Eparkhos
Well-known member
Martha his mother.
Alternate History The Undying Empire: A Trebizond Timeline
- Thread starter Eparkhos
- Start date
gral
Well-known member
Thought so.
That sounds like a bold move when she's basically a whore - albeit a very powerful one and has no links to the legitimate dynasty. Possibly when she has a child by him, giving her a possible position as a regent for a son preferably and also it would give her time to isolate him further. Plus give a bit of time for his erratic behaviour to have people looking for a 'better' solution. Could be wrong but that would seem the best solution for her.
Steve
CastilloVerde
Active member
It seems that Katsarina is the anti-Theodora. A courtesan who became empress, but instead of helping her husband throughout his reign, is secretly plotting against him.
There should be a court historian like Procopius at Trapezous. I know at Constantinople there was one major historian involved in documenting the history after his predecessor ended. Here at Trapezous, a historian could write a Secret History that would rival Procopius because things are certainly about to get interesting.
Yes.Let him be himself,so nobody would miss him,produce 1-2 healthy sons...and regent Katsarina is going for title of most succesful woman ever born.
I must admit I was thinking of the comparison with Theodora and the opposing stance that Katsarina is taking here. Have to see what Eparkhos decides however as its his TL but deposing the basis of her power as empress, at least before she's supplied an heir does seem a very risky move for her. Unless she already has a suitable candidate for the throne she thinks she can control.
Part XXXI: The Samtskheote War (1507-1509)
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Part XXXI: The Samtskheote War (1507-1509)
The coup of 1507 had left Alexios V and Katsarina as the undisputed rulers of the Trapezuntine Empire. However, as in all states in this period, there was still a great deal of the populace who believed that God’s support for a regime, or lack thereof, was displayed through military feats and victories. Alexios’ coup had seen the involvement of the bandons in a military capacity, but massacring a royal entourage from an ambuscade wasn’t exactly an awe-inspiring victory. Like his father before him, Alexios would spend the first years of his reign trying to establish legitimacy for himself by military means, while Katsarina solidified their rule on the home front.
Alexandros’ long reign had seen Trapezous’ strength girded with a network of alliances and non-aggression pacts with all of her immediate neighbors, bar only the Ottomans, who were far too powerful to fight. However, the looming civil war between Ebülhayr Paşa and Mehmed III could present an excellent opportunity to expand the buffer zone with the Ottomans. This conflict will be discussed at a later time, but eastern Anatolia was primarily loyal to Mehmed III, who would need to muster every man he had to fight the numerically superior forces of Paşa. Indeed, as the spring of 1508 drew near, Alexios ordered that the western bandons be ready for quick mobilization in case the conflict broke out before an Imperial army could arrive to intervene.
However, the first conflict of Alexios V’s reign would not come from the west but from the east. In November 1508, Alek’sandre II of Kartvelia keeled over after nearly three decades upon the throne, shattering Kartvelia. The succession laws of this time, while not the demented empire-destroying Salic breed that were common in the west, still mandated that every son of the late king be given a great deal of land to compensate for not receiving the crown itself. This was obviously problematic in that it gave any ambitious son the means to overthrow his brother, but even worse, Alek’sandre had five sons; Bagrat (b.1485)[1], David (b.1486), Vakhtang (b.1492), Giorgi (b.1497) and Demetri (b.1497). Obviously, Giorgi and Demetri weren’t exactly in a good position to coup their brother, seeing as they were only twelve years of age, but the elder three could all spell disaster for each other. Better still, Bagrat, who was legally entitled to inherit the crown, had been leading a raid against the Shirvanites at the time of his father’s death and so was trapped on the far side of a mountain range until the frost came. This left David and Vakhtang to fight each other in Tbilisi, not over whether Bagrat should receive his birthright, but rather over which one of them should usurp him. In April 1509, David barely escaped an assassination attempt and fled the capital, eventually reaching relative safety in Trapezous. Following his departure, Vakhtang crowned himself as Vakhtang V, officially beginning another civil war.
Obviously, securing the stability of Kartvelia was a vital Trapezuntine policy, as it was one of their best allies and formed a bulwark against raiders coming from the north and east. Under most circumstances, the Trapezuntines would have swiftly intervened on behalf of whichever prince’s position appeared the most stable. However, the unexpected arrival of David to the court changed all of that. If Alexios could manage to install the third brother upon the Kartvelian throne, he would gain an ally who would be beholden to him for the rest of his reign, effectively turning their larger neighbor into a vassal (or so he thought). However, if he failed in doing so, then it could potentially see the collapse of the ancient alliance, which would leave Trapezous out in the cold, and could even embolden the Karamanids enough to try and one-up the Ottomans with an invasion. It was a very high-risk, high-reward situation. Alexios was in favor of the foremost course of action--raising the bandons and marching eastwards to install David upon his throne. However, Anastasia argued against it, as it was simply too much of a risk, not realizing she was putting herself in near equal amounts of peril. Besides, they could simply imprison David and use him as a bargaining chip further down the road. The two went back and forth on the matter for several weeks, but finally, Anastasia prevailed upon her husband. David was imprisoned and “blinded”[2], in fact merely being shipped across the Black Sea to join Alexandros and Romanos in Tmutarakan. Alexios and Trapezous pledged their support to Vakhtang, and in the summer of 1509 a Pontic army was raised to join the war.
The intervention of the Trapezuntines did not substantially alter the balance of power in Kartvelia, as Vakhtang had already had the majority of the kingdom’s men-at-arms at his back. Bagrat had been able to scrounge up some 8,000 footmen from Kartli and a few thousand more auxiliary Shirvanite cavalry and Avar footmen. Vakhtang, in contrast, had raised more than 25,000 men out of his own strength, which was shortly thereafter supplanted by 20,000 Trapezuntines. Vakhtang’s plan was to trap his brother and his army in the Upper Alazani Valley, in which they could be encircled and destroyed, while Bagrat’s plan was to try and slip past his brother’s army into the western two-thirds of the kingdom, where the local nobles could hopefully be rallied to his banner in exchange for increased privileges.
Both Vakhtang and Alexios knew that Bagrat, while significantly weaker than either of them, still posed a threat and that weight of numbers was not everything. Alexios in particular was afraid that if he let Bagrat live, the rebel would try and have him assassinated. As such, they set a trap in August 1508. As the royal Kartvelian army moved to encircle the valley, they left a gap along the road near the fortress town of Kvetera. Bagrat, seeing this as an opportunity to escape and move further westward as he had hoped, bolted through this gap, his advance scouts and pathfinders hindered in their efficacy by a lack of time and difficult terrain. As such, when the Bagratid army emerged from the passes west of Kvetera to find a Trapezuntine army arrayed before them across the plain of Tianeti, they were caught completely flat-footed. Bagrat ordered a retreat, only to find that Kvetera, which had appeared to be abandoned, had in fact been occupied by a concealed garrison of Vakhtangists, who now revealed themselves and cut their retreat. Thinking quickly, Bagrat led his men off the road into a small river valley, carved by the Aniskhevi River, and raced southwards along its banks. The Trapezuntines gave chase, following the Kartvelians across several miles of rough terrain. On 29 August, 1508, the Trapezuntines finally caught the Bagratids upon a ridge seperating the watersheds of the Aniskhevi and Kintiskhevi River. Alexios pinned them in place with the bulk of his forces, then sent his right flank around the ridge to encircle them. After several brutal hours of fighting, the Bagratid army was slaughtered to a man, the only survivor being Bagrat himself, who was led off in chains. Alexios lost only 2,000 men killed or severely injured, a remarkably small butcher’s bill. However, he considered this too high and, after a night of paranoid ramblings, had one of his subcommanders executed for trying to get him killed, albeit indirectly, and several others blinded for conspiring to aid him.
After winning this decisive victory, the Trapezuntines linked back up with Vakhtang’s forces. The Kartvelian had his brother blinded and imprisoned in the isolated fortress city of Maghas, deep in the heart of the Greater Caucasus and from which escape would bring only death by exposure. With his hold on all of Kartvelia now secured, Vakhtang appeared to be ready to stand down the Kartvelian army. However, Alexios intervened, and managed to convince the newly-consolidated monarch to accompany him on a joint campaign that would further legitimize both of them against a common enemy; the Samtskheotes.
The Samtskheots have, of course, appeared most prominently so far in their betrayal of a joint Kartvelian-Trapezuntine army at the Battle of Saint Eugenios in 1485. That this betrayal had failed to prevent a de facto Ottoman defeat was disastrous for the atabegdom, which was now left sandwiched between Kartvelia and Trapezous with no Ottoman protection to be had. After getting his affairs in order, Alek’sandre had campaigned heavily against the Samtskheotes, executing the traitorous Qvarqvare II in 1488 and briefly annexing the entire region back into the Kartvelian crown. However, the terrain here was not at all favorable to Kartvelian settlement, more resembling the plains and rolling hills of Mongolia thousands of miles away than it did the Kartvelian valleys and mountains only a few score miles to the north. Attempts at intensive agriculture failed miserably due to poor soil quality and constant raids, from both the tribal vassals of Karaman and of the Qutlughids. After three years, Alek’sandre finally swallowed his pride and allowed the settlers to return to their homes. He settled several small bands of Turko-Mongols from the far side of the mountains, hoping that their presence would keep raiders from attacking the far more valuable heartland to their north. This had worked for several years, but after a decade and a half the nomads had begun to grow antsy. After Alek’sandre’s death, the leader of the largest band, Mengü, revolted and proclaimed himself the Khan of Qersh, refusing to bow down to the weak farmers in Tbilisi.
This obviously insulted Vakhtang. However, it was Alexios who persuaded the monarch to press the attack even as civil war had only just been quenched. The Trapezuntines would also suffer from Samtskheote raids, as there were a number of passes that led across the mountains that lay within their territory. Alexios wanted to both prevent these raids as well as eliminate the possibility of future raids by securing or erecting fortresses on the far side of the mountains. Vakhtang also wanted to close off the southern approach to Kartvelia to any future raiders, and so the two rulers agreed to work together. They dispatched an ultimatum to Qersh in November 1508, intending to march against them the following spring.
The arrival of this ultimatum in Qersh had a disastrous effect. Many of the minor bands immediately fled from the Khanate, not wanting to risk it all for some upstart who they hardly cared for. This left Mengü with only a few thousand horsemen, all of the three largest tribes who remained loyal to him. He began drawing up plans for meeting the Kartvelians and their allies, hoping to draw them out onto the plains and encircle them as so many other horse lords had done throughout history. As such, he ordered all potential provisions to be stripped from the north and west of his country, so as to deny his enemies forage while he maneuvered them into a kill zone.
