Golden Legion

Whilst the original Golden Legion was, indeed, one legion strong, the company has steadily increased in size since its founding. Officially following the the Carian Tabulation, each legion is structured as follows:

Frankonia's native population is not great enough to allow extensive recruitment, and the Golden Legion traditionally recruits most of its soldiers overseas, particularily from the Yelanid Alliance. However, its officers are almost exclusively from Frankonia itself, either by birth or education, due to very specific qualifications that the Legion asks of its leaders: high standards of etiquette and Republican chivalry, general knowledge about Frankonian law and history, as well as battlefield competence. The Constitutional State Academy in Ponvarus, which has faculties in political science, history, language, war, and more, accounts for nearly all new officer assignments to the Legion.   Its unusual structure and nomenclature were a conscious decision taken by its founder Rochelle Carus, who based the Legion on the army of pre-Republican Frankonia.

The Golden Legion was founded during the middling years of the Grand Republic, when the anti-Frankonian Red Turban Movement started to gain traction around the Leagues of the Yelanid Alliance. The Serene Conclave feared a deterioration in bilateral relations and, even worse, that Frankonian merchants might be turned away from its markets. After an extensive consultation process failed to formulate an official response, Prince-Mayor Louis-Philippe Delafosse, member of the mysteriously wealthy Clandestinus line, privately employed Rochelle of the Carus family, one of the Republic’s August Houses, to establish a new condottière company based in the Alliance.   With extremely generous pay, diverse role selection, and upwards mobility, the Golden Legion proved a popular career choice for impoverished residents around the Yafasiv desert, depriving the Red Turbans of potential supporters. In the ensuing recruitment battle, the Golden Legion attracted many thousands, soon establishing two full-sized legions and a dozen permanent strongholds around the Leagues, often placed near hazardous caravan routes to quell banditry. This alone did not deter the Red Turbans, since anti-Frankonian sentiment remained widespread. But Rochelle had proposed a cunning plan to alleviate the root of the problem: the Golden Legion would start intervening in local affairs with the aim of breaking apart Frankonian mercantile oligopolies, the greatest single source of hatred against the Republic within the Alliance.  

Le Mécon

Having been practically unopposed in their craft for generations, the Republic’s trading enterprises in the Alliance were not prepared to start fending off organised lines of armoured legionnaires, supported by battlemages and siege engineers, and thus capitulated their assets without much opposition; the fact that this Golden Legion, and its unacceptably secondary impact on the profit margins of mercantile business ledgers was funded by the Prince-Mayor and acted with his blessing, dragged the Grand Republic into a catastrophic political crisis known as Le Mécon (Frankonian shorthand for Le Mécontentement, meaning discontent). Le Mécon caused the island’s government and representative bodies to functionally collapse; Prince-Mayor Delafosse was found dead in the streets, ritualistically felled by the dread hand of a Mantis Assassin.   Tax collectors went on strike, port registration clerks shut down the Crossfares by barricading themselves in their offices and letting arrival permits go unstamped, and the influential All-Republic Guild of Bathhouse Staff threatened to randomly set up Zones of Truth within the bathhouses, causing politicians and members of high society to avoid them like the plague – thus damaging one of the very pillars of Frankonian culture, causing incalculable harm to the small-to-medium business ecosystem across the entire island.   The republican and financial order was restored after a year by Charles Le Gallois, a shrewd Syndic of the Great Trade League. As part of the restoration process, Charles and Rochelle reached an agreement whereby the Golden Legion in effect became a state mercenary company contracted in perpetuity to Frankonia. Whilst the Legion was formally curtailed to become more of a ceremonial bulwark than anything else, their popularity in the Thirteen Leagues had become too great. So Charles made one concession: the Golden Legion was allowed to operate with “moderate political and strategic autonomy” within and around the territories of the Yelanid Alliance.  

End of the Red Turbans

Amidst the turmoil of Le Mécon, the Red Turban Movement underwent a similar organisational crisis. Though loosely regimented to begin with, the economic and social upheaval caused by the Golden Legion eventually shattered its single-issue grievance. New bilateral agreements between each of the Thirteen Leagues and the Golden Republic resulted in Frankonian merchants now having to conform to a grim, novel reality: mutually beneficial economic partnerships. Rochelle directed the Legion’s commanders to target former Red Turban partisans for recruitment, gradually swelling its numbers to new heights.  

Role in the Silent Morning

In more recent history, the IV Golden Legion Umbra Solem played a notable role in Operation Persevering Sentinel, more commonly known as the Silent Morning. The Fourth Legion formed cohort-sized assault groups, known as incursators, and these enforced the closure of Frankonia’s central institutions during the mass arrests. True to their name, these assault groups utilised force against noncompliant state actors, notably laying siege to the Lion’s Circlet, the headquarters of the Golden State Inquisition. Once the tower's wards had been breached, legionnaires violently turned the Circlet inside out, arresting surviving Inquisitorial stragglers.   Though this deployment is understood to have been illegal under the Legion’s contract to the Republic, tantamount to an act of war, there were no prosecutors brave enough to charge legate-general Hector de Mur for it. After all, most had been coincidentally disappeared during the purge.