The Millennium Archives

by Moonatik

Equestria's Great Reformation

“This is just some more book readin’ about the Celestial Millennium, don’t get too excited.”

Extract from “Overview of Equestrian History” by Sweet Potato.

In the latter half of the 700s, Equestria faced its greatest crisis since the Lunar Rebellion as the Centuries of Calm came to a dramatic end in the Glorious Reformation. In the preceding centuries, the ruling noble class of Equestria as well as Celestia herself had become complacent in their positions. For Celestia herself, it had been long enough since the Lunar Rebellion that she could put it behind her, but it wasn’t near enough to her sister’s expected return that she felt that she needed to be prepared. For the nobility, they and their ancestors had lorded over their fiefdoms uncontested for centuries, with their wise and benevolent Princess being able to step in and intervene on their behalf whenever things got out of hoof.

This complacency gave rise to mismanagement and a drastic increase in instances in which nobleponies abused their positions and have it overlooked. In response, a collection of small landholders and merchants formed an organisation called the “Friendship Amongst the Tribes Society”, commonly referred to as the Tribists. The Tribists then sought to gain the support of the small industrial working class and the vast peasantry, seizing on popular discontent with the semi-feudal system and eventually organising a mass movement against it, with its stated aims being “a national and democratic transformation of Equestria”.

Whilst the methods of the Tribists were initially peaceful, they were soon met with violence on behalf of mercenaries employed by the nobility, who were legally disallowed from raising private armies. The chaos escalated over the course of years, culminating on the 14th of July 789, where a Tribist rally in Canterlot resulted in a clash between the Royal Guard and the Tribists and later a full-on riot in the streets of Canterlot. This prompted direct intervention from Princess Celestia, who took to the skies and bellowed to the ponies below demanding peace and decrying the dishonourable Royal Guardsponies who dared attack the ponies they were supposed to protect. Eyewitnesses described a fiery passion that nopony had seen from Celestia in their lives, and the violence halted almost immediately.

Celestia demanded an audience with the Tribist leaders, who met with Celestia not long after. The Tribist leaders issued their grievances to Celestia, and to their surprise she was extremely amenable, previously being simply unaware of the many struggles that the Equestrian bourgeoisie, peasantry, and industrial workforce had dealt with on behalf of the nobility, but more than ready to right these wrongs. The result of the meeting was an agreement to establish an Equestrian Parliament, with members elected by all propertied ponies, and for an official document to be drafted defining the relationship between Princess Celestia and her subjects. Said document became known as “The Charter of the Three Tribes and their Princess”, also known as the Tribist Charter, and it formally defined Equestria as a nation of the Three Tribes first and a state ruled by Princess Celestia second, with the will of the former superseding the will of the later.

The first meeting of the newly elected Parliament followed just weeks after the agreement, with its first actions including the total abolition and reformation of all state institutions intended to purge them of their feudalist roots, land reform including the abolition of the semi-feudal land structures and ending Celestia’s personal ownership of all land, the abolition of all internal trade barriers, the endorsement of a single dialect of the Equestrian language along with the establishment of the EEA to form a unified national educational curriculum. Celestia also declared independently of the agreement that any noblepony who had hired mercenaries was in violation of the agreement to not raise private armies and thus had their noble titles stripped and property seized.

Prior to this monumental shift, the nobility considered the ageless alicorn Princess Celestia to be their greatest asset in securing their own power, but with Celestia seemingly switching sides on behalf of the new rising bourgeois class most nobles gave up the fight entirely. Some resisted, but they were either talked out of causing any more trouble by Celestia or put down violently when all other options failed. Regardless, the nobility was mostly fine, and many of them readjusted to the new system fairly quickly.

The event also proved that despite ruling alone for centuries, Celestia was still a capable and respected leader for her ponies, with many praising her for her preparedness to let the past go and allow Equestria to gallop into the future. What followed in the centuries after the Great Reformation was a revolutionary reordering of society allowing for hitherto untold levels of productive development, urbanisation, industrial growth, and statebuilding.

