Alternate History The Undying Empire: A Trebizond Timeline

Part XLVI: The War of the Second Holy League (1521-1522)

Eparkhos

Well-known member
Part XLVI: The War of the Second Holy League (1521-1522)

As King Julius of Hungary and his allies streamed across the Ottoman Empire’s northern and western frontiers, it seemed as if that venerable dynasty was facing its deathblow. The once-proud state had been devastated by years of civil war, attacks from the east and west, and its coffers and barracks lay fallow. The grand vizier couldn’t muster more than a few thousand men to defend his realm, and its final demise seemed inevitable as hordes of invaders streamed towards the City of the World’s Desire. However, with his back against the wall and little left to lose, Ebülhayr Paşa would use every resource available to him, pulling out all the stops he could to take as many of the Crusaders down with him as he could.

The Ottoman Empire in Europe could be divided into three rough geographic regions, a fact which the Crusaders had taken into account. The Bulgarian plains, stretching across the Danube banks north of the Balkan Mountains, were thinly populated thanks to several decades of constant back-and-forth raiding and the losses of the Second Ottoman Civil War and thus provided a direct route towards the capital that could only be easily halted by the mountains themselves. Further south, the plains of Thrake were the heartland of the Ottoman state and could only be accessed through the passes north and west, and thus could be fairly easily defended. And, of course, the west was dominated by mountains and river valleys that in some ways resembled the rough countries of the Caucasus. Of course, this latter region still played host to a number of independent-minded Vlach bands and hundreds of Turkish brigands and highwaymen who had been forced out of their homes by Ebülhayr Paşa’s purges. The plan, as outlined by the members of the League in the weeks leading up to the invasion, was fairly simple. Julius and Bogdan the Blind would attack into Bulgaria, quickly securing the Danube basin and pushing southwards to the mountains, where they would fight through to the mountains, which they would hold and secure as a launching point for an offensive the next year. Meanwhile, the Albanians and Moreotes would invade the west, hopefully making common cause with the Turkish hold-outs and the Vlachs of the region against the Sublime Porte. If everything went according to plan, then by the end of the year they would have pushed to the eastern edge of the Rhodopes and secured everything west of there, possibly including Salonika as well. As soon as the war began, the Hungarian and Moreote fleets would strike into the Aegean[1], clearing it of Ottoman ships, while the Moldovans would perform a similar strike against Ottoman fleets in the Black Sea, possibly with Trapezuntine help if it could be secured. The goal of this naval offensive was to cut the supply lines between Europe and Asia, which would significantly reduce the amount of food and men the Sublime Porte could raise to fight in the former region and lengthen the time it took to move men from the east into the west. If everything went off without a hitch, a Crusader army would be sitting in Constantinople by the autumn of 1522. It was understandably believed that the Ottomans would be unable to muster enough of an army to pose a serious threat to any of the armies, as they were exhausted from the civil war and what men remained under arms were scattered across the Ottoman realm.

The Ottoman plan was far less well-defined. Ebülhayr Paşa had been caught flat-footed by the Crusader attack, and was left scrambling to muster a response. As Julius and his confederates had suspected, the Ottoman army was in shambles after the civil war, and there were less than 10,000 men scattered across the entirety of the Empire, many of them engaged in struggle against Turkish diehards[2] in the remote and difficult-to-fight-in areas. Even worse, the Ottomans were teetering on bankruptcy because of the loss of tax revenues, so he couldn’t exactly just hire mercenaries to make up for it. The plan which the grand vizier created was panic-driven and uninspiring, but it might be enough to keep his state afloat. His plan was to abandon most of the Bulgarian plains, bar only a few hardened fortresses which could be used to slow down the Crusader advance. The Ottomans would fight on in the west, using the ridges and valleys of the Lower Balkans as defensive bulwarks against the Albanians and the Moreotes, who he (rightfully) saw as the weak links in the alliance against him. While the Crusaders were being slowed down there, he would scrape together as many men as he could by whatever means possible--conscription and rushed training, the ‘borrowing’ of mamluks, taking loans from any available source to raise mercenaries--to meet them on the field of battle. He had little faith in this plan, but he was driven by desperation and a belief that God would stand with him against the infidels. Of course, God helps those who help themselves, so he knew he would have to make the best of a bad situation to receive the favor of the divine. As such, he swallowed his pride and several decades of diplomatic fiascos and wrote to one of his coreligionists….

At sea, the Crusaders were victorious against the Ottomans on a scale that no-one had dared to imagine. Ebülhayr Paşa had sent much of the Ottoman fleet down the coast of the Aegeean to sealift men and supplies from his territories around Smyrne, but had done so just before word of the putting out of large fleets from Moldova and Nafplion reached him. While he desperately tried to recall this armada, they continued to lumber down the coast. The Moreotes and Hungarians quickly caught word of this embarking from sympathetic islanders and they, along with several dozen Hospitaller ships who were glad to have helped in the struggle against the infidels, vectored onto the Ottoman armada. At the Battle of the Aignoussa Strait in late February, the Turkish fleet was caught off-guard and utterly destroyed. As the ships passed between the Aignoussa Islands between Khios and the mainland, a Hungarian fleet appeared in their rear, driving them forward with thunderous cannons. The naval paşa broke off several of his warships to defend against this attack, denuding the rest of the fleet just in time for the Moreote and Hospitaller fleets to appear at the front of the formation. With their forces split, the Turkish transports were ravaged by the combined arms of the Orthodox and the Catholics, with some twenty-seven being sunk, eleven captured and six driven aground on the islands, whence their crews were promptly slaughtered by the islanders or died of thirst some time later. The allies, in comparison, lost only four Hungarian galleys[3], two Moreote galleys, a Moreote galleass and no Hospitaller ships, effectively crippling the Ottoman fleet. The crusaders would then be able to blockade the coasts of the Ottoman Empire to further cripple their economy and ability to move troops. The Moldovans won a smaller battle in the Black Sea quite handily a few weeks later, confining the Ottomans to the Sea of Marmora alone.

Meanwhile, on land, the Crusaders were making swift advances against the forces of the Sublime Porte. The Moldovans had a great deal of experience in forcing crossings of the Danube thanks to their years of raiding against the infidels, and as such were able to secure a half-dozen bridgeheads and fording points across the Great River within a few weeks of the invasion beginning. As such, the commander of the 3,000-strong force of light cavalry and skirmishers that the vizier had sent to delay the advance of the enemy into Bulgaria, Alexandros Paşa, turned his attention against the Moldovans. The Ottoman force attacked and successfully defeated the Moldovan force at Kamaka (OTL Oryahovo), driving them back into the river, but this would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. While Alexandros Paşa and his men were busy fighting off the Moldovans, they failed to notice or stop the large Serbo-Hungarian army--some 25,000 men under Julius himself--emerging onto the plains from the west. Julius fell upon the Ottoman army like a bolt from on high, routing the Ottomans with heavy casualties and capturing the Paşa himself. With the chief force sent to stop him completely annihilated, Julius and Bogdan would spend the following weeks securing the Bulgarian plains and the passes across the Balkan Range. The Danube essentially acted as a tether, carrying in addition to its usual trading barges the chain of boats that kept the Moldovan and Serbo-Hungarian force fed and stocked. The greatest impact of this was that it allowed the Crusaders to remain free from the pillaging and looting that usually defined military campaigns of this period, which greatly endeared them to the local Bulgarians and gave them a leg up over the Turks. By these manners, the entirety of the Bulgarian plain had been secured within a few months. By the end of July, Julius sat on the northern end of the Gabrovo Pass, mulling over an offensive into Thrake itself.

You see, while the Crusaders were making excellent time in the north, the Albanians and the Moreotes were doing anything but. Both Andronikos and Jozë had hoped that the local irregulars would aid them in their drive against Constantinople, but in truth they did anything but. The Turkish bandits of the western mountains had concluded that while Ebülhayr Paşa hated them and would try to kill them all, the infidels would try to do the same thing and, even worse, try to force them to adopt their heathen faith. As such, many of the Turks and Turkmen had taken up arms against both groups, dramatically slowing the advance of allied forces in the west. Andronikos was forced to contend with constant harassment against his supply lines as he pushed northwards into Thessalia, which forced him to split off large sections of his army to fend off these raiders. Jozë, meanwhile, switched tack entirely and struck directly against the Turkish bandits as well as the Ottoman garrisons of the region itself, using the excellent mobility of his light horsemen and highlander infantry to cordon off regions of the frontier and beat them down, which would, after several months, allow him to clear a path through the border zone into the Ottoman heartland. Because of these delays, the western allies were completely out of position by midsummer, the Moreotes having failed to even reach the Giannitsa swamps west of Salonika, which was their goal for the end of May, while the Albanians had yet to reach the Axios Valley, which was also their goal.

With the western allies utterly failing to hold up their end of the plan, Julius was left to contemplate a strike against Constantinople itself. After all, the Ottomans were quite weak as was, seemingly having devoted all of their forces to holding the western mountains against the Albanians and the Moreotes. If he trusted the plan, then it was entirely possible his weaker allies could be defeated piecemeal, which would allow the forces of the false prophet to turn their full forces to him, making it a much tougher fight than it would be otherwise. He should strike now while the opportunity was available to him and there was nothing between him and the City of the World’s Desire, not wait until the opportunity to achieve the dream of so many kings passed from him. Bogdan was unwilling, feeling that they should wait for the certainty of victory, which Julius considered to be foolhardy at best. The road before them was open! And so, in August 1521, Julius crossed the mountains with his army, bound for the City of Constantine itself.

However, the king had made one fatal miscalculation: There was in fact an Ottoman army present in Thrake, a comparatively small force of 11,000 that Ebülhayr Paşa had scraped together from conscripts, mercenaries and garrison forces. He had managed to secure loans from a number of Armenian banking houses, and with this he had hired several thousand Turkmen from Anatolia to supplement the small force of native troops that he had raised. This was no great army, but it was still an army and a somewhat coherent one that could, under the right circumstances, pose a threat to the Hungarian invasion force. Ebülhayr Paşa was a cagey son-of-a-bitch, and as he anxiously followed the progression of Julius and his army into Thrake, he knew that he had an opportunity for a long-odds victory if he played his cards right. The future of Islam in Europe was riding on the outcome of this campaign, and he was determined to stand strong.

As Julius advanced deep into Thrake, he met surprisingly little resistance. As he advanced, the militias and raiding forces that he had been expecting vanished in full retreat, universally yielding the field of battle to the Crusaders. Across the mountains now, the Hungarians didn’t even try to keep up the Danube supply chain, instead pillaging as they went. This both weakened their own ability to resupply and angered the locals, which led to a revival of the Greek self-defense militias of the civil war, who now fought alongside the Sublime Porte to drive out their coreligionists. Julius was taking minor but constant losses from these raiders, which he effectively ignored in favor of a constant advance. He could smell blood in the water, he wasn’t going to give up now when he was so close to victory. By the time he had reached Edirne, his men were exhausted and considerably fewer in number, as well as surrounded by several hundred angry riders who were determined to achieve revenge for their ruined homes, but he paid this no mind. When word reached him that Ebülhayr Paşa and an army were gathered at Ergenoupoli[4] (OTL Uzunkopru), he decided to engage and try to crush the Ottoman army in hopes that he could advance to and winter before or within the walls of Constantinople.

After several days of maneuvering, the Hungarian and the Greco-Ottoman army met along a ridge line several dozen miles north of Ergenoupoli, with Ebülhayr Paşa holding the defensive position atop the ridge. He knew his force was fragile, and was hoping that the Hungarians would exhaust themselves on uphill charges against his somewhat fortified position, after which they could be ground down by the Turkmen and by the Greek irregulars. Julius, meanwhile, hoped to pin down the Ottoman forces atop the ridge with his center and right, then circle around with his overloaded left to pin them down and crush them[5]. The night before the battle, both armies were comforted by their respective clergy, urging valor to them all.

That dawn, on the morning of September 28, Julius deployed his forces in the pre-dawn chill, hoping to catch the Ottomans off guard with an early morning attack. As the sun split the sky, the Hungarians advanced against the Turkish host, moving quickly up the ridge. However Ebülhayr Paşa had suspected that something like this would happen and so had mustered his men even earlier, successfully catching the Hungarians by total surprise. As the Crusaders plowed into the Ottoman pike hedges, their lines soon descended into chaos. With the sun rising at the Ottoman back, their attackers were severely impaired, and so many of them began to fire wildly with their crossbows and arquebuses. Julius was among his men, rallying them and pushing them forward, where they were beginning to push through the Ottoman center as the demoralized conscripts proved unable to hold against the prime of the Black Army. Ebülhayr Paşa too joined the fray in person, knowing that the crucial moment of the battle was at hand. The air was filled with screams and gunshots and the clamor of battle, making it almost impossible to hear shouted orders, and the Crusaders struggled to see even the men beside them. Under these circumstances, it is entirely understandable that an inexperienced soldier mistook King Julius, who was riding horizontally across the breadth of his army, for an Ottoman commander. The Hungarian monarch was knocked from his saddle by a billhook and dragged under the hooves of his horse until it too was killed and fell upon him, finally killing him. With their leader dead, the Hungarians began to falter, and Ebülhayr Paşa was able to lead his own left into the weak Hungarian right and shatter it, causing them to rout. The rest of the Crusader line soon followed, and Ebülhayr Paşa ordered the horsemen to begin their pursuit. The Serbo-Hungarians would flee in all directions, but only a handful of the 15,000 men who had taken the field that day would escape back across the frontier into Christian lands.