Unfortunately for him, he would never get the opportunity to employ these plans. As soon as the passes froze, the allies struck. Suspecting that the Samtksheotes would have destroyed significant amounts of foodstuffs, the allies had split their forces, both outnumbering the defending horsemen. Alexios advanced along the western road from Borjomi, while Vakhtang and his men moved along the road from Tbilisi. Mengü devoted his attention to harassing the Trapezuntines, as he thought that they were less eager to fight than the Kartvelians and thus could more easily be persuaded to withdraw. However, Mengü significantly underestimated the size of the Trapezuntine army, and so was unaware that the force he was facing was in fact 5,000 men smaller than the one which had departed Borjomi. As the Samtskheotes pulled back, harassing the Trapezuntines as they went, they were unknowingly tightening their own noose. On 28 April, as the Samtskheotes were fording the Kuranenri River, just downstream from the small fortress of Art’aani (OTL Ardahan), a Trapezuntine formation, led by one Ioannes Sabbiades, sprung upon them from ambush, attacking the front of the formation. Mengü beat a hasty withdrawal back to the north bank and decided to try and grind down Sabbiades' force from range. However, while he was pinned here, the rest of the Trapezuntine army rushed ahead, hoping to encircle them. Desperate to evade this trap, Mengü ordered his men to scatter, but it was too late. Trapped between the hills to their left and a canyon to their right, the Samtskheotes were unable to escape the closing trap. The lightly-armed, lightly-armored horsemen were utterly slaughtered, being cut down in droves by the far heavier-armored Ponts. After two hours, nearly the entire formation was dead, except for a handful who had managed to ride off into the hills or hide among the dead.
The Battle of Sabbiades’ Ford effectively saw the end of a sovereign Samtskhe. The rest of the campaign season was spent hunting down the remaining Turko-Mongol bands in the region, after which preparations were made for the reintegration of the region into Kartvelia proper. Alexios, of course, grew paranoid and feared that Alek’sandre was prolonging the war in hopes of weakening the Trapezuntines, and so withdrew while there were several enemy forces left in the field. A double fort system was constructed across the breadth of the southern frontier, stretching along the Aras Cliffs and into the hills westward of that great natural embankment as far as the Vol’tik (Oltu River). From here, the new conquests were ceded to Trapezous, encompassing a broad range of dense, isolated hills that stretched to within a few scant miles north of Theodosiopolis. Alexios gave orders for the construction of a number of fortresses, both to secure those passages as well as the breadth of the Akampsis River, which was the only effective means of communication on the far side of the mountains. He left Sabbiades behind with twelve bandons to erect these fortresses before withdrawing back to Pontos proper. He awarded himself as triumph upon returning to the capital, no doubt hoping to emulate his father, but became uncomfortable partway through and fled the parade.
The completion of the campaign in 1509 proved to be fortuitous timing, as just the following year, the Ottoman Empire would collapse into civil war. Trapezous would need all hands on deck to exploit this crisis, or maybe even to just survive it….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the historical Bagrat III
[2] Alexios here took a leaf from his namesake and had David ostensibly blinded, in fact just shunting him off to Tmutarakan as an insurance policy in case Vakhtang tried to double cross him.
The coup of 1507 had left Alexios V and Katsarina as the undisputed rulers of the Trapezuntine Empire. However, as in all states in this period, there was still a great deal of the populace who believed that God’s support for a regime, or lack thereof, was displayed through military feats and victories. Alexios’ coup had seen the involvement of the bandons in a military capacity, but massacring a royal entourage from an ambuscade wasn’t exactly an awe-inspiring victory. Like his father before him, Alexios would spend the first years of his reign trying to establish legitimacy for himself by military means, while Katsarina solidified their rule on the home front.
Alexandros’ long reign had seen Trapezous’ strength girded with a network of alliances and non-aggression pacts with all of her immediate neighbors, bar only the Ottomans, who were far too powerful to fight. However, the looming civil war between Ebülhayr Paşa and Mehmed III could present an excellent opportunity to expand the buffer zone with the Ottomans. This conflict will be discussed at a later time, but eastern Anatolia was primarily loyal to Mehmed III, who would need to muster every man he had to fight the numerically superior forces of Paşa. Indeed, as the spring of 1508 drew near, Alexios ordered that the western bandons be ready for quick mobilization in case the conflict broke out before an Imperial army could arrive to intervene.
However, the first conflict of Alexios V’s reign would not come from the west but from the east. In November 1508, Alek’sandre II of Kartvelia keeled over after nearly three decades upon the throne, shattering Kartvelia. The succession laws of this time, while not the demented empire-destroying Salic breed that were common in the west, still mandated that every son of the late king be given a great deal of land to compensate for not receiving the crown itself. This was obviously problematic in that it gave any ambitious son the means to overthrow his brother, but even worse, Alek’sandre had five sons; Bagrat (b.1485)[1], David (b.1486), Vakhtang (b.1492), Giorgi (b.1497) and Demetri (b.1497). Obviously, Giorgi and Demetri weren’t exactly in a good position to coup their brother, seeing as they were only twelve years of age, but the elder three could all spell disaster for each other. Better still, Bagrat, who was legally entitled to inherit the crown, had been leading a raid against the Shirvanites at the time of his father’s death and so was trapped on the far side of a mountain range until the frost came. This left David and Vakhtang to fight each other in Tbilisi, not over whether Bagrat should receive his birthright, but rather over which one of them should usurp him. In April 1509, David barely escaped an assassination attempt and fled the capital, eventually reaching relative safety in Trapezous. Following his departure, Vakhtang crowned himself as Vakhtang V, officially beginning another civil war.
Obviously, securing the stability of Kartvelia was a vital Trapezuntine policy, as it was one of their best allies and formed a bulwark against raiders coming from the north and east. Under most circumstances, the Trapezuntines would have swiftly intervened on behalf of whichever prince’s position appeared the most stable. However, the unexpected arrival of David to the court changed all of that. If Alexios could manage to install the third brother upon the Kartvelian throne, he would gain an ally who would be beholden to him for the rest of his reign, effectively turning their larger neighbor into a vassal (or so he thought). However, if he failed in doing so, then it could potentially see the collapse of the ancient alliance, which would leave Trapezous out in the cold, and could even embolden the Karamanids enough to try and one-up the Ottomans with an invasion. It was a very high-risk, high-reward situation. Alexios was in favor of the foremost course of action--raising the bandons and marching eastwards to install David upon his throne. However, Anastasia argued against it, as it was simply too much of a risk, not realizing she was putting herself in near equal amounts of peril. Besides, they could simply imprison David and use him as a bargaining chip further down the road. The two went back and forth on the matter for several weeks, but finally, Anastasia prevailed upon her husband. David was imprisoned and “blinded”[2], in fact merely being shipped across the Black Sea to join Alexandros and Romanos in Tmutarakan. Alexios and Trapezous pledged their support to Vakhtang, and in the summer of 1509 a Pontic army was raised to join the war.
The intervention of the Trapezuntines did not substantially alter the balance of power in Kartvelia, as Vakhtang had already had the majority of the kingdom’s men-at-arms at his back. Bagrat had been able to scrounge up some 8,000 footmen from Kartli and a few thousand more auxiliary Shirvanite cavalry and Avar footmen. Vakhtang, in contrast, had raised more than 25,000 men out of his own strength, which was shortly thereafter supplanted by 20,000 Trapezuntines. Vakhtang’s plan was to trap his brother and his army in the Upper Alazani Valley, in which they could be encircled and destroyed, while Bagrat’s plan was to try and slip past his brother’s army into the western two-thirds of the kingdom, where the local nobles could hopefully be rallied to his banner in exchange for increased privileges.
Both Vakhtang and Alexios knew that Bagrat, while significantly weaker than either of them, still posed a threat and that weight of numbers was not everything. Alexios in particular was afraid that if he let Bagrat live, the rebel would try and have him assassinated. As such, they set a trap in August 1508. As the royal Kartvelian army moved to encircle the valley, they left a gap along the road near the fortress town of Kvetera. Bagrat, seeing this as an opportunity to escape and move further westward as he had hoped, bolted through this gap, his advance scouts and pathfinders hindered in their efficacy by a lack of time and difficult terrain. As such, when the Bagratid army emerged from the passes west of Kvetera to find a Trapezuntine army arrayed before them across the plain of Tianeti, they were caught completely flat-footed. Bagrat ordered a retreat, only to find that Kvetera, which had appeared to be abandoned, had in fact been occupied by a concealed garrison of Vakhtangists, who now revealed themselves and cut their retreat. Thinking quickly, Bagrat led his men off the road into a small river valley, carved by the Aniskhevi River, and raced southwards along its banks. The Trapezuntines gave chase, following the Kartvelians across several miles of rough terrain. On 29 August, 1508, the Trapezuntines finally caught the Bagratids upon a ridge seperating the watersheds of the Aniskhevi and Kintiskhevi River. Alexios pinned them in place with the bulk of his forces, then sent his right flank around the ridge to encircle them. After several brutal hours of fighting, the Bagratid army was slaughtered to a man, the only survivor being Bagrat himself, who was led off in chains. Alexios lost only 2,000 men killed or severely injured, a remarkably small butcher’s bill. However, he considered this too high and, after a night of paranoid ramblings, had one of his subcommanders executed for trying to get him killed, albeit indirectly, and several others blinded for conspiring to aid him.
After winning this decisive victory, the Trapezuntines linked back up with Vakhtang’s forces. The Kartvelian had his brother blinded and imprisoned in the isolated fortress city of Maghas, deep in the heart of the Greater Caucasus and from which escape would bring only death by exposure. With his hold on all of Kartvelia now secured, Vakhtang appeared to be ready to stand down the Kartvelian army. However, Alexios intervened, and managed to convince the newly-consolidated monarch to accompany him on a joint campaign that would further legitimize both of them against a common enemy; the Samtskheotes.
