Editing Discworld (section)

===Ankh-Morpork===
{{Topquote|Quanti Canicula Ille In Fenestra|The motto of the city of Ankh-Morpork}}
{{Topquote|We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes/We own all your generals, touch us and you'll lose! Morporkia, Morporkia, Morporkia owns the day! We can rule you wholesale, touch us and you'll pay!| The "threat" portion of the national anthem of Ankh-Morpork, "We Can Rule You Wholesale".}}

The largest city on the Discworld, home to over a hundred thousand souls,<ref>and well over ten times the actual number of citizens!</ref> the capital of mercantile activity, a cultural melting pot and a hive where scum and villainy rule by law. Something of a bizarre mix of London, New York, Florence, and Amsterdam (with the author saying it resembles large parts of 19th century Prague), the Big Wahoonie (as it is sometimes called) is located at where the fertile Sto Plains meet the Circle Sea byways of the River Ankh. This river is one of the vilest, unhealthy, life-bearing (which in the case of a river like this is NOT a good thing) and toughest bodies of water in fiction. The sludge is tough enough to draw a chalk line on, you can walk across if you keep the pace up, smaller watercraft have been known to get stuck if the weather is too hot or too cold, and the bloody thing tends to catch fire in the summer. Still, the people of the city are proud of their very own River of Life. Suggestions to improve the Ankh using new embankments and dwarf-built sewers have met with general protest from the citizens of the Disc's largest city, who will protest just about anything just for the hell of it.

The founding of Ankh-Morpork is shrouded in legend. Some sources claim [[Rome|it was founded by twin brothers raised by a hippopotamus]]. The animal is the royal animal of Ankh. Eight stone hippopotami decorate the Brass Bridge, and legend states that if the city is ever in danger they will come to life and run away. Another legend states that long ago there was a great flood, and an ark was built to save two of every animal from it. After forty days and forty nights, all the dung from these animals was thrown overboard and people called it "Ankh-Morpork".

Ankh-Morpork used to be a kingdom, but the last king, Lorenzo the Kind, was overthrown and subsequently executed for torture and (implied) paedophilia. His executioner, Stoneface Vimes, wanted to introduce democracy to the city. [[Fail|This was voted against]], since the public saw it as "the rulers of the city don't want to do their bloody jobs", and in the end Old Stoneface himself got executed for regicide. Nowadays, Ankh-Morpork is run by an official called the Patrician as part of a non-hereditary oligarchic system, appointed by the various powers in the city. In practice, most Patricians were just as bad as their royal predecessors, but they were a lot more tolerable since they were also a lot more replaceable and didn't act like they had the Gods-given right to be tyrants, rising to power through honest corruption and despotism.

The current Patrician, Havelock Vetinari, has decided to do things differently. Inheriting a city that was corrupt and crumbling he began to train it like a dog. Thieves were allowed to found their own guild and work semi-legally (they have to carry ID cards and may only steal from people within certain quotas), the Seamstresses (hem hem) organized and even the guild of Assassins was allowed to function in the open. The guilds take the violation of the internal rules very seriously and are allowed to punish transgressors that would otherwise be tried by the city. Guilds were made clear that a lower, but continuous source of revenue is better than large chunks of it laced with daggers in the back. This allowed the city to not only grow but also prosper. Nobody (whether they are in power or not) likes Vetinari, but they prefer him in charge rather than someone under the thumb of a rival guild, or one of  the unaligned but infamously insane Patricians of the past. After rebuilding the old guilds in his preferred way and establishing the new ones, he allowed the decrepit and corrupt City Watch to crumble into oblivion, until a national crisis brought to his attention a certain Night Watch captain with an ironbound adherence to the spirit of the law, and allowed another great project- the construction of a modern police force that might avoid the rampant corruption and open thuggery of its predecessors, actually function for the general benefit of the city, and be loyal to the city's laws rather than whatever crackpot happened to be in charge- to begin. Meanwhile, Lord Vetinari acts completely in the interest of the city with next to no ego, has no vices he indulges in, does not act like a despot despite being one, and fully understands and acts on the human desire to have tomorrow be just like today. It also helps that he has now made his own presence (or more subtly, the presence of his kind of governance) an integral component of keeping the city going.

Unless you're a mime of course, in which case Vetinari will have you hung upside down in the scorpion pit. LEARN THE WORDS.

Under Vetinari's rule, the Pax Morporkia turned from "Resist and we'll kill you" that was common under the monarchy to "Resist and we'll call in your mortgage". Ankh-Morpork has no standing army and instead [[China|relies on being the primary business partner of the nations around them, allowing the city to financially ruin anyone]] trying to invade them. If it actually needs to fight, it "Calls up the Regiments" which means that anyone who's got a title and enough money for a thousand funny hats has the right to equip, recruit and retain a force of fighting men. The city has also started to see a large influx of migrants: humans, dwarfs, troll, gnomes and even the undead flock to the city in droves. While they generate some problems, above all they generate revenue. Vetinari has been very open to this growth, claiming that alloys are stronger. This has, of course, added to the number of plots against him. Fortunately, he runs several of these himself and is fully capable of keeping an eye on most of the plotters.
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