Verse:Chlouvānem Inquisition

The Chlouvānem Inquisition (natively Murkadhānāvi; see below for other names) is a country on the planet of Calémere. With a population of 1.457 billion people it is also its most populated country (counting about 17,8% of the total Calemerian population). It is a federally organized theocracy, consisting of 117 dioceses (juṃšañāñai) with a large degree of autonomy; the dioceses are mostly a contiguous territory extending throughout the whole continent of Márusúturon (Mārṣūtram in the Chlouvānem language), covering about 40% of it; some dioceses are entirely insular in the neighboring seas, though the islands of Kāyīchah are much closer to Védren, effectively making the Inquisition a transcontinental country. The Inquisition covers approximately 14.4 million square kilometers (about 8% of the land areas on Calémere), which makes it also the largest country on the planet.
Counted as separate entities are also many territories - mostly islands with military bases or scientific stations - across the planet; the most notable of those is the Lalla Kehamyuita (“High North”), jointly governed with Askand, Skyrdagor, and Brono, which is a large but almost uninhabited territory consisting of the whole part of Eastern Márusúturon north of the 68th parallel north.

Capital of the Inquisition is the holy city of the Yunyalīlta, Līlasuṃghāṇa, in the southern part of the Great Chlouvānem Plains.

While the consolidation of the Inquisition as a single state is fairly recent, the Inquisition as a body was formed in the Great Plains at the beginning of the Second Era as a churchlike body run by the Inquisitors (murkadhānai, literally “black hands”, due to many early rituals requiring the use of lunīla berries and their pitch-black unedible juice), the preachers of the Yunyalīlti religion.
Chlouvānem peoples — a métis ethnicity formed by interracial breeding of various prehistoric peoples of the Great Plain, most prominently the Ur-Chlouvānem, a Lahob population who had migrated from Northern Evandor across the vast steppes of Márusúturon before reaching the Plains, as well as the Ancient Kūṣṛmāthi, founders of the first urban civilization on the continent — in the next two thousand years preached their religion and expanded throughout most of the continent, assimilating local peoples but creating numerous countries that were held together by their common religion and the use of Classical Chlouvānem as a lingua franca among the other vernaculars that developed from it. The beginning of the Fourth Era was marked by the formal unification of all Chlouvānem countries into a single country, where religious and civil government coincide.

The Chlouvānem Inquisition is today the main superpower of the Eastern Bloc on Calémere, ideologically contrasted to the secular and plurireligious West (despite it being the only major theocracy and despite many prominent Eastern countries not being even Yunyalīlti) and the leading technological innovator on the planet. It is a highly developed country following a religion-driven regionally planned economy with a strong focus on environmental-friendly policies; it consistently ranks in the highest places when it comes to human development and quality of life, and has the second-lowest income inequality on the planet, after the fellow Yunyalīlti country of Brono. On the social side, though, the Inquisition implements a strict monoreligious policy, with non-Yunyalīlti people (heretics) being most often either converted or legally persecuted and killed en masse.
Despite formal peace being strived for and kept by both sides, the relations between the Inquisition and the West remain tense, particularly due to the former’s repeated calls to holy war; the last such conflict (called the East-West Global War), ninety years ago during the reign of the extremely radical Great Inquisitor Kælahīmāvi Nāʔahilūma Martayinām, ended in a white peace when the conquest-bound Chlouvānem armies were forced to retreat and leave the then-economically collapsed West due to a near-implosion of the Inquisition due to a series of revolts, particularly in the annexed territories of Brono and Greater Skyrdagor.

Chlouvānem ethnicity

The ethnic definition of Chlouvānem is very broad: popular usage, converted into a legal definition, defines as Chlouvānem everyone who:

• is a follower of the Yunyalīlta;
• is part of a cultural group entirely based on Yunyalīlti practices of Chlouvānem tradition, or has been considerably influenced by it (inherently linked with being Yunyalīlti believers);
• is part of a cultural group linguistically in a state of diglossia with a local, regional “word” (bhælāmaiva) and Classical Chlouvānem, the latter inherently tying said cultural group to all other Yunyalīlti ones with similar characteristics.

Being a follower of the Yunyalīlta is, in most cases, enough to make the other two points true, and inside the borders of the Inquisition that’s almost always the case; in fact all Yunyalīlti who are not originary of either Brono, Fathan, Ikalurilut (countries with overwhelming Yunyalīlti religious majority), of Greater Skyrdagor (where about a quarter of the population is Yunyalīlti, up to 54% in the country of Goryan), or of a few other traditional minorities around the world (most notably Holenagic Yunyalīlti) and live in the Inquisition are Chlouvānem.
In fact, during the reign of Great Inquisitor Nāʔahilūma, no such distinction was included in censuses, as the only possible distinction to be done among humans was either Yunyalīlti or heretic.

