History of Eorzea

See also: Lore

History of Eorzea

To fully understand the realm of Eorzea, one must first delve into her past and witness the violent cycle of birth and destruction which forged the land from darkness.

The First Umbral Era

The Calamity of Wind

Eorzea is characterized by elemental calamities which plunge the realm into short, yet harrowing periods of chaos known as Umbral Eras, followed by extended periods of prosperity known as Astral Eras. What then, you may ask, of the land before the first calamity struck? Drawing from the songs and writings of countless civilizations, theologians believe prehistory to be a tempestuous time of uncontrolled creation overseen by a mercurial god or gods—creation which abruptly ends with the destruction of all that exists, ultimately allowing for the rise of mankind from the wreckage. Historians and scholars of biological fields, on the other hand, claim that mankind could not have simply “appeared” and suggest an evolution of the species in the thousand thousand years preceding the first calamity. What the two groups do, however, agree upon is that modern history begins with the First Umbral Era.

It was not until the advent of the Sixth Umbral Era that, by the process of elimination, scholars were able to declare with certainty that the elemental calamity which ushered in the First Umbral Era was indeed connected in some way with wind—possibly in the form of terrible hurricanes, tempests, or tornadoes. Recent dealings with the moogles of Moghome in which village elders have spoken of a wind-driven disaster previous to the first five calamities serve to further reinforce this theory.

The First Astral Era

A Time of Stone And Fire

It is during the First Astral Era that mankind is believed to have learned the essentials for survival—the ability to carve stone tools and the ability to make fire. Tools allowed for the rise of agriculture and a departure from hunting and gathering, which eventually resulted in the abandonment of nomadic lifestyles and saw the establishment of villages and towns. Within these towns, civilization thrived and basic sciences such as animal husbandry and simple metallurgy were discovered and refined.

As the towns grew, so did the hegemonies that oversaw the towns until finally kingdoms were born. However, kings, as is their wont, are rarely content with what they have, and soon the leaders of the newly formed countries abandoned the creation of tools for the forging of weapons, and the era descended into bloodstained madness.

Equipped with picks and axes, historians believe mankind made short work of nature’s bounty. Cave paintings dated to the First Astral Era suggest the existence of hundreds of now-lost species, from two-headed bison, to winged cocurl-like scalekin, to firs reaching over a thousand yalms in height.

The Second Umbral Era

The Calamity of Lightning

Despite the constant wars waged by kings seeking to expand their domains, mankind thrived, its numbers multiplying with each passing summer. To house and feed the people, forests were felled and fields planted. To forge their tools and weapons, mountains were gutted and skies blackened. For countless years, nature suffered this wanton spoiling of the land until finally the scales were tipped. Mountains of fire belched forth ink-stained clouds which covered the skies and thrust the realm into eternal darkness. And from the skies fell an endless rain of white-hot levinbolts which razed fields, boiled lakes, and split the very walls of mighty fortifications. For a full twelvemoon and a day did nature’s fury ring.

Fearful that the gods meant to purge the land of mankind once and for all, the people abandoned their homes and towns and fled underground into caves. Awaiting them here, however, was not salvation, but death, for the caves became breeding grounds for pestilence and plague. As the people sat trapped in darkness, watching their families meet slow, painful ends, they concentrated their efforts on the one path left to them—prayer. Theologians believe it is this mixture of desperation and focused prayer that gave way to the very first magical incantations.

Now fully aware of the land's boundless anger, mankind turned to the heavens for strength. Through prayer, the people of Eorzea discovered that hidden deep within words lies magic - magic that, when fueled by faith, can empower .

The Second Astral Era

Faith in Above

And so through primitive magicks did mankind endure until the skies had finally parted—those showing proficiency in these esoteric techniques rising to positions of power within the communities. The people were drawn to these charismatic leaders who accredited the fall of the previous era with the faithless kings and their unquenchable avarice. They claimed that only through faith and prayer would they be saved from a similar fate, and thus were the first organized religions born.

