Great Perm (Abrittus)

Great Perm (Latin and Greek: Permia, Norse: Bjarmaland) was a large, early Ugro-Finnic state in North-Eastern Europe. Its early developments lie before the time of historical records. The core region from which Great Perm expanded was the Upper Volga region; its early culture carriers were the Komi and the Merya. The development of a state in the modern sense must have taken place during the 7th century. ///Insert end of state here, when conceptualised.///

Territory
At the height of its power (from the 9th to the 12th centuries), Great Perm controlled a large territory from the White Sea to the Ural Mountains.

Economy, Culture and Society
The driving force behind the unification of various tribes and their extension into new territories was the booming trade with the resource-hungry Roman (and to a lesser extent, Celtic) Empire. Great Perm provided the Mediterranean civilizations (and the developing Germanic and Slavic states at its fringe) with wood, meat, honey, furs and fish. Later, as urbanisation deepened and crafts blossomed especially in the South-Western, core region of Great Perm along the Volga and Moskwa, which had intense contacts with the Potamian Koina of the Borysthenes and the Tanais, Great Perm`s economy diversified and things which had previously been imported were produced autochtonously, allowing for the import of the latest waves of technological innovation from the Mediterranean.

The vast majority of Great Perm`s growing population had come to live in river towns, which served both as marketplaces, fortresses and places of political gathering and government, after the model of their Southern neighbours, the Slavs and Ostrogoths. The countryside is dominated by very sparsely populated endless forests, where members of the same Ugro-Finnic peoples, who were also the core of the urban population, only slowly modernised their traditional lifestyles in order to meet the demands for increased production.

In Great Perm, Southern and Northern Komi, Merya, Erzya, Muromians, Mesherians, Karja, Mari and Magyars lived together. While the different languages remained separated in the countryside, a common Permian language began to develop in the towns, facilitated by trade and the similarities of many Ugro-Finnic languages ("permi" means marketplace or town in Meryan and in Common Permian). In the largest towns in the South-West, individual dialects and Common Permian came to be written in Greek letters around 700 CE, while the Northern (Zyrian) Komi and Karja dialects were written in Latin letters from around 750 CE. In the North-West, Common Permian was also written in Latin later.

In the towns, several scriptural religions have found some followers (both foreign merchants and Permian converts), but the vast majority of the Permians followed indigenous Shamanist cults, which showed significant variations from the North-West to the South-East. The Magyars syncretised Shamanism with Turkic Tengrism. The state remained religiously neutral and secular, and conflicts between the religious groups were comparatively rare in Great Perm (at a time when the Mediterranean was haunted by religious terrorism, Odinists and Lausai fought against each other in Germanic Europe, and Musanists and Samailans devastated Northern Africa in their in-fights).

History
///establishment - departure of Northerners - assisting the Magyars against the Kimeks - land conflicts with the Potamian Koina - the Watershed Solution - war with Sweden in the West - yet-undetermined-downfall///