Aquilonia (Conan)

Aquilonia is a fictional country created by Robert E. Howard for the fictional character Conan the Barbarian, who eventually becomes its king. The mythical country existed during the Hyborian Age. Howard was precise concerning the geographic relationships between his fictional world and the real world, placing it in modern France and southern Britain, but left the origins of Aquilonia vague.

Howard first described Aquilonia in an essay about the nine Hyborian kingdoms that existed when the borders finally stabilized. It is a western kingdom bordered by Zingara to the southwest, the Pictish Wilderness to the west, Cimmeria to the north, Border Kingdom to the northeast, Nemedia to the east, and Ophir and Argos to the south. The Border Kingdoms started as Hyborian colonies and maintained their independence because its more powerful neighbors preferred this relatively harmless entity at their borders than having to engage each other in a territorial war.

The people of Aquilonia are related to the Zingarans, but the mixed racial heritage of these coastal peoples led Howard to discount them as Hyborians. He described the Zingarans as darker skinned than their Hyborian cousins and exotic in their habits. Though he points out that this description also fits the people of Zamora, the two kingdoms and their populations are not related.

Aquilonia would emerge as the most powerful of the Hyborian kingdoms. The Hyborian culture of the time was described by Howard as dynamic and its civilizing influence was felt by most of their barbarian neighbors. The Hyborians of the time had a mixed heritage and no longer closely resembled their ancestors, though Howard points out that this mixed heritage had not weakened them in any way. Slavery was widespread in the Hyborian world, creating the unintended side-effect of slaves mating with their masters. This produced bloodlines of mixed heritage in most kingdoms of the time, Hyborian or not.

Aquilonia itself contains at least three provinces with distinct cultural and hereditary differences from other Aquilonians. The province of Gunderland to the north of the country did not contain slaves, though Howard did not give any reasons for their absence here. The people of this province have undergone less interbreeding with other races than any other Hyborians of the time. They resembled the ancient Hyborians more closely than any of the others, remaining tawny-haired and gray-eyed.

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