The Lyran Commonwealth: historical inspirations and founding story
Right from the start of BattleTech, the Lyran Commonwealth was a popular home base. That’s mostly because their armed forces hire a lot of mercenaries – most players’ favorite faction just is their own mercenary outfit. But there’s also something endearingly ridiculous about the Commonwealth that makes them ripe for memes like the notorious “Steiner Scout Squad”.
Historical Inspirations
If you’re hoping for another scorching hot take like my “Free Worlds League is Rome, actually,” this might be a little disappointing. (Stay with me, though – there will be arguments for some outrageous claims later in the year.) I mostly agree with the standard view: the Lyran Commonwealth is a mashup of German Empires and states. While nothing seems to be based on the short-lived and unmourned Third Empire of the 1930s and 40s, the “Second Empire” of the German Kaisers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries seems to have been a major inspiration.
Unfortunately, the popular perception of the Second Empire is a bit tainted by propaganda from the First World War and it’s often thought of as a military dictatorship – little more than a continuation of the cliché about Prussia being “an army with a state”. The truth is somewhat more appealing. Germany in this period was an industrial superpower and equally famous for its cultural and educational achievements. The Kaiser was powerful, but he was the head of a Federal state and had to negotiate with both state representative and a national parliament elected by universal male suffrage. While striking the “male” qualifier from that would have been better, that was a typical problem of the time.
The Lyran Commonwealth shares a lot of these appealing qualities. The realm typically vied with the Terran Hegemony for first place in the Inner Sphere in the realms of heavy industry, education, and culture. In its best years, the Commonwealth was able to boast not only of near-universal literacy, but even of providing at least a year of tertiary schooling to a majority of its citizens.
Unfortunately for the Lyran Commonwealth, the learning and diligence of its ordinary people was not always matched by the upper classes. This is felt most keenly in the officer corps, historically plagued by the “Social General”. This started as a hereditary honor rank granted to prominent people in the Commonwealth, but quickly led to nobles exercising command on right of blood alone. For centuries talent counted for far less than pedigree, meaning that the average Commonwealth colonel was… well, let’s try to only say nice things: they were well-dressed and very up to date on court gossip. As this is not a problem felt so keenly by the other powers of the Inner Sphere, I don’t think it’s meant to be a comment on neo-Feudalism in general – my hunch is that it’s blended in from the dying days of the Austrian Hapsburgs? At any rate, the Social Generals not only led to many talented Lyran officers of more humble rank departing their service, they also inclined Lyran Archons to employ mercenaries in key military missions.
There are some indications that this kind of contractor arrangement was also used for the government’s civilian responsibilities. In the education sector, accredited corporate institutions teaching to the technical needs of their parent firm are more common than liberal arts colleges focused on broadening their students’ minds. Private healthcare, with all the attendant inequalities, is also part of the Lyran story. To be poor and sick can mean a lifetime of debt. While this realm has some appealing qualities, the majority of its population are still trapped in the quiet dystopia of neo-feudalism. What’s most striking to me is the apparent absence of a widespread political resistance. The Second Empire had a powerful Social Democratic movement that spread despite attempts at political repression. Why isn’t there anything like that in the Lyran Commonwealth?
My hunch is that the creators of BattleTech were inspired by their own times. The Lyran Commonwealth gets its first full write-up in 1987’s House Steiner – The Lyran Commonwealth. For the writers, Ronald Reagan breaking PATCO (the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) in 1981 was recent history and the larger campaign of union-busting in the 80s was current events. Beyond the conscious efforts of politicians and business leaders, there was a growing awareness at the time that the mute forces of Globalization had undermined the position of organized labor in the United States (and all around the world). Attempts to fight for better conditions were all too frequently met by the threat to take work offshore in search of cheaper labor. Many union leaders adapted themselves to the new environment by painting up a succession of sellout contracts as “victories” because a plant or production line wasn’t closed. It seems that in the imagined future of BattleTech, Globalization has become “Galactic-ization”, with the ordinary people of the Inner Sphere confronting interstellar corporations that can switch production lines not just from continent to continent, but from world to world. A lucky few might get ahead in the world or flee out to the frontier (with its uncertain freedoms), but for the majority there’s no way out.
Founding
The Lyran Commonwealth itself was a relatively latecomer to the politics of the Inner Sphere. However, the three interstellar states that came together in that year were significantly older. The Tamar Pact (which the Tamar family had modestly named after themselves) even predated the Outer Reaches Rebellion, having been formed in 2235 on the pretense that it was merely a self-defense initiative by colonists threatened by piracy. The Pact’s agricultural surpluses made it a very influential local power in the chaotic years of the Rebellion and the withdrawal of Terran forces. Many other colonies were food importers and turned to Tamar simply to survive. Closer to Terra, Ian McQuiston, heir to a sizable family fortune, had come to control faster-than-light shipping in the region around the planet Skye in the 2290s. In 2299, he translated market domination into political control and established the Federation of Skye as a “defense league” with an army capable of protecting his business interest from piracy and more serious interlopers alike. In 2301, McQuiston’s protege Seth Marsden traveled further out towards the edge of the Inner Sphere with a model for success. Marsden settled on the distant planet Donegal, set up a FTL shipping company (Donegal Freights and Goods) and built up a trade network. He proclaimed the Protectorate of Donegal on the Skye model in 2313.
