Tricentennial War (Lorica)

The Tricentennial War
With the priesthood in disarray, mage-priests the world over took it upon themselves to establish local power bases, becoming a series of local feudal societies in various shifting alliances. The three remaining luminarates teamed up with them against each other as their luminances fought over the territory of the collapsed luminance and in particular, over their holy city; each luminance represented its own major ethnic group and each had a substantial claim to the territory as a result of various stories contained within their holy text. But between the three major luminances and dozens of new, minor ones and their shifting alliances, none was able to gain the upper hand for another three centuries, roughly 2000 AL - 2300 AL, in what became the Tricentennial War. And all the while the nomadic tribes continued their sporadic attacks. The domain of Luminarism lost a tremendous amount of territory, especially in the northern and southwestern fringes, to the nomadic tribes in the vicinity of each; eventually, the northern domain would become the empire of Saphrona in the modern day and the southeastern domain would become the states of Iutarru, and both would be purged of Luminarian rule.

The Tricentennial War saw major advancements in magical technologies as the mage-priests each sought to gain an advantage on everyone else. The Tricentennial War came to an end with the razing (once again) of the city of Luminaria, in 2300 AL, with the first city-spell - a spell that used enough mana, and had enough reach, to affect an entire city at once. Luminaria had at that stage in the war become home to half of all the mage-priests, working together to design new offensive spells in a common alliance against one of the luminances; with the city’s destruction, most of the mage-priests were wiped out, leaving that side with no mages. Over the course of three hundred years of fighting, mages and magical support had become essential to winning battles. The city-destroying spell, though not immediately recreate-able, nevertheless shifted the balance of power sufficiently that the luminarate responsible had enough power to usurp the rest.