The Samtskheots have, of course, appeared most prominently so far in their betrayal of a joint Kartvelian-Trapezuntine army at the Battle of Saint Eugenios in 1485. That this betrayal had failed to prevent a de facto Ottoman defeat was disastrous for the atabegdom, which was now left sandwiched between Kartvelia and Trapezous with no Ottoman protection to be had. After getting his affairs in order, Alek’sandre had campaigned heavily against the Samtskheotes, executing the traitorous Qvarqvare II in 1488 and briefly annexing the entire region back into the Kartvelian crown. However, the terrain here was not at all favorable to Kartvelian settlement, more resembling the plains and rolling hills of Mongolia thousands of miles away than it did the Kartvelian valleys and mountains only a few score miles to the north. Attempts at intensive agriculture failed miserably due to poor soil quality and constant raids, from both the tribal vassals of Karaman and of the Qutlughids. After three years, Alek’sandre finally swallowed his pride and allowed the settlers to return to their homes. He settled several small bands of Turko-Mongols from the far side of the mountains, hoping that their presence would keep raiders from attacking the far more valuable heartland to their north. This had worked for several years, but after a decade and a half the nomads had begun to grow antsy. After Alek’sandre’s death, the leader of the largest band, Mengü, revolted and proclaimed himself the Khan of Qersh, refusing to bow down to the weak farmers in Tbilisi.
This obviously insulted Vakhtang. However, it was Alexios who persuaded the monarch to press the attack even as civil war had only just been quenched. The Trapezuntines would also suffer from Samtskheote raids, as there were a number of passes that led across the mountains that lay within their territory. Alexios wanted to both prevent these raids as well as eliminate the possibility of future raids by securing or erecting fortresses on the far side of the mountains. Vakhtang also wanted to close off the southern approach to Kartvelia to any future raiders, and so the two rulers agreed to work together. They dispatched an ultimatum to Qersh in November 1508, intending to march against them the following spring.
The arrival of this ultimatum in Qersh had a disastrous effect. Many of the minor bands immediately fled from the Khanate, not wanting to risk it all for some upstart who they hardly cared for. This left Mengü with only a few thousand horsemen, all of the three largest tribes who remained loyal to him. He began drawing up plans for meeting the Kartvelians and their allies, hoping to draw them out onto the plains and encircle them as so many other horse lords had done throughout history. As such, he ordered all potential provisions to be stripped from the north and west of his country, so as to deny his enemies forage while he maneuvered them into a kill zone.
Unfortunately for him, he would never get the opportunity to employ these plans. As soon as the passes froze, the allies struck. Suspecting that the Samtksheotes would have destroyed significant amounts of foodstuffs, the allies had split their forces, both outnumbering the defending horsemen. Alexios advanced along the western road from Borjomi, while Vakhtang and his men moved along the road from Tbilisi. Mengü devoted his attention to harassing the Trapezuntines, as he thought that they were less eager to fight than the Kartvelians and thus could more easily be persuaded to withdraw. However, Mengü significantly underestimated the size of the Trapezuntine army, and so was unaware that the force he was facing was in fact 5,000 men smaller than the one which had departed Borjomi. As the Samtskheotes pulled back, harassing the Trapezuntines as they went, they were unknowingly tightening their own noose. On 28 April, as the Samtskheotes were fording the Kuranenri River, just downstream from the small fortress of Art’aani (OTL Ardahan), a Trapezuntine formation, led by one Ioannes Sabbiades, sprung upon them from ambush, attacking the front of the formation. Mengü beat a hasty withdrawal back to the north bank and decided to try and grind down Sabbiades' force from range. However, while he was pinned here, the rest of the Trapezuntine army rushed ahead, hoping to encircle them. Desperate to evade this trap, Mengü ordered his men to scatter, but it was too late. Trapped between the hills to their left and a canyon to their right, the Samtskheotes were unable to escape the closing trap. The lightly-armed, lightly-armored horsemen were utterly slaughtered, being cut down in droves by the far heavier-armored Ponts. After two hours, nearly the entire formation was dead, except for a handful who had managed to ride off into the hills or hide among the dead.
The Battle of Sabbiades’ Ford effectively saw the end of a sovereign Samtskhe. The rest of the campaign season was spent hunting down the remaining Turko-Mongol bands in the region, after which preparations were made for the reintegration of the region into Kartvelia proper. Alexios, of course, grew paranoid and feared that Alek’sandre was prolonging the war in hopes of weakening the Trapezuntines, and so withdrew while there were several enemy forces left in the field. A double fort system was constructed across the breadth of the southern frontier, stretching along the Aras Cliffs and into the hills westward of that great natural embankment as far as the Vol’tik (Oltu River). From here, the new conquests were ceded to Trapezous, encompassing a broad range of dense, isolated hills that stretched to within a few scant miles north of Theodosiopolis. Alexios gave orders for the construction of a number of fortresses, both to secure those passages as well as the breadth of the Akampsis River, which was the only effective means of communication on the far side of the mountains. He left Sabbiades behind with twelve bandons to erect these fortresses before withdrawing back to Pontos proper. He awarded himself as triumph upon returning to the capital, no doubt hoping to emulate his father, but became uncomfortable partway through and fled the parade.
The completion of the campaign in 1509 proved to be fortuitous timing, as just the following year, the Ottoman Empire would collapse into civil war. Trapezous would need all hands on deck to exploit this crisis, or maybe even to just survive it….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the historical Bagrat III
[2] Alexios here took a leaf from his namesake and had David ostensibly blinded, in fact just shunting him off to Tmutarakan as an insurance policy in case Vakhtang tried to double cross him.
CastilloVerde
Active member
Seems that Alexios will eventually start executing people for imagined crimes. If I were Katsarina, I would make preparations to get rid of Alexios before Alexios gets too paranoid to think rationally. Can't wait for more!
Also I think you mean Vakhtang not Alek'sandre above.
Fighting nomads was never easy.Best solution probably was made by Poland in 17th century - mix of medium and light calvary,later we added dragoons/mounted infrantry,not calvary/.
About tatars - i read,that their forces was of mixed quality.Personal units of Khan was well armed and dyscyplined,the same goeas for ,let say,profesional raiders,but some of others was so poor,that they do not even had sabers,only kind of maces.
Good only for harrasing cyvilians.
About tatars - i read,that their forces was of mixed quality.Personal units of Khan was well armed and dyscyplined,the same goeas for ,let say,profesional raiders,but some of others was so poor,that they do not even had sabers,only kind of maces.
Good only for harrasing cyvilians.
Would agree. Alexios is sounding distinctly unstable and already killed some generals after the victory over Bagrat. Starting to understand why getting rid of him would start to look an attractive idea for Katsarina. Not just in case he acted against her but also such a ruler is likely to make himself, and anyone closely associated with him, deeply unpopular. Which can be less than good for their health.
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Sorry for the delay.
I think anyone in Katsarina's shoes would be doing the same.
Yeah, most nomad forces after the Middle Ages were ineffective against standing armies, to say the least.
I concur.
Part XXII: A New Osman (1488 - 1510)
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Part XXII: A New Osman (1488 - 1510)
The Ottoman Empire had been birthed from the chaos that had reigned over Anatolia after the collapse of the Sultanate of Rûm. The old balance of power between settled Greeks and settled Salchouqs[1] had been upset by the sudden introduction of thousands of Turkmen warriors straight from the steppe. This period had seen the center of power in Anatolia shift from the Salchouq cities of the east to the western frontier, where the decaying Byzantine Empire’s[2] Anatolian territories were overrun by the fierce men from the steppe. Dozens of small ghazi statelets had cropped up, all with the express intention of plundering the Byzantines--all in the name of God, of course. The Germiyanids and the Aydinids had been the early forerunners, but a combination of skill and luck[3] had catapulted Osman and his followers to emerge from this period as the chief hegemon of western Anatolia. The government system which Osman and Orhan had established--a mixture of Turkmen warriors and slave soldiers as the military arm and a Byzantine-derived tax system to finance the state and its expansion--had supported the rise of the Ottoman Empire to control vast swathes of Rumelia and Anatolia. However, the Empire’s defeat and following decline in the 1460s had led many to question whether this system needed to be changed.
The failure of Mehmed II to prevent defeat in the War of the First Holy League and the subsequent collapse of Ottoman control of Anatolia led directly to the sultan's fatal ‘accident’ in 1466. He was succeeded by his young son, Mustafa II, but true power lay in the hands of Mahmud Angelović Paşa, his regent and later grand vizier, as well the man who was commonly suspected to have played a part in Mehmed’s death.
The realm that Angelović Paşa presided over was vastly different from the one which Mehmed had inherited. The frontier provinces of Serbia, Albania, and much of mainland Greece had been lost to the Latins. The Danubian vassals had both broken free from the Sublime Porte and now paid homage to the Hungarians, meaning that recovering them would be nigh-on impossible. Anatolia, formerly the heartland of the Ottoman domain, had been almost completely overrun by the Karamanids, depriving the Sublime Porte of its formerly numerous Turkmen horsemen. He was also facing down a brewing economic crisis, as most of their tributaries were no longer paying their dues and much of their European tax-collecting infrastructure had been lost during the war. The regent/vizier found before him a difficult task, but he would rise to the occasion. Angelović aspired to reform the upper echelons of the Ottoman state into a vessel for his own personal control, and he would use every opportunity presented to him to do so.
Angelović Paşa’s first step was to reform the tax system. At the time, the Ottomans were dependent upon the iltizām tax system, under which tax contracts would be auctioned off to various independent contractors, who would then collect their assigned taxes as well as extorting a great deal more for their own gain. This kind of tax system had been common throughout history, but it was both dreadfully inefficient and utterly hated by just about everyone. As such, in 1469 the grand vizier declared an official end to the iltizām system, instead promulgating the kentrosadiq[4] system. Under the new system, taxes would be collected by civil servants in a strictly organized system of surveyed plots, tax exemptions and surcharges depending on which villayet they were operating in. Those caught skimming off profits would sold into slavery to work in the mines of the Balkan Mountains, for which ‘hellish’ is an understatement. This reform saw the amount of tax collected by the state increase slightly but the number of extorted peasants fall dramatically. This made both Angelović Paşa and the Ottomans at large much more popular amongst their sedentary subjects, and after this the number of tax revolts, which had been a recurring problem for the last few years, fall dramatically.
Next, he turned his attention to the court and the bureaucracy. The vast majority of the bureaucracy were supporters of the House of Osman, and thus could be used against him by Mustafa if the two had a falling out. He also wished to do away with his domestic rivals, chief among them Rûm Mehmed Paşa, the chief supply officer of the fleet. Paşa fabricated a mass conspiracy against Mustafa in 1471, listing dozens of civil servants and potential rivals in both the bureaucracy and the court, and was able to convince the sultan that all of these venerable figures were plotting to kill him. When the young sultan flew into a panic because of this, he quickly gave the Paşa permission to root out this and any other plot against him. Over the following weeks, more than three hundred people were strangled and hundreds of others sent into exile, effectively stripping the court of any potential rival, as well as any family member of a potential rival who may have been driven to oppose him due to the purge, as well as any relatives of those. He also revived the papiai, the secret police of the Kantakouzenoi, promising to give the sultan knowledge of anything that they uncovered. Instead, he used it to further cement his control over the Sublime Porte, having any potential enemies murdered before they could become a threat. He also overhauled the bureaucracy, turning it into a straight-out meritocracy with little opportunity for the traditional aristocracy (in this case, timariots and sipahis) to interject traditional candidates. He removed the requirement to be a Muslim from all but the highest level of power, and from 1486 on he encouraged the use of both Greek and Persian[5] as the languages of administration.