The formation of other interstellar states – especially the nearby Terran Hegemony (2315) and Draconis Combine (2319) – prompted discussions of merging these three into a more powerful realm. By the 2330s, low-level and unofficial talks were occurring fairly regularly and it was often remarked that Tamar’s agricultural bounty, Donegal’s wealth of raw materials, and Skye’s industrial could form a beneficial partnership. Such idle talk formed the basis for Kevin Tamar, head of the Tamar Pact, proposing a formal merger in 2339. A head of government conference on Arcturus the following year led to the proclamation of the Lyran Commonwealth in 2341. The name, however, was euphemistic. Thomas McQuiston (Ian’s grandson), Simon Marsden (Seth’s son), and Kevin Tamar were businessmen running monopolies with states attached, and their merger was intended to bring wealth to them – not the hundred billion people living in the new Commonwealth. The council of nine ruling “Archons” (McQuiston, Marsden, Tamar, and a handful of their cronies) used their political power to transition from just getting by with levels of wealth that would make 21st Century billionaires green with envy into being unimaginably rich and happy to flaunt it. The lives and even whole worlds ruined by their cutthroat schemes were just “externalities”.
The brazen conduct of the Lyran plutocracy – and it’s tempting to use less polite terms – made them incredibly unpopular, but as the Archons controlled the guns and the ships there wasn’t much that ordinary people, or even smaller businesspeople, could do but complain until external forces brought the crisis to the boil. In 2367 the Principality of Rasalhague was decisively defeated by the Draconis Combine. While Rasalhague remained nominally independent and Kurita’s forces withdrew, Lyran military analysts were alarmed by the prospect of their long Rasalhague frontier becoming a border with the Combine. The Archons, terrified by the thought that someone other than them might have a turn at looting the Lyran Commonwealth, proposed fresh taxes to pay for a military buildup. This went down badly in the old Donegal and Skye territories, but it was outright explosive in the Tamar Pact worlds – even those that directly bordered the Draconis Combine. There, the popular view was that it would be better to refuse the Archons’ tax, secede, and try to cut the same deal that the Rasalhaguers had gotten.
Realizing that the Lyran Commonwealth could no longer bear the weight of the nine corrupt Archons, Robert Marsden decided to do the responsible thing and get rid of the other eight. It’s not quite stated, but I get the impression that Robert inherited the leadership of Donegal and the post of Archon that went in it at a fairly young age – maybe around 2372, when he was just 21. (Robert’s father Simon Marsden would live until 2392, but abdications happen). His recent ascension gave Robert Marsden the moral high ground of being the only Archon not known to be corrupt. Indeed, among the description of Marsden’s coup preparations, the House Steiner sourcebook has a funny line about him “secretly [collecting] evidence of the other archons’ illegal doings” – presumably this task had young Robert spending many sleepless minutes paging through an encyclopedia! Still, the time saved there was used diligently. Handshakes were made, mass audiences all over the Commonwealth were addressed, and senior officers in the Lyran military were recruited into the plot. When Marsden pulled the trigger in August 2375 and declared himself the Archon Basileus and sole ruler of the Lyran Commonwealth, the army was ready to back him and most people were completely convinced that he couldn’t be any worse than the rest.
I should pause here and point out that the Lyran Commonwealth’s reputation for being a realm full of well-educated people is earned some time after this period.
Still, once he had the other Archons out of the way, Marsden cut some of the smaller players into the action. He established an Estates General, giving the various petty nobles the privilege of advising him, and laid out the terms of the neo-feudal contract in writing. The contract, dubbed the “Articles of Acceptance”, gave local governments considerable autonomy provided that they render unto Marsden the things that are Marsden’s. Among the hundreds of Lyran planets, just a score of planetary governments refused Robert Marsden’s terms. Most of the dissident worlds folded when threatened with blockade, but the eight planets – among them Tamar and Skye, the capitals of two of the three realms that had merged into the Commonwealth – held out and were bloodily crushed by Marsden’s forces. There’s talk in the House Steiner sourcebook that the leaders of dissident worlds were motivated by concerns about their individual freedoms or concerns that the Commonwealth was becoming a dictatorship – but that seems too high-minded for politicians in such a venal era. More likely (and especially as Skye and Tamar were among the dissenters), they simply saw that Marsden’s regime had less to offer them. There’s also a possibility that the invaded worlds were not so much dissidents as examples for the others.
In fairness, the Marsden coup did ease some of the misery of the Lyran people, though not out of the goodness of his heart. Robert Marsden was, if anything, even more grasping than the Archons who he removed and far more ruthless to boot – but after he did away with the cartel and established a pure monopoly, stability and prosperity were in Marsden’s interests. If you'll forgive the repurposing of an old line, “what was good for the Lyran Commonwealth was good for the Archon Basileus.”