The History of the
Chapter One: The History of the Anarch Movement This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
— T.S. Eliot With the benefit and clarity of hindsight, elders across the world have often wondered if they could have possibly prevented the Anarch Revolt from taking place. The unpalatable truth is that the revolution was the climax of a series of events that had been set in motion centuries before the night that caught the Old World ablaze. No single moment, were it undone, would have changed the course of history. The revolt played out upon a stage doused in oil, its floorboards resting upon barrels of gunpowder, waiting for a single spark to set the whole thing alight. If the Elders had extinguished just one spark, it would only be a matter of time until another would have brought about the same result.
And So It Begins… The foundations of the Anarch Revolt were laid on the night the pillars of Carthage fell. The Ventrue of Rome looked across the waters to the Brujah of Carthage and suspiciously regarded their attempts at co-existence with the Kine. Suspicion turned to hatred when the Ventrue realized it would never be theirs. So they destroyed the city believing that if they could not have it, no one should. The lies they spun to hide the truth later became the basis for the Masquerade ANARCHS UNBOUND itself. The thunder of oppression echoed across the night sky, and can still be heard by Brujah the world over.
By the 14th century, after centuries of the elders building their empires at the expense of the young, the stage was set and the curtain finally rose. The players assembled, and first to enter was Pope Gregory IX, father of the Inquisition. Charged with rooting out and destroying heresy, the Inquisition was formed of ecclesiastical judges who roamed the Old World backed by Papal authority. Amid their crusade, a threat unlike any Cainite had ever before seen emerged: the Society of Leopold. These Inquisitors dared to strike directly at the creatures of darkness and endeavored to purge the world of the Cainite infestation. Heretofore, it was unimaginable to many elders that the Kine could ever become such a threat.
Europe had only recently been devastated by the most destructive pestilence the world had ever seen — the Black Death — that had threatened to wipe out the Cainites by destroying their herds. While the population recovered and mortal society rebuilt itself, the Inquisition unleashed this new wave of terror upon the Cainites. Some Elders hid securely within their domains, leaving their childer to be slaughtered, while others actively threw their fledglings into the fires of the Society of Leopold to save themselves. In order to preserve the power and security of the elders, the ends justified the means.