Verse:Chlouvānem Inquisition

The Chlouvānem Inquisition

Native name	Chlouvānumi murkadhānāvīyi bhælā
Capital (and largest city)	Līlasuṃghāṇa
Ethnic groups	Chlouvānem 98% Bronic 0,6% Skyrdegan 0,4% Others 1%
Religion	Yunyalīlti 100%
Nationwide official language	Chlouvānem
Other languages	Various local vernaculars
Demonym	Chlouvānem
Area	TBA — around 14,400,000 km2 (5,560,000 mi2)
Population	1,457,829,096 (4E 131 census)
Population density	TBA — about 101/km2 (262/mi2)
Government	Elective theocracy
Great Inquisitor	Hæliyoušāvi Dhīvajhūyai Lairė
Baptist	Huliāchlærimāvi Lænkæša Martayinām
Currency	Inquisitorial Talān (murkadhānāvīyi talān)
Drives on the	left

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.

Names

The name of the Inquisition in Chlouvānem is Murkadhānāvi, meaning "of the Inquisitors", where "Inquisitor", murkadhāna, translates to "black hand". The Inquisitors originally were the first preachers of the Yunyalīlta after the Great Prophet, and their hands were black due to the liturgical use of lunīla berries. These berries, commonly growing all throughout the wetter eastern half of the Lāmiejāya plain (as a climatic/cultural region, thus including also the Jade Coast and its basins), are not edible but have a dense pitch-black juice that was used in many shamanic rituals - often reinterpreted and passed into early Yunyalīlti ones - and also as a common black dye.
The Inquisition was founded by these preachers as a kind of guild in order to better guard and preserve liturgical texts and set up scientific orders studying the world - in fact, monasteries and temples were the centers of science for two millennia, and even today most of the largest libraries in the whole planet are those of Yunyalīlti temples. The Inquisition then gained political power and became a sovranational organization that had influence on every forming Chlouvānem realm - not unlike the Church in European history - until the beginning of the Fourth Era when all Chlouvānem nations were united under a single government - the Inquisition.

In Chlouvānem, there is thus no distinction between the Inquisition as a country and as a political organization, being both called murkadhānāvi. The country is however also often referred to as:

• murkadhāni bhælā “Land of the Inquisition”;
• chlouvānumi bhælā "Chlouvānem land";
• chlouvānumi murkadhāni bhælā - the designation in official documents, "Land of the Chlouvānem Inquisition".

In other Calemerian languages, there often is a distinction between the country (usually called Chlouvānem land) and the Inquisition. For example, in Skyrdagor the Chlouvānem people are called Snovanem and their country is Snovanemszikt, but the Inquisition as a political body is often called Murkadanavi. In Cerian, Chlouvānem people are called Imúnigúronen (from the Iscegon phrase in mutnen ingúron "Eastern invaders", a term applied to many other peoples in Western history but revitalized in the Early Modern Age and applied to the Chlouvānem - the easternmost hostile people they knew about) and their country is Imúnigúroná, but the Inquisition is either tó Murocadána or ten Imúnigúronen sévíson (literally Chlouvānem Church).

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.

Distribution

The population of the Inquisition is very unequally distributed throughout the national territory. The eastern part of the Lāmiejāya-Lāmberah plain, together with the neighboring Jade Coast and its surroundings, is the most densely populated area on the whole of Calémere, and similar densities may be found in coastal Haikamotė, Hirakaṣṭė, and Kainomatā dioceses in the East. On the other hand, there are many mostly rural areas as well as sparsely populated areas such as the taiga in the far Northeast, the Southern rainforest, and most high mountain chains; the extreme example is the desert belt formed by the Salt Desert and Great Desert, which is a huge area (almost 10% of the country) with no population at all except for a few oasis due to the almost complete lack of water sources.
Many of the most important cities of the Inquisition are on or near the shores of the Flæmvasta Sea (flæmvasta ga jariā) - the huge marginal sea bordered by the Jade Coast, the eastern part of the Plain, the Near East, and parts of the Far East: among the most important ones there are Līṭhalyinām, Līlta, Talliė, Huñeibāma, Līlikanāna, and Ehalihombu from east to west, plus the capital Līlasuṃghāṇa that lies inland but in the tidal Lulūnīkam lake (lulūnīkam ga gėrisa), and Lāltaṣveya which lies on the Lāmiejāya delta.

