(OOC: The Jurors are one of the most interesting aspects of this setting IMO. Mass movements are fun, but a soldiers' movement? Especially when those soldiers work directly for the big industrialists and landowners? Sign me up! Not sure about the banner choice yet.)
Just to give more information here, the jurors as we will explore in details are not just soldiers but anyone living on the Palatines or in the martial monasteries. All of Vaspukarani class politics falls on several axes; there are the legal and monastic clergy (the legal clergy being administrators and rulers, the monastic clergy being tied up in orders), the four chambers, some other divisions, and in the Jurors everyone is officially inside a super-order called the Holy Order of the Lord's Grand Jury (hence the name).
Juror Organization
This is then sub-divided into the High Juries, who form the regional leadership and are loyal only to the Patriarch, the Circle Juries, who form the garrison of the entire synodic circle (ie one of the Synodic Circles on the map, notice how every single circle has some juror territory) and are loyal to the local Archdeacons [who control the whole circles), the Palatine Juries who govern their palatine territories (and are self-governing and loyal only to the High Juries and cannot be revoked by even the Patriarch), and then individual civic garrisons loyal to the local Metropolitan.
Oftentimes the actual sitting members of these juries, elected by a common representative process, have family members in multiple levels of Juror Government. The election and selection process is very corrupt with every trick in the book you'd expect and sometimes even outright violence to fix votes. Over the years a number of notables and lineages have started to dominate and develop a stranglehold over Juror politics in most places except some backward or frontier garrisons where the old rules still apply.
Outside of the Autocephalates, who may be asked to levy their armies and navies to defend Vaspukaran in wartime (and some did so to great cost during the War with the Mare), Jurors are the only souls who may be asked to take up the sword outside of extreme emergencies. This was originally devised in part to spare the population from great feudal levies but also leaves a near monopoly of force in a social order with ambiguous loyalties to the Patriarch.
Within the Juries there are all kinds of sub-orders and such, and many Juror towns have prominent artisan orders (as the guild system is represented in Vaspukaran by holy orders as well, with abbots/prior, monks, and novices taking the place of masters, journeymen and apprentices). If this sounds very confusing, convuluted, and potentially politically a complete clusterfuck, that's because it is.
Jurors also belong to long-standing ceremonial organizations known as standards, who form into larger groups called Banners. Organizational units, these are basically treated as martial cults that worship some aspect of their Standard and Banner as holy and virtuous, similar to the veneration of specific saints or mystery cults. Standards have a looser naming scheme, while Banners are usually named after their founding member, great heroes, or some important event or commemorating legend. There is no standardization in size and catchment area, with some banners being 'ghost banners' with very few members and others being enormous and unwieldy.
The Jurors as Rising Class
One of the major crises in Vaspukaran is that elite Jurors (mainly Atamans and the leaders of specific sub-orders) have been using granted monopolies over a number of trade goods as well as the security of their treasuries to pursue a temple-led industrialization that is allowing them to massively strengthen their hold on power. They are far from the only ones doing this but they are currently the most effective. The result is that a holy martial order is transforming into a
banking and
industrial order, while still theoretically draped in a soldier's garments, and exercising its special rights in a way that is undermining the power structure of the country.
The fact that juror Palatines are self-governing untaxed areas of land with free trade between palatines also means that the Jurors, especially earlier on, were pursuing pockets of industrial development between far more undeveloped priestly territory, like some unholy amalgamation of the Zollverein, Special Economic Zones and the Holy Roman Empire's free cities.
Some specific garrisons have outsized local power: for example, the Jury of Nachivan was instrumental in the temple coup seventy-five years ago that brought down the last of the Infallible Patriarchs, the nickname given for the series of extremely powerful Patriarchs that founded a number of new orders and sought to make the Patriarch a truly absolute king of God's Kingdom. In the aftermath, the High Priesthood and Jurors took on much more power, and it was in this vacuum that industrialization really kicked off. The Jury of Nachivan still makes or breaks entire Patriarchal ministries. It often acts without reference to or even against the order of the High Jury of Kedarkan, to which it is theoretically subordinate to.
So key things to keep in mind:
1. Not all Jurors are soldiers, but most jurors are soldiers or have seen military service, and all have a very martial religious culture.
2. Jurors have unique self-organization and self-government in Vaspukaran, and an at least theoretically representative government of hierarchies of juries drawn from electors that goes up to the top. In reality, corruption, rotten buroughs, election-buying and low turnout is widespread and in some regions Komandirs and Atamans are drawn up by acclamation or by order from a higher-level jury. This happened to Black Elephant.
3. Their political system is fractious, decentralized, and all-over-the-place, with multiple competing poles of authority. They are not unified.
4. Their palatines were the leaders of early industrialization, and Juror monasteries are some of the largest banking establishments and investors in the country.
5. They are often blamed for everything, but Jurors as a class have enormous internal variation, and cut through from very poor urban dwellers in Juror towns and cities as well as dirt-scratching smallholders on the frontier to elite financier Atamans who in some ways are more powerful than the Patriarch himself.
6. Specific Juries are extremely powerful and have huge political influence.
lost? I think?
