The New World of the White Huns

[Hobelhouse]

And a double whammy, I've got a post to update you with as well!

The Aquitainian Rebellion

The Lankan capture of Olizpo [Lisbon] and the Amuricushi invasion that followed on its heels put the Ispanian state on the back foot. The Amuricushi were able to take Gades and Valencia by surprise, seizing most of Ispania's southern coast and putting the Straits of Gibraltar under their sole control. At first, King Francisau and his court dithered, knowing the Moors had ill intentions, but completely unable to read the intentions of the Lankans. As the Lankan fleet remained in port, however, it was decided the Moors were the larger threat, and the Ispanian army under Duke Tomas of Toledo fended off the Moorish expeditionary force just outside of Cortoba. They might have pushed forward and expelled the invasion there, but word had reached Saragosta of a new problem...

The nobles of Aquitaine had found their tacit acceptance of division at the hands of the Burgundians and Spaniards had bought them nothing but penury and ever-lower expectations. The flow of New World silver into Bordeu had, for the most part, stopped after the exile of the Golden Fleet and the de Agdes' supporters. Once a contender for cultural capital of Europe, the city was now decidedly shabbier, littered with the hulks of half-finished construction projects which had not seen work for decades. Aquitaine's other possessions, its sugar islands in particular, had also passed under Ispanian control and now sent their tariffs to Saragosta. Many of the supporters and opponents of King Alphonse alike had found their fortunes ruined by the Ispanian embargo of New Aquitaine, and after the failed Ispanian invasion of that kingdom, a fair number attempted to elude the Ispanian embargo (often through Breton and Vasconian intermediaries) and sailed to New Aquitaine regardless, taking possession of lands their families had, until then, been absentee landlords of. Thus there were many noble families with branches on both sides of the Atlantic and who maintained a continual, if attenuated, correspondence with each other. Those who remained in Aquitaine, then, saw an opportunity in Ispania's ongoing humiliation....

Aquitaine's orphan daughter, New Aquitaine, while massively successful through sheer weight of silver, still had several critical strategic weaknesses. It had a critical shortage of skilled manpower, particular of those skilled enough in the maintenance of Old World crops and livestock, and especially in skilled manufacturers and guildsmen. The Chimor and increasingly, a select few other ethnic groups like the Chincha had become acquainted in these skills, but the state's wide expansion threatened to stretch their small numbers thin. African, and later, southeast Asian slaves would fill this gap. More than this, though, none of these groups (other than, to an extent, the Chimor) could really be trusted to fight, and so this more than anything else left them hungering for Europeans to act as soldiers, leading to the model of "franchise feudalism" that recruited from the Frankish heartlands and Angland, and to their dependence on martial orders like the Lorenzian Brothers and the Knights of St. Peter. But New Aquitiane was running out of new lands to grant Votive venturers. Furthermore, they maintained little naval presence in the Atlantic beyond a bare bones coast guard; the Moors, and to a lesser degree the Antillians, Knights and Bretons served as their de facto navy and merchant fleet there - and amply took their cut. New Aquitaine had adapted to its orphanhood, but its ruler, Emperor Jerome, was always reminded of the loss of the motherland.

Things came to a head after the proclamation of Pope John XXII in Rome. Exarch Leo II of Sardinia, of the cadet Tolosa branch of the de Agde dynasty, was one of the first European rulers to recognize the new Pope. Sardinia, after the Division of Aquitaine, had become another home for exiled de Agde loyalists and various malcontents from the Northern Papal order. They were a close ally of the Two Africas, whose other allies, the "holy republics" in the boot and heel of Italy, had also fallen behind the new Pope. The Two Africas' ruler, King Warmaksanes, also had reason to dislike the Northern order; it was widely resented, for example, that the Pope had never granted official recognition of New World claims to anyone outside the old Frankish realm (which was also a point of contention for other realms like Angland and Denmark [1]). Furthermore, the Mauri people broadly had a greater sympathy for the more heterodox and egalitarian ideas coalescing around the Southern Pope. Thus it was not hard for Exarch Leo II to bring together a plot bringing all these elements together...

With confirmation of foreign support (including large donations of silver channeled through the New World branch of the Knights of St Peter) the new Pope's backers discussed how to respond to the Pope in Aachen, Urban III's, proclamation of excommunication for the so-called "anti-pope" and his followers. In consultation with his council and the magnates of Rome, including Grand Prior Ignacio of the Italian Langue of the Knights of St Peter, and the Nuncio of the Novaquitianian Langue[2], the Pope in Rome, John XXII, would be moved to make a proclamation excommunicating Urban III in turn, and denouncing a number of "worldly" acts and policies of the Northern Papacy, such as the Division of Aquitaine, the sale of Church offices to power-hungry nobles, and the use of Papal slave soldiers as tax farmers (which weighed heavily on Neustria and the Rhineland in particular[3]), calling for a new Ecumenical Council be called in Rome to discuss the issues of the Church in the Votive Age and concluding with a withering critique of Pope Urban III and his predecessors, lamenting the "Babylonian Captivity of the Mother Church by the Counterfeit Patriarchs of Aachen" (this passage was believed to be written by Grand Prior Ignacio himself.)

This was the opportunity the de Agdes had been waiting for. With the promise of the backing of both the Pope of Rome and New Aquitaine, long-laid plans were moved into action. In 1364, Count Luic of Gironde led a small force of de Agde loyalists and Breton mercenaries to capture the citadel of the Ispanian viceroy in Bordeu, and proclaimed his support for the Southern Pope, and for the rightful ruler of Aquitaine, Emperor Jerome de Agde. Other loyalists, acting out of Brittany and Pictavia to the north, mounted incursions of their own.

Now, Emperor Jerome did not have any shortage of problems to attend to already; in Tolteca, the Chicomoztoca and the Chimalhuacan were on the march, and in the south, a major Aymara revolt was brewing. Yet, it was said, he was one who always had the flash of new crowns in his eyes. Therefore, when word of the seizure of Bordeu reached him, he sailed to the Knights' ostensibly neutral stronghold of Sant-Bartolomeu [Tobago] on the remaining vessels of the old Golden Fleet, along with a chartered Moorish flotilla. There, he gathered a collection of men, including a large number of Knights and Lorenzian native auxillaries, and Anglo-Norse, Frankish, and Moorish mercenaries. His general, Valentin Garat, led a cohort that sailed first to take back St Joan [St Lucia] and the Islas Sucradas [Grenadines], then sailed on to Bordeu. Emperor Jerome sailed with the remaining cohort shortly after.

His landing sparked celebrations that one day would later inspire many famous paintings; proto-national and religious fervor became merged on the figure of Jerome returning as liberator from across the sea. This won their hearts; his generosity in silver won their purses. Emperor Jerome settled in to establish court in Bordeu, while Valentin Garat and the Count of Gironde led an army inland to liberate Tolosa. Yet, he found his new throne awkward, especially at first. Jerome, now getting on in years, had last seen Aquitaine as a young boy, when he was smuggled out from his relatives' home by de Agde loyalists. He had become used to having an army of native attendees and riding in a palanquin as their magnates did; and used to having cooperative, subservient nobles, who accepted his dictates with little pushback; this led him to make some major faux pas in his popular and political relations. Nevertheless, de Agde power and money helped smoothed this over, along with his own not inconsiderable personal charm, and his position was bolstered after Tolosa fell and his forces repulsed a hastily assembled Ispanian army crossing the Pyrennes near the Garats' old family seat, the original Morlans.

