Sidir VI: the five-times Emperor of the Era of the Princes

Sidir VI, whose name was also rendered Saudir, was a Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe and a scion of House Corrino who reigned during the Era of the Princes. Between 1848 AG and 1965 AG he held the Golden Lion Throne five separate times, raised up and cast down in a long contest with his second cousin Corrin V and a shifting field of other Corrino claimants. His broken succession was no accident of dynastic misfortune: it was the deliberate work of House Atreides, whose princes forced a rapid turnover of emperors so that no one ruler could grow too strong.

The Era of the Princes#

Sidir VI ruled in the period remembered as the Era of the Princes, an age in which the Corrino Imperium saw its emperors deposed and restored with dizzying speed. The throne passed back and forth among a crowd of Corrino kinsmen, with individual reigns sometimes lasting decades and sometimes collapsing within a single year.

The instability had a definite author. House Atreides was economically dominant in this period, and its leading princes, Phillipos III Atreides and Markos Atreides, grandsons and sons of Achilleus Atreides, pursued a settled policy of preventing any person from achieving great power. To that end they forced a rapid turnover in the occupants of the Golden Lion Throne, and it was this policy that gave the age its name. Sidir VI's five short reigns, and the equally fragmented nine reigns of his rival Corrin V, were the direct product of these Atreides machinations. Neither man was permitted to sit securely, because a secure emperor was precisely what the Atreides brothers intended never to allow.

Name and numbering#

Sidir VI was the first Emperor of the Known Universe to bear the name in the form Sidir. His regnal number continued the count of earlier emperors who had ruled under the older form Saudir, and the imperial rolls listed those predecessors as Sidir I through Sidir V. For that reason his own name was recorded in both forms, Sidir and Saudir.

The last of the earlier line, Saudir V, also rendered Sidir V, had reigned from 745 AG to 803 AG as the thirty second Emperor of the Known Universe and the fourteenth ruler of the Alman Corrino line. More than a thousand years therefore separated Sidir VI from the nearest emperor of his name, yet the name itself endured within House Corrino long after him, borne by a succession of later emperors reaching at least to a Sidir XX.

First and second reigns#

Sidir first became emperor in 1848 AG, succeeding his second cousin Corrin V, who had held the throne for only two years after following his uncle Irulon I. Sidir's opening reign proved the longest of his life: he ruled for fourteen years before he was deposed in 1862 and Corrin V was restored in his place.

Corrin then held the throne for fifteen years, until 1877, when Sidir was raised up a second time. This restoration was far briefer than his first tenure. Sidir's second reign lasted only until 1882, when Corrin was restored once more. The pattern of the two cousins displacing one another, established in these decades, defined the first half of the Era of the Princes and made the pair the emblematic rivals of the age.

Third reign and the rise of Audrii III#

Sidir's third accession came in 1886 AG, but this time the man he replaced was not Corrin V. Corrin's third reign had ended in 1884 in favor of his cousin Ezhar III, and it was Ezhar whom Sidir displaced two years later. Sidir then ruled for six years, until 1892, when he was deposed in favor of his own cousin Audrii III.

Audrii III proved a rival of the same durable kind as Corrin V. Like Sidir, he would eventually reign five times, his tenures scattered between 1892 AG and 1993 AG, and like Sidir he spent much of that century trading the throne with Corrin V and with Corrin's sons. Sidir VI, for his part, now entered the longest interval of his life away from the throne. More than four decades passed between his third deposition and his next restoration, years in which the succession cycled through Corrin V, Corrin VI, Corrin VII, and Audrii III without him.

The brief fourth reign and final restoration#

In 1935 AG Sidir was restored to the throne for a fourth time, replacing Corrin VII, a son of Corrin V who had reigned since 1919. The restoration barely outlasted its proclamation. Within the same year Sidir was deposed again, and the throne passed to Corrin V's other son, Corrin VI, who was himself removed in that same year in favor of his aged father.

Sidir's fifth and final accession came in 1963 AG, when he replaced Menemtahe III, a son of Ezhar III who had held the throne only briefly after succeeding Audrii III. By this point the contest had passed into a second generation on both sides, with the sons of Sidir and the sons of Corrin appearing in the succession alongside their fathers. Sidir's last reign continued for two years. In 1965 he was deposed for the final time, and Corrin V was raised to the throne yet again, beginning the ninth and last reign of Sidir's oldest rival. The two second cousins had between them opened and closed each other's tenures across more than a century.

Descendants and legacy#

Sidir VI had at least two children, and both followed him onto the Golden Lion Throne. His son Sidir VII reigned briefly in 1955 AG, succeeding Costin III, a grandson of Irulon I, only to be replaced within the same year by his father's old rival Corrin V. A second son, Negara III, fared somewhat better, ruling from 1956 AG to 1961 AG after succeeding Corrin V, before he in turn was deposed in favor of Audrii III, a cousin of his father.

The name and blood of Sidir VI persisted in House Corrino long after the Era of the Princes had ended. About eight centuries after his reigns, a distant descendant was proclaimed emperor in 2700 AG as Sidir XIV Estil III. His accession established a new branch of the dynasty, the House of Sidir Corrino, upon the Golden Lion Throne, where he ruled until 2727 AG. The five-times emperor whose every reign had been cut short by Atreides design thus became, in the long reckoning of the Imperium, the ancestor of an imperial house in his own right.