The Chlouvānem ethnicity and culture were historically born through interbreeding of various peoples in prehistoric times, to the point that different ethnicities came to identify as one; there are various theories on why among all of those languages Chlouvānem - the last one to come there chronologically - came to be the dominant one, but most probably there was a religious background, namely that it was the first language of the Great Prophet of the Yunyalīlta, and the language she spoke the most during her predication.

Demographics

Due to this extremely broad definition of ethnicity and due to the governmental policies extremely hostile towards non-Yunyalīlti, the Chlouvānem Inquisition is unique for its size and population as 98% of the population is ethnically Chlouvānem; it is to be noted, anyway, that this broad definition allows inside of it extremely large cultural variations, often also shaped by climate and environment and not just because of different cultural substrata.

That 2% of non-Chlouvānems is mostly due to two factors:

• Titular ethnicities of “ethnic dioceses”, a few dioceses where there often is a local indigenous pre-Chlouvānem language with legal recognition there. These titular ethnicities are rather small because, like all other Chlouvānemized peoples, they have interbred with Chlouvānems and taken cultural influences, as well as converted to the Yunyalīlta, and the “purest” form of their culture mostly survived in remote valleys or plateaus; in fact, in most ethnic dioceses the local titular ethnicity does not count for more than 10% of the population, with the majority of people having origins in both that ethnicity and in not-better-defined Chlouvānem;
• Some ethnically and linguistically Bronic or Skyrdegan peoples near the borders with Brono and Greater Skyrdagor.

Immigration

Immigrants to the Inquisition mostly come from Dabuke lands in northeastern Védren and western Márusúturon (the latter areas bordering with Chlouvānemized Dabuke lands part of the Inquisition); due to the widespread instability, poverty, and often war in these areas of the world, many displaced people flee these lands and because of geographical proximity the closest “safe” areas are the Western dioceses of the Inquisition. Due to most Dabuke people being animists and to Western Chlouvānem culture being born as a hybrid between “mainstream” (or Plains) Chlouvānem and the former Eastern Dabuke cultures, they’re often easily converted and integrated into it.

Skin colour

As predictable given the métis origins of the Chlouvānem people and their cultural-based ethnicity, skin colour is fairly unimportant in Chlouvānem society, as it has (even on ID cards) much like the same value as hair or eye colour. Different skin colours are however interesting in their distribution, and often it is a sign of a certain geographical origin.

Calemerian skin colours, in Chlouvānem usage, are grouped in eight major definitions, none of them coming even close to an absolute majority (unless the flugasniė and hailaxniė groups are taken as a single one).
Small numbers in brackets after the definitions roughly indicate its range in the Von Luschan chromatic scale. Note that the chlebmæxhliniė type does not occur on Earth and is therefore not represented there.

• the naleimurkaniė group (36-34) is the darkest skin colour of all, and in the Inquisition it is typical in the Eastern Islands as well as a few areas in the West and along the southernmost coasts. About 7% of all Chlouvānem belong to this group.
• the lallamurkaniė group (33-28) is the typical black skin, and is legally the relative majority among Chlouvānem people, with 28% of the population. It is common all throughout the nation, but from the Plain it increases the further West one goes, up to more than 90% in some of the westernmost dioceses.
• the flugasniė group (27-23) is the one most people on Calémere frequently associate with Chlouvānem people, as it is the relative majority in nearly all of their heartlands; the mid-high skin colour in this range (24, 25, 26) is probably the most common overall there. It is legally the third-largest, with 24% of all Chlouvānem.
• the hailaxniė group (18-20) is another stereotypically Chlouvānem-only skin colour, relative majority in many areas of the Plain, in the southern rainforests, and in the East. It is legally the second-largest, with 26% of all Chlouvānem, but popular usage hardly distinguishes it from the flugasniė group.
• the chlebmæxhliniė group (off-scale, closest to 18 or 20 but much more yellowish and somewhat greenish) is the rarest of all Calemerian colours, and second rarest in the Inquisition with 2,5% of all people (it is to be noted though that Chlouvānem with this skin colour are the majority of all such Calemerian humans), mostly in the northwestern steppes and deserts - though nowadays nowhere the majority.
• the niværeniė group (15-17 plus 21 and 22) is the colour of “dark-skinned whites”, not particularly common in the Inquisition as it amounts only to 5% of the population, mainly in the inland West and scattered among major cities in the rest of the nation.
• the julkniė group (7-9 plus 12-14, though more peachlike) is a light skin colour mostly common in the Northeast and parts of the East, as well as scattered elsewhere; it amounts to 6% of all Chlouvānem.
• the vindraniė group (11 and lower) is the colour of “whites”: despite being fairly common on Calémere it is hardly native to the lands of the Inquisition, apart from the taiga in the far Northeast and the islands off the Northeastern coast; being those historically sparsely populated areas, ancestral people of those areas are few and as such it is the rarest group, amounting to only 1,5% of all Chlouvānem.