The impacts of Ergenoupoli were immense. The Serbo-Hungarian forces withdrew from their positions south of the Balkans, eventually retreating back across the pre-war border with only a few minor areas along the frontier still holding. As soon as word of Julius’ death reached Krakow, Sigismund the Prussian, who had inherited the titles of Poland Lithuania after Jan Olbracht’s death, proclaimed himself the rightful King of Hungary, Croatia and Serbia and began making preparations for an invasion of the Pannonian lowlands the following spring. Many of the Hungarian magnates also revolted in support of him, as they believed that a distant king across the mountains would be preferable to any other potential ruler. The sudden exit of the Hungarians, who had been the lynchpin of the Second Holy League, caused the organization to crumble. Sensing an opportunity to get while the getting was good, Andronikos sued for peace with the Ottomans. Ebülhayr Paşa was more focused with events playing out elsewhere and so was willing to give up the former Despotate of Thessalia to the Moreotes, an unexpected windfall. The Moldovans, meanwhile, would negotiate with the Ottomans for territorial and commercial gains. The Ottomans were on the upswing but were still quite fragile, so Ebülhayr Paşa didn’t want to risk carrying on such a war indefinitely. The Moldovans would annex several fortresses along the banks of the Danube to secure their control of the river trade, but it was much less than what Bogdan had aspired to before the war began.

However, despite these defections, Albania stood alone against the Ottomans. Even as peace settled over most of the region, the Albanian-Ottoman Wars had just begun….

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[1] Hungary (or more accurately, Croatia) had a number of galleys that had been built up to help project power in the Aegean. Albania, in contrast, lacked ports thanks to the extensive Venetian holdings in the area, and so were constricted to wars on land.
[2] Ebülhayr Paşa had never been able to completely secure much of the frontier zone, and many of the Turkish refugees and survivors in the region had taken up the mantle of ghazi to raid against those who they considered to be heretical puppets of the decadent and incompetent Greeks. Some of them picked up the mystical Sufi orders who also opposed the Greeks, and this would be the genesis of Sufism in the Balkans for all intents and purposes.
[3] Hungary had only a few galleys with little experience, and as they were facing the actual warships they took the brunt of the losses in the battle.
[4] The town was named Ergen Kopru by the Turks, but given its majority Greek status and the pro-Greek slant of the regime in Konstantinople, it reverted to a Hellenized version after Ebülhayr Paşa’s victory.
[5] ‘Overloading’ means assigning more forces to one flank than the center and/or other flank, similar to the flank overloading that the Greek hoplites performed during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Just wanted to say, swell TL you've got here. Quite the twist in this latest entry, but it's a welcome and genuinely expectation-subverting one - from the chapters before, I had the impression that the Ottomans were about to be knocked out entirely, as usually happens in Late Byzantine-centric timelines.
 

stevep

Well-known member
Eparkhos

Well the Ottoman empire has survived despite the odds, albeit with further territorial losses and by the sound of it another long war to come with the Albanians. However their again taken heavy losses, especially in the defeat at sea

There was that note about Ebülhayr Paşa swallowing his pride and writing to a coreligionist so assuming also he will be getting additional aid, albeit at what cost.

We're been away from the city - i.e. Trebazon, not that other one ;) - for quite a while now so assuming we will find out what has happened to them. IIRC it was going to war with the Ottomans as well albeit a few years ago during the civil war, so unclear how their got on. Obviously haven't annilated them in Anatolia as Ebülhayr Paşa was able to recruit forces from there - at least before they went glug! If Ebülhayr Paşa is gaining the support of another powerful Muslim state, either the Marmaluks or the White Sheep was it then they could find themselves distinctly exposed.

Steve
 

ATP

Well-known member
Mamluks in Egypt before ottomans conqered them in OTL had their own caliph.Sultan considered caliph himself.So,with sultan dead,who is rightfull caliph now ?
 
Part XLVI: The Ratetas Regency (1517-1525)

Eparkhos

Well-known member
Sorry, no time for comment response, have a nice day, thank you for reading.

Part XLVI: The Ratetas Regency (1517-1525)

The madness and subsequent purges of Alexios V had resulted in the death of most of the Trapezuntine aristocracy, an effect that was only intensified by the rapid rotation of regents for the restive David in 1515 and 1516. By the time Ratetas assumed the office of regent, he found that the usual source of usurpations, the nobility, had been ground into a fine powder and scattered to the wind. As such, with the church and the bureaucracy backing him, he was free to mold the Empire and David’s future rule however he saw fit. It was of immense luck for both that he chose well….

Before he had even departed for the war on the Sangarios’ banks, Ratetas had struggled to set up a regency government around him. He had little administrative experience other than organizing resupply efforts for his ships, and he was fully aware that with his hold on power as tenuous as it was, picking the wrong second-in-command could result in the death or blinding of him and his entire family. With such high stakes, he naturally decided to play it safe, and raised his youngest son, a fairly minor member of the junior bureaucracy named Theophylaktos, to the position of mesazon, or Imperial chancellor[1]. While his father and several of his brothers and cousins took ship for Nikaia and the fighting there, Theophylaktos was left as regent for the regent at the young age of twenty-seven, forced to try and sort through the administrative hell that had been left behind by the chaos of the last decade. It was an uphill battle, to say the very least.

The years of purges had engulfed not only much of the court but also many from the upper ranks of the Imperial administration, effectively decapitating the revenue and internal governance branches of the government, which had left many of the more far-flung parts of the empire to run around like headless chickens. Theophylaktos’ first action was to raise an experienced tax collector named Isaakios Aspietes to the newly created office of megasphoroeispraktoros, or national tax collector, who was charged with managing the collection of the numerous land and crop taxes which were owed by the citizens of Trapezous. Theophylaktos was also alarmed to find that the years of neglect had nearly led the Trapezuntine treasury to bankruptcy, a fact which his father’s expedition to the west was hardly helping. To keep solvency while a more permanent solution was worked out, he summarily raised a new tax, the kephoros, which taxed urban households by a total number of adult residents[2] at a certain percent. This infuriated the residents of the capital city, and Trapezous was engulfed by rioting members of the urban poor, who were already having a hard enough time making ends meet before they started being taxed for doing what they had been asked to do only months before[3]. Theophylaktos was able to scrape together the remaining eleutheroi and several bandons from the surrounding countryside to put down the rioters within a few days, but much of the city’s commercial district was damaged, many buildings have been set on fire during the chaos. It is at this time that Theophylaktos first developed the migraines which would plague him for the rest of his life. He also began to suspect that the cause of the state’s financial decline was due to wide scale embezzlement, and he embarked upon an anti-corruption crusade. Anyone caught stealing money from the state’s coffers was sold into slavery, while anyone caught with more than ten pounds worth of stolen gold was athalricized[4] in the mese of Trapezous[5]. He went so far as to review every material request from across the empire in the last decade with two dozen trusted companions, which resulted in the death or enslavement of more than a thousand corrupt desk jockeys. How much impact this actually had in the grand scheme of things is unknown, but once the Trapezuntine state income started to rebound after 1518, Theophylaktos chalked it up to this in greater part than he did the reformed tax collection system.

With the immediate problem resolved, Theophylaktos was able to turn his attention to more esoteric matters. He believed that the reason for the widespread corruption and ineptitude in the bureaucracy was because there was no standardized way of testing the competency of aspiring civil servants. If nepotism and corruption played a large part in how many civil servants entered the service, then they would believe that such nefarious deeds would be acceptable to perform themselves. In order for the Trapezuntine bureaucracy to reach its full potential, all opportunities for misdeeds needed to be weeded out of the entry process; if a civil servant is kept away from corruption in his formative years and shown that the wages of corruption are only death and pain, then he will be incorruptible, out of fear if nothing else. But how to do so?

The inspiration of the neosystemadomikon has been speculated to be everything from the contemporary Ming jishi system to a direct revelation from God himself to the mesazon after he ate too much cannabis one night. Regardless of its origin, the new Imperial exam system is arguably the most important product of not only the Ratetas regency but the reign of David the Great itself. Anyone, from the lowest provincial farmer to a member of the Imperial family itself, would be subject to the same, impossible-to-rig series of tests and examinations to determine their potential as a civil servant. Upon reporting to one of the twenty designated provincial testing site (located in the twenty largest towns within the empire, of course) the applicants would be subject to a basic literacy test, to weed out the morons and the scammers. Then they would be assigned a number--written as a complex formula, in the old Milesian system, which had been phased out in favor of Indo-Arabic numerals during Alexandros II’s reign and was impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t been trained in its use from childhood[6]--and told to report to the Imperial Testing Center in the capital. There, they would be processed by that number and randomly assigned to a tiny, fifty-square-foot room where they would be locked in for two days and a night to take the test, after which their papers would be stamped with another randomly selected formula with the same product and shuffled through three layers of test examiners, who would each grade one section, before finally being gathered together and reviewed by a fourth examiner, who would then certify the results and have them posted in a designated building outside palace. Those who passed would enter the Trapezuntine bureaucracy as civil servants.

The desired curriculum of these applicants would vary greatly under successive aftokrators and mesazons, but the foru constants that persisted from the time of Theophylaktos onward were math, the natural sciences, law and the antiquites. The mesazon felt that math was necessary knowledge for the bureaucrats, who would almost certainly have to do calculations with some regularity, and the natural sciences would make sense as a subject of knowledge for men who would be working with practically all aspects of society. An understanding of the laws of the empire is just common sense, but the desire for knowledge of the antiquities is somewhat of a mystery, as Theophylaktos didn’t write much down about this. It is probable that he, like so many across Europe and the Near East, was obsessed with the idea of the renaissance man and felt that any good bureaucrat must be well-rounded. It would take several years for the neosystemadomikon to be fully implemented across Trapezous--the first class to make its way through the system entered civil service in 1522--but once it was completed it would dramatically help the ailing bureaucracy’s return to competency.

The only other event of note on the homefront during Ratetas’ regency was a series of bad droughts and famines that affected the newly-conquered Inner Paphlagonia from 1531 to 1534. The region had already been devastated by years of warfare and constant back-and-forth raiding between the various Turkmen tribes and bands, Neo-Rumite forces hoping to finally put down these raider bands once and for all and of course the forces of Trapezous themselves, who were having more than a little bit of difficulty driving back the numerous enemies who were arrayed against them. The entire Black Sea littoral region was hit by a series of droughts in the first half of the 1530s, but the impact was felt the hardest in this region, which was naturally quite dry compared to the rainforests coasts of Pontos and the fertile valleys of Khaldea[7]. Ratetas had by now returned from conducting affairs in Nikaia, and was present to personally oversee the famine relief which his son propagated. Grain was shipped in from Pontos and from across the Black Sea, while hundreds of hapless farmers and their families were shuttled around to different parts of the empire to ease the burden placed upon Paphlagonia’s limited resources. The church also played a significant role in the affair, with Patriarch Dionysios opening the patriarchal coffers to succor the afflicted peoples of the region. Of course, the military presence in the provinces there was also stepped up to keep the Turkmen from taking advantage and they, too, needed to be fed, but on the whole it was an improvement for the Paphlagonians.

While the disasters and crisis of Ratetas’ tenure were thankfully few, this did not mean this time as regent was a period of little activity. Good fortune and the blood of too many good men (alongside a number of not-so-good-men) had allowed the regent to inherit a situation whence the power of the nobility and the independent-mindedness of the church had both been greatly curbed. Ratetas recognized this and knew that he could not let this bout of good fortune go to waste. He pursued a series of policies aimed at keeping the nobility in their place--namely, entirely subservient to the emperor and his officers--with multiple angles of attack.