Emperor Jerome was excommunicated by Northern Pope Urban III after news of his landing reached Aachen. This forced open multiple faultlines within the church and its hierarchy. The Knights, in particular, suffered fraught internal division; the Novaquitainean tail had started to wag the European dog. The Nuncio of the New Aquitainian Langue had wide influence with the Roman nobility, thanks to the influence of New World silver renovating the port of Ostia and many other places in and around Rome. And, de facto, this branch of the Order was simultaneously a branch of the Novaquitainian state, owning vast estates in the Andes, particularly the frontier regions. The current Grandmaster of the Order, Agostin de Icosi, was Mauri in background and also sympathetic to Pope John XXII. Yet the Grand Priors of many Langues remained loyal to the Northern Pope and vicious infighting broke out among the leadership, and the Grand Prior of Italy and the Nuncio of New Aquitaine were excommunicated; Grand Master Agostin was himself, in turn, excommunicated for refusing to remove them from their positions.

This led to a schism in the Order; The Ispanians, feeling vindicated on treating the Knights like a fifth column, seized their assets in Ispania (at least, those not behind Amurichushi lines.) The Burgundian, Rhaetian, and other northern Langues fell behind the new, Pope Urban-approved Grandmaster (former Grand Prior of Burgundy) Bernard of Lyons, while the others fell in solidly with Grandmaster Agostin or were evenly divided. The split permeated down to the ground level, though, and there was a period of chaos where vessels and men defected to one side or another, sometimes multiple times. Knight-on-Knight violence broke out in divided commanderies like those of Niza and Mantova. Unit cohesion, in the Mediterranean branch at least, suffered a blow it would not quickly recover from. The commanderies of Arles and Barcino became refuges for Pope Urban III's loyalists from across the Mediterranean (and also kept the Count of Barcino firmly in the Northern camp...)

The Burgundians, solid Northern backers to begin with, entered the war quickly, knowing Jerome would soon come calling for their half of Aquitaine as well. They sent a large and well-trained army to march on Tolosa, with the Pope's blessing. On the other hand, King Giovanni of Italy, of the same dynasty, had been taken by surprise by the news of the new Pope's ascent, and dithered on how to respond, giving the Roman Pope's faction hope he would declare for their side; meanwhile, Grand Prior Ignacio of Italian Langue consolidated control of the Knights' extensive fortresses and holdings in Italy, including the fortress of Heneto [Venice]; the Northern Loyalists would organize around the commandery of Medilano. When King Giovanni eventually, on the urging of his co-dynasts, came down on the side of the Pope in Aachen, revolts broke out in Pisa, Siena, and other Italian cities. The Italian Knights, accustomed from their beginning to acting covertly against the state, lent their support to these revolts and the Italian Langue widely recruited among the rebels and turned into something of a religious mob (in more than one sense of the word), to a degree that disconcerted even Grandmaster Agostin, as "Holy Republics" were proclaimed in Pisa, Siena, and Genua under various local nobles and holy men. With the Italian kingdom in chaos, the Free City of Ravenna moved to expand its territory, and King Giovanni penned a desperate letter for help to Burgundy.

Exarch Leo II landed a Sardinian-Mauri force at Narbo shortly after Jerome's arrival in Europe, and deposed the Burgundian Legate, allowing the Conseila to declare support for Aquitaine. Jerome's forces were battle-hardened from the New World, but comparatively few in number, while Burgundy had many well-trained knights; thus the Burgundians were able to best the Aquitainians outside of Carcassona and prevent them from linking up with the Sardinians and Narbonese. Yet, they were unable to decisively crush Jerome and his forces either, being distracted by the outbreak of rebellion in Italy, and moved to send their armies to help their co-dynasts in the west. Leo II would strike again, landing in Provence and securing the support of its own Exarch to re-assert its old privileges versus the Kings of Burgundy, and the Burgundians would be further split fighting in the south.

Jerome, now in secure control of most of Aquitaine, moved to reward his supporters. His general, Valentin Garat, would be made new Count of his family's ancestral Bearn; the Count of Gironde was promised the currently-defunct County of Auvernia, which belonged to Burgundy for now. He ruffled some feathers in Narbo when he even appointed one of his generals, Petre Aznar, as their new Legate. Petre, who was used to having the run of his vast rural family lands around Lake Nicoya [Nicaragau], might have initially seemed a poor fit to negotiate with the fractious Conseila, but he quickly developed a rapport with many of the younger members of the Conseila through his boisterous style, and this, along with the prospect of lower taxes(the Aquitanians could afford to be generous...) and access to New World markets, was enough to get the Narbonese to firmly commit to being part of the Aquitanian state again.

Jerome could not rest easy, however, for the armies of Neustria, and behind them, of Pope Urban III himself, were now on the march....


[1]As far as the Pope was concerned, the Twin Crowns were rightful rulers of all of North Solvia, no matter that these claims were treated as a joke by the Anglo-Norse who had lived there for more than two hundred years now.
[2]Representing the Grand Prior, who himself lived in Morlans
[3]More on this in a future post...

Meet the New Boss- Nova Ispania Edition

The war with Lanka had not gone well for Ispania, to say the least. Her naval forces defeated, her colonial fortresses would prove vulnerable to bombardment from the sea - as had Olizpo itself. The Red Swans and the Moors took advantage of this weakness; a combined Moorish-Red Swan fleet sailed from Haiti, landing first at the Moorish freeport of Casteddu [Natal]. From there, the fleet moved south along the coast, sailing to Gaundere [Maceió] and captured that port as well, here, they proclaimed the rebirth of the old kingdom of Tatolamaayo (or simply Tatola), under a Fula noble of their choosing. Raising a small band of Fula cavalrymen, Tupi scouts, and Moorish tufenjeras, the fleet then sailed south to San Valentino [Recife] and bombarded the Ispanian Capitan-General's citadel. When he surrendered, the Moors were able to seize the armory and distribute weapons to their catspaws. The fleet continued its path south, where they were able to reinforce the other major freeport of Anfa [Salvador], liberate Galdugo in a similar fashion, and finally retake La Tomzepanda [Sao Paolo] - which the Red Swans reinstated as their own freeport of Rakhtahamsabandara.

Kumaraya Ratta, admiral of the Lankan fleet occupying Olizpo, now was now faced with a decision. Having humiliated Ispania, he was now forced to decide what, exactly, he wanted from it. Amuricushi ambassadors, seeking him out discreetly, would urge him to march on, and decapitate the Ispanian state completely. Yet, he could find no quick and simple profit in that.... and he was already operating way beyond his purview. When the Ispaniards sent an emissary to discuss terms, he demanded the right to establish Lankan ports, levy tariffs, and trade freely in Nova Ispania, basing rights in Ferislanda and Figenlanda [the Azores and Madiera], and a host of other economic concessions besides. Facing down invasions in the north and south, the Ispanians still balked, and sent a fleet to attempt to dislodge the Lankans, to similar disastrous results. This led them to, grudgingly, accept the Indian admiarl's terms. Yet, no sooner had the Lankan fleet departed Olizpo, than a Moorish one sailed in - a courtesy for which, it was rumored, several chests of New Aquitaine's finest silver had changed hands.

