Farise

Farise is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the Callidoran Dry, a merchant-republic on the far southern coast of the Shallow Sea. Its people speak a degenerate form of Old High Perwynese — "usually just called Perwynese" — loaded with loanwords from the Sea Lords, the Unstarans, and local tribes: a living fossil of the colonial tongue.

Magocracy and independence

Farise was founded during the Colonial Era as the Magocracy's chief southern port. When the Magocracy fractured, Farise broke away and constituted itself as a merchant republic under an elected sovereign, the Doge of Farise. For a century after that break, as Minalan recounts from the colonial records:

The Doges of Farise were able to use magic, cunning, and the antipathy between the duchies to protect their own prosperous merchant fleet. They were largely successful, and the old Imperial Naval standard of Farise — a green flag with a yellow chain in a circle at its center — ruled the Shattered Sea from Alshar to Unstara for a hundred years.Minalan, Practical Adept

The Narasi conquest and the Occupation

That is, until three of the Five Duchies decided that the occasional commerce raiding and unreasonable trade policies of the Doge of Farise was more trouble than it was worth and finally invaded the place, sending both an overland force (with which I was lamentably all too familiar) and a robust naval force against it.Minalan, Practical Adept

The invasion was the conflict Minalan himself had fought in as a young warmage — the Farise campaign that forged him alongside Azar, Astyral, and Pentandra.

Under occupation, Farise was ruled by a succession of Doges answerable to the Narasi crown, its famous electoral Congress of Electors reduced to a rubber-stamp and its commerce drained by absentee governors. By Practical Adept the city was sliding back toward piracy, factional assassination, and a secretly ambitious would-be Doge, Rellin Pratt, backed by the old Mirkandar criminal syndicate.

Doge Mirkandar I

Minalan's solution, in Practical Adept, was to steal the office itself. Undercover as "Master Mirkandar," a mysterious wizard with deep pockets and deeper allies, he used the rigged Congress of Electors against itself: eliminating Pratt in a ritual duel, standing as the only viable candidate, and accepting election as sovereign Doge of Farise. His first acts were his Prime Edicts — declaring a State of Emergency, commissioning the Iron Wheel as Farise's new navy under Lorcus, and committing the city to break the Duke of Merwyn's incoming armada and end the slave-and-pirate trade of the Shallow Sea.

Farise thus closes the series as an unlikely Magelaw-aligned sovereign state, ruled from the Doge's Citadel by "Mirkandar the Magnificent, Sovereign Doge of Farise" — a role Minalan holds in addition to his Count Palatine of the Magelaw.