--Bona al la encycla lorica.
History of Late Age Luminarism[]
The Sacking of Luminaria[]
While the mage-priests of Luminarism ensured that they were the only ones capable of using magic in all their territory, thereby preventing technological advancement, the same could not be said of the nomadic tribes of the Expanse. They improved their weaponry and their horse husbandry, and struck at luminances throughout Origina, both to the northeast and to the south, as well as retreating to the northwest when the luminarates sent their slower armies in pursuit. Over the course of several hundred years, roughly 1600-2000 AL, the several nomadic tribes attacked more or less unhindered by the mage-priests, who were too few to use their spells to mount an effective resistance. Great stretches of land were pillaged, countless villages destroyed, eroding the power and political support of the mage-priests who were seen as losing the mandate of the deities. The raids culminated in a daring nomadic attack through the great desert, straight into the heart of Luminarian power, in a surprise attack on the religion’s holy city of Luminaria. The mage-priests were caught unawares; a third of all mage-priests in the world were killed that day, including its leadership, and the luminance of Luminarium, of which Luminaria was its capital, collapsed.
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.
Library of Erudita[]
The surviving mage-priests and nobles would not lightly forget how instrumental advances in magical technology had been in winning the war, and established a grand library in Erudita in 2306 AL. The library would then go on to give rise to many notable mage-priests with influential inventions to their name. The establishment of the library attracted inquiring minds from the world over, and inventions blossomed like they had not for almost two thousand years. Like Luminaria had before it, Erudita became the center of the world, and the wellspring of progress. Whereas early Luminarism was the golden age, this was the silver age.
War of the Seventeen[]
The sects of the Concord, standing united, waged a war against the priests of Luminarism, using their own primitive form of magic against the much more advanced magic of the priests, who though they nominally persecuted everyone who used magic, used plenty of it themselves. This hypocrisy became ever more evident to the soldiers in the war as the Order of Concord, pooling their numbers, was able to force the mage-priests into a series of pitted battles where they were forced to use their magic where all could see them. As a result, even as the mage-priests won practically all their battles, each battle resulted in more and more people throughout Ethaya becoming disillusioned with Luminarism, soldiers telling any civilian who'd care to listen, about the magic spells unleashed by the priests of anti-magic. So so though the mage-priests won their battles, they lost the war, and religion in Ethaya became replaced with a moderate, magic-accepting denomination of Luminarism, which still exists in its weakened form in Ethaya to this day.
While this war is called the War of the Seventeen, it started with seventeen sects united in a Concord against the priests and ended with twenty-nine sects; three sects had been utterly destroyed by the mage-priests and their devout, but another fifteen had joined, having seen the usefulness of being united against a common foe.
Rise of Antimagic[]
The mage-priests' defeat at the hands of the guilds prompted a resurgence of the anti-intellectuals, who claimed that the empire's willingness to use magic - a thing of the gods and not for humans - had brought this setback upon them. The empire was overthrown, and in its place arose several luminances who had different beliefs about the role of magic in society. Two of the luminances favored some use of magic, and the other luminances turned against them, waging a war where one side used magic overtly and the other used it covertly; where one side used it to do good in public view, and the other used it to do evil in public view. The anti-magic luminances however had the advantage of numbers, and won this First Antimagic War.
With their victory, the mage-priests stopped being mage-priests and reverted to being just plain priests. In fact, as a result of the propaganda in use over the course of the war, including many instances of using magic to catastrophic ends (by the anti-magic side) that gave magic a bad rap, pretty much everyone in Origina had become disillusioned with magic, and magic for any use whatsoever was outlawed. The suppression of magic was therefore done without any magical support, but relying solely on the power of brainwashing via Luminarism and the priests' control of the government. And so it would be, with this altered form of the Dica outlawing any magic in Luminarian lands for the next thousand years.
War of Originian Revelation[]
The War of Originian Revelation is the war started by the mages of Altariya University in their quest to spread their revelatory teachings to Origina, following the conclusion of the Fourth Detariyan War. Altair, unwilling to jeopardize their mission by sending Altariyan mages of Detariyan or Ethayan ethnicities, would allow only those of Originian ethnicities to travel to Origina as part of the Diaspora to spread revelation throughout the world. As Origina was so far away, relatively few of the Altariyan mages qualified. Nor would Altair allow his mages to start a war of aggression against any foreign powers for fear of creating an intercontinental coalition against the nascent University - a fear very much on their minds after two decades of war against the guilds.
Those who went of course found themselves being heavily prosecuted. The Originian states had of course heard of the rise of Altariya University, and guards throughout the continent were told to keep a lookout for spellshapers. Many of the Altariyan missionaries were captured and tortured or executed, and the rest were soon fleeing for their lives, whilst simultaneously trying to teach their technology to cadres of students, as well as procure the moieta needed for their spells (and in particular, for the weirds for their own pupils to use). Early skirmishes against the mundane militaries of the luminances led almost invariably to the mages' defeat or escape. Eventually - several years later - the mages would have the numbers to take on the mundane troops and push them back, spreading throughout all the luminances until only the capital city of Luminaria was left as the anti-intellectuals’ and priests' final bastion. The siege of Luminaria concluded with Altariyan victory and the proclamation of Altariyan dominion and the abolishment of the priests of Luminarism, and so the dominion of Luminarism came to an end.