Much of the land and estates both physically and economically of the men who had been executed by Alexios remained in legal limbo long after his death. According to the laws which had been promulgated during the chaos of the 1340s, if a man were to be executed for treason then his land would be returned to the state; the law here was crystal clear, there was no room for interpretation. However, if this person had been killed for his support of someone who later became emperor, then this seizure would be made void. Given that no-one was quite sure what the hell was going on in terms of property rights after Alexios’ bloodbath, Ratetas was jam-packed with requests from the next of kin of those who had been unjustly persecuted and who felt that they were owed their loved one’s land. Ratetas and Theophylaktos went through all of these listings with a fine-toothed comb, giving land back to those who they felt were worthy and denying the rest, which resulted in several hundred angry relatives of those killed during the purges taking but brigandry in the wilds of the mountains. This would be a recurring problem that would ultimately require the intervention of Tarkhaneiotes and several bandons to be done away with in a series of anti-highwayman campaigns throughout the 1530s. The greatest upshot of this affair, though, was that there was now several thousand acres of land which had formerly been possessed by the magnates that were sitting in Imperial bond, concentrated primarily in the newly-conquered frontier zones. Ratetas recognized the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by further reducing the power of the aristocracy and securing these new conquests by extending the bandon system into these regions. He invited several thousand Circassians, Armenians and other Orthodox/Apostolic peoples from across the region, many of whom had been forced into exile due to violence in their homelands, to settle in these regions in exchange for service: most took him up on his offer. In this manner, Ratetas was able to, in the five years between 1521 and 1526, almost completely secure the newly conquered lands in the west and south.

Ratetas also undertook some numismatic reform, but this had little impact other than slightly altering the ratio of the precious metals within the baser denominations of the coins, and so has little standing in comparison to the other events of his regency. He, with the help of Theophylaktos, also promulgated a new codex of laws, the Nomos Davidos, in 1522, which was somewhat impressive in terms of scope but wound up being more of a confusing mess than anything else as it tried to balance precedent and unwritten laws from across Pontos in terms of value and apply them across all of the country at once, ultimately being discontinued in favor of the Nomos Basileus Davidos in the 1540s. Ultimately, the thing which Ratetas is best known for is what he didn’t do: rock the boat. By keeping a firm but gentle hand on the tiller domestically and cautiously expanding the empire’s territory, the admirable admiral was able to keep Trapezous on the right course throughout the usually chaotic years of a long regency, thus ensuring that the boy aftokrator would come into his own without a major crisis. After a seven-year-long regency and a lifetime of service, Ratetas died in his sleep in January 1524 at the age of seventy-four. Rather than selecting a regent to carry him through the forty-one days he was still legally a minor, David assumed the throne in his own right and was crowned on 13 March 1524.

Khalaza David, o oikodomos, kai khalaza David, o katastrapheas….

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[1] The exact role of the mesazon varied greatly throughout history, and so it is difficult to truly name an English equivalent. The closest office is probably either chancellor or prime minister, but these are still rough analogs.
[2] That is, adult men
[3] Alexandros II had instituted a number of tax breaks and donatives in hopes of driving up Trapezous’ birth rate, so that it could compete with its neighbors. Many Trapezuntines had taken advantage of this, and as you might imagine they weren’t exactly overjoyed to now be taxed more for doing so.
[4] To quote myself: This is the most extreme punishment recorded in Byzantine law. The subject of this punishment was whipped raw, then tied to a platform in the public square. They first had their fingers severed with a hacksaw, then their hands, then their forearms and then their arms up to their elbow. Their nose was skinned and then severed, after which the same was done to their legs. They were then blinded and left on the platform for three days in excruciating agony. Finally, they were set on fire and burned to death, which no doubt was a mercy. This punishment is recorded for only two individuals in Byzantine history, those being the perennial rebels Basil the Copper-hand and Ioannes the Athalricist.
[5] That is, the city center
[6] Alexandros II also completed the long-awaited Nikephorian Reforms, which had been proposed by the philosopher Nikephoros Gregoras in the 14th Century. They were, namely, switching to Arabic numerals and adopting a slightly altered Julian calendar, i.e. the OTL Gregorian Calendar.
[7] Khaldea refers to the Lykos Valley and the surrounding country of rivers and valleys. It had previously been referred to solely as Lykonia, but the expansion of Trapezuntine influence in the region had led to its renaming.
 

stevep

Well-known member
I ran that through Google Translate, and isn't it ominous.

For someone. Possibly however not the subjects of the empire. Given that we also have:
Regardless of its origin, the new Imperial exam system is arguably the most important product of not only the Ratetas regency but the reign of David the Great itself

Its a rare ruler who gets the name Great without having stepped on - or more often trampled into the dust some opponent. Of course some of the people he destroys may be inside the empire, possibly including elements of Ratetas's family if he thinks them too powerful. [Given that between the madness of his father and the actions of the regency the monarchy is pretty much unchallenged and only the successful regent might be seen as a threat].

A lot will depend on the character of David himself and what's going on in the wider world. True for part of this period the former Ottoman empire is being kicked all over the place but there are other potential threats out there. However with than handle I assume David will leave the empire significantly larger than he found it. Coupled with some much needed stability and what sounds like a very good bureaucracy it could be heading for a 'golden' age.

Steve

 

ATP

Well-known member
It look like China bureaucracy.They were still corrupted.
Or "great" idea when british India Company decided to take people from Oxford,becouse they should not steal.Well,they still do that.
But - great chapter.
 
Part XLIX: The Opening of the Davidine Period (1523-1525)

Eparkhos

Well-known member
Part XLIX: The Opening of the Davidine Period (1523-1525)

Loukas Ratetas had, during his long regency, secured the throne of the Megalokomnenoi for the young aftokrator David. Like Anastaios or Tzimiskes before him, he had overseen a period of domestic quiet and successful campaigns abroad that would allow his ward to assume the office of ruler under the best possible circumstances. The treasury had recovered from its nadir during the reign of Alexios V, while the bandons had recovered much of their strength after the brief civil war during the early regency. Thanks to the acts and perseverance of Ratetas, David would be able to open his reign with a flurry of action, a trend which would define his long and successful reign….

On the night of 13 March 1523, hundreds of candles were lit in the streets of Trapezous. Dozens of small processions formed in all parts of the town, pouring towards the center of the town before merging together into a single parade. Thousands of Trapezuntine marched down the mese, chanting prayers and acclimations as they approached the Hagia Sophia[1]. Icons rose above the marchers, depicting Saint Eugenios, Saint Basileios and the many military saints affiliated with the Komnenoi. At the head of this great procession were the eleutheroi, marching in perfect formation under arms, the chi-rho painted on their shields and regimental flags flying in the wind. At the front of the eleutheroi, atop a glistening white horse, rode David himself, who chose to conceal himself in hooded robes similar to a monk’s. After reaching the Upper Town, the procession made a sharp turn onto the road leading to the Hagia Sophia, which sat rigidly against the darkness of the night sky. The procession circled around the cathedral before finally arriving at its eastern gate. David and his guards dismounted and entered the church, followed by many of the Trapezuntines. In the chamber of the cathedral, David was officially installed as aftokrator in a two-hour long ceremony by Patriarch Dionysios, before they turned and went to the steps of the church. The Crown of Komnenos, which had lain in state since the death of Alexios V a decade before, was produced, now with several pendulata[2] attached as the old Roman crowns had been[3]. As the sun rose over the mountains to the east, the crown was lowered onto David’s head to the cheers of the people, officially marking the beginning of his sole rule.

David’s coronation was an excellent piece of political theater. He had already been crowned thrice--firstly at the behest of Basileios Mgeli in 1514 to mark the beginning of his minority rule, then again by Loukas Ratetas to secure his legitimacy as regent, and then a third time in Nikaia to mark the official beginning of the personal union between the two Greek states back in 1520--so a fourth coronation would have seemed completely unnecessary to most rulers. In David’s eyes, however, it served a vital purpose. Firstly, it was a public announcement that from here on out he would be a true aftokrator, ruling alone, a matter which David felt important to convey given the highly colorful opening period of his regency and the gains which had been made under Ratetas, which he felt could lead one of his sons--who he regarded as half-brothers--to try and usurp him. Secondly, it brought him into the eyes of the public for the first time since his second coronation eight years before. He hoped to present the image of a young, promising and most importantly sane ruler, as his minority had been plagued by fears that he would inherit his father’s madness and jealous rage. Finally, the symbolism of the rising sun played on the already improving fortunes of the Trapezuntine state and his relation to it in the eyes of God. David felt that he ought to remind the people that while Ratetas had presided over many successes, these gains had only been possible because God supported him as the rightful monarch of the Greeks and the Romans. As you can imagine, growing up under the constant threat of deposition--Ratetas had been well-regarded enough after his victories in the west that he might have gotten away with a coup, and it was widely rumored that if he was unwilling to, then Sabbas Tarkhaneiotes, the victor of Kastamone, had the guts to do it--had made David conscious of the volatile nature of court politics, and he felt an urgent need to insure himself from the threats of usurpation.

It has also been suggested that the formal and ornate coronation process was an attempt by David to shore up what he feared could be a publicity problem regarding his appearance. Alexandros II had been a black-haired, brown-eyed man with tanned, bronze skin, hooded eyes and a hooked nose, and Alexios V had borne a strong resemblance to him, with a slightly darker skin tone and curlier hair thanks to Martha’s Levantine extraction. David….was not. He was fair-skinned, bearing more resemblance to a Kartvelian than to a Pont or a Turk. He had straight brown hair and light brown eyes, with high, arching brows and a long, straight nose. Shockingly, this had never raised Alexios’ suspicion, but after his death it was widely speculated that David was the product of adultery on the half of Katsarina. He did not look the part of a Komnenos, and so he feared that he would not be treated as such. The ornate coronation was an attempt to legitimize himself further, as well as present himself to the people in such a manner that his glaring differences from his father weren’t so obvious.

One of David’s chief activities as a youth--well, he was still a youth, being only sixteen years of age, after all--was the study of the annals of Trapezuntine history. One of his chief tutors, Alexios of Sinope, had written O Khronia Trapezousos, an extensive and in-depth history of Trapezous itself since 1088[4] and the Komnenian emperors of the Trapezuntine Empire, and his instructor had successfully imbued him with both a love for history itself and an understanding that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. In 1513, he had written a short text describing the greatest flaws of each aftokrator since Alexios III, who had reigned back in the mid-1300s. The most common problems were succession and heirs, two deeply intertwined problems. Manouel III had been overly kind and generous to his sons, and for this he had been poisoned by Alexios IV[5]. Alexios was in turn murdered--gruesomely beaten to death, in fact--by his eldest son, Ioannes IV, who was deposed by Alexandros I more than a decade later and later died under suspicious circumstances while in exile. Alexandros the Elder’s worst mistake was vacillating between which of his sons he wished to succeed him, which resulted in both of their deaths in the Brother’s War and the ascension of Alexandros II. Alexandros II had managed to dodge the assassin’s knife--at the time of writing, he was actually alive, albeit rotting in a dungeon in Stettin, of all places[6]--but had botched his succession by allowing Martha to screw up Alexios and Romanos, and then passing the throne to neither of them. Nikephoros I had been too trusting for his own good, while Alexios V had been far too paranoid to be a good ruler, as evidenced by his purges and mass executions. His demise had actually come from being too trusting, though, and allowing his literal scheming whore of a wife to remain in the palace, which had led to his ultimate assassination. David concluded that the best way to ensure his own survival and continued rule was to a) find a trustworthy and fertile wife who could help him govern and tend to dynastic matters, b) educate his children and have enough spares that one or two of them losing their minds wasn’t too much of a threat, c) designate a heir and make sure that his siblings weren’t going to cause trouble and, d) keep a healthy level of paranoia, but don’t go full-out Caligula like his father had. These conclusions would shape David’s palace policies and, to an extent, his domestic and diplomatic decisions regarding which foreign marriages to pursue, ultimately having an immense impact on the entirety of his reign.

The first issue that David faced after assuming the throne and taking up the orb of rulership in his own right was marriage. As Alexios V’s reign-of-terror had demonstrated, choosing the right spouse was a matter of crucial importance for any ruler, if only because they would have immense influence on their children and heirs. David was already determined that he would not repeat the foolish errors of his father and grandfather, planning on keeping a constant eye on his wife to make sure she didn’t scheme against him and/or brutalize their heir to the throne as Anastasia and Martha had done, respectively. Ratetas had, thankfully, refused to promise David’s hand to the daughters or sisters of any foreign rulers--although he did not refrain from occasionally mulling over betrothing him to one of his daughters, even going so far as to try and push David and Anna Ratetasina, his youngest daughter, together in hopes that sparks would fly--so he was free to make a pragmatic decision. There were five Orthodox states--it should also be noted that David was a fanatically devoted follower of the Orthodox Church--who had potential matches amongst their royal families. There was of course Kartvelia, but by now there were more than a dozen current marriages between minor members of their respective royal families, so a marriage to a Kartvelian princess would have little strategic benefit other than binding the close states even closer together. Across the Black Sea, Moldova was a vital trading partner thanks to its domination of the Lower Danube, and it could be a very valuable partner against Ottoman revanchism, as well as the only other state on the Black Sea whose fleet could potentially rival the Trapezuntines. There was a slight problem, though, as Moldova was at war with the Golden Horde, and an alliance with them could imperil Trapezuntine holdings in Perateia. The Russian states were too distant to make good allies, and there was already a marriage alliance with Volga Novgorod conducted two generations prior. Finally, there was Morea, who had made an impressive series of gains against the Ottomans during the War of the Second Holy League and who could also form a pincer against future Turkish threats. However, they were quite distant, and communications between them such as would be necessary to fight such a war against the Ottomans would have to pass through Ottoman or Karamanid territory, which would effectively cripple any value they had as potential allies. The Palaiologoi also had a competing claim to the glory of old Rhomaion, and so an agreement with them would be quite distasteful to a ruler who was as mindful of his tenuous legitimacy as David was.

