| Andermani Empire | |
|---|---|
| Form of government | Constitutional Imperial Monarchy |
| Official language | German |
| Home Planet | New Berlin |
| Capital | New Potsdam |
| Head of state | Emperor of the House of Anderman |
| Head of government | Chancellor |
| Senior military commander | Grand Admiral rank known |
| Executive branch | Imperial Council |
| Military | Imperial Andermani Navy, Imperial Andermani Army |
The Anderman Empire is a fictional star-nation in the Honorverse, the background setting for a series of novels and short stories in the military science fiction genre, written by David Weber and others and published by Baen Books.
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The Empire is a technologically advanced medium power. Its population is predominantly ethnic Chinese with German culture and German as the official language. The Empire's homeworld is New Berlin. As has been thus far demonstrated with Andermani characters, Andermani citizens usually have Chinese given names and German surnames.
A popular nickname for a native of the Andermani Empire is "Andy" (plural "Andies").
New Berlin was originally a world settled by ethnic Chinese colonists known as Kuan Yin, after the Chinese goddess of mercy. The name was bitterly ironic, as the colony was doomed by an indigenous bacterium that devoured voraciously every lifeform that had Terran chlorophyll. Entire crops were ruined, and the colony was teetering at the edge of extinction when a mercenary named Gustav Anderman seized the planet, around the year 1600 post-Diaspora.
An efficient administrator, Anderman and his men addressed Kuan Yin's plight. He brought microbiologists and genetic engineers to the planet, and these scientists succeeded in developing strains of Terran vegetation immune to local bacteria. Twenty Terran years after Anderman's invasion, the planet was capable of feeding itself. The locals were so grateful to Anderman that they had no trouble whatsoever in accepting him as Emperor Gustav I of the Anderman Empire, and embraced German culture and language as if it were their own, even changing Kuan Yin's name to New Berlin.
By the time of Anderman's death, his Empire ruled over six solar systems and it has continued to expand throughout the following centuries. Gustav Anderman's descendants, the Anderman Dynasty, have ruled over the Empire ever since, and proven to be extremely capable, despite a tendency toward eccentricity. For example, Gustav Anderman himself, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Frederick the Great, even running around in period costumes of Frederick's time. Or Gustav VI, who tried to appoint his prized rose bush as Chancellor of the Empire (an action which caused his removal from the throne, without much popular complaint). Or Gustav VI's older sister, who took the throne by using a legal fiction that allowed her to proclaim herself a man, bypassing the Imperial Charter's mandating male heir-only line of succession (it certainly helped "Gustav VII" that "he" had previously taken control of the Imperial Navy's Home Fleet). Gustav VII is considered to be one of the best rulers the Empire has ever had.
The Andermani Empire is a constitutional monarchy headed by an Emperor. A document known as the Imperial Charter serves as the Empire's constitution; among other things, the Charter regulates the succession to the Imperial Throne. Ever since the foundation of the Empire, the Imperial throne has been in the hands of the House of Anderman.
The Emperor personally wields an important amount of power, and the Andermani distrust for republican forms is widely known. Despite this, the Emperor does not have absolute power, and the existence of the office of Chancellor has been mentioned; the Chancellor of the Andermani Empire may be analogous to, for example, the Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, however, unlike its Manticoran counterpart, the appointment of a Chancellor is exclusively up to the Emperor.
There has also been mention of an "Imperial Council". The powers and attributions of this Council are still unknown, but it has been mentioned that the Council played an important role during the succession crisis following the overthrow of Emperor Gustav VI.
The current leader of the Andermani Empire is Emperor Gustav XI. Some members of the Andermani Imperial family mentioned so far in the novels are Crown Prince Huang Anderman and Grand Admiral Chien-lu Anderman, who holds the nobiliary title of Herzog von Rabenstrange (Herzog being German for Duke).
The Imperial Andermani Navy (IAN) is the fictional space navy if the Andermani Empire in the Honorverse.
As the Empire's spacegoing naval force, the IAN is not only responsible for defending the Empire's systems against enemy forces, but it is also in charge of "showing the flag", as well as annexing new systems into the Empire and maintaining presence in the Empire's areas of interest, notably the Silesian Confederacy, which the Empire considers to be its area of influence.
Some members of the IAN command are actively against Manticore, and pursue a more aggressive stance against the Manticorans, especially in Silesia.
Andermani military ships have the prefix IANS (Imperial Andermani Naval Ship).
The ships of the IAN emphasize missiles as their primary weapons system instead of energy weapons (which gives them advantage in long range combat but not so much in close combat), and are usually smaller and less massive than their Manticoran counterparts. This means that with equivalent inertial compensators IAN ships are faster than Manticorian ships of the same class, which suits their missile heavy doctrine. Unlike their Manticoran or Havenite counterparts, Andermani warships are painted in a haze gray color instead of white, and the ships are emblazoned with their names instead of their hull numbers.
In the recent novels of the series, the IAN has reached a technological level close to that of the Royal Manticoran Navy, after developing indigenous missile pods and pod-laying superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers as well as having copied the RMN's new inertial compensator technology. This is a result of the Empire's extremely efficient foreign intelligence services.
Shipboard troops in the IAN are provided by the Imperial Andermani Army, as there is no separate Marine Corps in the Andermani military. While normally only posted on the Andermani capital world in times of peace, recent events (an assassination attempt on a close relative to the Emperor) have meant that some of the IAN's ships have received a complement of elite Totenkopf Hussars -The Andermani Emperor's personal guard — as Marines.
The Andermani Empire is an expansionist power, but its rulers have been wise enough to grant a considerable degree of autonomy to their conquered subjects, thus preventing uprisings and rebellions. Perhaps due to Gustav Anderman's mercenary profession, the Empire he founded has a tradition of intervening in other nations' affairs only when there was something in it for them. The guiding principle of Andermani diplomacy and foreign relations is Realpolitik. The Empire's primary expansionist interest has long been the chaos-ridden Silesian Confederacy.
The Empire has long been distrustful of Haven, both due to its republican form of government (which the Empire views as inherently unstable) and to its expansionist drive, as the Empire feared that, after dealing with Manticore, both Silesia and the Empire would be the future targets of the People's Republic. Even though relations between the Empire and the resurrected Republic of Haven have been uneventful, the Empire has joined Manticore in its renewed war with Haven.
Manticore and the Empire are trading partners and are usually in good terms with each other. Silesia, however, has been a major bone of contention between both nations, which almost led to a war once. There are also factions in the Imperial government and the Imperial Navy which favor an anti-Manticore foreign policy. The nation of Silesia was partitioned between the Andermani and the Manticorans, a necessary move to secure the Empire's participation in the new war with Haven.
David Weber has said that "the Andermani Empire is, in many ways, the Prussia of Frederick the Great".[1]