| Twinkings War | |||||
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| Belligerents | |||||
| Swemmel's forces | Kyot's forces | ||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||
*Swemmel
| *Kyot†
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The Twinkings War was a civil war fought in Unkerlant shortly after the Six Years' War ended. The war began when King Guntram of Unkerlant died, leaving his twin sons, Swemmel and Kyot, disputing the throne as neither would admit that his brother was the elder son and heir. Already damaged by the Six Years' War, Unkerlant was nearly ruined by more years of savage fighting as the flower of an Unkerlanter generation was forced to choose between two sadistic, tyrannical princes. The chaos of the war also allowed the Unkerlanter provinces of Zuwayza and western Forthweg to secede from the kingdom, while Gyongyos expanded its border in the Elsung Mountains at Unkerlant's expense.
Despite Kyot initially holding the capital, Cottbus, and granting Zuwayza its independence to free up more of his troops, the war ended in victory for Swemmel, who proceeded to execute his brother by boiling him alive. Swemmel then proceeded to purge Unkerlant's government, army, and nobility of Kyot's supporters, real or imagined. One of the few survivors of the purge was General Chlodvald, Unkerlant's greatest commander during the Six Years' War, who was allowed to retire to an estate outside Sommerda.
The war left large stretches of Unkerlant ruined and its peasants starving; the Duchy of Grelz alone saw a third of its villages destroyed. Close to a full generation passed before the country recovered, only to be invaded and devastated once more by Algarve during the Derlavaian War. But the massive purge of the nobility also allowed able commoners such as Marshal Rathar to rise to positions of power, which may have aided Unkerlant's eventual triumph over Algarve.
Literary Note[]
The Twinkings War is clearly an analogue of the Russian Civil War, between the Bolsheviks and their White adversaries, which devastated Russia in the direct aftermath of World War I. While both conflicts saw the old regime's nobility decimated, a major difference is that the Twinkings War has no ideological background, being simply a personal contest for power between two equally autocratic princes.
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