And so, in the end, marriage was proposed with the Moldovans. Bogdan was receptive to an alliance with the Trapezuntines, who he also saw as potentially valuable allies against the Turks, and so after a brief back and forth a betrothal was agreed between David and Ionela of Moldova[7]. Ionela had been born in 1505 and so was several years older than the aftokrator. According to all sources, she was a very quiet and asocial woman who had no real interest in anything other than reading and knitting. As you might imagine, she was a well-known figure in the Trapezuntine court scheme and became infamous for hosting debauched parties[8].

After securing a marriage alliance in his first year, David then turned his attention to the politics of ruling. He agreed with most of the domestic policies which had been enacted by Ratetas and so left them in place, although he did ease the taxes which were placed on the church’s land holdings--not on the church itself, mind you, but on their properties instead--an act which brought him much favor with the Pontic Patriarchate. In early 1524, he embarked from Trapezous for Davidoupoli, touring his territories and subjects in the Nikaian Empire. He was most displeased with how Bishop Lefkos, who had been running things since Ratetas left, had been handling the people and the taxes in this region--essentially using them as a base to advance his personal riches and properties rather than preparing them for the inevitable conflict with the Turks--and so he promoted him upwards to regent for his territories in the newly-created territory of Western Scythia, which consisted solely of Ginestra and the small force of pirate-hunting galleys posted there. With Lefkos out of the way, he assigned one Konstantinos Lakharnas, a veteran of the Nikaian Rising, to reform the administration in the west along the lines of the existing state apparatus in Trapezous proper.

It was very important to David that the bandons be made ready for war as quickly as possible, for he was planning war. He was driven by many reasons, among them a desire to legitimize himself even further and prove that the victories in the west had truly been because of God’s favor and not because of the luck and/or skill of his regent. However, he was far from a prideful fool blinded by hubris, and geopolitical concerns always remained at the back of his mind. Were he to complete his God-given mission to restore the Roman Empire to its pre-Manzikert borders--whether he actually believed this or not is a matter of great debate, with most historians concluding that he was too much of a pragmatist to actually believe it and instead used it as a propaganda tool--he would need to secure strategic depth for his empire. As it was, the Trapezuntines were a coastal empire dependent on sea travel to connect its far-flung territories, which stretched more than a thousand kilometers along the coast of the Black Sea. Its landward territories had little strategic depth and could be rather easily penetrated by hostile forces, especially from along the Neo-Rûmite border. Trapezous needed to push inland to secure its coastal territories and allow it to reclaim more of its rightful territories.

David’s desired target was the Neo-Rûmite Sultanate. They had radically reformed--transitioning from the Karamanid Beylik to the Neo-Rûmite Sultanate around the turn of the 16th Century is just the most visible example--under the long reign of the successful Bayezid II/Kayqubad IV into a centralized and formidable state that dominated Inner Anatolia and could project power out in all directions. David feared the growth of Neo-Rûmite power; they were already strong enough to pose a serious threat to the Trapezuntines before they had reformed, and now their power had greatly expanded and was growing every year as their network of irrigation canals made the valleys and plains of the east bloom. He needed to strike now and with overwhelming force to nip this threat in the bud. Erzincan, Theodosiopolis (OTL Erzurum) and Sebasteia (OTL Sivas) all glittered just a few dozen miles from the border. He was sure that if he struck with the full force of Nikaia and Trapezous that the Neo-Rûmites would be severely weakened, if not crippled. He began preparing for mobilization, hoping to launch his desired invasion in the spring of 1525.

However, events would intervene to preclude David’s planned war. In the summer of 1524, a wave of desperate messengers arrived in Trapezous from Tbilisi, begging for David to ride to the aid of his cousin like his father and grandfather before. The damned Mongols had come, 100,000 of them[9], and the Caucasian Gates had been overrun. Aleks’andretsikhe had fallen, and there were only two more fortresses between the hordes and the valleys. David knew at once that he could not allow the Golden Horde to push into Kartvelia, both for the sake of his ally and himself, and so he marshalled his men for war….

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] That is, the Hagia Sophia of Trapezous. The Hagia Sophia faces westward, so the procession had to circle around it to face the rising sun.
[2] Pendulata are the strands of pearls and gemstones that dangle off the side of most Byzantine crowns, as well as the Hungarian Crown of Saint Steven. David here has had pendulata added to the usually penduless crown to symbolize his connection to the Byzantine rulers of old.
[3] Rather than repeating myself, I’ll just say that I’ve recently started watching Stargate: SG-1 and it’s quite good.
[4] After Manzikert, the Gabrades family had set themselves up as semi-autonomous rulers of Trapezous and the surrounding territories, only being returned to the Empire proper after 1143. A branch of the family had clung on as rulers of Theodoro until Alexandros II’s reconquest of that region in 1475, at which time they were stripped of their holdings and resettled in Khaldeia, where they remained until this story’s present.
[5] OTL We don’t know that Alexios IV died in this manner, but it is widely suspected that his death was at the very least hastened by his scheming sons.
[6] After abdicating, Alexandros II had gone into exile in Tmutarakan for several years. After Alexios murdered Nikephoros and seized power, he wisely fled Trapezuntine lands altogether, going westwards to Esztergom in 1507. Ladislaus V allowed him to take up residence in his court, further fueling rumors of his illegitimacy, and upon the outbreak of the civil war he had taken up arms in service of his possible son and patron. As Ladislaus was driven into Austria and forced to seek Bogislaw’s shelter, Alexandros had taken up residence in Vienna in 1511. After a time, he had grown bored with his life and court and had raised a company of mercenaries. He had been hired by the Duke of Brunswick to help him put down a peasant revolt in 1514, after which he was kept on the payroll as a security force. With the outbreak of the War of the Three Leagues, he successfully organized a defense of the Duchy in 1517 and much of 1518 before he was finally defeated by Bogislaw. Alexandros was then thrown into a dungeon in Stettin, where he would stay for the next six years. As the Bauernkrieg raged on in the 1520s, the newly-installed Konrad was forced to seek help from any available quarter, and so recruited Alexandros--now known as Alexander the Greek--to lead one of his armies, which he did with much success. In 1531, with the end of the war in Saxony, Alexandros was rewarded for his service with the lordship of the County of Bentheim-Tecklenburg, a small county on the border with the Rhinemouths. He would remarry and have one son by his German wife, Nikola von Rheda, before dying in 1534 at the age of 76. His son, Alexis, would reign for several decades to come and play a notable role in the Reformation.
[7] Romanian chronicles of this period have an annoying habit of only listing the sons of rulers, so her name is a guess
[8] This is sarcasm
[9] A cookie to whoever gets this very obscure reference.
 

stevep

Well-known member
Eparkhos

No idea on the reference. Are you referring to the number of 100,000 there? [Unless something like that was a number alleged IIRC for the size of the force that Darius sent to invade European Greece after the defeat of the Ionian rebellion, which Athens supported?]

That would mean their attacking Kartvelia as well as Moldova so there's potential for them to be engaged on several fronts and the allies would I assume have a significant naval superiority, although I assume that "could imperil Trapezuntine holdings in Perateia". Thinking about it is this the ally that Ebülhayr Paşa looked to for aid a couple of chapters back. I wasn't thinking of the north as a possible direction but that could be why they were clashing with Moldova.

Is the Neo-Rûmite Sultanate - the former Karamanid the power that emerged from the black and white sheep tribes a while back and didn't their empire include most of Iran at one point? If so that sounds like a real case of overstretch. Plus wasn't the empire basically a satellite of them at one stage? Or I'm I mixing up the states in the area? It would give depth to the empire however.

David does sound ambitious, plus even rumours of a desire for 'restoring' the pre-Manzikert borders is going to upset a hell of a lot of people, including I think all his neighbours.

Another good chapter and looks like we're back with the empire for a while.

Steve
 

Eparkhos

Well-known member
Eparkhos

No idea on the reference. Are you referring to the number of 100,000 there? [Unless something like that was a number alleged IIRC for the size of the force that Darius sent to invade European Greece after the defeat of the Ionian rebellion, which Athens supported?]

That would mean their attacking Kartvelia as well as Moldova so there's potential for them to be engaged on several fronts and the allies would I assume have a significant naval superiority, although I assume that "could imperil Trapezuntine holdings in Perateia". Thinking about it is this the ally that Ebülhayr Paşa looked to for aid a couple of chapters back. I wasn't thinking of the north as a possible direction but that could be why they were clashing with Moldova.

Is the Neo-Rûmite Sultanate - the former Karamanid the power that emerged from the black and white sheep tribes a while back and didn't their empire include most of Iran at one point? If so that sounds like a real case of overstretch. Plus wasn't the empire basically a satellite of them at one stage? Or I'm I mixing up the states in the area? It would give depth to the empire however.

David does sound ambitious, plus even rumours of a desire for 'restoring' the pre-Manzikert borders is going to upset a hell of a lot of people, including I think all his neighbours.

Another good chapter and looks like we're back with the empire for a while.

Steve
No, the Karamanids/Neo-Rum are completely separate from the Qoyunlu/Qutlughids at this point
 

ATP

Well-known member
100.000...all i could think is Grunwald battle/1410/ where both parties claimed that they fought 100.000 enemies.
In realist - Teutonic order probably have 16-17.000 calvary,and polish-lithuanians - about 23.000.
Still biggest calvary battle of medieval period.

Back to topic - no matter who would be enemy,neo-rumites or mongols,he need light and medium calvary supported by dragoons.
England archers with longbows have some mounted units which fought only on foot supporting calvary,he could do the same.
 

Eparkhos

Well-known member
@stevep
No idea on the reference. Are you referring to the number of 100,000 there? [Unless something like that was a number alleged IIRC for the size of the force that Darius sent to invade European Greece after the defeat of the Ionian rebellion, which Athens supported?]
Hungarian folk song, actually.
That would mean their attacking Kartvelia as well as Moldova so there's potential for them to be engaged on several fronts and the allies would I assume have a significant naval superiority, although I assume that "could imperil Trapezuntine holdings in Perateia". Thinking about it is this the ally that Ebülhayr Paşa looked to for aid a couple of chapters back. I wasn't thinking of the north as a possible direction but that could be why they were clashing with Moldova.
Ding ding ding.
David does sound ambitious, plus even rumours of a desire for 'restoring' the pre-Manzikert borders is going to upset a hell of a lot of people, including I think all his neighbours.

Another good chapter and looks like we're back with the empire for a while.
Oh yeah, we'll be going back to the Empire for a while. David's ambitions (and other things) will cause trouble in the future, no doubt about it. I'd say more, but that's be spoiling.
100.000...all i could think is Grunwald battle/1410/ where both parties claimed that they fought 100.000 enemies.
In realist - Teutonic order probably have 16-17.000 calvary,and polish-lithuanians - about 23.000.
Still biggest calvary battle of medieval period.

Back to topic - no matter who would be enemy,neo-rumites or mongols,he need light and medium calvary supported by dragoons.
England archers with longbows have some mounted units which fought only on foot supporting calvary,he could do the same.
David's army does need to be mordenized rather quickly, as the Trapezuntines have historically tended towards heavy/medium infantry from the bandons and light infantry from irregulars. I don't know where they'l get the horsemen, though.
 
Appendix A: December 1523, Sarai

Eparkhos

Well-known member
I should also note I started writing narrative appendices

Appendix A: December 1523, Sarai

Nogai rode across the plains, his own ragged breath barely audible over the thundering of his horse’s hooves and the thunder of cannonade behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, anything other than the blood-red sky and circling carrion birds obscured by the rollicking of his mount. Every fiber of his being was screaming at him to keep riding as far and as fast he could, his sweaty hands clenched around the reigns, but he needed to know what was behind him.

He pulled his reign and tried to turn, but his horse refused to follow, rearing and thrashing as it tried to continue its flight. Nogai clung to its mane like he always did, but the coarse hair slid out of his fingers like water and he fell for the first time since his childhood, the void beneath him seeming to suck him in. He hit the ground like a stone and instinctively rolled, then froze as he caught sight of the city behind him.