He also attempted to modify the army’s structure to both improve its fighting abilities and its loyalty to him. He allowed the existing officer corps to persist but altered its recruiting program, opening up opportunities for soldiers to rise through the ranks. This, along with the various other meritocratic programs enacted during Angelović Paşa’s tenure as regent/grand vizer, had the double effect of increasing the ability of those holding positions of power as well as allowing Angelović to get his claws into them early, singling out good prospects to improve his relations with and either warp them into devout loyalists or have them exiled to the Danubian frontier[6] and/or killed off. The recruitment of the army remained roughly the same, although the use of the devşirme[7] was dialed back and re-phrased as the ‘Potential Officer Recruitment Program’, or ‘Çalviafsarone’, a far more diplomatic term. Locals in the Asiatic provinces were allowed to form militias to defend from Karaman aggression, but their European counterparts were not allowed to do so for fear of siding with any potential invaders. This pool of recruits could be used to expedite the mustering of armies, which further helped Ottoman prospects. Finally, a range of forts were constructed across all of their frontiers, to cut down on losses to foreign raiders and slow any enemy invasion, be it from their co-religionists or the Latin knights from the west.
Angelović also pursued a fairly aggressive foreign policy, seeking to return his, I mean, his charge’s empire to its former heights. Most prominent amongst these efforts was Notaras’ War, which began after a botched attempt to seize formerly Genoese possessions in the Aegean. Following the victory of the Sublime Porte in this conflict, a number of islands in the aforementioned sea were annexed into the Ottoman realm, the islanders being given a number of privileges--most notably exemption from the jizya tax and the çalviafsaroni and permission to raise militias to defend against pirates--to keep them loyal and try to wean the subjects of other islanders away from their Italian overlords. As previously mentioned, Thessalia was reduced to a vassal, as were the Çandarids before they were fallen upon and driven east over the mountains to exile in Syria in the 1480s. He also campaigned heavily against the Albanians, who were divided between various warring clans and tribes. Before his death, the highlanders were driven out of much of the eastern country or reduced to subjects, with the independent Albanians being driven to the far western mountains, where they would be perpetually vulnerable and a workable buffer state with the Venetians. He also attempted to reduce the Trapezuntines to vassals and actually succeeded in doing so, but their tribute was limited to the annual payment of a single ducat to Constantinople. Nonetheless, he was able to use this as an opportunity to increase his and Mehmed III’s prestige, by forcing, the Trapezuntine embassy to persuade through the streets of the city to a booing crowd in a scene similar to a Roman triumph, pay homage to the sultan in person and kiss his feet[8], then place the single ducat on a pillow, which would then be given to the grand vizier, who would then hand it to the sultan.
Most notably, he also encouraged the advancement of Greeks, be they Orthodox or Muslim, through all ranks of society. The majority of territories controlled by the Sublime Porte after the disastrous 1460s were Greek-speaking, across mainland Greece, the islands, Thrake[9] and Anatolia. There were sizable Turkish (a mixture of Turkmen and Salchouqs) and Bulgarian populations, but these were both smaller. The Bulgarians in particular had next to no political power, as their nobility had been utterly slaughtered and their land parceled out between timariots. Angelović Paşa framed this to Mustafa and Mehmed as a way to shore up Ottoman rule, and while this was true it also helped him build up power for himself. However, as power is and was a zero-sum game, this made many of the Turkish nobility unhappy, a phenomenon which would rear its head some time later. In the short term, however, this program led to increased support for the Ottomans in its Greek provinces and an increased percentage of Greeks in the sultan’s bureaucracy and court. He also made constant efforts to improve relations between the Sublime Porte and the Orthodox church. The millet system, an idea which Mehmed had begun to develop but had been unable to institute before his untimely and completely accidental death, was instituted in 1472. The Ecumenical Patriarch was given control over all churches in the Ottoman Empire excepting a few Latin churches which were allowed to exist as bargaining chips for the Italians. In matters of personal and family law, the Orthodox were allowed to self-govern. Many of the monasteries maintained their old Byzantine tax exemptions, but many others had them revoked. He also encouraged the Ecumenical Patriarch to try and subvert the Pontic Patriarchy with the pretext of Trapezous’ vassaldom, but this ultimately went nowhere because of factional infighting and a general opposition amongst the churchmen to taking orders from the infidels. As a whole, however, this period saw the Ottomans and the Orthodox Church become further interwoven, the latter being given a number of incentives to remain loyal to the further. Among these steps was an outlawing of the enslavement of Greek Orthodox in 1480, although this had little impact due to the increasing number of slaves taken from Circassia and bought from the Barbaries.
In spite of these great reforms, Mahmud Angelović Paşa was a man just like any other. In 1490, the great statesman died at the ripe old age of seventy, after nearly a quarter of a century at the top. He left Mehmed III, merely eight years old, as sultant. To take his place as regent and vizier, he appointed one of his most promising apprentices, a Greek Muslim named Ebülhayr Paşa. Ebülhayr Paşa continued the policies of his master throughout the entirety of his tenure as grand vizier, leading campaigns against Albania and Epirus throughout the 1490s in the name of the sultan and continuing the advancement of Greeks in the government. The tensions which had begun to foment during the latter half of Angelović Paşa’s reign continued to simmer just beneath the surface, as the newly-advanced Greeks clashed with the traditional Turkish aristocracy. Ebülhayr Paşa was able to keep a lid on things by siccing the papiai on anyone who looked at him funny, up to and including his own nephew in 1503.
However, this would come back to bite him, as Mehmed began to view his own regent with increasing distrust and fear. After all, it was an open secret that Angelović Paşa had his father strangled for disappointing him at the Siege of Trapezous, and who could say that Ebülhayr Paşa wouldn’t do the same to him? As he grew older and the chances of producing a male heir became higher, the possibility that Ebülhayr Paşa would have him killed to extend his own reign became more and more prominent in his mind. However, he knew that nothing would get him bumped off more quickly than a botched coup, and so throughout the 1510s he plotted, quietly but purposefully. Ebülhayr Paşa had him under constant surveillance due to his paranoid nature, and he was able to meet with his loyalists only by going on long hunting trips to the wilds around Adrianople. He knew that the bureaucrats would be loyal to their master, and so they couldn’t be trusted. Neither could the Greeks, as they would be most likely to turn on him, as the historical record showed that Greeks weren’t exactly the most trustworthy people[10]. As such, he made contact with the traditional Turkish aristocracy. The two of them had a shared interest, after all; he wanted to regain the power that his grandfather would have had, and they wanted to recover their traditional rights and privileges. As he spent more time with his confederates, the sultan gradually became convinced that the only way to save the Ottoman Empire was to undo all of the reforms enacted by Angelović Paşa. The timarotes, hotbeds of Turkish settlement, were scattered across eastern and southern Anatolia, especially in territories recently recovered from the Karamans and in Bulgaria, whereas the Bulgarians had been broken nearly completely and were thus open for settlement.
Unfortunately for Mehmed, Ebülhayr Paşa’s paranoid regime meant that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stage a palace coup without being assassinated. However, the army was still mostly Turkish, so he had far better chances of unseating the grand vizier by force of arms. He couldn’t just march an army into the capital, though, as there would still be enough time for the vizier to have him bumped off. By 1508, he had concluded that the best way for him to reclaim his birthright would be to flee to the provinces and raise a revolt against the capital regime. As such, over the next two years, he convinced Ebülhayr Paşa to undertake a buildup along the Danubian border. A succession crisis was brewing in Hungary, and he framed this as an opportunity to recover the Danubian principalities. Instead, he was marshalling forces under generals loyal to him. Finally, on 12 February 1510, he and a few loyalists slipped out of the capital and rode north, braving the winter weather to reach the frontier. A week later, upon arriving in Tarnovo, he and his generals declared the government in Constantinople illegitimate. The Second Ottoman Civil War had begun….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Recall, these are the partially hellenified Turks who migrated into the region in the 11th century and partially adopted the customs of the region in which they had settled, while retaining their Islamic faith and many other Turkish cultural aspects.
[2] I’m using this term here for simplicity’s sake, as well as the term ‘Greek’. I’m sure some of my readers are REE-ing at me right now, but I’m doing this for greater accessibility.
[3] Most notable amongst these windfalls was becoming the leader of a Sufi sect and inheriting the remnants of Alexios Philanthropenos’ auxiliary corp after his imprisonment in the 1290s.
[4] This is notable as being one of the first times that the Ottomans would use Greek in an official promulgation and, furthermore, as the name of an institution.
[5] The Ottomans used Old Anatolian Turkish as one of their languages of governance, which derived upwards of 90% of its vocabulary and syntax from contemporary, i.e. Middle Persian.
[6] The Wallachians and Moldovans were fiercely opposed to the Ottomans as well as having a vested interest in being able to tax the greatly expanded Danube river trade to their greatest ability. As such, they made frequent raids against forts on the river bank, often massacring or enslaving any garrison members. The Wallachians in particular had preserved the practice of impalement, finding that Turkish punitive expeditions usually lost heart after having to push through a forest of their own dead along the river bank, which in some places was nearly a mile wide.
[7] This translates as either ‘blood tax’ or ‘child levy’, neither of which are exactly inviting names.
[8] Having to kiss the Pope was one of the Catholic doctrines which most infuriated the Orthodox, making it into several compilations of ‘The Errors of the Latins’. As such, being forced to do it to the Sultan, who wasn’t even a Christian, was extremely insulting to the Trapezuntines as well as the other Orthodox states who were forced to give submission in such a way.
[9] Thrake extended all the way up to the Balkan Mountains, encompassing the southern half of OTL Bulgaria. Before the 1800s, the region was a fair mixture of Bulgarians and Greeks, but the Greek War of Independence led many of the Thrakian Greeks to adopt Bulgarian customs or leave for greener pastures.
