[top]Founding

The one-time state church of the Anuirean Empire, the Imperial Temple was once home to the Paladin, an ehrshegh of the Roele bloodline, said to have been a direct descendant of Roele himself.

[top]Dissolution

Founded shortly after the cataclysm at Mount Deismaar, the Imperial Temple of Haelyn once existed as a unified religious order. However the temple splintered in the wake of the Anuirean Empire's fall, as dissenting priests debated how best to serve the Lawmaker. While there is still a sense that there is one Imperial Temple of Haelyn, there is clearly no central leadership in the temple, but rather several distinct leaders and their movements and followers.
In Talinie, during the "Wasted Centuries", nobles and priests fought in a series of wars over petty questions. From this chaos emerged Fitzalan the Blessed. He preached a spiritual message of humility, grace, and stewardship combined with an guide to personal conduct that emphisized work and fatalistic submission to the world as it is.
The leadership of the Imperial Temple took little notice of Fitzalan at first, as Talinie was a remote part of the Empire. But as Fitzalan's teachings spread and took root, he was challeneged by those who rejected his interpretation. He argued that the Imperial Temple's belief in a rule of law was empty if not tempered with mercy. He also argued that a rigid devotion to the letter of the law represented a spiritual laziness, for it required no reflection on a right course of action; mercy and justice, he proclaimed, were deliberate acts.
Outraged by these criticisms, Fitzalan's works were examined and condemned. In 327 MR, Fitzalan was arrested by the Inquisition of Righteousness and Justice in Aerele. Tried and comdemned, he became a martyr to his movement.
Many in the Imperial Temple objected to this reactionary suppression of a scholarly criticism of the status quo. Notable among these was Blaede Vathormane, Grand Master of the Holy Order of Haelyn's Aegis, the miliary arm of the Imperial Temple. Based on the evangelistic work of the Holy Order, Blaede, called for a concilliatory tone and work towards reconcilliation. The arrest and excution of Fitzalan was very contraversial. Blaede objected to this move calling it, "the act that will severe the Imperial Temple forever." As the years went on, Blaede Vathormane and the Holy Order of Haelyn's Aegis began to formulate their own aims and policies, while remaining faithful to the Orthodox Imperial Temple, as the faction Aerele became known, in terms of the rites, worship, and teaching of Haelyn, including the traditional close reading of the Book of Laws as the primary document of the faith. When the Orthodox Imperial Temple began to use the Inquisition against political enemies in the temple, and not just against undisputed heretics of the faith, Blaede severed all formal ties with the Orthodox Imperial Temple, and the Holy Order of Haelyn's Aegis was no longer just a knightly order, but an independent temple known simply as Haelyn's Aegis. For the multitude that rejected either the new doctrines of the Northern Imperial temple, or the suppression of the Orthodox Imperial temple, Haelyn's Aegis was the standard bearer for orthodoxy in practice, but not by force.
By the time Haelyn's Aegis split with Aerele, the Imperial Temple was sundered. Further conflicts would divide Haelyn's temples just as the Empire itself was divided.

[top]New Temple Domains


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