Sarai--he had spent enough time in the capital to know it like the back of his hand--was engulfed in flame, great black plumes of smoke from burning homes and funeral pyres rising into the hellish sky. Beside it, the Volga lay choked with bodies, a carpet of floating black that stretched from bank to bank. As he watched, the minarets of the great mosque were hauled down, crashing to the ground with the sound of doom. A swarm of men scurried over the palace and merchants’ quarters, looting and carrying off everything they could. Wagons lay scattered around the edge of the city, piled high with the riches of the khanate and surrounded by chain gangs of women and children, all screaming, crying out for mercy.

Something tightened around his ankle and he glanced over his shoulder to see that his horse had been caught by another rider, no, riders. A half-dozen men galloped towards him, one carrying an orange horsetail banner, with bows held at full taut. At once, they loosed, and the arrows hurtled towards him....


Nogai Ahmed Khan sat bolt upright, chest heaving. His hands raced to his chest and he felt all over his torso, searching for arrow wounds, then to his relief realized it had been a dream. He fell back into bed, panting, thanking God and all the angels that it had just been a dream. His stomach still churned, though, and after trying to ignore it for several agonizing minutes he stood and started to pace.

The tiles of the palace floor were cold, colder than the pit in his stomach even. He had had a similar dream once before, on the night before his victory at Taipaq five years ago. That dream had come true; with the swinging of his left flank around the edge of the Uzbek line he had forced them to yield the field entirely. Could this dream come true? Was it a premonition of the fall of his empire? He shuddered, praying it wasn’t. Still, if it was, it could be a gift. God would not have given him this forewarning if he intended to abandon him. He paused, replaying the dream over in his mind. He recognized the banners of the invaders, they belonged to the personal guard of the Uzbek khan. Surely, that meant that if he did not change his ways, then the Uzbeks would destroy his empire. He ought to shift his men eastward and strike against them as soon as possible, to make sure they could not bring about his ruin.

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t do that. The Russians and the Poles grew stronger every year, and if he turned his full force against the Uzbeks they would strike him in his back and destroy him that way. He sighed, kicking the frame of his bed. That was the root of the problem, after all. The cowardly farmers bred faster than his people did, and they were growing bolder as the disparity between them grew. Eventually, they would overwhelm him or his successors by sheer weight of numbers, it was just a matter of time.

Nogai paused, thinking. Numbers wouldn’t be a problem if he kept them fighting each other. In the time of his forefathers, the Russian and Polish states had been utterly smashed and reduced to squabbling fiefdoms, all paying tribute to him while fighting him again. What if he did so again? Did he even have enough men to do so? It would be much easier if he put fear back into them, sent them running like rats like Subotai had once done, and destroyed them without fighting them….

“Servant!” he shouted.

A Ruthenian servant, his name Vladimir or Dmitri or something, scrambled in through a side door.

“Yes, my master?” he said in an irritated tone.

Nogai frowned, deciding not to waste his time beating him for his insolence. He’d have him sold south to the Ottomans soon enough. “Fetch Tuqtamiş.”

“Yes, my lord.” The Ruthenian scurried out of the room, and he resumed pacing. A few minutes later, Tuqtamiş entered through the main door, surprisingly well-dressed for having been woken in the middle of the night. Nogai said as much.

“I’ve found to always be prepared.” Tuqtamiş said in his typical polished tone.

“Good for you,” Nogai said, knowing that he wasn’t going to get a straight answer. “Tell me, which of our neighbors is the weakest?”

Tuqtamiş paused for a moment, eyes and lips pursed. “The Khanate of Turan or Great Perm, I believe. They’re both quite fragile, more coalitions of tribes than an actual khanate or chiefdom. I imagine we could crush them in a season or less.”

Nogai shook his head. “No, I mean our settled neighbors. Novgorod, Lithuania, Moldova, them and their ilk.”

Tuqtamiş paused again. “You mean settled neighbor? Feudal, or centralized, right?”

Nogai nodded, and his secretary paused once again.

“I believe,” he said, an unusual note of caution in his voice, “That that would be the Kartvelians. They’re a patchwork of lordships and estates, and probably couldn’t muster more than two tumens against us.” he paused again. “They’ve actually been rather aggressive towards us recently, their priests have been spreading their slave’s faith in the tribal territories on our side of the mountain. In fact, they actually spurred the Vainakhs to rebellion a few years ago, and because of them the Avars stopped paying tribute.”

“What?!” Nogai shouted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask, sir.”

Nogai started to shout something, then cut himself off. Tuqtamiş was right. “If something like this happens again, let me know.”

He turned and started pacing again. “We have what, seven tumens to their two? It’s time to put the fear of God back in them. When was the last time we raided them, anyway?”

“Sometime around 1335, I believe. The Dzadhiks* went through around 1395, but they’ve been practically untouched since then.”

“Good, send out the riders. Tell my vassals to gather here by the end of March.” Nogai said. Visions of victorious slaughter and raping-and-pillaging flashed through his mind. After a century and change of peace, Kartvelia would be brimming with loot and slaves. Hell, if it went well enough, he might be able to gather enough men to his banner to reduce the Russias once again and maybe even go after Poland or Hungary. If everything went well, he would go down in legend like Subotai or even Genghis….

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*This is a derogatory name for Temur-e-Lank; the Golden Horde’s khans did not consider him to be a real Mongol such as themselves.
 
Part L: The Gates of Alexander (1455-1525)

Eparkhos

Well-known member
Part L: The Gates of Alexander (1455-1525)

In the middle years of the 15th century, Basileios of Funa and several companions had journeyed into the untamed wilds of the eastern Caucasian Mountains, hoping to spread the good news amongst the even wilder men of the region. The Avars, Vainakhs had the numerous other peoples of the eastern mountains had gained a reputation for martyring missionaries, and so it was to the shock of many that Funa was able to baptize several thousand converts from amongst the heathens, even securing the baptism of an Avar king, Rusalan I. The seed that Funa had planted would sprout like a mustard tree[1], as Rusalan and his successors, painting themselves as the Sword of Christ, unified much of the highlands under Christian rule and won a series of impressive victories against the pagans and the Muslims. This would prompt missionaries would enter the lands of the Muslim Golden Horde, an action which brought the ire of Sarai down upon them and sow the seeds of Saint Zphosas’ War[2], the largest conflict in the region since the War of the Caucasian Gates a quarter-century before.

In the years after Rusalan’s consolidation of the Avar Highlands, the official support of an established state on the northern side of the mountains gave the Orthodox Church a sudden inroad into the tribal region which had so long defied their attempts at proselytization. Traveling through the previously-inaccessible Malla-Kheli pass[3], churchmen from Kartvelia and beyond could go eastwards into the lands of the Kumyks and the Lezgins, or westwards into the lands of the Vainakhs. Efforts at conversion were most successful in the latter two peoples. Despite the Vainakhs’ nominal subservience to the Golden Horde, the Kartvelians were able to keep them in their sphere of influence by projecting power through the Caucasian Gates, which allowed money, embassies and even armies to march north and support factions friendly to Tbilisi in the region. This state of affairs led to the rise of one Ma’aru, a mercenary captain of mixed Avar and Vainakh descent, in the late 1510s. Ma’aru was able to rally the Orthodox Vainakh bands to his banner and, with support from Tbilisi and Kunzakh, crush the pagan and Muslim Vainakhs. At the Battle of the Terka River--hereafter known as the Battle of the Ts’yehn River[4]--in 1519, Ma’aru’s alliance utterly annihilated his enemies, with some 1,500 Vainakhs and several hundred Avar and Kartvelian mercenaries routing 3,000 enemies (a mixture of Vainakhs and Muslim Circassians) and slaying so many that the river ran red with blood, hence the name. With this victory, Orthodox ascendancy in Ciscaucasia was confirmed almost indefinitely. Ma’aru established a capital at Zaur (OTL Vladikavkaz) and set about transforming his alliance into a functioning state.

For the next few years, the Orthodox Vainakhs got along happily. The khan was distracted in the east, beating back invasions by the expansionist Uzbek Khanate, and as far as Sarai was concerned Ciscaucasia might have been on the moon. This happy state of affairs would end abruptly with the ascension of Nogai Ahmed to the khanate in 1521. Nogai Ahmed had been the victor against the Uzbeks at the great Battle of the Ural River in 1520, and had used this as a foothold to overthrow and murder his brother, the reigning khan Selim Ahmed[5]. Nogai Ahmed Khan was in a bad position from the outset. While he had succeeded in repulsing the Uzbeks from the western side of the Ural River, he had been unable to recover the vast swathes of the east which they still controlled. The Golden Horde controlled only the territories of the former Blue Horde; in effect, it had lost much of its eastern heartland, and as such would be greatly weakened as far as steppe empires went. The Russians were on the verge of reunification under the militarist Volga Novgorod, and they would soon pose a grave threat to the Khanate; the Polish-Lithuanians were growing in strength and were starting to push back against his realm’s western edge, and the Uzbeks would soon be able to push against his eastern frontier once again. If his state was going to survive the coming crisis, he needed to act swiftly and crush the upstart breakaways who were nibbling away at his borders to put the fear of God back into his tributaries. Only then, by presenting a united front to his many enemies, would he be able to keep his state alive and face down the many threats that were gathering against him from all directions. In the spring of 1524, he mustered six tumens--120,000 men--more than three-quarters of the men available to him, and marched southwards.

Word of the approaching Mongol horde spread swiftly, and within a few weeks Ma’aru was able to scramble together some 6,000 men, an impressive number for the region but a woefully small force to take on the great khan. He sent out a call for aid to his coreligionists, which by now included the Circassians, the Kartvelians, the Trapezuntines, the Avars and the Lezgins. The latter two quietly ignored his pleas for help, as they themselves could easily become targets of the horde’s fury and so decided to sit this one out. The Circassians did the same, and the aftokrator David apologized for being unable to help but stated that he was busy with other matters, like not losing Perateia to a deluge of horsemen. This left Kartvelia to tentatively answer the call, with Vakhtang dispatching a few thousand mercenaries and volunteers to help Ma’aru in his war against the infidels. Most importantly, he allowed a small number of Vainakhs who had settled in the Pankisi Gorge in the preceding years to cross back over the mountains and aid their fellows in the coming struggle. At the time, Vakhtang considered this to be allowing his rebellion-prone subjects to go off and get themselves killed, essentially creating a self-resolving problem..

Nogai Ahmed arrived in Ciscaucasia in June 1523. He made a circuit of the northern side of the mountains, reminding the Circassian vassals of their duties to supply him with gold and slaves and exacting the tribute that many of them had ‘misplaced’. He then sent embassies eastward to the Kumyks, who were under lose Horde control, threatening to quote ‘fall upon you like a bolt from on high, slaughter your men like pigs, rape and slaughter your women and sell your children in slavery in the distant lands of the Arabs, then grind your bones and scatter your dust across the breadth of the Caspian Sea’ if they did not submit to paying tribute. The Kumyks wisely did so, as did the Avars when confronted with a similar missive. With his flanks secured, the khan then plunged into Vainakhia(?) proper with a crossing of the Terek River in August.

The resulting campaign was a literal and metaphorical massacre. Nogai Ahmed was a cagey ruler, and before he had embarked on his mission of vengeance he had made sure to study the Vainakhs and every element of his society. Upon concluding that the Vainakhs were some of the most clannish people on the planet, he quickly devised his master plan. After crossing the frontier, he raced for the heart of Vainakh territory, shrugging off enemy bands from all directions as they tried to assail the far superior Mongol force from all directions. His target was Nasare, the second largest settlement of Ma’aru’s state and home to one of the five bishoprics north of the mountains. He arrived at Nasare on 16 August, finding that many of the local Vainakhs and their allies had holed up there to protect those who were unable to accompany Ma’aru in his retreat up into the mountains. While Nasare was an impressive fortress by the standards of Ciscaucasia, it was woefully pathetic compared the Lithuanian and Russian fortresses that Nogai Ahmed was used to battering down. As such, a bombardment of only two days served to level the entire eastern half of the city, and the irregular foot soldiers that rushed through the ruins en masse were able to quickly reduce the rest of the city. He but the Nasareans to the sword, believing that they had forfeited any right they had to ‘life’ or ‘surrender’ in rebelling against him.