Returning to South Solvia, Kumaraya Ratta found a changed landscape - the Moors and Red Swans had claimed his prize before he could. Nevertheless, Kumaraya's confidence had swelled with victory, and he presented the Moorish and Red Swan representatives with his treaty with Ispania, giving Lanka what amounted to overlordship in all but name of Nova Ispania. After some deliberation an accommodation was worked out with the Moors; the kingdoms of Tatola and Galodugu would pay tribute to Lanka, while the Moorish freeports and plantations continued to operate, now with an even freer hand. The Lankans would receive a special 25% duty on all sugar and dye going east past Cape Watya, enforced by means of an official stamp given at Sihanuwara, which would thus become a mandatory transshipment and stopover point for most Moorish traders.

The Red Swans proved less accommodating; having won their long-lost possession back at last, they were unwilling to so easily give up its profits. In this case - unlike with the Moors or Ispania - starting a war would have repercussions with their mother city of Khambayat, and thus with Chandratreya, bringing the consequences closer to home. Thus, after leaving a delegation of troops to found a settlement at Jayagrāhī Varāya - the "Port of Victory" [Porto Alegre] - he returned to the Cape, where he received news that war might soon come to Watyan waters anyway, by way of the Kapudesan cities' conflict with the overweening Musengezi....

On the ground, not as much changed for the inhabitants of Nova Ispania as might be expected. The Captaincy of San Marcos and points west, for instance, continued for now under Ispanian rule, as they had not been visited again since the disastrous naval battle with the Lankan fleet. In the revived Fula kingdoms, their new rulers were nominally Christian and fluent in the local Ispanian creole, while the "Iberios" - the now-plurality of the population that claimed mostly Ispanian descent - remained extremely prominent, and even more so, the Moors. The biggest change was a shift in power from aristocratic governors and bureaucrats generally sent from Ispania, to local land magnates who often had extensive marriage ties to Fula and Tupi clans. These magnates would provide many advisors for the kings of Tatola and Galodugu and, indeed, were just as important as the Fula themselves to their rule. Inland, the herdsman kingdom of Binyaala - which, receiving many escaped slaves, had taken on aspects of a maroon colony - remained just as opposed to colonial expansion, but now Moorish arms held their raids at bay, rather than Ispanian ones.

In Raktahamsabandara, things would not remain so peaceful. Over a dozen years of Ispanian occupation, the Christian minority had built up a rather lot of bad blood with the predominately Hindu inhabitants. After the liberation of the port, vengeful Hindus and Buddhists had looted and burned the Cathedral of St James, and vandalized nearly every other church. The Christians, meanwhile, would answer tit-for-tat, assassinating the Red Swan governor in the middle of the night. It is likely that there would have been a general massacre of the Christians had not the head of the local Mauri merchant interest stepped forward and offered to transport any willing Christians to his family's estates on Isla Pasca [St Helena]. The deputy governor, now no longer a deputy, agreed, and so the majority of the Christians then present in the city would come to leave. The Mauri presence, though, would come to grow, and in time the Christian community in the city became almost as large as before...

Map of the coalitions in 1365 of the War of the Popes, including major Knights naval bases and fortresses. No labels, will likely make a larger version with them once the war shakes out...

 

[Mooze17]

Ooooh, this is VERY interesting. It makes sense that if a new religion was going to emerge anywhere, it would be in the Anatolian foothills, which have been the site of so much mixing between varied people’s like Eftal, Greeks, and Alans for such a long period, and have been filled with so many varied heretical beliefs. Patir Manuel was described as emerging from the Hephtalites, and his rhetoric about all being united in a monotheistic god seems to reflect to me more Christian aspects, but the fact that this whole movement is a repudiation of what divides the various marginalized pastoralists of Anatolia and explicitly is rejecting the divisions between the various Buddhist and Christian sects certainly seems set to create something very unique. I don’t think they are going to be crushed, either. The previous post on the Hepthalites mentioned that the Xasar’s increasing restriction of privileges for local Hellenistic Elites played a role in “cohering the disparate peoples of Asia Minor against them”, and I doubt that the site of Manuel’s death would be able to become a site of holy pilgrimage if the Lateris were going to be wiped out. The fact Arashes is also gathering up the remaining Lateris with the explicit intention of fighting back and that the whole movement originally started as a way to unite the many men (and women) of North-Central Anatolia in mutual defense against both the Xasar and the Christodoulids, and that the Xasar hold on the interior of Asia Minor seems to be so weak and peripheral well they are simultaneously alienating a lot of the local elites, seems to me like it’s foreshadowing the Lateris succesfully driving the Xasar and Christodoulids out of Central Anatolia and being successful at converting a large amount of the regions people, perhaps forming a new nation based upon the unique culture of the region with the new religion serving as glue to bind them together.

 

[Practical Lobster]

Ooooh, this is VERY interesting

Thank you! It was a team effort to create the idea, and I must say after having written it I'm feeling pretty happy with how it turned out.

Patir Manuel was described as emerging from the Hephtalites, and his rhetoric about all being united in a monotheistic god seems to reflect to me more Christian aspects, but the fact that this whole movement is a repudiation of what divides the various marginalized pastoralists of Anatolia and explicitly is rejecting the divisions between the various Buddhist and Christian sects certainly seems set to create something very unique.

I agree. Although it is an explicitly monotheistic religion, it should be made clear that the new movement is extremely agnostic on the importance of Jesus, Buddha, etc. It's trying to push past all of that, even if it's blatantly adopting imagery and themes from everything from Xasar paganism to Christianity. There's a little Hinduism there too, I think, in the conception of the divine, but then again there's a little Hinduism in the Sogdian school too, so that makes sense as a through-current. The first major TTL religious cult to spring up out of the blue in the Near East, was, you may recall, explicitly Shaivist, and born out of syncretic contacts with Indian traders, conflating Ohrmazd and Mahadeva.

Lateris succesfully driving the Xasar and Christodoulids out of Central Anatolia and being successful at converting a large amount of the regions people, perhaps forming a new nation based upon the unique culture of the region with the new religion serving as glue to bind them together.

I can't guarantee anything, but it does seem to be a sort of perfect storm. Latreism / Latreia (not sure what I'll go with in the long run) is primed for success, especially compared to the Christodoulids, who are ideologically hollow nominally Christian brigands clinging to the glory of an Empire that's been dust for centuries now (I wanted to subvert the "revival of the empire" trope), or the Theophovoumenoi, who (as I had to emphasize) are getting increasingly savage and bloodthirsty the longer the Xasar era of repression lingers on.

As to whether they'll be able to build a state, we'll have to wait and see. It took the Sikhs several centuries to achieve that, and it took the Safaviyya considerably less. Just depends on circumstances.

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

Wow this feller Kumaraya Ratta has a reputation to rival Caesar and also controls the biggest remaining fleet of an island nation? Surely this is a recipe for political stability

I prefer Latreia btw, and it's gonna be interesting thinking of terminology and rituals there. I'm thinking "Hidden Prince" as a name for the Divine, could plausibly be Jesus or Sakyamuni and emphasizes the formlessness of the concept in general

Also who controls Crete and Cyprus? Are they Egyptian?

 

[Practical Lobster]

Wow this feller Kumaraya Ratta has a reputation to rival Caesar and also controls the biggest remaining fleet of an island nation? Surely this is a recipe for political stability

I don't know about biggest - I think the Lankans are operating with a pretty sizable reserve fleet in their home waters. But "most experienced and best" definitely. Stay tuned for more Kumaraya Ratta adventures!

And like Caesar, the guy pretty much is striking his own treaties in Europe. Which makes one wonder if he might not be chomping at the bit to get back out to a place far enough away he can keep acting autonomously. And perhaps the Polonnaruva monarchy (we gotta name that ruler sooner or later) might (short-sightedly) allow that, since it keep him from stirring up trouble at home or overshadowing them.

