Kirchberg is the smallest of Feldia’s duchies by population and, by most reckonings, the loudest in the places where decisions get made. It holds the realm’s oldest university and its most influential bishop. It exports neither grain nor iron. What it sells is judgement, and it has never had trouble finding buyers.
The land
The duchy occupies a high plateau in northern Feldia, bounded by the Steinwater to the east, beyond which lies Steinmark, and by the Korn to the south. Both rivers rise on the Spine. The Steinwater runs north to the coast and carries most of what Kirchberg buys; the Korn separates the plateau from Grenzmark and is bridged in fewer places than a traveler expects.
The ground is thin and stony, better for sheep than for wheat, and the duchy has made a virtue of that: Kirchberg vellum is the best in the north, and the flocks that produce it are managed with the same fussiness as the libraries. The climate is cool and gray, wet through most of the year, with snow that settles for months. The city keeps its roads clear at considerable expense. Visitors remark on it. Kirchbergers consider the remark beneath answering.
The city
Kirchberg city sits on the plateau’s northern edge, roughly six thousand souls by the tax rolls — a count that excludes the clergy and scholars, who belong to the cathedral and the university rather than to the town. Nobody agrees on what the real figure is.
Three buildings organize everything. The Cathedral of the Three Angels dominates the skyline, its windows added a generation at a time for six hundred years. The University of the High Seat sprawls to the west of it in a knot of halls, courts and lodging houses. The Bishop’s Palace sits between the two and is the least beautiful of the three, which locals will tell you is deliberate.
Downriver, the crossing town of Steinford handles the traffic the city has no interest in handling itself: wool and vellum going out, iron and grain and highland stone coming in, and the drovers and carters who move all of it.
People and learning
Status in Kirchberg comes from learning and from rank in the Church, and the two braid together so tightly that most people cannot separate them. Precision is admired. Evidence is admired. Volume is not. Public argument is rare and slightly scandalous; disputes are settled in private rooms by people who have known each other thirty years.
The university is the oldest in Feldia. Scholarship on the hill predates the realm’s conversion, though the university itself was formally chartered about three centuries ago. It produces physicians, historians, theologians and lawyers, and a degree from Kirchberg opens doors as far south as the Bagii Atoll. Admission is brutally selective. Twice a year the Rector reads out the names of those accepted from the cathedral steps, and twice a year a number of well-connected families learn that their money was not the argument they thought it was.
Trade
Kirchberg’s exports are letters, books and opinions. The cathedral and university scriptoria turn out manuscripts that sell across the north for prices that would embarrass a horse trader. Beyond that, the duchy lives on student fees, endowments from families buying their sons an education and their names a plaque, and counsel — nobles and merchants pay well for a discreet reading of a contract, a genealogy, or a theological position they need to survive.
The Bishop’s rulings on doctrine are followed, or at least argued with, in every diocese in Feldia. That is not a formal authority. It works anyway.
Recent years
Kirchberg’s usual complaint about the rest of the realm is that everyone acts too quickly. Lately the complaint has been turned around on it. Delegations from Grenzmark and Kronstadt have come asking for a position on Eisenmark’s closed border and gone home with a promise of further study.
There is also the matter of the scholar. An elderly member of the university died in his study in the spring; the death was ruled natural, and the man was old. His papers burned the same week. The university has said nothing beyond the ruling, and his colleagues have said less, which in a place this fond of talking has been noticed.