Saragossa
Saragossa was originally the capital of the Saragossa Conclave, a small southern league. The Conclave was conquered and absorbed into the Republic in TN 1636. The city was never properly integrated into Republican life and still causes the government many difficulties to this day with continuous demands and protests. Saragossa’s population is generally pro-South, but anti-Republican. They want independent status or at least membership in the AST. Since the Republic views Saragossa as a city-state within its borders, it categorically refuses all suggestions of autonomy, hoping to eventually integrate the city’s population into the Republican mainstream.
For the past three Terranovan centuries, the Saragossa People’s Front for Independence (SPFI) has been fighting a terrorist campaign in an attempt to achieve freedom. This terrorist group has relatively little popular support, mostly due to their radical views and indiscriminate choice of targets. Despite this lack of encouragement, the SPFI continues to battle those they see as foreign aggressors. Many military analysts suspect that either the Norlights or the CNCS has been secretly providing the SPFI’s soldiers with arms and training, but, thus far, no one has any evidence to support this claim.
Saragossa is governed, literally, by the 5th Republican Cavalry Legion, known as the Knights of Saragossa. Their prefect rules the city under martial law. The Knights are generally hostile towards the local population, reserving a special form of hatred for SPFI terrorists, who they call “Spiffies.”
Despite their aggressive demeanor, the prefects of the 5th Cavalry have consistently encouraged local enterprise in an attempt to win over local business leaders and tie Saragossa’s economy more securely into that of the Republic as a whole. The local economy is agriculturally based and is supplemented by power generation and various types of light industry.