[10] ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. The Turks at large had a very low opinion of the Greeks, viewing them as cowards who were unable to defend themselves from the ghazis or insolent for refusing to convert and frequently revolting.
The Ottoman Empire had been birthed from the chaos that had reigned over Anatolia after the collapse of the Sultanate of Rûm. The old balance of power between settled Greeks and settled Salchouqs[1] had been upset by the sudden introduction of thousands of Turkmen warriors straight from the steppe. This period had seen the center of power in Anatolia shift from the Salchouq cities of the east to the western frontier, where the decaying Byzantine Empire’s[2] Anatolian territories were overrun by the fierce men from the steppe. Dozens of small ghazi statelets had cropped up, all with the express intention of plundering the Byzantines--all in the name of God, of course. The Germiyanids and the Aydinids had been the early forerunners, but a combination of skill and luck[3] had catapulted Osman and his followers to emerge from this period as the chief hegemon of western Anatolia. The government system which Osman and Orhan had established--a mixture of Turkmen warriors and slave soldiers as the military arm and a Byzantine-derived tax system to finance the state and its expansion--had supported the rise of the Ottoman Empire to control vast swathes of Rumelia and Anatolia. However, the Empire’s defeat and following decline in the 1460s had led many to question whether this system needed to be changed.
The failure of Mehmed II to prevent defeat in the War of the First Holy League and the subsequent collapse of Ottoman control of Anatolia led directly to the sultan's fatal ‘accident’ in 1466. He was succeeded by his young son, Mustafa II, but true power lay in the hands of Mahmud Angelović Paşa, his regent and later grand vizier, as well the man who was commonly suspected to have played a part in Mehmed’s death.
The realm that Angelović Paşa presided over was vastly different from the one which Mehmed had inherited. The frontier provinces of Serbia, Albania, and much of mainland Greece had been lost to the Latins. The Danubian vassals had both broken free from the Sublime Porte and now paid homage to the Hungarians, meaning that recovering them would be nigh-on impossible. Anatolia, formerly the heartland of the Ottoman domain, had been almost completely overrun by the Karamanids, depriving the Sublime Porte of its formerly numerous Turkmen horsemen. He was also facing down a brewing economic crisis, as most of their tributaries were no longer paying their dues and much of their European tax-collecting infrastructure had been lost during the war. The regent/vizier found before him a difficult task, but he would rise to the occasion. Angelović aspired to reform the upper echelons of the Ottoman state into a vessel for his own personal control, and he would use every opportunity presented to him to do so.
Angelović Paşa’s first step was to reform the tax system. At the time, the Ottomans were dependent upon the iltizām tax system, under which tax contracts would be auctioned off to various independent contractors, who would then collect their assigned taxes as well as extorting a great deal more for their own gain. This kind of tax system had been common throughout history, but it was both dreadfully inefficient and utterly hated by just about everyone. As such, in 1469 the grand vizier declared an official end to the iltizām system, instead promulgating the kentrosadiq[4] system. Under the new system, taxes would be collected by civil servants in a strictly organized system of surveyed plots, tax exemptions and surcharges depending on which villayet they were operating in. Those caught skimming off profits would sold into slavery to work in the mines of the Balkan Mountains, for which ‘hellish’ is an understatement. This reform saw the amount of tax collected by the state increase slightly but the number of extorted peasants fall dramatically. This made both Angelović Paşa and the Ottomans at large much more popular amongst their sedentary subjects, and after this the number of tax revolts, which had been a recurring problem for the last few years, fall dramatically.
Next, he turned his attention to the court and the bureaucracy. The vast majority of the bureaucracy were supporters of the House of Osman, and thus could be used against him by Mustafa if the two had a falling out. He also wished to do away with his domestic rivals, chief among them Rûm Mehmed Paşa, the chief supply officer of the fleet. Paşa fabricated a mass conspiracy against Mustafa in 1471, listing dozens of civil servants and potential rivals in both the bureaucracy and the court, and was able to convince the sultan that all of these venerable figures were plotting to kill him. When the young sultan flew into a panic because of this, he quickly gave the Paşa permission to root out this and any other plot against him. Over the following weeks, more than three hundred people were strangled and hundreds of others sent into exile, effectively stripping the court of any potential rival, as well as any family member of a potential rival who may have been driven to oppose him due to the purge, as well as any relatives of those. He also revived the papiai, the secret police of the Kantakouzenoi, promising to give the sultan knowledge of anything that they uncovered. Instead, he used it to further cement his control over the Sublime Porte, having any potential enemies murdered before they could become a threat. He also overhauled the bureaucracy, turning it into a straight-out meritocracy with little opportunity for the traditional aristocracy (in this case, timariots and sipahis) to interject traditional candidates. He removed the requirement to be a Muslim from all but the highest level of power, and from 1486 on he encouraged the use of both Greek and Persian[5] as the languages of administration.
He also attempted to modify the army’s structure to both improve its fighting abilities and its loyalty to him. He allowed the existing officer corps to persist but altered its recruiting program, opening up opportunities for soldiers to rise through the ranks. This, along with the various other meritocratic programs enacted during Angelović Paşa’s tenure as regent/grand vizer, had the double effect of increasing the ability of those holding positions of power as well as allowing Angelović to get his claws into them early, singling out good prospects to improve his relations with and either warp them into devout loyalists or have them exiled to the Danubian frontier[6] and/or killed off. The recruitment of the army remained roughly the same, although the use of the devşirme[7] was dialed back and re-phrased as the ‘Potential Officer Recruitment Program’, or ‘Çalviafsarone’, a far more diplomatic term. Locals in the Asiatic provinces were allowed to form militias to defend from Karaman aggression, but their European counterparts were not allowed to do so for fear of siding with any potential invaders. This pool of recruits could be used to expedite the mustering of armies, which further helped Ottoman prospects. Finally, a range of forts were constructed across all of their frontiers, to cut down on losses to foreign raiders and slow any enemy invasion, be it from their co-religionists or the Latin knights from the west.
Angelović also pursued a fairly aggressive foreign policy, seeking to return his, I mean, his charge’s empire to its former heights. Most prominent amongst these efforts was Notaras’ War, which began after a botched attempt to seize formerly Genoese possessions in the Aegean. Following the victory of the Sublime Porte in this conflict, a number of islands in the aforementioned sea were annexed into the Ottoman realm, the islanders being given a number of privileges--most notably exemption from the jizya tax and the çalviafsaroni and permission to raise militias to defend against pirates--to keep them loyal and try to wean the subjects of other islanders away from their Italian overlords. As previously mentioned, Thessalia was reduced to a vassal, as were the Çandarids before they were fallen upon and driven east over the mountains to exile in Syria in the 1480s. He also campaigned heavily against the Albanians, who were divided between various warring clans and tribes. Before his death, the highlanders were driven out of much of the eastern country or reduced to subjects, with the independent Albanians being driven to the far western mountains, where they would be perpetually vulnerable and a workable buffer state with the Venetians. He also attempted to reduce the Trapezuntines to vassals and actually succeeded in doing so, but their tribute was limited to the annual payment of a single ducat to Constantinople. Nonetheless, he was able to use this as an opportunity to increase his and Mehmed III’s prestige, by forcing, the Trapezuntine embassy to persuade through the streets of the city to a booing crowd in a scene similar to a Roman triumph, pay homage to the sultan in person and kiss his feet[8], then place the single ducat on a pillow, which would then be given to the grand vizier, who would then hand it to the sultan.
Most notably, he also encouraged the advancement of Greeks, be they Orthodox or Muslim, through all ranks of society. The majority of territories controlled by the Sublime Porte after the disastrous 1460s were Greek-speaking, across mainland Greece, the islands, Thrake[9] and Anatolia. There were sizable Turkish (a mixture of Turkmen and Salchouqs) and Bulgarian populations, but these were both smaller. The Bulgarians in particular had next to no political power, as their nobility had been utterly slaughtered and their land parceled out between timariots. Angelović Paşa framed this to Mustafa and Mehmed as a way to shore up Ottoman rule, and while this was true it also helped him build up power for himself. However, as power is and was a zero-sum game, this made many of the Turkish nobility unhappy, a phenomenon which would rear its head some time later. In the short term, however, this program led to increased support for the Ottomans in its Greek provinces and an increased percentage of Greeks in the sultan’s bureaucracy and court. He also made constant efforts to improve relations between the Sublime Porte and the Orthodox church. The millet system, an idea which Mehmed had begun to develop but had been unable to institute before his untimely and completely accidental death, was instituted in 1472. The Ecumenical Patriarch was given control over all churches in the Ottoman Empire excepting a few Latin churches which were allowed to exist as bargaining chips for the Italians. In matters of personal and family law, the Orthodox were allowed to self-govern. Many of the monasteries maintained their old Byzantine tax exemptions, but many others had them revoked. He also encouraged the Ecumenical Patriarch to try and subvert the Pontic Patriarchy with the pretext of Trapezous’ vassaldom, but this ultimately went nowhere because of factional infighting and a general opposition amongst the churchmen to taking orders from the infidels. As a whole, however, this period saw the Ottomans and the Orthodox Church become further interwoven, the latter being given a number of incentives to remain loyal to the further. Among these steps was an outlawing of the enslavement of Greek Orthodox in 1480, although this had little impact due to the increasing number of slaves taken from Circassia and bought from the Barbaries.
In spite of these great reforms, Mahmud Angelović Paşa was a man just like any other. In 1490, the great statesman died at the ripe old age of seventy, after nearly a quarter of a century at the top. He left Mehmed III, merely eight years old, as sultant. To take his place as regent and vizier, he appointed one of his most promising apprentices, a Greek Muslim named Ebülhayr Paşa. Ebülhayr Paşa continued the policies of his master throughout the entirety of his tenure as grand vizier, leading campaigns against Albania and Epirus throughout the 1490s in the name of the sultan and continuing the advancement of Greeks in the government. The tensions which had begun to foment during the latter half of Angelović Paşa’s reign continued to simmer just beneath the surface, as the newly-advanced Greeks clashed with the traditional Turkish aristocracy. Ebülhayr Paşa was able to keep a lid on things by siccing the papiai on anyone who looked at him funny, up to and including his own nephew in 1503.