I'm thinking "Hidden Prince" as a name for the Divine, could plausibly be Jesus or Sakyamuni and emphasizes the formlessness

That's a good one, especially because of the ambiguity - in the early days especially it might be useful to have a term that might make one group think Sakyamuni, and another think Jesus.

Also who controls Crete and Cyprus? Are they Egyptian?

They were Haruniya, so it would make sense for them to fall in with Egypt unless we need to retcon that and have some petty despot or independent local governor set up shop. Not sure Egypt would permit that, and Egypt's Mediterranean fleet is a damn sight better than it's Red Sea Fleet.

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

They were Haruniya, so it would make sense for them to fall in with Egypt unless we need to retcon that and have some petty despot or independent local governor set up shop. Not sure Egypt would permit that, and Egypt's Mediterranean fleet is a damn sight better than it's Red Sea Fleet.

Probably some very autonomous Egyptian appointees then, I think any genuinely independent actor here might just get eaten by the Two Africas

 

[Practical Lobster]

Probably some very autonomous Egyptian appointees then, I think any genuinely independent actor here might just get eaten by the Two Africas

That's my thought. They're certainly not tightly integrated into Egypt or anyone really. And probably considerably more Christian and Greek-speaking than the Near East as a whole.

 

[245]

So are the red swans going to get the city's they lost in south America back?

What's happening in Japan and Korea?

How are Scotland and Ireland?

 

[Hobelhouse]

That's my thought. They're certainly not tightly integrated into Egypt or anyone really. And probably considerably more Christian and Greek-speaking than the Near East as a whole.

I debated putting Crete in the Aegean League on that map, I could easily see them falling away from an Egyptian-based power, especially since the main reason they took it in the first place is mostly so the Xasars couldn't have it. Cyprus, is closer to the coast and so I think more likely to stay under their control, but they're probably quite autonomous. Maybe a small Mauri presence, otherwise not much influence from foreigners.

With the the schisming and ongoing internal meltdown of the Knights, it may be interesting to see if the Egyptians decided to take a larger role in the Eastern Med - seems like they've sort of relied on their quasi-alliance with the Knights to do a lot of their anti-Xasar work for them. The Xasars don't seem likely to regain naval supremacy soon though - they are far from both Western and Eastern centers of naval and technological innovation. The Egyptians can buy the latest Lankan cannons, the Xasars can't. But, the Egyptians may have bigger things to worry about with the Persians knocking on their door...

 

[Practical Lobster]

With the the schisming and ongoing internal meltdown of the Knights, it may be interesting to see if the Egyptians decided to take a larger role in the Eastern Med - seems like they've sort of relied on their quasi-alliance with the Knights to do a lot of their anti-Xasar work for them. The Xasars don't seem likely to regain naval supremacy soon though - they are far from both Western and Eastern centers of naval and technological innovation. The Egyptians can buy the latest Lankan cannons, the Xasars can't. But, the Egyptians may have bigger things to worry about with the Persians knocking on their door...

It's certainly plausible that the Egyptians and Xasar will resume their ancient rivalry, rather than the alliance of convenience that saw them both fight against Iran that I detailed in my last post. I just saw a window where their traditional basis for rivalry was diminishing, since as you say the Xasar lack naval supremacy (Jihangir's idea that the Xasar fleet would be able to brush aside the Aegean League with just a bit of funding was probably genuinely wrong, even if he shipped them Pandya made cannons or something). I figure the trade links Egypt can offer at this point would be worth more than Crete, an island that would be just another peripheral, probably rebellious ulcer in the Xasar realm.

 

[PecuTheGreat]

Well yeah, I think the "phage therapy gets a lead of a few decades over antibiotics" is a cool way to move laterally, making things different without making them blatantly worse. I'd like to be able to find more points like that, especially on military matters (I'd really like to see earlier advances in rocketry, given Mysore's historical accomplishments in (briefly) reviving them as a battlefield surprise).

Nor do I think it's possible for no antibiotics to ever be found, there's plenty besides penicillin and even before penicillin there were experiments with lethal dyes that only bound to bacterial cells. Nubian mummies have been found with high quantities of tetracycline, thought to be from their beer-brewing methods-- for all we know the first antibiotics could come out of Makuria, and centuries "ahead of schedule".

How "ahead of schedule" phages can/should be is also something to consider. Viruses can't be seen at all without an electron microscope, but general reasoning about the world of microorganisms in general, or using visible environmental-effects to find and reason about organisms you can't even see yet-- that can all start in the next century, easily. Right now E coli phages are isolated most easily from the effluents from the gastrointestinal tract (where E coli itself is most at home), so an earlier drive to taxonomize diseases through indicators from blood, wastes, etc could yield a mysterious solution of components that people can't see yet, but they know how it works from experiments with it. Maybe in the short run doctors are vilified as perverts who want to steal your poop but hey, all in a day's work.

I mean, when we discovered penicillin we didn't exactly know much about what it is and how it functioned except for that it kills bacteria. I suspect a very similar thing could happen with phages if they can be "farmed" without the grower requiring to know much about them except well, it kills bacteria and when i put it in this mixture and remove the part of the mixture, it continues to kill bacteria.

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

The North, Remembered

It is the custom of people, all over the world, to love their homeland and credit their own virtues to it. The Uighurs, like the Ruru [Rouran] and Xiongnu before them, attributed to themselves honesty, honor, and resilience, exemplified by their strong bonds and frightening effectiveness on the march. The civilization to their south, with which they would so often find themselves at odds, contained thousands of ecologies within itself. In every county or township, the gentry edited gazetteers which sang the obvious praises of life amid the mellifluous groves and vales of home, or tried to prove the less obvious benefits of hacking away at a wasteland’s poor soils. Proverbs, spoken and memorized from lifespan to lifespan, considered it a virtue to die and be buried in the township where one was born, and annually sweep the graves of ancestors who lived much the same way.

So then why did the Khitai despise their homeland enough to order its colonization? While the Uighurs based their power in China on that force-of-arms which broke the Qi dynasty, the Khitai learned to govern from within the half-Sinified “government” offices which oversaw the Uighurs’ great confiscations. The Khitai did not credit their elevation to the timeless virtues of the steppe, but to their ability to adapt to the times. Rootlessness became their virtue, but nothing else could have served them so well. For a thousand years, the sons of the Orkhon and Yellow Rivers dueled— but now, the Khitai were masters of the Orkhon and Yellow, the Yangtze and the Pearl. Centuries of convulsion were stilled by their hand. And still they dreamed of a thousand years more— a millennium of peace. Never again would the Orkhon spit out another inspired warchief and his conquering horde, not if its fields were tilled by cultivators who knew how to respect their betters. But those betters were the Khitan themselves, or at least those worthy and well-connected enough to leave the steppe and become the backbone of government. For those distant cousins who remained in the old homeland and followed the old ways, however, the ruling clans had little sympathy. In the north the Khitan would represent the power of the agriculturist over the pastoralist, and in the south they would represent the exact opposite. In the shadows of Kaifeng’s theaters and pagodas they performed the horseback rituals of buyan— for theirs was not the power of this or that constituency, but a power for all lands and for all time.