Moreover, this calculated massacre had the exact effects that Nogai Ahmed hoped it would. Previously, Ma’aru had been able to convince many of the tribal leaders to accompany him on his planned retreat into the mountains, where he (rightfully) believed his chances would much better, as the Mongols weren’t exactly famed mountaineers. Now, however, with many of their clan members butchered by the invaders, many of the elders and war-chiefs felt that they were honor-bound to fight the Mongols on the field of battle. Ma’aru desperately tried to convince them of the foolishness of this, but many of them were determined and sure that God would secure them victory. The resulting Battle of Zaur--actually fought a few miles north of the capital--was about as one-sided as you’d expect, the khan’s men riding down the poorly-armed Vainakhs en masse and losing only a handful of men to their brave but suicidal charges. At the end of the day, 3,000 Vainakhs and 200 Mongols were dead, and the war making ability of the Vainakhs had been irrevocably crippled. The small force that still remained loyal to Ma’aru shattered, as many clans chose to gather up all of their surviving members and flee to Circassia or Avaria rather than try and continue what would surely be a suicidal war. With no other option available to him, Ma’aru fled up into the high mountains with his small band, establishing a new capital settlement in one of the most isolated valleys of Ciscaucasia, known as Bashtorostan (OTL Nizhnyaya Unal). While he refused to surrender to his hated enemy, Ma’aru was effectively knocked out of the war, unable to project power beyond the four valleys closest to Bashtorostan.

With the first target of his wrath all but eliminated, Nogai Ahmed then looked southwards. The Vainakhs were the most direct affront to his control of the region, but they were only as insolent as they had been because of the promise of foreign support. Circassia and Avaria had both been returned to the fold, but as soon as there was no massive army threatening to make it as if they had never, ever lived they would almost certainly resort to their old ways. In order to secure his hold on the region of Ciscaucasia, he needed to reduce what was, in his mind anyway, a state sponsor of rebels: Kartvelia. Not only was this region rich and mostly untouched by Mongol armies[6], in ravaging the region and utterly annihilating the Kartvelians and their state he would prove himself equal to, if not better than, Ahmed Sultan, who had failed to fight through the Caucasian Gates nearly thirty years previous. Indeed, Nogai Ahmed thought, if he could break through then all of Transcaucasia would be his, cementing him as one of the greatest khans to have ever lived, allowing him to take tens of thousands of slaves and levy thousands more pounds of gold and other valuables from the new territories. As he retired to winter camp that year--he wasn’t stupid, trying to force a crossing that late in the year would be suicide--visions of plunder and murder danced in the great khan’s head. In allowing the Pankisi Vainakhs to join their fellows, the Kartvelian king had unknowingly sown the seeds for his own destruction in giving the Horde the pretext it needed to invade.

Meanwhile, on the southern side of the mountains, Vakhtang was blissfully unaware of the Sword of Damocles that hovered above him. The Horde had made frequent raids against the states of Ciscaucasia, so this was nothing new. Supposedly, he was more concerned with the ascension of David to the Trapezuntine throne and the diplomatic and economic ramifications of this than he was of the massive Mongol horde that was massing on his northern border. As such, the provincial dukes remained in their territories that winter and spring, rather than being marshalled for war. Aleks’andretsikhe and the other six fortresses of the Caucasian Gates were reinforced, sure, but Vakhtang was woefully overconfident in their capabilities. He believed that the Mongols, a steppe horde as they were, would be behind the times in terms of siege technology and so would be unable to break through the aging fortresses, many of which had been built more than a quarter of a century before and had not been built-up or expanded since. Nogai Ahmed was in fact an experienced siege commander with a personal love for the development and usage of cannons, which would have been a warning sign if Vakhtang hadn’t been dying of syphilis.

That spring, April of 1525, the khan sent 20,000 men into Circassia to threaten the Circassian Gates as well as remind the Circassian tribes of their subservience to him once again. This force, reinforced with several hundred Circassian mercenaries, bore down on the Duchy of Abkhazia, the westernmost territory of Kartvelia. Had they managed to break through, they would have been able to utterly ravage the Kartvelian heartland in advance of the main invasion force. The Kingdom of Saint George was only spared this destruction because Mamia Dadiani, the march-ward of the Abkhazes and Duke of Tsukhumi, happened to be the only competent feudal ruler in Kartvelia and had taken the arrival of Nogai Ahmed the year before as a sign to start mobilizing. He had some 4,000 men ready and waiting in addition to several thousand more militiamen ready to be called up at a moment’s notice, and so was able to quickly scramble together nearly 11,000 Kartvelians and Abkhazians and several hundred Circassian and Vainakh exiles to meet the invasion force at the fords of the Myzmta near Anakopion (OTL Adler) along the coastal plain. While the Mongols outnumbered Dadiani by more than two-to-one, they were unwilling to risk a forced crossing of the river against a force of heavy infantry that were helped by defensive works, and so elected to withdraw back to Circassia to await reinforcements.

This probing action had its desired effects, in spite of its tactical defeat. Vakhtang was finally roused from his idle and mustered out all the men and lords of Kartvelia, mustering a host of some 30,000 and marching with all speed towards the Circassian Gates. He feared that the Mongols would attempt to push through the western crossings, which were, logistically speaking, far less daunting than the Caucasian Gates. As such, he knew he needed to act swiftly to cut off any potential attack from that region, which together with the impressive fortifications of the Gates would allow him to hold off Mongol attacks until he was able to negotiate a peace. Vakhtang and his army advanced to the Myzmta by the end of June, and so brought a combined host of 40,000 against the Mongols.

Nogai Ahmed then set the next stage of his plan in motion, sending two tumens (40,000 men) and the Circassian vassals to attack the king in the west, with orders to pin them down while taking as few casualties as possible. The fighting along this front began as soon as mid-July, as the Horde and their allies launched probing attacks all along the frontier, fighting a half-dozen small actions before falling back to the west, gradually wearing down the defenders’ numbers and morale. However, this was not the chief area of the war. With Vakhtang pinned down and the Kartvelians thoroughly distracted, Nogai Ahmed was free to move against his true target: the Caucasian Gates.

The Alans, who inhabited the region around the pass, had had the fear of God put into them with the utter crushing of the Vainakhs and so were willing to, if not join the Horde’s forces then at the very least not fight against them. Because of this, the pickets that were supposed to inform the defenders of Baltatsike, the northernmost fortress, of any approaching host abandon their positions and allow the outer bulwark to be taken by surprise. Nogai Ahmed has light cannons sent ahead of the main force with the scouts and hauled up the side of the valley under the cover of night. Once the attack begins, the Circassian and other vassal troops that are being used as human shields surge forward to assail the fortress, whose defenders are caught completely off-guard. Shot rains down from both the pass to the north of them and from the heights to their east, and the defenders soon rout and flee down the valley, leaving the ruins of the fortress to the Horde. Similar tactics are employed at Larshtsike and Daritsike, the next two fortresses, to much success. Then Nogai Ahmed and his army reached Aleks’andretsikhe, the greatest fortress of all the Caucasus. Alek’sandre II had chosen the location of his citadel well, and it was nearly unassailable. It sat on a sheer-faced plateau jutting out into the center of the pass, surrounded by a bend of the Terek that made direct assault almost impossible. The only heights around the city that could be used for bombardment were also fortified, essentially making it impregnable. For a week the Mongols laid siege to the fortress, pounding away with cannons that could barely be elevated enough to even hit the cliffs below the walls and making suicidal assaults across the river and the cliff face. Nogai Ahmed was forced to admit that his whole plan might be foiled by Alexander’s Bastion, and had begun mulling over a strategic withdrawal before the solution appeared to him. An Alan shepherd had been captured by a foraging party, and in exchange for the safety of his family he would tell them of a secret pass around the fatal gorge. Nogai Ahmed was intrigued, and allowed the man to give his peace. It took sixteen days of trekking through the wildest parts of the mountains, at elevations where snow clung to the ground even in summer and where horses would regularly asphyxiate simply from walking, but at long last the advance force descended into the valley of the Jutistskali River. Over the following weeks, thousands of men would make the arduous journey across the Juta Pass, but eventually a full tumen would camp in the valley. In late August, they sallied out into the Terek Valley proper.
Aleks’andretsikhe’s south-facing defenses were still quite impressive, but were much easier to bombard. After several days of round-the-clock bombardment, the guns of the great fortress finally fell silent.

Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, the khan and his army slipped around the fortress and continued down the pass. Gudauritsikhe, the next fortress, had been abandoned by the time they reached it, its garrison retreating down the valley to the more defensible Zakatsikhe, which like the great fortress sat atop a plateau overlooking the entirety of the valley. Here, the Mongols were also forced to lay siege to the fortress, whose guns were able to rain hell down upon them from a great distance. After a few days of non-stop attack, the khan devised a plan. He had ranks of captured prisoners shackled together and marched back and forth along the valley for several days in the row. At such distance, the defenders were unable to discern their countrymen from enemy soldiers and so opened fire, burning through much of their powder reserves as they did so. On the fourth day of this, Nogai Ahmed ordered an assault on the western face of the castle, which was the least steep and thus least defensible. The third wave made it over the walls, and the fortress was taken with much bloodshed on both sides. Nonetheless, with Zakatsikhe taken, there was only one fortress left between the khan and the lowlands: Ananuri, a decrepit castle built during the reign of Tamar, and which would surely be no match for the full weight of the Horde’s army.

On 12 September, Nogai Ahmed and his army arrived at Ananuri and laid siege to it, pummeling the cliffside hardpoint with dozens of cannons of all sizes. The defenders stood strong under the withering fire, but as the second day dawned they appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The towers of the fortress had been reduced to rubble, and the walls sported many gaps; only the unexpectedly fast current of the Arkala River prevented the Mongols from simply swarming it. They had the numbers, after all, some three tumens of 60,000 men were still in the host. Nogai Ahmed was on the verge of ordering the final assault when word reached him from his pickets down the valley:

An army flying the Five-Cross Flag approached from the south-east, numbering nearly as many as the Mongols themselves. The battle to decide the fate of all the Caucasus was to be fought at Ananuri, on the morrow….

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[1] This is a reference to Matthew 17:20
[2] Zphosas was the Avar missionary who had converted many of the Vainakhs and Ma’aru himself, and so was considered to be responsible for the rebellion in Ciscaucasia by the Horde
[3] This is a minor pass across the Eastern Caucasus that is too high and too narrow to be used by an army, but is still large enough for particularly daring merchants to travail. It had previously been unusable because of the many feuding tribes of the area, but with Rusalan’s unification of the region it was now open to trade, which further bound Avaria into the Kartvelian sphere.
[4] Literally translates as “Battle of the river which was red”, more precisely “Battle of the Bloody River”
[5] After Ahmed Sultan’s many victories, ‘Ahmed’ had been adopted as a common regnal suffix for the khans of the Golden Horde. It translates as ‘Most praiseworthy’, and so it was added directly into the ruler’s title as well.
[6] Kartvelia had been devastated by the armies of Temur-e-Lank, but many of the Mongols of the steppe did not consider him to be one of them, instead regarding him as a Tajik or Persian.
 

stevep

Well-known member
I should also note I started writing narrative appendices

Appendix A: December 1523, Sarai

Nogai rode across the plains, his own ragged breath barely audible over the thundering of his horse’s hooves and the thunder of cannonade behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, anything other than the blood-red sky and circling carrion birds obscured by the rollicking of his mount. Every fiber of his being was screaming at him to keep riding as far and as fast he could, his sweaty hands clenched around the reigns, but he needed to know what was behind him.

He pulled his reign and tried to turn, but his horse refused to follow, rearing and thrashing as it tried to continue its flight. Nogai clung to its mane like he always did, but the coarse hair slid out of his fingers like water and he fell for the first time since his childhood, the void beneath him seeming to suck him in. He hit the ground like a stone and instinctively rolled, then froze as he caught sight of the city behind him.

Sarai--he had spent enough time in the capital to know it like the back of his hand--was engulfed in flame, great black plumes of smoke from burning homes and funeral pyres rising into the hellish sky. Beside it, the Volga lay choked with bodies, a carpet of floating black that stretched from bank to bank. As he watched, the minarets of the great mosque were hauled down, crashing to the ground with the sound of doom. A swarm of men scurried over the palace and merchants’ quarters, looting and carrying off everything they could. Wagons lay scattered around the edge of the city, piled high with the riches of the khanate and surrounded by chain gangs of women and children, all screaming, crying out for mercy.

Something tightened around his ankle and he glanced over his shoulder to see that his horse had been caught by another rider, no, riders. A half-dozen men galloped towards him, one carrying an orange horsetail banner, with bows held at full taut. At once, they loosed, and the arrows hurtled towards him....


Nogai Ahmed Khan sat bolt upright, chest heaving. His hands raced to his chest and he felt all over his torso, searching for arrow wounds, then to his relief realized it had been a dream. He fell back into bed, panting, thanking God and all the angels that it had just been a dream. His stomach still churned, though, and after trying to ignore it for several agonizing minutes he stood and started to pace.

The tiles of the palace floor were cold, colder than the pit in his stomach even. He had had a similar dream once before, on the night before his victory at Taipaq five years ago. That dream had come true; with the swinging of his left flank around the edge of the Uzbek line he had forced them to yield the field entirely. Could this dream come true? Was it a premonition of the fall of his empire? He shuddered, praying it wasn’t. Still, if it was, it could be a gift. God would not have given him this forewarning if he intended to abandon him. He paused, replaying the dream over in his mind. He recognized the banners of the invaders, they belonged to the personal guard of the Uzbek khan. Surely, that meant that if he did not change his ways, then the Uzbeks would destroy his empire. He ought to shift his men eastward and strike against them as soon as possible, to make sure they could not bring about his ruin.