However, this would come back to bite him, as Mehmed began to view his own regent with increasing distrust and fear. After all, it was an open secret that Angelović Paşa had his father strangled for disappointing him at the Siege of Trapezous, and who could say that Ebülhayr Paşa wouldn’t do the same to him? As he grew older and the chances of producing a male heir became higher, the possibility that Ebülhayr Paşa would have him killed to extend his own reign became more and more prominent in his mind. However, he knew that nothing would get him bumped off more quickly than a botched coup, and so throughout the 1510s he plotted, quietly but purposefully. Ebülhayr Paşa had him under constant surveillance due to his paranoid nature, and he was able to meet with his loyalists only by going on long hunting trips to the wilds around Adrianople. He knew that the bureaucrats would be loyal to their master, and so they couldn’t be trusted. Neither could the Greeks, as they would be most likely to turn on him, as the historical record showed that Greeks weren’t exactly the most trustworthy people[10]. As such, he made contact with the traditional Turkish aristocracy. The two of them had a shared interest, after all; he wanted to regain the power that his grandfather would have had, and they wanted to recover their traditional rights and privileges. As he spent more time with his confederates, the sultan gradually became convinced that the only way to save the Ottoman Empire was to undo all of the reforms enacted by Angelović Paşa. The timarotes, hotbeds of Turkish settlement, were scattered across eastern and southern Anatolia, especially in territories recently recovered from the Karamans and in Bulgaria, whereas the Bulgarians had been broken nearly completely and were thus open for settlement.
Unfortunately for Mehmed, Ebülhayr Paşa’s paranoid regime meant that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stage a palace coup without being assassinated. However, the army was still mostly Turkish, so he had far better chances of unseating the grand vizier by force of arms. He couldn’t just march an army into the capital, though, as there would still be enough time for the vizier to have him bumped off. By 1508, he had concluded that the best way for him to reclaim his birthright would be to flee to the provinces and raise a revolt against the capital regime. As such, over the next two years, he convinced Ebülhayr Paşa to undertake a buildup along the Danubian border. A succession crisis was brewing in Hungary, and he framed this as an opportunity to recover the Danubian principalities. Instead, he was marshalling forces under generals loyal to him. Finally, on 12 February 1510, he and a few loyalists slipped out of the capital and rode north, braving the winter weather to reach the frontier. A week later, upon arriving in Tarnovo, he and his generals declared the government in Constantinople illegitimate. The Second Ottoman Civil War had begun….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Recall, these are the partially hellenified Turks who migrated into the region in the 11th century and partially adopted the customs of the region in which they had settled, while retaining their Islamic faith and many other Turkish cultural aspects.
[2] I’m using this term here for simplicity’s sake, as well as the term ‘Greek’. I’m sure some of my readers are REE-ing at me right now, but I’m doing this for greater accessibility.
[3] Most notable amongst these windfalls was becoming the leader of a Sufi sect and inheriting the remnants of Alexios Philanthropenos’ auxiliary corp after his imprisonment in the 1290s.
[4] This is notable as being one of the first times that the Ottomans would use Greek in an official promulgation and, furthermore, as the name of an institution.
[5] The Ottomans used Old Anatolian Turkish as one of their languages of governance, which derived upwards of 90% of its vocabulary and syntax from contemporary, i.e. Middle Persian.
[6] The Wallachians and Moldovans were fiercely opposed to the Ottomans as well as having a vested interest in being able to tax the greatly expanded Danube river trade to their greatest ability. As such, they made frequent raids against forts on the river bank, often massacring or enslaving any garrison members. The Wallachians in particular had preserved the practice of impalement, finding that Turkish punitive expeditions usually lost heart after having to push through a forest of their own dead along the river bank, which in some places was nearly a mile wide.
[7] This translates as either ‘blood tax’ or ‘child levy’, neither of which are exactly inviting names.
[8] Having to kiss the Pope was one of the Catholic doctrines which most infuriated the Orthodox, making it into several compilations of ‘The Errors of the Latins’. As such, being forced to do it to the Sultan, who wasn’t even a Christian, was extremely insulting to the Trapezuntines as well as the other Orthodox states who were forced to give submission in such a way.
[9] Thrake extended all the way up to the Balkan Mountains, encompassing the southern half of OTL Bulgaria. Before the 1800s, the region was a fair mixture of Bulgarians and Greeks, but the Greek War of Independence led many of the Thrakian Greeks to adopt Bulgarian customs or leave for greener pastures.
[10] ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. The Turks at large had a very low opinion of the Greeks, viewing them as cowards who were unable to defend themselves from the ghazis or insolent for refusing to convert and frequently revolting.
Good update but sounds like the Ottomans are coming up to another round of civil war which, depending on what's happening elsewhere would mean some chance to recover more territory for the empire. Plus reversing all those policies when several look very good is not going to help the economy, let along there's going to be a lot of unhappy Greek speakers if Mehmed III's coup succeeds. All it needs is a strong - and sane - leader in Trebizond to take advantage of this.
However I think there's a mistake in the above. If that's Mehmed II having that 'accident' in 1472 then I can't see Mehmed III being only 8 years old when Pasa died in 1490?
Did the Ottomans impose that policy of Orthodox leaders having to kiss the sultan's feet? Not a way to endear yourself to a hell of a lot of your subjects.
Steve
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Mehmed II's son, Mustafa II, reigned from 1472 to 1485 (IIRC). Mehmed III is Mehmed II's grandson.
Eparkhos
Well-known member
The Trapezuntines will cease being Ottoman vassals, but may not cease being vassals altogether.
In regards to your second comment, the Ottomans did end that policy under Angelovic, instead forcing them to bow like all foreign leaders. Not exactly the most outgoing ceremony, but a sight better than before.
Part XXXIII: The Death of Princes (1510-1514)
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Part XXXIII: The Death of Princes (1510-1514)
The court of Alexios V was a place ruled by fear. The aftokrator was a deeply paranoid man who leapt at shadows, both real and imagined. He was known for killing and mutilating anyone who slighted him[1]--once again, both real and imagined--and because of this, not a second went by when the formerly bright and colorful court of Alexandros II’s reign was not covered in a layer of shadow. As time drew on, Alexios’ rule became increasingly manic and draconian, as he feared conspiracies against him, seeded in all corners of the realm. Resentment began to build against him as he sent hundreds of innocent(ish) men and women to their deaths on baseless claims, or had them horrifically mutilated or exiled upon similar grounds. In time, this would spur the growth of just such a thing, and like Aesop’s eagle, Alexios would give his enemies the means of his own destruction….
Anastasia Katsarina has been described by several contemporary historians as the ‘anti-Theodora’[2], a woman of lowly status, to say the least, who was catapulted into the highest halls of power but retained many of her previous attributes and character. This is doubtless true in many ways, but it was most openly expressed in how the aftokratorissa wielded--or, more accurately, clung to--power. After all, it was her network of connections and spies that had allowed her to make the leap from literal scheming whore to left hand of the aftokrator himself, and only a fool would not use this network to further their hold on power once they had seized it. Katsarina made a great show of giving over the entirety of her ‘organization’ to her husband, allowing him a level of access to the dark world of courtly access that few contemporary rulers possessed. Of course, she held some things in reserve, names of agents and informants struck from the rolls that Alexios knew of, hoards of coin and weapons concealed amongst the twisting passages that stretched beneath the Great Hill[3]. This network allowed her to exercise her power through both soft and hard means, once again in a manner unusual for the empress, and in some aspects she was more powerful than her husband, as her secret network allowed her a degree of secrecy and knowledgeable unavailable to those who worked through legal means.
But this was a double-edged sword, as the increasingly paranoid nature of her husband meant these precautions made her a potential target were he to discover what she had been hiding from him. As shown in previous chapters, Alexios had always been twitchy, to say the least, and how much of this was legitimate and how much a carefully-maintained piece of political theater is unknown even to present researchers. However, the bouts of Justinian II-esque mental anguish only truly began in 1511. In that year, Katsarina detected a brewing plot against the emperor’s throne and his life. The madness and pettiness displayed during the intervention in Kartvelia had angered a sizable faction of the army, as several of the commanders which he had summarily executed were well-regarded by their men and all-around successful commanders. The nephew of one of these generals, one Gabriel Papadopoulos, had enlisted the help of several other officers to depose Alexios in a military coup and install Andreas Megalokomnenos, his first cousin, in his stead. Papadopoulos was smart enough to recognize that the eleutheroi would almost certainly be unswayed by any attempts to subvert them, and so he had directed his efforts at the regular forces garrisoning Trapezous, managing to form a force of eighty or so willing soldiers. Unfortunately for him and Andreas, one of these men happened to frequent a prostitute who reported to one of the aftokratorissa’s minions, and the rest is history. Alexios ordered the eleutheroi to storm the barracks of the disloyal soldiers, and in the process Papadopoulos and several others were killed. They were the lucky ones. Alexios had the other conspirators flayed alive and tried to do the same to Andreas, who managed to escape only by sheer luck; he was an insomniac, and happened to notice the eleutheroi mustering that night and decided it was time to leave. Andreas fled by ship to Constantinople, where he took up residence in the Sublime Porte.
The discovery of Papadopoulos’ conspiracy shook Alexios to his core, validating his many paranoid fantasies in the form of a concrete threat from the army. Katsarina encouraged this, seeing an opportunity to remove a potential threat--she had never been able to worm her way as thoroughly into the army as she had into the court or the bureaucracy--and increase her own control over her husband at the same time. The papiai were further strengthened, becoming the 16th century equivalent of the secret police, charged with arresting and torturing anyone who even looked at Alexios funny. For a time, this was a rather effective method of securing his reign, as far as the aftokrator was concerned. The courtiers already hated him, he was sure of that, and so the only way to keep them in line was with fear. If an innocent bystander happened to be rubbered, it was no great loss--after all, no-one was innocent in court politics--and every potential enemy caught or killed was one less who could threaten him. Of course, this approach was self-defeating, as nearly every innocent (and many guilty) person who was killed had a family who would be ever so slightly upset that one of their relatives had been sent to the great beyond because of the emperor’s insane delusions. The Alexiac Problem, a dilemma common across most internal security forces, is named after him and the situation the aftokrator thrust himself into. Every revealed and executed conspirator or potential conspirator had relatives, and eventually one of these relatives would get pissed enough to start plotting against him, and eventually some of these would be discovered, which would cause another round of persecutions, which would just anger more people, and so on and so forth. Between 1511 and 1514, Alexios had more than three hundred courtiers, monks and bureaucrats executed and hundreds of others brutally mutilated--primarily having their arms or hands chopped off and blinded, but sometimes even worse--and sent into exile. Among these were many of his own cousins, both male and female. The smart members of the House of Komnenos and the House of Mgeli[4] ran after Andreas was forced into exile, most going to Morea, the Ottomans or the Qutlughids[5]. Alexios believed that all of this was necessary to secure his God-given throne, and that all of these punishments were carried out in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s will, who spoke to him regularly. This was probably a piece of political theater--probably. There were also a number of minor military revolts, as moirarkhs attempted to dethrone the aftokrator, but most of these went nowhere due to internal factionalism and the skill of the emperor’s assassins. The most troubling of these was the Revolt of 1513, which saw soldiers in the Lykos valley rise against the capital and briefly establish a breakaway state before they were driven out by loyalist soldiers and fled across the border to the Qutlughids. Alexios was crazy but he wasn’t stupid, and he knew that he needed the army on his side to stay in power. He paid his soldiers handsomely--especially the eleutheroi--using money gained from increased taxes on the nobility and tariffs imposed on Italian and Ottoman trade.
