The Settlement

The Altmer arrived in Summerset from Aldmeris at the close of the Dawn Era, in the long migration that followed the Aedric withdrawal from Mundus. They made landfall on the eastern shore of what was then the easternmost region of the realm, the island now called Auridon, and built their first city upon the harbour where they had come ashore. The Aldmer themselves left no record of what they called the settlement in those earliest years; the city that grew upon the same ground in the Daedric Era is the one later known as Balmora. The human scholars who reached Auridon many thousands of years afterward reasoned that this had been the first foundation of the Altmer upon Tamriel, and called the place Firsthold on that account. The name is a human convention and is not used in any Aldmeri source.

From the eastern shore the settlers moved westward, across the land bridge that then joined Auridon to the rest of the realm, and inland onto the larger island that would become the seat of their civilisation. The cities of the interior were founded in the centuries that followed.

The Realm under Alinor

By the early Daedric Era the Altmer of Summerset had organised themselves into a confederation of city-states under the nominal authority of the crown at Alinor. Alinor was the cultural and economic centre of the realm: the seat of the high kings, the chief market, and the site of the Crystal Tower. The other major cities, Cloudrest, Lillandril, Shimmerene, Sunhold, and the eastern foundations on Auridon among them, kept a high degree of self-government, especially those at the frontiers of the realm. Each maintained its own council, its own laws within the limits of the common Aldmeri custom, and its own quarrels with its neighbours. The crown at Alinor adjudicated where adjudication was sought and otherwise let the cities order their own affairs.

The arrangement held for the whole of the Daedric Era. The eastern cities of Auridon, the furthest from Alinor and the closest to the mainland, exercised the widest practical independence and built their own trade networks across the land bridge to Tamriel and the Aldmer cities beyond.

The Sundering

The Elven Wars ended the realm as it had been. The powers exchanged at Mount Ator tore apart the geography of southwestern Tamriel: the land bridge to the mainland was lost, the seas rose between Summerset and Auridon, and what had been a single continuous realm became a scatter of islands divided by waters no fleet could reliably cross. The currents of those waters have not settled since.

Contact between the islands was lost within a generation. Each surviving city was thrown back upon its own resources, and the crown at Alinor could no longer exercise even the nominal authority it had held before the war. Communication with mainland Tamriel ceased entirely. The realm of Summerset, as it had been governed from Alinor through the Daedric Era, did not survive Mount Ator as a single political body, and what remained of Altmer civilisation on each of the islands developed thereafter in isolation.