-Historian Maritza Ortskt-Dukovna presented her findings in a packed 
auditorium at the National University in Danube City. As she expected, her 
audience was shocked and outraged, because she was calling into question the 
nation’s understanding of one of the most significant events of its history. To 
defile the name of the Grand Duke, considered the most visionary member of the 
Royal Family since King Vladik…how dare she, even if she was the Prime 
Minister’s wife?

To her shocked audience Maritza simply replied:

“This is what I found, and this is how my training as a historian forced me to 
interpret it. I am as troubled by it as anyone else sitting in this room. I challenge 
you to prove me wrong. If you can prove me wrong, it would set my heart at ease, 
because I didn’t want to believe it myself. But, as I stated, these are my findings, 
and this is how I am forced to interpret them.”

Unfortunately for the reputation of the Grand Duke, none of Maritza’s fellow 
historians was able to find any evidence contradicting what she discovered during 
her four-month stay in Vienna. Documents from the Danube City archives, 
interpreted through the new information coming out of Vienna, seemed to support 
her theory that the fire of 1755 had been deliberately set. Within two years most 
historians in Danubia reluctantly accepted the new interpretation of the Great Fire 
of 1755.

Once her theory became accepted as fact, Maritza quipped: “We can’t be too hard 
on the Grand Duke. After-all, his deception did give us a nicer city.”