The policy of Northern Focus, born of such vain desire, struggled even to enlist the cultivator-colonists who would be its most obvious beneficiaries. What to the Khitai sounded like a perfectly good deal— thousands and thousands of mu 畝 [sixth of an acre] of land!— could only appeal to the northernmost latitude-band of Chinese, the farmers of wheat and barley increasingly left behind by prosperous southern rice-farmers, to say nothing of their urban cousins. The northward march of the Chinese could only ever be a poor substitute for the southward march— made poorer still by the freezing winters north of the Great Wall, such that only a stripped-down agricultural package of sorghum, select cultivars of wheat, and soybeans were viable in a short summer growing season. Winter was a season of hibernation in which there was little to do but drink; consuming one’s stores of food too early (and being refused the charity of neighbors) meant death. Speaking of neighbors, the high population density of China might mean small plots of land, made smaller by the Chinese preference for partible inheritance (the sons held their departed father’s property in common or split it equitably among themselves, as opposed to “eldest son inherits all” primogeniture), but it also meant plenty of company. In the new commanderies beyond the Great Wall, a person might have a larger estate, but also had to rebuild from scratch the extensive ties of township and county, which were not simple romance but a vital guarantor of the general quality of life. These ties made everything from markets to labor recruitment to marriages possible— but in the lands of the Northern Focus, for example, the families of young women could charge extortionate bride-prices from prospective grooms by citing the general scarcity of women.

News of the Northern Focus circulated through their empire’s county gazetteers, but the offices set up in Yellow River cities to process northbound migrants were not exactly swamped with work. Instead, for quite a while the majority of colonists were the bondsmen who the Khitai dismissively referred to as Han’er 漢兒, a name which came to refer to all subsequent northern colonists. These bondsmen were an essential feature of the Khitai military apparatus: the Khitai concept of ordu included not just an army but also an accompanying estate capable of manning and provisioning that army. It included herders and their livestock and grazing lands, farmers and their fields (although these might have less importance in a migratory ordu), craftsmen to make weapons and buildings, several categories of slaves, and a hierarchy of managers— and each household provided its adult men as soldiers for the ordu’s owner, a landowning military aristocrat of a style that would be familiar in Europe (although some ruled from great tent-circles as well as static manors and palaces). The northern military was a cohesive, self-supporting society— and Northern Focus inevitably fell into a complementarity with the needs of the ordu, from which it would not escape easily. Most of the “new Han’er” were seasonal or otherwise temporary migrants, young men who generally hoped for little more than to spare their families the expense of feeding them for a time. The Khitai ordu managed all questions of land ownership and defense, leaving the “colonists” free to come and go as they liked (most tried to leave before winter), and the ordu were themselves the main consumers of agricultural produce (much was stocked away in granaries to prepare for the zud, the devastating winters that sometimes ruined agricultural and pastoral economies across the north). The military courier-post system was also the main method for sending one’s earnings home. For some Yellow River families, their holdings shrunken to slivers by partible inheritance, even a few silver coins at regular intervals could be a godsend. This is how some of the New Han’er came to stay permanently in the north, sending their paltry surpluses home and serving as “anchors” for younger members of their clan to seek out upon arriving in the north. Others, however, stayed in the north to cut ties with home, and for a time the gazetteers of Jingdong [“east of the capital”: Henan and Shandong, east along the Yellow River from Kaifeng] vilified all northbound migrants as traitors to clan and county. Vanishingly few families did what the Khitai had hoped for: pulling themselves up root-and-stem and migrating as a unit to the north.

Who saved the Northern Focus from this mediocrity? Ironically, it was the steppe natives. The lands [Mongolia] fenced in by the Khingan Mountains in the east and the Altai in the west comprised three main confederations wherein the leading tribe gave its name to the whole assemblage. The eastern Qonggirad were early allies of the Khitai, rewarded handsomely for defending the Khitai homeland from Uighur attacks; the central Jalayir and western Naimans were late converts to the cause. All three were held at arm’s length economically after the enthronement of the Yaol clan: markets were held by the northern commanderies at specific times and places, and access to them required a Chinese office-title (which formally placed the holder within the Khitai bureaucracy but usually involved no cession of sovereignty or oversight) or a certificate valid for a limited time. Since titles and certificates could be sold, reassigned, or stolen, the right to participate in markets became an object of competition, which contributed to the consolidation of the steppe but could also tear it apart at any time— and the rewards of that competition were overpriced southern fabrics and tools, exchanged for underpriced hides and furs from the north. The Han’er, however, had the potential to liberate the northern economy. A majority of them were unmarried men, who could be integrated into northern society through intermarriage. In return, they offered a backdoor into the Chinese economy, with significant profits for themselves. Civilian markets, some of which turned into permanent towns, were held at some distance from the commanderies. The clan networks of the Han’er, sustained by the “relay” seasonal migrations between “old” and “new” clan-centers, facilitated the transport of cartloads of “souvenirs” (including livestock and horses) to and from the south. The growing towns, however, were also transforming into centers of craftsmanship in fabrics, weapons, and tools that reduced the overall dependence on long-distance trade for these items.

Kaifeng did not know what to do. The Northern Focus was finally starting to see the movement of entire families, but the manner of their occupations enriched autonomous elements within the empire and devalued Khitai titles, certificates, and other beneficences. The dispute of Empress Dowager Tabuyan and her reformist Khitai ministers, nominally over the sacral status of the old Uighur capital Ordobeliq, was in fact a debate over whether the Northern Focus had gotten out of hand. The northern commanderies, lacking direction from above, refused to do anything that might anger either of the court factions— they simply pocketed informal taxes on “souvenir” traffic, lessened the restrictions of titles and certificates so that their own markets would become more competitive, and hoped (as Kaifeng did) that the question of land would poison relations between the Han’er and the steppe natives, and give Khitai institutions a definitive excuse and plan for intervention. For a time it seemed this might happen— every plot farmed by the Han’er was naturally one that could not be grazed by their neighbors, and the springs and streams of this arid land threatened to become ulcers of conflict. Through direct ownership or adjudication between subject tribes, the Naiman, Jalayir, and Qonggirad considered themselves the final authority on land rights within their loosely bounded hegemonies, and it fell to them to decide the fate of the north. The response of the Qonggirad, quickly copied elsewhere, relied on a few key principles. All Han’er or mixed households would have to affiliate themselves with a particular clan, and since this affiliation was familial or pseudo-familial it could not be sold or reassigned. Questions of land and water rights were to be decided at a local level (and sales to “outsiders” of any sort was discouraged), but could be brought to higher levels for appeal. Confederal security and judicial institutions would take active steps to prevent “poaching,” which involved restrictions on hunting for the Han’er (which would also be familiar to the European peasant) and also strongly punished overcollection of grass for hay— but the Han’er were generally allowed to participate in pastoralism as hired help for larger herders or owners of herds of their own. If a steppe clan and its affiliate Han’er simply did not have enough resources for each to receive an adequate share, the confederation had one more reason to wage war (and to compel the obedience and participation of its subjects for the war effort). This agreement fell under tremendous strain during the reign of the “New Policies” stratocracy and attendant disasters, which saw refugees fleeing from the south toward known clan connections in the north. A partial solution was found in sending some of them even further north, to accompany the traders and raiders who collected furs in the snowy lands of the Buryats and Evenks— but perhaps the system was really saved by the quick consolidation of the Qing dynasty, which convinced many refugees to return to their old homes. The defection or surrender of the remaining Khitai institutions in the north left the Naiman, Jalayir, and Qonggirad as masters of the land, inheritors of the ordu model and the systems that grew up around it. Although the populations within each confederation still considered themselves the keepers of separate traditions and customs, lacking the moral and philosophical glue that Minyak [1] Buddhism would later provide, the basic characteristics of their society were set by this time.