Throughout this bloodbath, Katsarina retained most of her power, but she could not help but grow increasingly uneasy as her husband’s madness swelled. She too bore a healthy dose of paranoia, and began to fear that Alexios only retained her as aftokratorissa because of her influence of the court. As he was currently undertaking what was effectively a purging of the court, soon she would be useless to him and discarded, executed or sent off into exile. The butchering of the many courtiers had an outsized effect on her clients--after all, intriguers would be fingered by their rivals for disposal on behalf of the papiai, and they naturally hung around with shady crowds--and as the purges drew on she began to fear that her worst fears were coming true.
The chain of events that saw the ultimate downfall of Alexios V began in the winter of 1513. The papiai had just arrested nearly two dozen plotters for treason against him, and most disturbingly a great number of them were clergymen, especially monks. Alexios began to fear that the church was conspiring against him, hoping to overthrow him in place of someone more pliant. He didn’t dare arrest the patriarch, Konstantinos II, directly, but he could still reduce the opportunity they had to undermine him. He had Romanos, his long-suffering brother, dragged out of his cell in Tmutarakan and executed, finally putting an end to the poor bastard’s suffering. The ramifications of this were immense; he had arrested and mutilated many of his cousin previously, but to execute your own brother required a level of true madness that went beyond any political theater. Katsarina was now sure that she must either strike first or be killed. The marriage between Alexios and Anastasia had been far from a happy one, for obvious reasons, but they had produced exactly one child, the young prince David, in 1508. Katsarina was sure the best way for her to stay in power was for Alexios to have an unfortunate accident so that she could rule as regent for David for however long it took for him to become mature enough to rule.
The aftokratorissa began making plans as soon as possible. While the purges had wrecked her once magnificent network of spies and contacts, she still had a number of loyalists scattered across the court. Amongst these was one Alexios Francesco Skaramagos. Skaramagos was the son of Antonio Scaramanga, the last Genoese governor of Ghazaria, and while he had been born in Genoese territory he had rapidly Hellenized, becoming a minor player in the Trapezuntine court during the reign of Alexandros II. He was a notoriously skilled assassin, supposedly able to kill a cow with a quarrel through the eye at a thousand paces, and Katsarina had sheltered him from Alexios’ purges because of these skills. Now, the aftokratorissa charged Skaramagos with killing her husband, promising him protection and a million neahyperpyra under her new regime. Skaramagos was quite reluctant to do so for obvious reasons, and it was only by threatening to kill his brother Nikolaos that he was coerced into doing it.
On the night of 28 May 1514, Skaramagos snuck up onto the roof of the rebuilt Church of Saint Eugenios, which lay across a broad chasm from the palace on the Great Hill. Lying silent in the morning mists, the assassin waited for more than six hours as the sun rose and the fog burned off. Alexios paced in his study, passing back and forth between a narrow gap in the palace’s masonry no more than an inch wide, a memory of the siege thirty years before. Skaramagos counted the seconds between each passing of the hole, the difference between two passings of the whole as the tyrant moved about oblivious. Then, with a short breath, he squeezed the trigger. The quarrel whistled across the gap, falling more than twenty feet from its trajectory before slotting through the tiny hole. Alexios V fell, mortally wounded by a shot to the stomach.
However, he was not yet dead. Even as Skaramagos fled from his roost, the aftokrator cried out for his guards. He knew he was dying, that he had a day or two left at best before Death claimed him at last. He needed to make the best of what time he had left, for himself and for his dynasty. Alexios had long suspected that his wife was plotting against him--he was crazy, but he wasn’t stupid--but had been afraid to move against her given the potentially vast number of potential assassins that she could have in her employ. Now, however, he no longer had to fear the assassin’s blade. Katsarina had prepared for a failed assassination and was ready to play the part of the shocked and grieving widow or the appaled but caring wife in equal measure, but she had not prepared for Alexios’ sudden wrath. The emperor was unable to move, but had the papiai arrest his wife and drag her before him, so he could have her strangled in front of him. With Katsarina dead, he then turned the papiai and the eleutheroi loose on the unsuspecting Trapezuntines, hoping to purge any potential threats to his son in one last orgy of violence. No-one was safe; the patriarch was dragged out of the Hagia Sophia and beheaded, the eparkhos and his wife were killed in their beds; the heads of the city’s three chief merchant families were hacked down by the eleutheroi in the center of the market; the grand notary[6] was killed in a brothel; the grand domestic was trapped in a closet and burned alive. The few remaining prominent noblemen were all killed, effectively throwing any future court into anarchy with all of their leaders dead or blinded. As his soldiers were drenching the streets of the city in blood, Alexios sent for two men in particular to be brought before him. Basileios Mgeli, who had just returned from a diplomatic mission to the Qutlughids and so was caught completely flat-footed, and Basileios Davidopoulos, Alexios’ mentor, were marched into the palace, no doubt expecting to face their imminent demise. Instead, the aftokrator thanked them for their long and loyal service and asked them to stand as regents for his young son, alongside the captain of the eleutheroi, Basileios the Scythian[7]. They hurriedly agreed, and Alexios dispatched them to obtain all the relevant records and books on the legal manner of succession. Once they returned, Alexios had the eleutheroi muster outside the palace, recognize the men as co-regents, and abdicated in favor of his son. With a crossbow bolt still lodged in his sternum, the ex-emperor was then carried across the city to the Church of Saint Eugenios, where he retired into prayer. Early the next morning, he finally died after a day of agonizing pain, at the age of 37.
There was a three-day interregnum, as the business of selecting a new patriarch was decided by the regents. Eventually, Davidopoulos was elevated as Patriarch Basileios III, and David was crowned as emperor on 1 June, at the young age of 6. Alexios’ paranoid reign and his final massacre had gutted the city of Trapezous and the empire of large of most of their competent officials and the bureaucrats who usually keep the state running, but it had also slain or driven out the fractious courtiers and noblemen who trouble most regencies. Ironically, one of the most tumultuous reigns in Trapezuntine history would be followed by one of its most peaceful regents, as the Three Basils would be free to reshape the kingdom to fit the upcoming monarch and the upcoming old empire….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the last period of widespread executions during this era of Trapezuntine history; under Alexios’ successors, the milder punishment of blinding would return to vogue.
[2] Credit to CastilloVerde for this description.
[3] The palace and citadel of Trapezous were located south-east of OTL Trabzon, atop the Çukurçayır Hill.
[4] By this point, the Mgeli were considered a cadet branch of the Megalokomnenoi, as Alexandros had formally adopted Basileios Mgeli and his other half-siblings as his children. It’s quite weird when phrased like that, but I assure you, it makes sense.
[5] The problem posed to Trapezous by this should be obvious, but the diaspora of claimants to the surrounding realms of these rival states posed a serious threat, as this was essentially a casus belli served to them on a silver platter.
[6] The grand notary is roughly equivalent to the grand secretary of previous eras.
[7] Basileios the Scythian was not actually a Scythian but rather a Turkic of some sort, probably a Mongol, Turk or a Kipchak.
The court of Alexios V was a place ruled by fear. The aftokrator was a deeply paranoid man who leapt at shadows, both real and imagined. He was known for killing and mutilating anyone who slighted him[1]--once again, both real and imagined--and because of this, not a second went by when the formerly bright and colorful court of Alexandros II’s reign was not covered in a layer of shadow. As time drew on, Alexios’ rule became increasingly manic and draconian, as he feared conspiracies against him, seeded in all corners of the realm. Resentment began to build against him as he sent hundreds of innocent(ish) men and women to their deaths on baseless claims, or had them horrifically mutilated or exiled upon similar grounds. In time, this would spur the growth of just such a thing, and like Aesop’s eagle, Alexios would give his enemies the means of his own destruction….
Anastasia Katsarina has been described by several contemporary historians as the ‘anti-Theodora’[2], a woman of lowly status, to say the least, who was catapulted into the highest halls of power but retained many of her previous attributes and character. This is doubtless true in many ways, but it was most openly expressed in how the aftokratorissa wielded--or, more accurately, clung to--power. After all, it was her network of connections and spies that had allowed her to make the leap from literal scheming whore to left hand of the aftokrator himself, and only a fool would not use this network to further their hold on power once they had seized it. Katsarina made a great show of giving over the entirety of her ‘organization’ to her husband, allowing him a level of access to the dark world of courtly access that few contemporary rulers possessed. Of course, she held some things in reserve, names of agents and informants struck from the rolls that Alexios knew of, hoards of coin and weapons concealed amongst the twisting passages that stretched beneath the Great Hill[3]. This network allowed her to exercise her power through both soft and hard means, once again in a manner unusual for the empress, and in some aspects she was more powerful than her husband, as her secret network allowed her a degree of secrecy and knowledgeable unavailable to those who worked through legal means.
But this was a double-edged sword, as the increasingly paranoid nature of her husband meant these precautions made her a potential target were he to discover what she had been hiding from him. As shown in previous chapters, Alexios had always been twitchy, to say the least, and how much of this was legitimate and how much a carefully-maintained piece of political theater is unknown even to present researchers. However, the bouts of Justinian II-esque mental anguish only truly began in 1511. In that year, Katsarina detected a brewing plot against the emperor’s throne and his life. The madness and pettiness displayed during the intervention in Kartvelia had angered a sizable faction of the army, as several of the commanders which he had summarily executed were well-regarded by their men and all-around successful commanders. The nephew of one of these generals, one Gabriel Papadopoulos, had enlisted the help of several other officers to depose Alexios in a military coup and install Andreas Megalokomnenos, his first cousin, in his stead. Papadopoulos was smart enough to recognize that the eleutheroi would almost certainly be unswayed by any attempts to subvert them, and so he had directed his efforts at the regular forces garrisoning Trapezous, managing to form a force of eighty or so willing soldiers. Unfortunately for him and Andreas, one of these men happened to frequent a prostitute who reported to one of the aftokratorissa’s minions, and the rest is history. Alexios ordered the eleutheroi to storm the barracks of the disloyal soldiers, and in the process Papadopoulos and several others were killed. They were the lucky ones. Alexios had the other conspirators flayed alive and tried to do the same to Andreas, who managed to escape only by sheer luck; he was an insomniac, and happened to notice the eleutheroi mustering that night and decided it was time to leave. Andreas fled by ship to Constantinople, where he took up residence in the Sublime Porte.