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“All that is pretty much true. Like, it’s a fine enough way to talk about what happened then. But because I’m me, I’m gonna talk about the thestral perspective for a minute.”

Extract from a Moonspeaker’s sermon, 789.

I am sure many of you have heard the news from Canterlot, and I’m sure that many of you haven’t.

For the first time in many hundreds of years, Equestrian governance has undergone a fundamental change. After some hooing and hawing in all the big cities and in Canterlot itself, a group that calls themselves the “Friendship Amongst the Tribes Society” has taken the reins of government and received the endorsement of Celestia. I’ll be calling them Tribists for brevity’s sake. They have announced a whole raft of changes to Equestrian society, everything from land ownership to education. At the centre of it all is charter signed between the leaders of this reforming movement and Celestia herself. I could go through all the details of this charter but there’s only one that really matters, as you’ll all soon see.

The writers of this charter have played a very subtle trick, but a crucial one. The charter boasts new rights for all Equestrians, guarantees of democratic self-rule to all Equestrians, and a bright future for all Equestrians. Yet who is included amongst “all Equestrians”? They do not say all ponies, or even all sapient creatures, but they draw the line at Equestrians. Indeed this makes the question of who is really Equestrian quite important.

Are we thestrals considered Equestrians? We thestrals, who have lived on these lands for centuries before Equestria even existed? We thestrals, who would gladly accept a genuine show of “friendship amongst the tribes”? We thestrals, who have been part of Equestria since its very founding? We thestrals, who fought in the wars that unified these lands to begin with? Apparently not! This new charter is officially known as “The Charter of the Three Tribes and their Princess”, making it explicit in formal writing that Equestria is a state unequivocally hostile to the thestral tribe, that we are viewed as a foreign and malign entity in their otherwise “harmonious” society. Nowhere in the charter does it even mention thestrals!

My friends, I wish I could say this comes as a surprise, but this only serves as more confirmation of what we already knew. The Equestrian kingdom is dedicated to the persecution and dominance of our tribe and our faith. Even after nearly eight hundred years, they excuse their cruelty by making reference to the Lunar Rebellion, something none of us were alive to have had any say in. They treat this Rebellion as if it was the greatest crime in all of history, that somehow twelve nights of unrest in response to an oncoming wave of persecution deserves to be punished with perpetual discrimination. It doesn’t take a graduate of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns to see the disparity. Though knowing what is taught at that school, perhaps being a graduate would make it harder to see that disparity.

So while these Tribists boast about the new society they are building, about all the new things they will bring to nightly or daily life, for us thestrals the most crucial thing of all remains the same. We are treated with cruelty and hostility, and Equestrian society under Celestia does not extend their harmony to us. Frankly my friends, I do not know if there is any sense or honour in waiting another two-hundred years for our Goddess to return and strike our oppressors down, a night none of us will live to see. We were given but one life, and we would be fools to live it passively.

We will only be saved when we realise that nopony is coming to save us. Our Goddess will not return in our lifetimes, and there is no “Chiropterra” out there ready to race over the seas and free our people. We only have our fellow thestral and our fellow Lunarist to turn to.

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“To be fair, the charter did mention thestrals,” Moonatik admitted. “There was a provision stating that Parliament reversed the right to make special laws that applied exclusively to ‘dragons, griffons, changelings, thestrals, buffalo and other creatures that reside in Equestria’. The Moonspeaker may have missed this or meant that the charter didn’t mention thestrals as ponies on a similar footing to the three tribes, because no matter how you look at that it’s pretty damn racist.”

“Oh, and most people at the time thought Chiropterra was a myth, no empirical evidence of its existence had ever been presented to the public, and the circumstances around its alleged foundation were seen as too fantastical to be true. We know better now, of course.”

“Either way, point was, tensions between the three tribes and thestrals were bubbling. Eventually, they came to a head.”