A much less harmonious version of these events played out among the Jurchen, sandwiched between the Liao and Yalu Rivers and extending north past the Tumen into the Sungari and Amur. The peoples west of the Khinggan were stereotyped in the terms that farming cultures often use for their enemies— namely, that they were a small population that used “more land than they needed” and should “vacate” or “be vacated” from some of it. In truth, their patterns of settlement were fairly compact. A clan’s pastoral routes typically followed closed routes over a territory that might, for example, be limited to a single mountain and the surrounding plains, with pastures at different altitudes exploited as the seasons permitted. The longer, history-making migrations, and the attendant reshuffling of once-stable land regimes, were brought about by dangers (war, drought, famine, epidemic) or opportunities (war again) on a historic scale. East of the Khinggan, the zhenghu 正戶 (“registered household”, referring to those Khitai still living in the Liao River homeland) largely succeeded in keeping the Northern Focus out of their territory, redirecting that flow into Jurchen lands. However, the main Jurchen specialties in Khitai markets were ginseng, sable fur, and pearls. All three products either required sparsely populated environments (sables) or were vulnerable to overharvesting (ginseng, pearls). A sparse population was, to the Jurchen, the guarantor of prosperity and a guard against enemies. Unfortunately for them, the Han’er in these territories eyed these same resources as a path to easy wealth, with no parallel west of the Khinggan. Another discovery threatened greater danger for the Jurchen: soybeans grew surprisingly well east of the Khinggan. Exploitation of this vast expanse and its abundant rivers could, optimists reasoned, pay dividends for the entire empire for centuries on end.

The Yaol dynasty, however, had mere decades on the clock, and the New Policies Clique of General Qadir Sulu Irbas faced a crossroads. Stereotyped as a mix of mad generals and simpering aristocratic hangers-on, their names have become a byword for bad governance. Some antecedents for their policies can ironically be found in the early era of Northern Focus, where armies owned land, regulated markets, and dutifully forwarded surplus production to their granaries and storehouses for emergencies. A connection to the dubiously Manichaean Red Standards Society is also conjectured, based on the “army-commune” system of the Red Standards rebels, the Turkic roots of the Red Standards warchief Anxi Yanyan, and the presence of certain descendants of defectors to the Yaol within the New Policies Clique. At the very least it is appropriate to say that the Clique believed the structure of the ordu could and should be applied to all of society— making it only natural that the harbingers of their downfall would be the “cosmopolitan” White Turban rebels of Hangzhou, who had the most to fear from the total replacement of individual initiative by administrative command. The personality and ideology of Qadir Sulu Irbas, a cold and unsociable man, would never be fully reconstructed— he acted in consultation with a small and shifting “Inner Clique” and left his appointed mouthpieces to explain and propagandize. These mouthpieces were replaced often, and only from the common traits of their arguments (which draw from many schools, indicating the intellectual diversity that survived into the late Yaol and would cause so many problems for the Qing) could the “core” ideas of the Clique be discerned. In any case, the army was to govern and it believed that the people needed land. The question arose as to what land the army would be sent to procure, and with desertions mounting every day there wasn’t much time to decide. Perhaps they could have gone north and utterly broken the Jurchen; instead, this fate was visited on the Tai of the Pearl River. The rice economy of the south was after all known to be more prosperous than the north, to say nothing of the potential for overseas trade. The New Policies Clique might also have wanted to “recover” the subjects of old dynasties, as this conferred more legitimacy than hunting after new subjects. The Qi measured their success by the degree to which “former subjects of Great Han” were brought back into the fold, and the Yaol declared that they surpassed the achievements of the Uighurs by reference to the same metric.

Conditions in the northeast under the New Policies Clique were therefore the same as the preceding era. It was a period of small wars, of pushing and shoving: the Khitai pushed the Han’er, the Han’er pushed the Jurchens, and the Jurchens pushed each other. Access to markets proved decisive, especially as the Khitai collapse accelerated: those who could put up with Han’er encroachment long enough to keep wearing fake smiles around the Khitai were better-armed than those who did not. Terror was used to keep the Han’er away from the ginseng fields, the forests with their game and furs, the freshwater clam deposits, but this invited reprisal by increasingly hardy groups who bought or stole weapons from the collapsing local commanderies. The new Qing dynasty might have intervened, but their attempts to extend their rule to the zhenghu Khitai along the Liao River led to battles with the Qonggirad, self-appointed protectors of the Khitai, along the Great Wall. As the roads west of the Liao became mired in this conflict and possible aid from across the sea was appropriated by the Qing state, the northeast remained in its strange isolation. Its major point of contact with the outside was Yongmingcheng [Vladivostok], which was itself separated from China proper by Korea and the sea.

Yongmingcheng, the Jurchens, and the Han’er all shared some concern about Korean hunters trespassing north of the Yalu River and that mountain called Changbai or Baekdu. But the bigger threat was Abaqa, the Qonggirad Khan, whose gesture of protection extended not just to the Khitai but also to the defeated Jurchens chased from their homes in the previous era of conflict. As the Han’er were largely settled on the lands vacated by this group, they also had much to fear from their return. Out of their antagonistic neighbors, the rulers of Yongmingcheng had to create a force that could keep out the Qonggirad, or (they hoped) open a second front on behalf of the Qing. As with the Khitai commanderies before it, controlling access to markets was the basis of Yongmingcheng’s leverage, but the cold relations between the Han’er and the Jurchens largely prevented the horizontal work-arounds seen elsewhere. The granting of titles was also a more significant gesture here. If Yongmingcheng declared a cooperative Jurchen chieftain to be a “regional military commissioner”, this implied an expectation that the chieftain’s area of residence would remain free of internal or external conflict— and failure to discharge that duty could see the chieftain’s enemies empowered by a reassignment of the title. The Han’er benefited the least in this era, as Yongmingcheng considered their defection to the Qonggirad a more remote prospect than the defection of the Jurchens— and this faith was maintained despite Han’er numbering among Abaqa’s most trusted advisors, and the deadly enmity that separated “our” and “their” Jurchen. The Jurchen imposed as strict a subjection upon the Han’er as Yongmingcheng let them get away with, instituting harsh punishments for trespassing. The pressure was partially released through settling the Han’er further away from the most powerful Jurchen groups on the Korean border, in lands won from Qonggirad allies— but this meant driving them into colder territory along the Sungari and upper Liao. In a manner resembling other zones of overlapping settlement, like Haiti and the Hindu Kush, “understanding” between the peoples of this area largely came from “practical” accommodation with the circumstances rather than any real goodwill or collaboration. In the meantime, Yongmingcheng could present the Qing court with produce from soybeans to walrus teeth, and the emperor Xu Zhenyi could joke that perhaps something good had come out of the Northern Focus after all.

