To your first point, that's why I said Barcans are bad federated partners, we were told Aurvandil was attacking them and so we came to their aid, they never once told us about peace talks despite considerable amounts of coordinating our armies through the halls of the Veinsormoot which includes Barca's ruler and other high ranking members so if us aiding them was a bad idea, they could have at least mentioned it since they knew we were going to be declaring war.
Yes, well I made it clear to the 'Moot and quite concisely said "You don't need to attack, we've nearly attained peace, and attacking will remove any possibility of peace". But the Veinsormoot wasn't interested, their response was essentially "And?".
To your second point, to the moot it felt like a sucker punch because as I said, Barcans don't like to communicate, I am not saying it was a sucker punch though, it's just that's how every character out of Barca and Aurvandil see it. Next, we were told if we remain neutral we get Paisly, what terms did we refuse for the handover? Also two main points to your following paragraph, we are not saying was Machievel did was right or that it warrants cause for a war, what caused the war was the torturing of Machievel which topped off all the other things they did to piss us off. Lady Florence was in no danger of any serious harm, she would have been kicked out of the position of margrave of Paisly and Machievel would have took the position, making it D'hara's. Lady Florence's only serious damage would have been to her pride. Want to argue? Look at every other religious uprising in BM, the peasants did no serious damage to the previous holder of position.
I asked D'Hara to actually become diplomatically neutral (Within reason) for the duration of the war, as a gesture of genuine neutrality because simply declaring "I am going to be neutral" isn't enough. Upon completing these conditions Aurvandil would have no issue handing over Paisly, of course D'Hara could just then break their neutrality, but it will have lost them a lot of diplomatic face and grace with other realms. There was no consequence for D'Hara breaking their sworn neutrality because they never made themselves diplomatically neutral but continued to politically position themselves amongst their allies, who were fully supportive of their move, so they broke their word with no negative diplomatic repercussions whatsoever, which Mendicant stated was the reason why he wouldn't hand Paisly over just on the basis that D'Hara has sworn itself to neutrality. As Rynn was too much of a politician to actually be trusted to hold his word after dicking Aurvandil about one time too many times with their attempts to play both sides of the war for profit.
Also, Rynn did defend what Machiavel said, declaring it perfectly justified and saying D'Hara stood by it. And your other point is purely OOC, IC a mob of religious fanatics attack a largely undefended lady in her estate at the whims of an Ambassador with the intent to drive her out and lynch her, and when this was put forward on the rulers channel D'Hara didn't deny this was the case, but instead defended it as perfectly justified to drag her out kill/rape/beat/lynch Lady Florence. And when you don't deny something, but defend and justify it, that is admitting it did happen but trying to defend why you did it.