Largest cities

No.	City	Diocese	Population (4E 131)	Tribunal
1	Līlasuṃghāṇa (*)	Nanašīrama	29,698,169	Jade Coast Area
2	Ilėnimarta (*)	Kanyāvālna	16,484,913	Jade Coast Area
3	Līṭhalyinām (*)	Latayūlima	13,148,337	Jade Coast Area
4	Līlta (*)	Mīḍhūpraṇa	11,792,845	Jade Coast Area
5	Cami (*)	Haikamotė	11,452,121	Northern Far East
6	Līlikanāna	Āturiyāmba	9,222,641	Southern Far East
7	Mamaikala	Sūmrakāñca	6,981,303	Namaikęeh / Northern Plain
8	Galiākina	Galiākñijātia	6,445,932	Jade Coast Area
9	Līlekhaitė	Hūnakañjātia	4,621,393	Near East
10	Naiṣambella (*)	Yayadalga	4,503,612	Southern Far East
11	Lāltaṣveya	Aṣasārjātia	4,218,309	Eastern Plain
12	Yāmbirhālih	Ārvaghoṣa	4,093,774	Jade Coast Area
13	Lūlunimarta	Ogiñjātia	3,817,090	South
14	Kuma Nīmāliša	Ndejukisa	3,443,106	West
15	Yotachuši	Hachitama	3,138,653	East

The largest metropolitan area in the Inquisition is the one extending mainly on central-eastern Haikamotė diocese, centered on Cami, with a population of 43,357,289 people according to the most accepted definition.

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.

Geography

Political subdivisions

In the Inquisition there are three major levels of local administration: the diocese, the circuit, and the parish.

The highest level is the diocese (juṃšañāña), comparable to a federate state; their head is a bishop (juṃša). Many dioceses in an area with shared economical and cultural characteristics are grouped in an administrative unit called tribunal (camimaivikā), which intervenes in common regional economic planning and is as well an important statistic unit.
There are in total 142 dioceses in the Inquisition, divided into 16 tribunals (but seven dioceses are not part of any tribunal: four of them are mostly sparsely populated steppe plus a part of the desert; the other three are insular dioceses between the rest of the Inquisition and the continent Védren): Jade Coast Area (17), Eastern Plain (10), Namaikęeh - Northern Plain (7), Central Plain (9), Western Plain (7), Inland Southwest (8), Coastal Southwest (5), South (14), Near East (6), Southern Far East (7), Far Eastern Islands (6), Northern Far East (9), East (9), Northeast (9), North (10), and West (9). Population of the dioceses ranges from 55,717,346 (Haikamotė in the Northern Far East) to 12,403 (the Nukahucė islands, a remote chain of coral atolls part of the Far Eastern Islands tribunal but somewhat isolated from them). Diocese area ranges from 961,559 km² (Nanūkijāṇa, including the whole Salt Desert and about half of the Great Desert) to 268 km² (the Nukahucė islands).

Some dioceses consist of two separate administrative units with a single religious head - these are mostly newer developments, where effectively a new "state" has been created for all matters except the most strictly religious ones. Depending on the diocese, these separate units may be called provinces (ṣramāṇa) - for larger but less densely populated areas - or quaestorship (ṭūmma) - for smaller, mostly urban areas. Quaestorships are a special kind of administrative division, as they are only divided in municipalities, but they are normally counted as cities statistically - for example the capital city of the Inquisition, Līlasuṃghāṇa, is listed as the nation's largest city, with 29.8 million inhabitants - there is however no such entity as the city of Līlasuṃghāṇa, but only its quaestorship. There are in total six quaestorships in the Inquisition: Līlasuṃghāṇa (diocese of Nanašīrama), Ilėnimarta (diocese of Kanyāvālna), Līṭhalyinām (Latayūlima), Līlta (Mīdhūpraṇa), Cami (Haikamotė), and Naiṣambella (Yayadalga); apart from the latter (counting 4.5 million people), all other ones have more than 10 million inhabitants and are the five largest cities of the country.

The next local level is the circuit (lalka), whose denomination changes in some dioceses — including hālgāra (district) and others — without major differences in competences (though it should be noted that competences of circuits or equivalent administrations are not centralized, but defined by the diocese or province).

The lowest level of local administration is the "municipality" one — whose names are in most dioceses either parish (mānai), city (marta), or sometimes village (poga). The distinction between them is mostly of population, with municipalities above a certain population (in many dioceses 70,000 people) being considered cities. The distinction between villages and parishes is more blurry and varies more between each diocese, with villages usually being independent municipalities whose populations are either very small in size compared to nearby ones, or located in sparsely populated areas. Clusters of nearby mid-small parishes often form an entity called inter-parish territory (maimānāyuseh ṣramāṇa), sharing between them some basic services like recycling, local transport, or fire protection.

While the lowest independent division is the parish (including cities and villages), a minor area in a parish may be recognized as a hamlet (mūrė) (note that some dioceses use the term for village (poga) instead), which for cities is usually a borough (martauseh poga, literally "urban village"). Note that cities may also have hamlets: boroughs are usually defined as such if many of them form a large contiguous urban area; smaller inhabited places in rural areas administered by a city are still hamlets.

Large uninhabited or extremely sparsely populated areas are often not assigned to any municipality, but are administered by the circuit and defined as an extra-parish territory (šrimāṇāyuseh ṣramāṇa).