House Marik: The Free Worlds League

The Grand Duchy of Oriente

Known throughout the Free Worlds as a center of learning, arts and sciences, Oriente is the cultural crown jewel of the League to its admirers. Its detractors frequently call it "home to a crowd of oily-tongued politicos, fancy-ass lawyers and whacked-out artsy types who wouldn't know honest work if it shot at them out of a Gauss rifle." No resident of the League, however, denies the extent to which this cosmopolitan, progressive-minded province has shaped the larger life of the nation. Founded as a federation of largely democratic worlds, the Grand Duchy of Oriente has given the Free Worlds League many of its finer cultural touches, as well as a legacy of democratic government that has sometimes caused considerable trouble. Parliament exists largely because of Oriente, whose long-ago leaders insisted on some form of representative government for the League they wished to create. Without such a formidable elected governing body, the Captains-General of earlier eras would surely have had an easier time ruling a less fractious Free Worlds. But no freedom-loving League citizen would have been willing to pay the price of such unity. Latter-day Leaguers may complain about provincial partisanship and gridlock, but none would give up the personal freedoms secured by centuries of necessary political horse-trading among myriad different interests.

The Grand Duchy of Oriente is the source of another valuable legacy as well: scientific and technological innovation. This region led the League in both until the start of the Succession Wars, and even those centuries of savage conflict could not completely erode Oriente's research edge. Calloway IV, home to several BattleMech factories, also houses the Calloway Technical Corps, one of the League's foremost military design and engineering concerns-a sore point for some Marik Commonwealth citizens, who hate to acknowledge any sort of military superiority outside their own borders. In civilian circles, Metamorphosis Inc. on the planet Dayr Khuna remains consistently at the cutting edge of biotechnology, with a sideline in replacement body parts that remains lucrative despite a widespread bias against such things among average citizens.

Oriente owes part of its democratic bent to the large population of British and North Americans among the region's early settlers. Both of these groups came from societies accustomed to often-raucous representative government, a tradition they proudly carried with them to the stars. Spaniards and Italians were the two other largest ethnic groups, with a sprinkling of Basques as well. The modern duchy shows various traces of all these cultural strands, from the Spanish-style siesta customary on the southern continent of Martigues to the Italian Renaissance-style marble buildings that grace the planet Oriente's government precincts, to the province-wide passion for soccer games. The duchy's location near the often-shifting Capellan border has also given it a sizable Chinese population, along with pockets of Korean, Indian and Russian émigrés from Capellan Confederation worlds. The largest Asian enclaves exist on Les Halles and Anegasaki, both of which were under Capellan control at various times in their history.