The discovery of Papadopoulos’ conspiracy shook Alexios to his core, validating his many paranoid fantasies in the form of a concrete threat from the army. Katsarina encouraged this, seeing an opportunity to remove a potential threat--she had never been able to worm her way as thoroughly into the army as she had into the court or the bureaucracy--and increase her own control over her husband at the same time. The papiai were further strengthened, becoming the 16th century equivalent of the secret police, charged with arresting and torturing anyone who even looked at Alexios funny. For a time, this was a rather effective method of securing his reign, as far as the aftokrator was concerned. The courtiers already hated him, he was sure of that, and so the only way to keep them in line was with fear. If an innocent bystander happened to be rubbered, it was no great loss--after all, no-one was innocent in court politics--and every potential enemy caught or killed was one less who could threaten him. Of course, this approach was self-defeating, as nearly every innocent (and many guilty) person who was killed had a family who would be ever so slightly upset that one of their relatives had been sent to the great beyond because of the emperor’s insane delusions. The Alexiac Problem, a dilemma common across most internal security forces, is named after him and the situation the aftokrator thrust himself into. Every revealed and executed conspirator or potential conspirator had relatives, and eventually one of these relatives would get pissed enough to start plotting against him, and eventually some of these would be discovered, which would cause another round of persecutions, which would just anger more people, and so on and so forth. Between 1511 and 1514, Alexios had more than three hundred courtiers, monks and bureaucrats executed and hundreds of others brutally mutilated--primarily having their arms or hands chopped off and blinded, but sometimes even worse--and sent into exile. Among these were many of his own cousins, both male and female. The smart members of the House of Komnenos and the House of Mgeli[4] ran after Andreas was forced into exile, most going to Morea, the Ottomans or the Qutlughids[5]. Alexios believed that all of this was necessary to secure his God-given throne, and that all of these punishments were carried out in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s will, who spoke to him regularly. This was probably a piece of political theater--probably. There were also a number of minor military revolts, as moirarkhs attempted to dethrone the aftokrator, but most of these went nowhere due to internal factionalism and the skill of the emperor’s assassins. The most troubling of these was the Revolt of 1513, which saw soldiers in the Lykos valley rise against the capital and briefly establish a breakaway state before they were driven out by loyalist soldiers and fled across the border to the Qutlughids. Alexios was crazy but he wasn’t stupid, and he knew that he needed the army on his side to stay in power. He paid his soldiers handsomely--especially the eleutheroi--using money gained from increased taxes on the nobility and tariffs imposed on Italian and Ottoman trade.
Throughout this bloodbath, Katsarina retained most of her power, but she could not help but grow increasingly uneasy as her husband’s madness swelled. She too bore a healthy dose of paranoia, and began to fear that Alexios only retained her as aftokratorissa because of her influence of the court. As he was currently undertaking what was effectively a purging of the court, soon she would be useless to him and discarded, executed or sent off into exile. The butchering of the many courtiers had an outsized effect on her clients--after all, intriguers would be fingered by their rivals for disposal on behalf of the papiai, and they naturally hung around with shady crowds--and as the purges drew on she began to fear that her worst fears were coming true.
The chain of events that saw the ultimate downfall of Alexios V began in the winter of 1513. The papiai had just arrested nearly two dozen plotters for treason against him, and most disturbingly a great number of them were clergymen, especially monks. Alexios began to fear that the church was conspiring against him, hoping to overthrow him in place of someone more pliant. He didn’t dare arrest the patriarch, Konstantinos II, directly, but he could still reduce the opportunity they had to undermine him. He had Romanos, his long-suffering brother, dragged out of his cell in Tmutarakan and executed, finally putting an end to the poor bastard’s suffering. The ramifications of this were immense; he had arrested and mutilated many of his cousin previously, but to execute your own brother required a level of true madness that went beyond any political theater. Katsarina was now sure that she must either strike first or be killed. The marriage between Alexios and Anastasia had been far from a happy one, for obvious reasons, but they had produced exactly one child, the young prince David, in 1508. Katsarina was sure the best way for her to stay in power was for Alexios to have an unfortunate accident so that she could rule as regent for David for however long it took for him to become mature enough to rule.
The aftokratorissa began making plans as soon as possible. While the purges had wrecked her once magnificent network of spies and contacts, she still had a number of loyalists scattered across the court. Amongst these was one Alexios Francesco Skaramagos. Skaramagos was the son of Antonio Scaramanga, the last Genoese governor of Ghazaria, and while he had been born in Genoese territory he had rapidly Hellenized, becoming a minor player in the Trapezuntine court during the reign of Alexandros II. He was a notoriously skilled assassin, supposedly able to kill a cow with a quarrel through the eye at a thousand paces, and Katsarina had sheltered him from Alexios’ purges because of these skills. Now, the aftokratorissa charged Skaramagos with killing her husband, promising him protection and a million neahyperpyra under her new regime. Skaramagos was quite reluctant to do so for obvious reasons, and it was only by threatening to kill his brother Nikolaos that he was coerced into doing it.
On the night of 28 May 1514, Skaramagos snuck up onto the roof of the rebuilt Church of Saint Eugenios, which lay across a broad chasm from the palace on the Great Hill. Lying silent in the morning mists, the assassin waited for more than six hours as the sun rose and the fog burned off. Alexios paced in his study, passing back and forth between a narrow gap in the palace’s masonry no more than an inch wide, a memory of the siege thirty years before. Skaramagos counted the seconds between each passing of the hole, the difference between two passings of the whole as the tyrant moved about oblivious. Then, with a short breath, he squeezed the trigger. The quarrel whistled across the gap, falling more than twenty feet from its trajectory before slotting through the tiny hole. Alexios V fell, mortally wounded by a shot to the stomach.
However, he was not yet dead. Even as Skaramagos fled from his roost, the aftokrator cried out for his guards. He knew he was dying, that he had a day or two left at best before Death claimed him at last. He needed to make the best of what time he had left, for himself and for his dynasty. Alexios had long suspected that his wife was plotting against him--he was crazy, but he wasn’t stupid--but had been afraid to move against her given the potentially vast number of potential assassins that she could have in her employ. Now, however, he no longer had to fear the assassin’s blade. Katsarina had prepared for a failed assassination and was ready to play the part of the shocked and grieving widow or the appaled but caring wife in equal measure, but she had not prepared for Alexios’ sudden wrath. The emperor was unable to move, but had the papiai arrest his wife and drag her before him, so he could have her strangled in front of him. With Katsarina dead, he then turned the papiai and the eleutheroi loose on the unsuspecting Trapezuntines, hoping to purge any potential threats to his son in one last orgy of violence. No-one was safe; the patriarch was dragged out of the Hagia Sophia and beheaded, the eparkhos and his wife were killed in their beds; the heads of the city’s three chief merchant families were hacked down by the eleutheroi in the center of the market; the grand notary[6] was killed in a brothel; the grand domestic was trapped in a closet and burned alive. The few remaining prominent noblemen were all killed, effectively throwing any future court into anarchy with all of their leaders dead or blinded. As his soldiers were drenching the streets of the city in blood, Alexios sent for two men in particular to be brought before him. Basileios Mgeli, who had just returned from a diplomatic mission to the Qutlughids and so was caught completely flat-footed, and Basileios Davidopoulos, Alexios’ mentor, were marched into the palace, no doubt expecting to face their imminent demise. Instead, the aftokrator thanked them for their long and loyal service and asked them to stand as regents for his young son, alongside the captain of the eleutheroi, Basileios the Scythian[7]. They hurriedly agreed, and Alexios dispatched them to obtain all the relevant records and books on the legal manner of succession. Once they returned, Alexios had the eleutheroi muster outside the palace, recognize the men as co-regents, and abdicated in favor of his son. With a crossbow bolt still lodged in his sternum, the ex-emperor was then carried across the city to the Church of Saint Eugenios, where he retired into prayer. Early the next morning, he finally died after a day of agonizing pain, at the age of 37.
There was a three-day interregnum, as the business of selecting a new patriarch was decided by the regents. Eventually, Davidopoulos was elevated as Patriarch Basileios III, and David was crowned as emperor on 1 June, at the young age of 6. Alexios’ paranoid reign and his final massacre had gutted the city of Trapezous and the empire of large of most of their competent officials and the bureaucrats who usually keep the state running, but it had also slain or driven out the fractious courtiers and noblemen who trouble most regencies. Ironically, one of the most tumultuous reigns in Trapezuntine history would be followed by one of its most peaceful regents, as the Three Basils would be free to reshape the kingdom to fit the upcoming monarch and the upcoming old empire….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the last period of widespread executions during this era of Trapezuntine history; under Alexios’ successors, the milder punishment of blinding would return to vogue.
[2] Credit to CastilloVerde for this description.
[3] The palace and citadel of Trapezous were located south-east of OTL Trabzon, atop the Çukurçayır Hill.
[4] By this point, the Mgeli were considered a cadet branch of the Megalokomnenoi, as Alexandros had formally adopted Basileios Mgeli and his other half-siblings as his children. It’s quite weird when phrased like that, but I assure you, it makes sense.
[5] The problem posed to Trapezous by this should be obvious, but the diaspora of claimants to the surrounding realms of these rival states posed a serious threat, as this was essentially a casus belli served to them on a silver platter.
[6] The grand notary is roughly equivalent to the grand secretary of previous eras.
[7] Basileios the Scythian was not actually a Scythian but rather a Turkic of some sort, probably a Mongol, Turk or a Kipchak.
Ugh that was bloody. Its going to take a while for the empire to recover although the sheer horror of Alexios's reign probably means a lot of people will want some peace and stability.
As you say there is the problem with all those relatives driven into exile. With the very young son of a madman and a whore on the throne some at least are likely to suggest that David is not suitable for the throne and should be replaced by a more capable ruler - a burden their 'reluctantly' willing to take on themselves.
I also wonder what the mental state of David would be after such an upbringing. Notice you say the regency is very peaceful but that leaves open what happens when and how it ends.
Steve