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t do that. The Russians and the Poles grew stronger every year, and if he turned his full force against the Uzbeks they would strike him in his back and destroy him that way. He sighed, kicking the frame of his bed. That was the root of the problem, after all. The cowardly farmers bred faster than his people did, and they were growing bolder as the disparity between them grew. Eventually, they would overwhelm him or his successors by sheer weight of numbers, it was just a matter of time.

Nogai paused, thinking. Numbers wouldn’t be a problem if he kept them fighting each other. In the time of his forefathers, the Russian and Polish states had been utterly smashed and reduced to squabbling fiefdoms, all paying tribute to him while fighting him again. What if he did so again? Did he even have enough men to do so? It would be much easier if he put fear back into them, sent them running like rats like Subotai had once done, and destroyed them without fighting them….

“Servant!” he shouted.

A Ruthenian servant, his name Vladimir or Dmitri or something, scrambled in through a side door.

“Yes, my master?” he said in an irritated tone.

Nogai frowned, deciding not to waste his time beating him for his insolence. He’d have him sold south to the Ottomans soon enough. “Fetch Tuqtamiş.”

“Yes, my lord.” The Ruthenian scurried out of the room, and he resumed pacing. A few minutes later, Tuqtamiş entered through the main door, surprisingly well-dressed for having been woken in the middle of the night. Nogai said as much.

“I’ve found to always be prepared.” Tuqtamiş said in his typical polished tone.

“Good for you,” Nogai said, knowing that he wasn’t going to get a straight answer. “Tell me, which of our neighbors is the weakest?”

Tuqtamiş paused for a moment, eyes and lips pursed. “The Khanate of Turan or Great Perm, I believe. They’re both quite fragile, more coalitions of tribes than an actual khanate or chiefdom. I imagine we could crush them in a season or less.”

Nogai shook his head. “No, I mean our settled neighbors. Novgorod, Lithuania, Moldova, them and their ilk.”

Tuqtamiş paused again. “You mean settled neighbor? Feudal, or centralized, right?”

Nogai nodded, and his secretary paused once again.

“I believe,” he said, an unusual note of caution in his voice, “That that would be the Kartvelians. They’re a patchwork of lordships and estates, and probably couldn’t muster more than two tumens against us.” he paused again. “They’ve actually been rather aggressive towards us recently, their priests have been spreading their slave’s faith in the tribal territories on our side of the mountain. In fact, they actually spurred the Vainakhs to rebellion a few years ago, and because of them the Avars stopped paying tribute.”

“What?!” Nogai shouted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask, sir.”

Nogai started to shout something, then cut himself off. Tuqtamiş was right. “If something like this happens again, let me know.”

He turned and started pacing again. “We have what, seven tumens to their two? It’s time to put the fear of God back in them. When was the last time we raided them, anyway?”

“Sometime around 1335, I believe. The Dzadhiks* went through around 1395, but they’ve been practically untouched since then.”

“Good, send out the riders. Tell my vassals to gather here by the end of March.” Nogai said. Visions of victorious slaughter and raping-and-pillaging flashed through his mind. After a century and change of peace, Kartvelia would be brimming with loot and slaves. Hell, if it went well enough, he might be able to gather enough men to his banner to reduce the Russias once again and maybe even go after Poland or Hungary. If everything went well, he would go down in legend like Subotai or even Genghis….

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*This is a derogatory name for Temur-e-Lank; the Golden Horde’s khans did not consider him to be a real Mongol such as themselves.

Eparkhos

Interesting background to the trigger for the attack. Of course one thing that would bring about the dream he had would be if his forces were too heavily bogged down in the Caucasus Mts or worse still heavily defeated there.
 

stevep

Well-known member
Part L: The Gates of Alexander (1455-1525)

In the middle years of the 15th century, Basileios of Funa and several companions had journeyed into the untamed wilds of the eastern Caucasian Mountains, hoping to spread the good news amongst the even wilder men of the region. The Avars, Vainakhs had the numerous other peoples of the eastern mountains had gained a reputation for martyring missionaries, and so it was to the shock of many that Funa was able to baptize several thousand converts from amongst the heathens, even securing the baptism of an Avar king, Rusalan I. The seed that Funa had planted would sprout like a mustard tree[1], as Rusalan and his successors, painting themselves as the Sword of Christ, unified much of the highlands under Christian rule and won a series of impressive victories against the pagans and the Muslims. This would prompt missionaries would enter the lands of the Muslim Golden Horde, an action which brought the ire of Sarai down upon them and sow the seeds of Saint Zphosas’ War[2], the largest conflict in the region since the War of the Caucasian Gates a quarter-century before.

In the years after Rusalan’s consolidation of the Avar Highlands, the official support of an established state on the northern side of the mountains gave the Orthodox Church a sudden inroad into the tribal region which had so long defied their attempts at proselytization. Traveling through the previously-inaccessible Malla-Kheli pass[3], churchmen from Kartvelia and beyond could go eastwards into the lands of the Kumyks and the Lezgins, or westwards into the lands of the Vainakhs. Efforts at conversion were most successful in the latter two peoples. Despite the Vainakhs’ nominal subservience to the Golden Horde, the Kartvelians were able to keep them in their sphere of influence by projecting power through the Caucasian Gates, which allowed money, embassies and even armies to march north and support factions friendly to Tbilisi in the region. This state of affairs led to the rise of one Ma’aru, a mercenary captain of mixed Avar and Vainakh descent, in the late 1510s. Ma’aru was able to rally the Orthodox Vainakh bands to his banner and, with support from Tbilisi and Kunzakh, crush the pagan and Muslim Vainakhs. At the Battle of the Terka River--hereafter known as the Battle of the Ts’yehn River[4]--in 1519, Ma’aru’s alliance utterly annihilated his enemies, with some 1,500 Vainakhs and several hundred Avar and Kartvelian mercenaries routing 3,000 enemies (a mixture of Vainakhs and Muslim Circassians) and slaying so many that the river ran red with blood, hence the name. With this victory, Orthodox ascendancy in Ciscaucasia was confirmed almost indefinitely. Ma’aru established a capital at Zaur (OTL Vladikavkaz) and set about transforming his alliance into a functioning state.

For the next few years, the Orthodox Vainakhs got along happily. The khan was distracted in the east, beating back invasions by the expansionist Uzbek Khanate, and as far as Sarai was concerned Ciscaucasia might have been on the moon. This happy state of affairs would end abruptly with the ascension of Nogai Ahmed to the khanate in 1521. Nogai Ahmed had been the victor against the Uzbeks at the great Battle of the Ural River in 1520, and had used this as a foothold to overthrow and murder his brother, the reigning khan Selim Ahmed[5]. Nogai Ahmed Khan was in a bad position from the outset. While he had succeeded in repulsing the Uzbeks from the western side of the Ural River, he had been unable to recover the vast swathes of the east which they still controlled. The Golden Horde controlled only the territories of the former Blue Horde; in effect, it had lost much of its eastern heartland, and as such would be greatly weakened as far as steppe empires went. The Russians were on the verge of reunification under the militarist Volga Novgorod, and they would soon pose a grave threat to the Khanate; the Polish-Lithuanians were growing in strength and were starting to push back against his realm’s western edge, and the Uzbeks would soon be able to push against his eastern frontier once again. If his state was going to survive the coming crisis, he needed to act swiftly and crush the upstart breakaways who were nibbling away at his borders to put the fear of God back into his tributaries. Only then, by presenting a united front to his many enemies, would he be able to keep his state alive and face down the many threats that were gathering against him from all directions. In the spring of 1524, he mustered six tumens--120,000 men--more than three-quarters of the men available to him, and marched southwards.

Word of the approaching Mongol horde spread swiftly, and within a few weeks Ma’aru was able to scramble together some 6,000 men, an impressive number for the region but a woefully small force to take on the great khan. He sent out a call for aid to his coreligionists, which by now included the Circassians, the Kartvelians, the Trapezuntines, the Avars and the Lezgins. The latter two quietly ignored his pleas for help, as they themselves could easily become targets of the horde’s fury and so decided to sit this one out. The Circassians did the same, and the aftokrator David apologized for being unable to help but stated that he was busy with other matters, like not losing Perateia to a deluge of horsemen. This left Kartvelia to tentatively answer the call, with Vakhtang dispatching a few thousand mercenaries and volunteers to help Ma’aru in his war against the infidels. Most importantly, he allowed a small number of Vainakhs who had settled in the Pankisi Gorge in the preceding years to cross back over the mountains and aid their fellows in the coming struggle. At the time, Vakhtang considered this to be allowing his rebellion-prone subjects to go off and get themselves killed, essentially creating a self-resolving problem..

Nogai Ahmed arrived in Ciscaucasia in June 1523. He made a circuit of the northern side of the mountains, reminding the Circassian vassals of their duties to supply him with gold and slaves and exacting the tribute that many of them had ‘misplaced’. He then sent embassies eastward to the Kumyks, who were under lose Horde control, threatening to quote ‘fall upon you like a bolt from on high, slaughter your men like pigs, rape and slaughter your women and sell your children in slavery in the distant lands of the Arabs, then grind your bones and scatter your dust across the breadth of the Caspian Sea’ if they did not submit to paying tribute. The Kumyks wisely did so, as did the Avars when confronted with a similar missive. With his flanks secured, the khan then plunged into Vainakhia(?) proper with a crossing of the Terek River in August.

The resulting campaign was a literal and metaphorical massacre. Nogai Ahmed was a cagey ruler, and before he had embarked on his mission of vengeance he had made sure to study the Vainakhs and every element of his society. Upon concluding that the Vainakhs were some of the most clannish people on the planet, he quickly devised his master plan. After crossing the frontier, he raced for the heart of Vainakh territory, shrugging off enemy bands from all directions as they tried to assail the far superior Mongol force from all directions. His target was Nasare, the second largest settlement of Ma’aru’s state and home to one of the five bishoprics north of the mountains. He arrived at Nasare on 16 August, finding that many of the local Vainakhs and their allies had holed up there to protect those who were unable to accompany Ma’aru in his retreat up into the mountains. While Nasare was an impressive fortress by the standards of Ciscaucasia, it was woefully pathetic compared the Lithuanian and Russian fortresses that Nogai Ahmed was used to battering down. As such, a bombardment of only two days served to level the entire eastern half of the city, and the irregular foot soldiers that rushed through the ruins en masse were able to quickly reduce the rest of the city. He but the Nasareans to the sword, believing that they had forfeited any right they had to ‘life’ or ‘surrender’ in rebelling against him.

Moreover, this calculated massacre had the exact effects that Nogai Ahmed hoped it would. Previously, Ma’aru had been able to convince many of the tribal leaders to accompany him on his planned retreat into the mountains, where he (rightfully) believed his chances would much better, as the Mongols weren’t exactly famed mountaineers. Now, however, with many of their clan members butchered by the invaders, many of the elders and war-chiefs felt that they were honor-bound to fight the Mongols on the field of battle. Ma’aru desperately tried to convince them of the foolishness of this, but many of them were determined and sure that God would secure them victory. The resulting Battle of Zaur--actually fought a few miles north of the capital--was about as one-sided as you’d expect, the khan’s men riding down the poorly-armed Vainakhs en masse and losing only a handful of men to their brave but suicidal charges. At the end of the day, 3,000 Vainakhs and 200 Mongols were dead, and the war making ability of the Vainakhs had been irrevocably crippled. The small force that still remained loyal to Ma’aru shattered, as many clans chose to gather up all of their surviving members and flee to Circassia or Avaria rather than try and continue what would surely be a suicidal war. With no other option available to him, Ma’aru fled up into the high mountains with his small band, establishing a new capital settlement in one of the most isolated valleys of Ciscaucasia, known as Bashtorostan (OTL Nizhnyaya Unal). While he refused to surrender to his hated enemy, Ma’aru was effectively knocked out of the war, unable to project power beyond the four valleys closest to Bashtorostan.