In but a matter of years, kingdoms centuries in the making were replaced with theocracies populated with men and women eager to prove their worth. Only through the construction of massive temples, monuments, and effigies would they achieve peace and salvation. To adorn these constructs so that the gods would smile upon them, the people perfected the arts of painting and goldsmithing. To protect these constructs from those who would defy the gods, they solved the riddle of steel. To better bask in the gods' light, mankind reached high to the heavens.

Church-commissioned construction of countless cathedrals, temples, and sepulchers during the Second Astral Era saw the rapid advancement of stonemasonry, the constant mantra of “to the heavens” pressuring early architects to conceive techniques that might defy the very laws of nature.

The Third Umbral Era

The Calamity of Fire

Faith and fear had given the churches absolute power over the realm; however, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Soon, desire for plenary control pit rival religions against one another, culminating in the advent of an extended dark age of holy wars, witch hunts, and cleansings. Towns were burned, children sold into slavery, all while men and women died in the thousands. With no one to tend the fields at home, crops withered, leaving those few who had not marched to war to starvation. The coffers of the victors swelled with the spoils taken from their enemies, but there was nowhere to spend this newly acquired wealth. The road to rebuilding would be a long one, but the people were convinced that if they maintained their faith, they would rise as they had done once before. By this time, however, the gods had grown weary with mankind—the hubris displayed by the church enough to convince the heavens that the people of Eorzea must, once again, be humbled. In the following moons, the sun grew large, parching the earth and sapping the life from all creation, be it plant or animal. Verdant fields and lush forests were reduced to dust-choked wastelands, the people who relied on them for their livelihoods, stricken with famine. The Calamity of Fire was upon them.

Recent discoveries of the skeletons of large plant-eating fauna in the Grand Wake have some scholars convinced that Thanalan's modern day deserts were once a lush grassland lost in the fires of the calamity that ended the Second Astral Era .

The Birth of an Empire

Approximately 5000 years ago, Eorzean civilization reached what can arguably be considered its peak—at least in the sense of technological advancement and overall influence on the rest of Hydaelyn—with the advent of the Allagan Empire and its spread north to Ilsabard, east to Othard, and south to Meracydia. The following section examines the rise and fall of the realm’s most prosperous age.

Saint Coinach's Find

Nearly six centuries ago, a determined young man in Ul'dah by the name of Coinach would stumble upon what would prove to be the greatest discovery of the Sixth Astral Era—relics of the great Allagan Empire.

An Order of Nald’thal seminarian, Coinach was immensely clever, consistently receiving the highest marks amongst his peers. The order had high hopes for the young prodigy and envisioned him a future leader in the church. These hopes crumbled to dust when Coinach became infatuated with stories of a long-lost empire briefly mentioned in holy scripture—Allag. Despite being less than a year from graduation, he abruptly abandoned his studies and began a fevered pursuit of knowledge on a subject most in the order regarded at best as allegory. Turning a deaf ear to the pleas of his professors, Coinach was expelled from the seminary and eventually ostracized by his closest companions. This, however, only fueled the young man’s passion to prove his detractors wrong. To fund his obsession, Coinach became a merchant—every coin earned put into the acquisition of ancient tomes and the overseeing of exploratory digs in remote locations across the realm. It was not until the year before he passed away—over five decades after his search began—that Coinach finally found what he was looking for in a sparsely populated corner of Mor Dhona. Once a laughingstock in academic circles, Coinach was now a hero. Universities begged him to join their staff, while sponsors from across Eorzea showered him with coin to finance future excavations. Further vindication was achieved after his death when he was canonized, not by the order which forsook him, but by the followers of Althyk, the Keeper. Coinach's name lives on to this day in Saint Coinach's Find - an organization dedicated to the continuation of the eponymous archaeologist's work.

The destruction wrought by both the Battle of Silvertear Skies and the subsequent Calamity altered the land in such dramatic fashion that locations once submerged under hundreds of yalms of water were now exposed , revealing Allagan ruins which had not seen the light of day for countless summers . The scholars of Saint Coinach's Find have since begun excavations in these areas in hopes of making their next big discovery.

