St. Ives Compact

In the fictional BattleTech universe, the St. Ives Compact was a minor Inner Sphere nation.

Genesis
The Compact began life as the St. Ives Mercantile League. That nation merged with four others to form the Capellan Confederation. Owing to its status as one of the five original founding nations, St. Ives became the St. Ives Commonality, one of five such districts within the Confederation.

The Compact was formed in 3029, as a direct result of the Fourth Succession War. Duchess Candace Liao, firstborn of Chancellor Maximillian Liao and his heir, fell in love with Justin Xiang Allard, a Federated Suns spy who had infiltrated the Capellan Confederation's spy agency. Rather than stay in the Capellan Confederation with a double-agent who helped conquer a third of it, she fled her home nation and took the St. Ives Commonality with her.

Given the destruction the Capellan military suffered at the hand of the Federated Suns, they were unable to do anything about the St. Ives secession. To further protect her fledgling nation, Prime Minister Candace allied with the Federated Suns, who provided military protection.

Clan invasion
The 3030s and '40s were an era of peace for St. Ives. Candace and Justin married and had four children, Kai, Cassandra, Kuan-Yin, and Quintus Allard-Liao.

When news of the Clan Invasion reached St. Ives, it was unknown exactly who was attacking. At the time, Kai was a member of the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth and the unit he was in was rotated to the Clan front. The leaders of the Inner Sphere were called to a conference on Outreach to coordinate strategy with the others. There, Jaime Wolf revealed that the Clans were in fact the descendants of the Star League Defense Force that was led into exile by Commanding General Aleksandr Kerensky in 2784. In order to aid their Federated Commonwealth allies, Duchess Candace authorized the 1st St. Ives Lancers to help against the invasion.

After they had returned from Outreach, a Capellan assassin attempted to kill Candace and Justin. The assassin only succeeded in wounding Candance, but he/she was killed before Justin succumbed to his wounds. Candace traveled home to Sian and killed her sister Romano and the father of Romano's children. Rather than assume the throne herself, she allowed Romano's eldest, Sun-Tzu, to become Chancellor.

The Clan Invasion was halted in 3052 by the Truce of Tukayyid, well before Clan troops neared the St. Ives Compact.

Capellan-St. Ives war
In 3060, Chancellor Sun-Tzu determined that the time was right to reclaim St. Ives. Due to poisonous family politicking in the Federated Commonwealth, a new regime under Katherine Steiner-Davion had come to power that was much less sympathetic to St. Ives. Also, Sun-Tzu had been elected First Lord of the Star League and he used that power to its greatest effect.

A Capellan spy had worked her way up in the ranks of the St. Ives military, and, under her authority as a battalion commander, she launched an "unprovoked" assault against the Capellan Confederation. This was actually a plot by Sun-Tzu to make St. Ives appear the aggressor. Sun-Tzu called in SLDF peacekeepers, but some members of the St. Ives military attacked them, believing it to be the next step in a Sun-Tzu plot. This played perfectly into his hands, as it continued to portray St. Ives as the aggressor.

In 3061, at the Second Whitting Conference, the Star League member nations voted to withdraw peacekeepers from St. Ives because they saw that Sun-Tzu was simply using them to supplement his own forces, who were attempting to retake St. Ives. By that point most of the damage had been done, and Sun-Tzu simply replaced the SLDF troops with Capellan forces. Candace decided that defending the entire Compact was impossible, so she decided to defend the "lower," larger half of the crescent-shaped nation and abandoned the capital of St. Ives.

Soon enough, Candace and Sun-Tzu agreed upon a peace that was largely negotiated by Kuan-Yin Allard-Liao and former ComStar Precentor Martial Anastasius Focht. This agreement called for the Allard-Liao family to hold the St. Ives Commonality as their landhold and for St. Ives to have a greater say in military matters than any of the other Commonalities. With those compromises in place, the St. Ives Compact was officially reintegrated into the Capellan Confederation in 3063.

St. Ives Military Command
The SIMC was never large. It consisted of the prestigious St. Ives Lancers, the workhorse St. Ives Armored Cavalry, and St. Ives Janissaries (a unit modeled on the Ceti Hussars). SIMC doctrine was an amalgamation of strategy and tactics from the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth. The SIMC also maintained the St. Ives Academy of Martial Sciences on St. Ives. The only military academy in the Compact, SIAMS was designed to train officers for the SIMC.