Littorand started as a minor fiefdom on the fringes of Boscan territory. Its lack of vital resources and extreme distance from the capital meant that its was given a reasonable degree of autonomy from the beginning.
The territory got its first taste of independence when it was cut off from the central government during the empire’s second civil war; the province’s obscurity precluded it being a target for any of the warring factions, and its governor maintained a firm stance of neutrality in order to preserve the peace. In the three years before full imperial authority was restored, the province became nearly self-sufficient, with tightly-knit bureaucracies in every major city and a large enough agricultural sector to make food imports unnecessary. The region’s poor mineral wealth had allowed a flourishing trade in repairs and tinkering, with broken or damaged machinery being recirculated instead of replaced.
The greater empire’s indifference to the province continued after the war, and as a result the bureaucracy established during isolation grew more and more integral to Littorand’s governance, to the extent that each new governor was eventually pre-selected by a council of city mayors before being presented to the capital.
When the third Boscan civil war shattered the empire, the province of Littorand was barely affected. Only when the imperial army and police were withdrawn to quell unrest in the north was the lack of central authority noticed. The resulting lawlessness caused the local councils to decide to take matters into their own hands: bands of citizen constables were elected to keep the peace in each town, with each town’s actions held accountable by the province’s governor. By this point, the office was almost entirely beholden to the councils – it was quickly reduced to a figurehead position, with executive decisions made by an assembly of appointed representatives from each of the major population centres.
The relative success of Littorand’s constables in restoring law and order was not missed by the province’s neighbours – within a year of the withdrawal of imperial troops, the better part of six former provinces had joined together into a loose coalition. Stability was the driving force behind this meta-nation, but the opportunity for true independence from the empire had not been lost on the citizens. Their taxes were now paying for their own security and infrastructure, and they did not look forward to a return to funding works half a continent away.
The official secession was almost unnoticed – by the time the nation of Littorand claimed sovereignty, another five or six smaller territories had already announced their independence from Bosca proper. In many cases, these earlier declarations were purely political in motivation – some were simply breakaway fiefs of the empire, with the local governors seeing an opportunity to set themselves up as kings, while others were genuinely revolutionary, embracing radically different forms of government – some democratic, others military.
Over the years, most of the breakaway states have been conquered or bribed back into becoming part of Bosca, but Littorand has always maintained its self-sufficiency. To date, Bosca has launched three major wars of invasion and at least half a dozen attempted annexations of minor scraps of territory; none of the former and only two of the latter have succeeded. Littorand’s political independence – founded on self-sufficiency and reinforced by its distance from and economic superiority over the Boscan homeland – has become an assumption of all of its citizens.