The Third Astral Era

The Rise of an Empire

The communities which emerged in the aftermath of the Calamity of Fire, while fearful of the gods, were wary to once again make them the centerpieces of their society. Pursuit of the divine had incurred the wrath of the heavens, so to avoid a similar fate, mankind chose to place distance between itself and the gods. As a result, society began to focus on the individual talents of its people. Faith in the gods gave way to faith in oneself. With this newfound confidence, mankind began producing some of the greatest minds in history. New discoveries i science and technology were being made each day. Civilization was advancing at a rate unseen in the previous two Astral Eras, and at the forefront stood a man who would see that civilization reach to the far corners of Hydaelyn-Xande.

Considered by many to be a genius in his own right, the highly ambitious Xande used his uncanny intelligence and charisma to build a nation that, while founded in science, did not deny the magic of the Second Astral Era. Those few descendants of the priests and witches of the Second Astral Era were welcomed and given places where they might hone their skills and wield them for the good of the people. As Xande learned more of magic’s potential, he assigned many of these “mages” to his newly formed army, where their unmatched strength on the battlefield allowed the young leader to subjugate neighboring lands with limited Allagan casualties. In less than a year, Allag was the largest nation in Eorzea and Xande crowned himself emperor.

Upon his death, Emperor Xande was interred in a tomb built within a crystalline cavern located in Mor Dhona—reasoning behind this being that it was thought the concentrated levels of pure aetherial energy might repair the corrupted flesh and restore Xande’s soul to his new body. The actual consequences were quite different.

The Origins of Aetherochemistry

It goes without saying that the Allagan Empire would never have survived, let alone expanded and thrived, had it not been for the might of Xande’s handpicked mage cadres. Their most important contribution to the empire, however, was not solely spellweaving, but the incorporation of their magicks into existing scientific principles. Siege engines enhanced with magicks launched projectiles farther and with more precision. Ensorcelled treadwheel cranes lifted blocks ten times their maximum load with a fraction of the manpower. Once the secrets of aether had been unlocked, they were applied not only to war, but to everyday societal needs, from construction to medicine, transportation to communication. The field came to be known as aetherochemistry, and upon it would the Allagans ride into a Golden Age of prosperity.

This is an artist's rendition of the Allagan Empire as envisioned by the scholars of Saint Coinach's Find. Massive metal frames unearthed at the find in Mor Dhona suggest that the Allagans employed airships not unlike those in use today.

A Golden Age

Xande knew he would not live forever, but he was not about to allow his life’s work come to naught upon his passing, so he carefully groomed his offspring to carry on his legacy. As a result, in the years subsequent to the first emperor’s death, the direct descendants of Xande fostered the growth of the empire by dispatching its armies to the far corners of Ilsabard and Othard. While there was resistance, the empire made short work of all who stood before it, and in time there was not a city in the Three Great Continents where the imperial standard did not hang.

With no more enemies to fight, peace prevailed and the people thrived. The focus of the empire now shifted from expanding its borders to bettering the lives of those who lived within them. One such undertaking involved the construction of a massive array of spires at Silvertear Falls designed to gather the very rays of the sun and deliver that energy to the homes and manufactories of the empire. With the completion of Syrcus Tower—or the Crystal Tower, as it would come to be called in the scripture of later eras—the Allagans began their reliance on myriad machina to ease their daily burden and allow them to concentrate on bettering their minds and their souls. For three centuries, not a war was waged on the Three Great Continents, and the bloodshed which had spawned the empire became but a blemish on a forgotten age.

The miracle of aetherochemistry had given the Allagans everything they wanted and more. Yet, a man who believes he has everything will not strive to create anew. Lacking the drive that once made it great, society slowly fell into disarray. The people had grown complacent, abandoning learning and drowning themselves in leisure, relegating any and all work to machina. Birth rates plummeted while suicide became increasingly common. Leaders grew corrupt and complacent, leading to isolated uprisings in the worst of cases.

In the years preceding the Seventh Umbral Era and the re - emergence of the Crystal Tower, scholars had very little to draw upon regarding the sun - collecting spire's appearance. Early attempts by artists commissioned by Saint Coinach's Find to recreate the Crystal Tower, while beautiful, were ultimately far different than the actual construct.