Kzinti Hegemony - History

History

The Kzintis first developed warp drive and took to the stars in Y11. By Y43, exploration and settlement had proceeded to the point where it was necessary to develop the Pentarchy to handle the demands of running an interstellar government. They quickly encountered the Lyrans (going to war with them in Y48) the Klingons (going to war with them in Y50) and the Carnivons (who they fought with intermittently from Y56). Shortly after the conclusion of the last of these wars (the First Klingo-Kzinti war, where they lost three planets) in Y82, they invaded the Federation in Y88, making peace in Y92 after a Federation counter-offensive had restored the original border.

The next round of wars of the Hegemony went a bit better, with the Kzintis reclaiming their lost planets in the Second Klingo-Kzinti war, and the defeat and near-extinction of the Carnivons. The action against the Carnivons turned into a war against the Lyrans (who had also been attacking the Carnivons), which did not go as well, with the Patriarch and two of his sons killed in (separate) actions against the Lyrans. The third son, the Patriarch Who Wept, made peace with the Lyrans in Y114, and was then forced to resign and go into exile.

This sparked a civil war when two of the nobles tried to claim the throne of the Patriarch. After several battles, the Patriarch and the Usurper (as the Kzinti histories call them, it is not certain which of the nobles is which) lead their fleets in a direct battle against the other. The Usurper got the worst of it and led his forces into the nearby energetic WYN nebula to avoid being captured. To his surprise, the nebula was essentially hollow, with a rich star cluster inside. He then started building a base for his followers in the WYN Cluster, unknown to anyone else for several years.

There followed a period of relative stability, followed by the predictable next round of wars. This culminated in the rule of the Patriarch of the Lance, who signed a treaty with the Hydran Kingdom in Y156, improved relations with the Federation, and he and his hand-picked "general staff" developed the logistics and fleet doctrine, and introduced fighters, all of which allowed the Hegemony to fight the Four Powers War (Y158-162) to a stalemate, after a very bad start.

The General War started as the 'Fifth Kzinti-Lyran War' in Y168 with the Klingons invading some months later and a substantial portion of Hegemony territory was occupied by the Coalition. Two full-scale assaults on the Kzinti homeworld of Kzintai were beaten back in the first real Kzinti victory of the war. Eventually, with Federation assistance they forced Coalition forces back to around the original borders, where a war of attrition set in. Efforts to help the war on other fronts included forces sent to help defend the Tholian Holdfast in Y177, and a fleet sent to serve as a 'flanking force' during Operation Remus in Y181.

At the end of the General War, machinations of the nobles had kept the Crown Prince from taking the throne after the previous Patriarch had died, when the grandson of the Usurper invaded with a fleet built within the WYN Cluster in a bid to take the throne for himself. The War of Return swept through Kzinti space as various commanders were faced with a decision as to which side would win—or reward them better. In the end, the winner was the Patriarch of Triumph, but it is not known whether this was the Crown Prince, the Usurper, or one of the military commanders. The Kzintis themselves have deliberately muddied the waters, for reasons that are not understood.

During the ISC War of Pacification, the Kzintis, like everyone else, tried to maintain control over their territory while desperately re-building the exhausted navy. The Hegemony joined in the fight against the Andromedan Invaders, and took part in the expedition to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to bring the Andromedan War to an end.