The detente of the Long Night has finally crumbled and given way to a time of conflict and strife for the Children of Caine, when young and old alike take to the battlefields. Across Europe and the Holy Land, the War of Princes rages. It rallies lords and their vassals to manuever against their rivals, to vie for power, to conquer or to settle ancient grudges.
Origins
At its most basic, the War of Princes is the intense conflict between a handful of powerful and active Methuselah, the so-called monarchs of the Dark Medieval. The conflict gets its name from the princes who direct many of the battles and the principalities that are the major prizes. Unlike the lords and monarchs to whom they swear fealty, princes control concrete domains. These domains can be attacked by force of arms, usurped through intrigues or swayed to switch overlords through enticements or threats. It is the princes who have the most to lose and the most to gain from the present conflict; therefore, it is their war.
As was the case in the Second City, Carthage and Constantinople, the War of Princes has already overflowed its bounds. What some thought would be just a settling of status between the monarchs has become a generalized state of conflict and strife. Cainite plotters and knights move from fiefdom to fiefdom taking what they can. Even the most conservative among the Damned must react, either by retreating into the shadows or by striking out before they are striken down themselves. The complacent feed the pyres while the bold seize what they can.
Like any storm, the War of Princes has been brewing for some time before some Cainite troubadour gave it a poetic name. No single event caused the war, but a series of happenings gradually fanned the flames of strife into the inferno that now rages across Europe and Outremer. Many of these preliminary conflicts seem minor at the time. French Toreador withdrawing support from the Grand Court in Paris, for example, seemed just like another Cainite scheme amidst so many others. But suddenly weakening the powerful Ventrue Prince Alexander led others whom he had held in check to move. In the Holy Roman Empire, the agents of High Lord Hardestadt suddenly had more freedom of action, and they were able to renew their expansion east. This led to greater conflicts between German Ventrue and the Tzimisce to the east, which sowed chaos in Hungary and give the Tremere blood-sorcerers room in which to grow into a power to be reckoned with. This process of isolated incidents building upon each other repeated itself time and time throughout the 11th and 12th centuries.
Of all events leading to the War of Princes, however, none can compare to the impact of the slaying of Saulot. Almost single-handedly, the magus Tremere changed the world of Caine's race, striking a deep and terrible blow that caused even the mighty Antediluvians to shudder in their sleep. For all the jockeying and intrigue of the War of Princes, never had an Antediluvian fallen to such a foe. The diablerie of Saulot sent shock waves through Cainite courts that stil reverberate in these nights.
It is hardly coincidental that the rise of the Tremere was soon followed by the reappearance of the monarchs--mighty Methuselahs stirred from torpor and hungry for power once more. Of course, some Methuselah had remained active throughout the Long Night. Michael, the Toreador Patriarch of Constantinople, had shephered his golden city since the third century despite growing religious mania, and Montano of Sicily had attended to his torpid sire, the Lasombra Antediluvian, for countless centuries. But starting in the 11th century, several of their contemporaries in the Blood rose from slumber or comtemplation to take a much more active role in the affairs of Dark Medieval Europe. In each case, mortal events built upon vampiric issues to lead them to activity.
In Britain, the ancient Ventrue Mithras had slumbered since the Roman nights, but he woke shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. He rose to become Prince of London and gathered the Ventrue of England and France to his banner. Shortly after, as the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1096, Caliph Jamal of the warrior caste of the Assamites rose to action in the Levant, calling his clan to push back the Frankish vampires who accompanied the crusaders. Perhaps in response, Montano exerted subtle influence over his Christian clanmates in Iberia to commit more and more to their "Shadow Reconquists" looking to push Muslim vampires from that peninsula. In Germany, the Ventrue High Lord Hardestadt marshaled his forces to push east into Tzimisce homelands and secure domain across the Holy Roman Empire. To the west, perhaps fearing the influence of powerful Ventrue in England and Germany, the Toreador Matriarch Salianna's agents withdrew their long-standing support from Alexander, the Ventrue Prince of Paris. Other, more subtle Methuselahs played deeper in the shadows, including the Cappadocian Japheth (his sire's keeper) and the archfiend Yorak, high priest of the Tzimisce Cathedral of Flesh. With equal shares of cunning, coercion, and charisma, these monarchs crafted nocturnal kingdoms from the loose conglomerations of lords and princes that had characterized the Long Nights. In the process, old rivalries where re-kindled and new ones set ablaze. By the end of the 12th century, the powder keg of the War of Princes was in place; all that was needed was the spark to ignite it. That spark came with the Fourth Crusade.
The events of the crusade of 1202 through 1204 were traumatic enough; its implications were far worse. In the daylight, the crusaders ended up sacking Constantinople, the grandest of Christian cities, and never once faced Muslim opponents. The so-called Army of Christ ended up carving up a Christian empire and serving the interest of French nobles and Venetian traders. The New Rome was sacked, burned and parceled like a roast hog. For the scions of Caine, matters were even more chaotic, as faction after faction failed to exhert more than the slightest influence over the crusaders. Assasinations, petty wars and power-plays all failed to ride herd on the mortal masses. Constantinople, which had been the grand experiment of the Toreador Methuselah Michael, came crashing down as he met his end. Many of his powerful subjects, from the Ventrue tyrant Caius to the Tzimisce visionary Gesu met similiar fates.
Empires had fallen before, of course, and the ancients had all seen childer and siblings meet the Final Death. But with the tensions already in place, the debacle vampires would come to call the Bitter Crusade, made two things abundantly clear. First, a time of reckoning was coming. The mortal herd was hardy and angry enough to lash out madly and take down its predators. Second, no one's safety was assured. Michael had been among the most potent active Methuselahs, and in the end, all he had built turned to ash with him. If he could suffer such a fate, so could anyone else. Therefore, a potent vampire who wished to survive needed to both secure his own position and move against enemies before they had a chance to do so.
The war was on.