With the first target of his wrath all but eliminated, Nogai Ahmed then looked southwards. The Vainakhs were the most direct affront to his control of the region, but they were only as insolent as they had been because of the promise of foreign support. Circassia and Avaria had both been returned to the fold, but as soon as there was no massive army threatening to make it as if they had never, ever lived they would almost certainly resort to their old ways. In order to secure his hold on the region of Ciscaucasia, he needed to reduce what was, in his mind anyway, a state sponsor of rebels: Kartvelia. Not only was this region rich and mostly untouched by Mongol armies[6], in ravaging the region and utterly annihilating the Kartvelians and their state he would prove himself equal to, if not better than, Ahmed Sultan, who had failed to fight through the Caucasian Gates nearly thirty years previous. Indeed, Nogai Ahmed thought, if he could break through then all of Transcaucasia would be his, cementing him as one of the greatest khans to have ever lived, allowing him to take tens of thousands of slaves and levy thousands more pounds of gold and other valuables from the new territories. As he retired to winter camp that year--he wasn’t stupid, trying to force a crossing that late in the year would be suicide--visions of plunder and murder danced in the great khan’s head. In allowing the Pankisi Vainakhs to join their fellows, the Kartvelian king had unknowingly sown the seeds for his own destruction in giving the Horde the pretext it needed to invade.

Meanwhile, on the southern side of the mountains, Vakhtang was blissfully unaware of the Sword of Damocles that hovered above him. The Horde had made frequent raids against the states of Ciscaucasia, so this was nothing new. Supposedly, he was more concerned with the ascension of David to the Trapezuntine throne and the diplomatic and economic ramifications of this than he was of the massive Mongol horde that was massing on his northern border. As such, the provincial dukes remained in their territories that winter and spring, rather than being marshalled for war. Aleks’andretsikhe and the other six fortresses of the Caucasian Gates were reinforced, sure, but Vakhtang was woefully overconfident in their capabilities. He believed that the Mongols, a steppe horde as they were, would be behind the times in terms of siege technology and so would be unable to break through the aging fortresses, many of which had been built more than a quarter of a century before and had not been built-up or expanded since. Nogai Ahmed was in fact an experienced siege commander with a personal love for the development and usage of cannons, which would have been a warning sign if Vakhtang hadn’t been dying of syphilis.

That spring, April of 1525, the khan sent 20,000 men into Circassia to threaten the Circassian Gates as well as remind the Circassian tribes of their subservience to him once again. This force, reinforced with several hundred Circassian mercenaries, bore down on the Duchy of Abkhazia, the westernmost territory of Kartvelia. Had they managed to break through, they would have been able to utterly ravage the Kartvelian heartland in advance of the main invasion force. The Kingdom of Saint George was only spared this destruction because Mamia Dadiani, the march-ward of the Abkhazes and Duke of Tsukhumi, happened to be the only competent feudal ruler in Kartvelia and had taken the arrival of Nogai Ahmed the year before as a sign to start mobilizing. He had some 4,000 men ready and waiting in addition to several thousand more militiamen ready to be called up at a moment’s notice, and so was able to quickly scramble together nearly 11,000 Kartvelians and Abkhazians and several hundred Circassian and Vainakh exiles to meet the invasion force at the fords of the Myzmta near Anakopion (OTL Adler) along the coastal plain. While the Mongols outnumbered Dadiani by more than two-to-one, they were unwilling to risk a forced crossing of the river against a force of heavy infantry that were helped by defensive works, and so elected to withdraw back to Circassia to await reinforcements.

This probing action had its desired effects, in spite of its tactical defeat. Vakhtang was finally roused from his idle and mustered out all the men and lords of Kartvelia, mustering a host of some 30,000 and marching with all speed towards the Circassian Gates. He feared that the Mongols would attempt to push through the western crossings, which were, logistically speaking, far less daunting than the Caucasian Gates. As such, he knew he needed to act swiftly to cut off any potential attack from that region, which together with the impressive fortifications of the Gates would allow him to hold off Mongol attacks until he was able to negotiate a peace. Vakhtang and his army advanced to the Myzmta by the end of June, and so brought a combined host of 40,000 against the Mongols.

Nogai Ahmed then set the next stage of his plan in motion, sending two tumens (40,000 men) and the Circassian vassals to attack the king in the west, with orders to pin them down while taking as few casualties as possible. The fighting along this front began as soon as mid-July, as the Horde and their allies launched probing attacks all along the frontier, fighting a half-dozen small actions before falling back to the west, gradually wearing down the defenders’ numbers and morale. However, this was not the chief area of the war. With Vakhtang pinned down and the Kartvelians thoroughly distracted, Nogai Ahmed was free to move against his true target: the Caucasian Gates.

The Alans, who inhabited the region around the pass, had had the fear of God put into them with the utter crushing of the Vainakhs and so were willing to, if not join the Horde’s forces then at the very least not fight against them. Because of this, the pickets that were supposed to inform the defenders of Baltatsike, the northernmost fortress, of any approaching host abandon their positions and allow the outer bulwark to be taken by surprise. Nogai Ahmed has light cannons sent ahead of the main force with the scouts and hauled up the side of the valley under the cover of night. Once the attack begins, the Circassian and other vassal troops that are being used as human shields surge forward to assail the fortress, whose defenders are caught completely off-guard. Shot rains down from both the pass to the north of them and from the heights to their east, and the defenders soon rout and flee down the valley, leaving the ruins of the fortress to the Horde. Similar tactics are employed at Larshtsike and Daritsike, the next two fortresses, to much success. Then Nogai Ahmed and his army reached Aleks’andretsikhe, the greatest fortress of all the Caucasus. Alek’sandre II had chosen the location of his citadel well, and it was nearly unassailable. It sat on a sheer-faced plateau jutting out into the center of the pass, surrounded by a bend of the Terek that made direct assault almost impossible. The only heights around the city that could be used for bombardment were also fortified, essentially making it impregnable. For a week the Mongols laid siege to the fortress, pounding away with cannons that could barely be elevated enough to even hit the cliffs below the walls and making suicidal assaults across the river and the cliff face. Nogai Ahmed was forced to admit that his whole plan might be foiled by Alexander’s Bastion, and had begun mulling over a strategic withdrawal before the solution appeared to him. An Alan shepherd had been captured by a foraging party, and in exchange for the safety of his family he would tell them of a secret pass around the fatal gorge. Nogai Ahmed was intrigued, and allowed the man to give his peace. It took sixteen days of trekking through the wildest parts of the mountains, at elevations where snow clung to the ground even in summer and where horses would regularly asphyxiate simply from walking, but at long last the advance force descended into the valley of the Jutistskali River. Over the following weeks, thousands of men would make the arduous journey across the Juta Pass, but eventually a full tumen would camp in the valley. In late August, they sallied out into the Terek Valley proper.
Aleks’andretsikhe’s south-facing defenses were still quite impressive, but were much easier to bombard. After several days of round-the-clock bombardment, the guns of the great fortress finally fell silent.

Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, the khan and his army slipped around the fortress and continued down the pass. Gudauritsikhe, the next fortress, had been abandoned by the time they reached it, its garrison retreating down the valley to the more defensible Zakatsikhe, which like the great fortress sat atop a plateau overlooking the entirety of the valley. Here, the Mongols were also forced to lay siege to the fortress, whose guns were able to rain hell down upon them from a great distance. After a few days of non-stop attack, the khan devised a plan. He had ranks of captured prisoners shackled together and marched back and forth along the valley for several days in the row. At such distance, the defenders were unable to discern their countrymen from enemy soldiers and so opened fire, burning through much of their powder reserves as they did so. On the fourth day of this, Nogai Ahmed ordered an assault on the western face of the castle, which was the least steep and thus least defensible. The third wave made it over the walls, and the fortress was taken with much bloodshed on both sides. Nonetheless, with Zakatsikhe taken, there was only one fortress left between the khan and the lowlands: Ananuri, a decrepit castle built during the reign of Tamar, and which would surely be no match for the full weight of the Horde’s army.

On 12 September, Nogai Ahmed and his army arrived at Ananuri and laid siege to it, pummeling the cliffside hardpoint with dozens of cannons of all sizes. The defenders stood strong under the withering fire, but as the second day dawned they appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The towers of the fortress had been reduced to rubble, and the walls sported many gaps; only the unexpectedly fast current of the Arkala River prevented the Mongols from simply swarming it. They had the numbers, after all, some three tumens of 60,000 men were still in the host. Nogai Ahmed was on the verge of ordering the final assault when word reached him from his pickets down the valley:

An army flying the Five-Cross Flag approached from the south-east, numbering nearly as many as the Mongols themselves. The battle to decide the fate of all the Caucasus was to be fought at Ananuri, on the morrow….

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This is a reference to Matthew 17:20
[2] Zphosas was the Avar missionary who had converted many of the Vainakhs and Ma’aru himself, and so was considered to be responsible for the rebellion in Ciscaucasia by the Horde
[3] This is a minor pass across the Eastern Caucasus that is too high and too narrow to be used by an army, but is still large enough for particularly daring merchants to travail. It had previously been unusable because of the many feuding tribes of the area, but with Rusalan’s unification of the region it was now open to trade, which further bound Avaria into the Kartvelian sphere.
[4] Literally translates as “Battle of the river which was red”, more precisely “Battle of the Bloody River”
[5] After Ahmed Sultan’s many victories, ‘Ahmed’ had been adopted as a common regnal suffix for the khans of the Golden Horde. It translates as ‘Most praiseworthy’, and so it was added directly into the ruler’s title as well.
[6] Kartvelia had been devastated by the armies of Temur-e-Lank, but many of the Mongols of the steppe did not consider him to be one of them, instead regarding him as a Tajik or Persian.

Well that's set up a cliff hanger. ;) Vakhtang's forces have arrived, although whether they have any Trebazon forces with them are unclear, although I suspect not. I have a feeling that the Kartvelias will lose but probably inflict some heavy losses and win time for David and aid to arrive. Not sure if this is the entire Kartvelia force in which case the western passes could now be exposed. If not however and Nogai could find himself in a tight situation, especially with Aleks’andretsikhe’s still held, albeit with limited resources, across his line of retreat.

Of course if the Kartvelia military is largely destroyed in this conflict before the country is rescued by the empire I could see an ambitious emperor such as David thinking about becoming the permanent 'protector' of Kartvelia. ;) If the Khanate is defeated heavily enough that its crippled as a threat he could also seek to extend his influence across the Caucasus as well into the Orthodox states there. Although that could strain relations with Kartvelia and also divert him from the more useful expansion in Anatolia.

Looking forward to seeing what happens next.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Great chapters.
1.i thought,that tuman have 10.500 soldiers,not 20.000.
2.Vahtang dying from syphilis ? how ? even if somebody discover Americas,there would be no time for people in Caucasus dying from that.
3.So,most of Caucasus people would be christian in this TL.logical.
4.Uzbeks would take over Golden Horde? also logical.And i do not think,that russians or anybody else could conqer much there.
Steppe people,as long as they have working armies,would win over any infrantry there till at least 1800.
Russians in OTL could win only becouse mongol-like armies was replaced by band of raiders,good for ravaging cyvilians,but not fighting other army.I bet,that mongols from 1240 would wipe out any european army on steppe till 1800.

5.You could made their calvary in 3 possible ways:
A.hire steppe people for fight,but also to train your own calvary.In 5 years,you do not need them anymore.
B.Mounted infrantry - both range,like english with longbows,and heavy infrantry,like saxon huscarls.
C. Poland could made winged hussarls becouse we buy warm blood horses from both Ottomans and Persia,mixed with european,and get so called equus polonus.Trebizond could do the same - and invite winged hussarls before Poland did.
 
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stevep

Well-known member
Great chapters.
1.i thought,that tuman have 10.500 soldiers,not 20.000.
2.Vahtang dying from syphilis ? how ? even if somebody discover Americas,there would be no time for people in Caucasus dying from that.
3.So,most of Caucasus people would be christian in this TL.logical.
4.Uzbeks would take over Golden Horde? also logical.And i do not think,that russians or anybody else could conqer much there.
Steppe people,as long as they have working armies,would win over any infrantry there till at least 1800.
Russians in OTL could win only becouse mongol-like armies was replaced by band of raiders,good for ravaging cyvilians,but not fighting other army.I bet,that mongols from 1240 would wipe out any european army on steppe till 1800.

5.You could made their calvary in 3 possible ways:
A.hire steppe people for fight,but also to train your own calvary.In 5 years,you do not need them anymore.
B.Mounted infrantry - both range,like english with longbows,and heavy infrantry,like saxon huscarls.
C. Poland could made winged hussarls becouse we buy warm blood horses from both Ottomans and Persia,mixed with european,and get so called equus polonus.Trebizond could do the same - and invite winged hussarls before Poland did.

1) must admit that was my thought as well.

2) Good point. Some other form of VD or wasting disease but I think syphillis is still thought of as originating in the Americas I believe.

4) Would say about a century earlier for when settled societies really start to get an edge over nomads. With decent organisation and leadership and firearms becoming effective at outclassing composite bows.

As it is the Russians especially started dominating the remainants of the Horde and other steppe people about this time and I think Eparkhos mentioned the chief Slavic/Rus state was a Volga Novgorod and Nogai himself in discussing targets mentioned Novgorod, which is probably that one. Hence I suspect their already starting to spread down the middle Volga.

Steve
 
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