***

The Khitai of Kaifeng were not a power for all lands and all time. In their dying empire, many of them would die as well— killed by the purges of their Turkish generals or vengeful rebels. Others weathered the storm by changing their surnames and pretending not to be Khitai, though of course that lie became truth in the second generation if not the first. Others fled, on horseback or foot, to the northern steppes— but they would find no rest here either. So away they went, to Akmola and Xvarazm and Ferghana, to witness the brilliance of the continent’s interior from the perspective of mean mercenaries and porters— and behind them, several new nations rose to take more glorious roles in this order. Not counting the Minyak Khaghanate, some seventy thousand people of full or partial Chinese extraction were scattered throughout the former zone of Northern Focus. Their way of life would be perpetuated by expansion of their populations, even as they assimilated to varying degrees into the surrounding societies. They were a counterpart to the Sart population of Persian-speaking sedentary peoples who lived among the western Turks, some of whom could trace their ancestry to the Sogdians or, indeed, the Eftal. Like the term "Sart", the “Han’er” label came to rest somewhere on the edge between ethnicity and class. All were absorbed into that polyglot continental order wherein which language was a master’s and which a slave’s largely depended on who was speaking to whom. So the roads of the next era were paved— and so too were lines of future conflict drawn up. At the turn of the 1400s, Naiman expeditions up the Irtysh ran into Rusichi expeditions poking around east of the Urals. Meanwhile, the Jalayir and the Buryats began their complicated dance around Lake Baygal, which would see the great mass of the snowy north opened to the appetites of the world beyond.

[1] Tanguts. They called themselves Mi-niah, the Tibetans called them Mi nyag, let’s just say the Bengalis propagated the name they heard from the Tibetans.

 

[Practical Lobster]

The State and the Forest

After the Pala invasions of the mid-thirteenth century, Utkala was still nominally ruled by an ayat - the supra-regional council of the various artisan guilds and landholders - but that period was winding to a close quickly. Harima Chotray, the mercenary who led the defense of Utkala against the Pala, had been a mercenary and an outsider to court politics, and thus content to work as a sort of emergency dictator without claiming true royalty. This fit with local conceptions of how government should work in any event, the complex and above all cautious world of post-Maukhani regional politics - trust the guild, spurn royalty. But it was woefully backwards in an era where regnal polities such as the Pandya, Chandrateya, and Pala were consolidating authority in the figure of a single person.

The “Equal Kingdoms” had barely survived the onslaught of the Askunu Turks. Factitious and divided, generally favoring entrenched landed and commercial interests at the expense of the state as a unified entity, Utkala’s government was a holdover and one which would not last long, even if it survived one Pala invasion. The institutions necessary to maintain a military capable of fending off the Pala were the same institutions that would ensure the irrelevance of any sort of guild council. Chotray built massive armies and all the tools necessary to feed and equip them out of whole cloth with emergency authority. To expect that said authority would just disappear after the crisis was naive. Even after Chotray died unexpectedly in 1261, just a few years after the end of the Pala War, the new centralizing prerogatives of the government remained.

One of the trends we witness in this era is an increasing desire of the state to understand the resources at its disposal. For example, the state became increasingly concerned with understanding precisely the amount of cultivated land, necessary for feeding troops; the amount of forested land capable of being used for ship construction; the number and quality of the forges in great cities; the amount of textiles created to clothe soldiers and generate sale revenue. There were subsequent Pala assaults on the Utkala Ayat - never so serious as that first great invasion, but between 1280 and 1315, four separate Pala attacks on the region necessitated military responses. At the end of the last one, the Ayat would find itself subordinated to a monarch once more.

Quantifying the amount of land in Utkaladesh (although the land, outside of formal documents, was generally called Odisa or Odisastra these days) was difficult. Property rights were often deeply divided, a legacy of the dominance of guilds and village assemblies. The traditional "bundle" of property rights could often be incredibly tangled, with, for example, a local assembly having the ability to manage and cultivate land, while a Brahmin "landowner" would only have the right to collect rent, but could not sell the land without permission of another, more regional assembly. This complex and unwieldy system had built up over time, the accretion of diverse rights and responsibilities. not doing anything to undercut prior established rights and responsibilities.

The members of a village assembly, all cultivators, considered themselves shareholders in a region of communal land. They managed this land together, making decisions about what to cultivate on what plots, where to sell the produce and for what prices. But this village typically held land in common beyond what was arable - the threshing floor, for instance, or barns for livestock, or land. This system was common across the Indian subcontinent, even in those instances where the land was formally owned by a temple or great landholder, generally speaking managerial decisions were made at a local level. This was beginning to change in many places, and was never a hard and fast rule, but it was at its core a decentralized agrarian system. Which is not to say that it was not rational or did not act to maximize profits - it very much did, and there is evidence that these cultivators put a lot of thought into the decisions of what to grow and where.

However, this system was bogged down by what was, at least under the Utkala Ayat, an insanely convoluted system of taxation. Taxes would frequently be owed to the Ayat itself, to a regional assembly, to the local assembly, to a local temple, to a local buddhist monastic complex, and finally rents would be due to whoever owned the land, even if that person was not a person at all but an entity such as the local assembly, temple, or monastic complex. As power began to consolidate in the cities, it could also be a joint-stock company or some other entity, hedging bets by purchasing title to land.

After the 1315 self-coup led by aristocrat and military leader Virabhadra Sulki re-established the monarchy, property acquisition changed fundamentally. The larger companies or wealthy individuals (often former soldiers enriched by military service or cronies of the Sulki state) preferred a different way of acquiring land. There had always been a natural impulse among societal elites to disdain the complex system of village councils and guilds and temple allegiance, and to prefer holding as much of the title to land outright as possible. This allowed them to buy, and sell, and rent with as few encumbrances and as much control as possible.

Generally, the only way to do this without engendering serious opposition was to acquire land through the process of “royal gifts.” Although historically, these had been an opportunity for a ruler to display piety, granting crown land to brahmins and temples, and the process had somewhat faltered under the Ayat, the new Maharaja Virabhadra brought it back as a way to enrich his partisans and reward those who had helped him seize power from the Ayat. These operations were directed primarily at “unoccupied land” which only meant “legally unoccupied” and had little regard for the tribal communities or villages who might reside on it so long as those tribal communities and villages did not have any way of proving their title to the land. Thus began a long and bloody process of seizing tribal land and forcing tribal landholders off, frequently with force.

One of the latter actions of the Ayat, and the one most critical to its downfall, had concerned timber. Spurred in particular by the perception of a timber shortage, enormous surveying operations had begun in the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, as the senapatis commanding the military worked both to expand the state military and, just as critically, understand exactly how much timber was being sold off to potential rivals (and this latter number, it would turn out, was truly astronomical). However, such surveying operations ran directly into the interests of entrenched Brahmin and temple landholders, who enjoyed having the ability to buy timber from the tenant villages and then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder. They feared, not without reason, that the arrival of surveyors meant that the Ayat would assert some ancient or perhaps utterly fabricated prerogative to limit their ability to sell timber, or worse, outright assert an interest in the sale of timber.

Accordingly, they had pushed back against the central Ayat in Kataka, which at the time was dominated by a more commercially-oriented faction in the city, and gave little heed to the interests of landholders. Through some political maneuvering, the landholders were able to gain a more prominent voice and put a stop to the land surveying. This in turn angered the senapatis, the council of military generals who had come over time to function as a sort of executive counterweight to the Ayat. By 1315, this and other grievances had led to outright civil war, and Virabhadra Sulki, commanding a large and modern army, had seized power. His ostensible goal had been to counteract a new Pala invasion, but this fourth and final great invasion fizzled out when Pala forces were needed elsewhere on the subcontinent. Although he promised to respect traditional land rights (and to a large degree he did), Virabhadra Sulki and his heirs embarked on a process of strengthening the central administration of the state and had little patience with attempts by nobles and village assemblies to dodge land surveys.

