#On the Office and Its Mandate
"A province is a parish with artillery."
The Praelates are the governors of the Bureaucratic Synod. They rule its provinces, cities and territories on behalf of Strasbourg. Commissions and the better class of complaint use the full style, Governor-Praelate. The Synod's own description calls the office part administrator, part preacher, part warlord. I have never found a way to improve on it, and that rarely happens to me.
A citizen of the Synod meets the office long before meeting the officer. The Praelate is the name at the foot of the levy notice. The Praelate is the voice behind the Lenten sermon, read aloud by a curate who did not write it. The Praelate is the authority cited by the armed man at the granary door. Most people in a province will never stand in a Praelate's chamber. All of them will eat, pray and be counted according to what is decided there.
#On the Provinces After the Concordat
Before the Concordat of Strasbourg, the Church governed a great deal and admitted to governing much less. After the Sundering of A.S. 45 its offices came into the open unevenly, a diocese here and a garrison town there. By about A.S. 50 an interim council was ruling in practice. That was administration by necessity. Lords kept their halls and magistrates kept their benches, and the Church kept the ledgers that told both what they owed.
The A.S. 90 settlement reversed the order of precedence. The crowns of France, Iberia and the Rhineland were subordinated to a single sacramental authority. From then on, territorial rule was delegated from Strasbourg instead of inherited from a grandfather. A province was governed in the Synod's name, under the Synod's seal and for the Synod's purposes. Whoever held it held it in trust. That might be a former count, a cathedral administrator, or a soldier with a good record and better friends.
The titles followed the law at their own pace. Courts, benches and governorships were renamed one jurisdiction at a time, over years. The Bureau of Records has never produced a folio that fixes the first day a governor signed as Praelate. I have looked. The Bureau calls the absence "continuity of office." I call it a gap, and the Bureau of Purity has asked me to stop.
Earlier editions of this Codex recorded that the governors of the Triune Hearth were re-titled Vicars-Praetorial after the Concordat.
The title Vicar-Praetorial went to civil magistrates. Governors took the title of Praelate. The resident Vicars who audit a governor's quotas are a separate office again. A word shared between titles proves no kinship between the offices, as any clerk who has filed under the wrong one can explain at length and in penitential tones.
#On the Governance of a Province
Few readers will be admitted to a Praelate's chamber, so I will describe one. There is a long desk with a ledger open at the current quarter. Wax warms over a spirit lamp. Petitioners queue on a bench made uncomfortable on purpose. One door admits a clerk from the Bureau of Tithes, carrying figures. Another admits a captain whose men need boots. Through the window, carts stand at the grain store while two armed officers count sacks against a list.
Most of a Praelate's administration is arithmetic with consequences. Tithes and levies must be raised in the amounts Strasbourg expects. Provisions must reach the towns and the garrisons, and where possible the people who grew them. The roads must stay open. The province must be fed enough to work and frightened enough to pay. These demands collide every quarter, and the Praelate chooses which one will be disappointed.
Then the office climbs into the pulpit. A Governor-Praelate preaches, or causes preaching. The province's public observances carry the governor's authority alongside the Creator's: the fasts, the feasts, the reading of decrees approved by the Bureau of Doctrine. The sermon and the levy notice are often read on the same morning, from the same step, in the same voice. Parishioners who tried to applaud one and groan at the other learned that the Synod treats them as a single document.
Beneath the pulpit sits the third part of the office. The warlord raises men, posts them, and turns them on any district that has fallen behind in its payments or its prayers. The signature that releases bread also authorizes the cordon around the bakery. I consider this efficient. The bakers hold a different view and have learned not to submit it.
#On the Governor Among Rivals
A Praelate who mistakes a province for property lasts about as long as a courier takes to reach Strasbourg. Other offices press in on every side, and they were placed there deliberately.
Above stand the Procurators of Strasbourg. Concordat Hall appoints them directly, and each oversees a whole region: Francia, Iberia, Germania, the Alpine Marches. A Procurator's red wax can shutter a cathedral or dissolve an army before sunset, and a governor's ordinances survive at their pleasure. They are a different office from the Procurators of the Minor Orders, the abacus-bearing scribes and counters of the Hierarchy. Provincial correspondence confuses the two often enough to have produced some memorable misunderstandings.
Then come the Legates. They arrive unannounced in troubled dioceses with authority to seize records, depose governors, or suspend armies in the Synod's name. A Praelate generally learns of a Legate's visit at the same moment as the doorkeeper.
The Vicar lives in residence and oversees quotas, taxes and observance. On paper the Vicar answers to the governor. In practice, the Vicar's red-sealed ledger often decides whether a city feasts or starves. A governor who argues with that ledger is arguing with Strasbourg's arithmetic within Strasbourg's hearing. Archons interpret the decrees the Praelate enforces and judge the disputes the Praelate's decisions create. Wardens hold the gates, prisons and roads. Theirs is the hand the populace actually feels, and a Praelate's order reaches a farmer's shoulder only by way of it. Across all of them run the demands of the Holy Bureaus. Each Bureau has its own collectors, and each is convinced its business comes first.
A Praelate is also not a Bishop-Praetorial. The Bishops-Praetorial, styled Custodes Animae, are spiritual governors of provinces and hold seats in the Assembly of Thrones. A Praelate's commission confers neither the style nor the seat. How the two divide a single province gets settled locally, repeatedly, and in writing.
#On Toledo and Trieste
Every novice clerk is taught two names, one as consolation and one as warning. The Synod is content to have produced both.
During a famine in Toledo, Governor-Praelate Alaricus opened the Granaries of Saint Benedict and fed the city. Toledo loved Alaricus for it, and every account that reaches my desk says the city still does. The Bureau of Doctrine has since presented the opening as proof of the Synod's benevolence. That is generous of Doctrine, since the benevolence had sat behind locked vault doors until one officer chose otherwise. The act made Alaricus beloved. It did not make famine relief a power of the office. A governor who cites Toledo as precedent can expect a reply from the Bureau of Tithes, which still disputes who holds custody of the grain.
In Trieste, Governor-Praelate Renata raised levy after levy to fund the Bureau of War, until half her province was empty. Every levy was lawful, and every levy was delivered. The Bureau of War received what it asked for, and Trieste received the bill. I am instructed to note that Renata's quotas were met. I note it. The province she administered is now very easy to count.
Both governors held the same commission and pressed the same seal. What separated them was how much each was prepared to let the province pay. Strasbourg cannot read that from a ledger until the ledger is closed.
#On the Present Application
In A.S. 201, a hundred and eleven years after the Concordat, every Synodal province is still governed by someone who holds Strasbourg's commission and answers for Strasbourg's quotas. Petitioners still wait on the bench. Wax still warms over the lamp. The office remains what the settlement made it: authority lent downward, with the receipt kept at the top.
A Praelate may feed a city or empty one, and the Synod files both under the same heading. Applications for a different kind of governor may be lodged with the Bureau of Records. The Bureau will acknowledge receipt.