These ventures found funding from disparate, and frequently foriegn sources. Although there were domestic banks in Kataka, they were frequently themselves financed by Lankan, Vangali, and Tamil joint-stock companies. If a young military man, freshly granted a royal gift of “unoccupied” land needed to raise a retinue to seize that land, and hire overseers to manage it, and surveyors to identify good shipbuilding timber, he would turn to a Katakan joint-stock company for assistance, meaning that the march of agrarian progress in Odisa invariably lined the pockets of distant financiers. His timber would be carried downriver on a barge to some small market town, where a Marwari merchant-speculator might assess its quality and earmark a portion for his client, a shipbuilding guild in Vanga, who in turn would construct trading ships that would be purchased by a Tamil guild and used to move Majachaiya pepper across the Indian Ocean to the Canal of Akhsau Mansar, where it would find its way up through the Sea of Marmara, past the looming blue domed temples of Konstantikert, up the Black Sea to the hands of an aristocrat in Smolensk, who would exchange it for a handful of shining gold coins, minted from gold mined in the (fast depleting) gold mines of Great Moravia. All things were interconnected.

Odisa in the Sulki era was a sort of crossroads of civilization - a hub for merchants and traders, a place where religions and cultures melded and were changed. This was perhaps most clearly seen in the vast stone temple of Jagannath at Puri, which under Sulki patronage displayed not merely a decision to elevate a cultic form of Vaishnavism, but to incorporate all peoples and practices. Although the Sulki dynasty themselves were clearly Vaishnavist, they nevertheless patronized Buddhist universities at Ratnagiri and Udayagiri and countless other small Buddhist monasteries across their regime. Their goal was to be non-partisan, to establish the monarchy as a neutral arbiter of sorts, a relief from (what was portrayed in royal propaganda as) an era of partisan guild rule.

Odisa in this time was also a place of staggering inequality, of vast gulfs between tribal poverty and commercial wealth. The confiscation of tribal land, the royal purchase or sometimes expropriation of forest land to feed the timber market, the shifting trends away from communal landholding and towards a more “bundled” form of land title all created shocking scenes of poverty and deprivation which were mirrored across much of the subcontinent in this time. The titanic wars that wracked so much of India during the fourteenth century similarly did not hesitate to visit the Sulki dynasty, creating further dislocation among the cultivating classes. Cities such as Puri, Simhacalam, and Kataka swelled with refugees and beggars. These unskilled laborers often struggled to find income, locked out of productive work by the power of the artisanal guilds and prevented from returning to nearby farms by the power of the village assemblies. Thus it was that a ready-made workforce was created for those who were annexing “unoccupied” land and centralizing land ownership - a host of new carpenters and tillers of soil were waiting for them.

We should not necessarily view Odisa as a microcosm for what happened across India in this period, not inherently. The Utkala Ayat had more in common with the long-defunct guild-republics of the Ganges that in it did with Pandya, Polonnaruva, or even Andhra (although in Andhra the fight to recreate an idealized guild republic in the face of the powerful Vemakana monarchy would create convulsions of its own). But the story of the decline of the Utkala Ayat holds up a mirror to what are common themes across the era - the conflicts between village assemblies, guilds, brahmin landholders, the new military-bureaucratic regnal states, and the profound dislocation of large portions of the cultivator class due to war and domestic upheaval. If we turn our attention to Andhra, just to the south, we will see similar themes play out, but with profoundly more violent ramifications.

 

[Hobelhouse]

Vignettes from the History of Wood, pt 1

Forests and wood have been an underappreciated part of the rise and fall of empires.

When the Roman empire rose, its hunger for wood to fuel industry, shipbuilding, and even mere firewood would play directly into its fall: deforested hillsides had increased runoff and lower crop yields. Erosion is estimated to have increased 20 fold; rain pushed the earth and the mouths of rivers like the Po further into the sea;. With larger distances to virgin forests, diminishing returns set in on Roman industry, and silted harbors made it even harder to ship or bring goods in, further impeding trade. As a cherry on top, with new, damp lowlands came the bloodsucking insects that spread the shaking sickness.

None of these things that did the Roman Empire in by themselves- but the Roman Empire never really had just one thing that did it in, it was a death by a thousand cuts...

The Successors of the Romans, the Franks and Xasars, had their own issues with forestry. With overall declines of population and industry after the fall of Rome, forests naturally replenished in Western Europe; in the aftermath of the Eftal invasions, something similar occurred in depopulated Anatolia. In the new Frankish order, many of Europe's natural stands of woods became direct Imperial property. This resulted in large wooded reserves with well-maintained coppice systems for firewood, and protected woods for shipbuilding, feeding wood both to the royal fleets based in Antwerfen and Narbo, and to the Franks' increasingly plentiful merchant sailors. With the increased stability of the Pax Francia. Ispania would never become a war zone inhabited by shepherds as in OTL, but rather remained a "magnate" economy based on Imperial officials on their courtly circuits, local nobles, and their vast colonias. Thus its forests were well-managed, and Ispania has much less scrubland and much more forest than the Spain we know.

The system of protected woods would be copied on a smaller scale throughout the Emperor's vassal lands. It was helpful that much of Pax Francia coincided with the Medieval Warm Period - deciduous trees being much more suitable to coppicing (cutting back to stimulate growth) than conifers. The Frankish lands grew in population, but warming temperatures and effective administration minimized the impact on forest cover. When the Frankish Empire disintegrated, that administration became less effective. Timber, especially for seagoing ships, was increasingly sourced from Angland and Denmark. The former itself would frequently source ships (though not the timber itself) from North Solvia, while the latter would find its attempts to source Baltic wood from Poland and the Rusichi met with mixed success. With the mass depopulation in the 1200s following the Flowering Flesh, forests began to spread naturally once again, and the need for foreign timber would not become significant in the Frankish lands again until the latter half of the 14th century. The Twin Crowns would exploit its Papal claim to North Solvia's timber by forging an alliance with the Kingdom of Greenland. Ultimately, though, only the longest masts would prove economical to ship across the Atlantic, and so Twin Crown investments in logging on the Kanatta [St Lawrence] river would ultimately go to benefit shipbuilders in Thorfinnsborg [Quebec City]. This brought with it an influx of migrants, mostly from Friesland, who would go on to claim key economic positions in the kingdom. On the eastern seaboard, the Anglish made their protectorate of Vinland tithe them a number of ships from each of its members, which they justified as contributing to their own defense. This was certainly justifiable, as long as the Twin Crowns were around; and so Storr Island [Long Island], New Devlin [Boston, MA], Ragnarshus [Bangor, ME], and Landregar [Louisborg, NS] also became notable hubs of shipbuilding.

In the Gulf of Tolteca and points south, wood hunting of a different sort would take place. The Twin Crowns was quick to lay claim to jungle lands around the coast of Tolteca, which were host to what would become known as the "Akienpeche Tree". [1]. An extract of this tree's wood could be used to dye clothes violet or purple with very satisfying color fastness. The Twin Crowns extended its control over the Yucatan quickly and enlisted displaced natives and Fula in hunts for wild trees. They also introduced the tree to their Caribbean possessions; they fought for control of the dye with the Moors, who traded with the Chicomoztoca, and the Anglish colony of Whithaven [Mosquito Coast] would be in part established to allow the dyers of London and Yorvick to source from someone other than their rivals in Antwerfen.

In Nova Ispania, a similar wood hunt drove their colonial frenzy. The sap of the brazilwood tree was similarly useful in making a crimson dye, and was similar in some respects to sappanwood from the East Indies. Votivists would lay claim to large sections of the coast, enlist Fula or Amazonian locals for help, and sell the harvest in Olizpo or Gades... then use the proceeds to equip men to return and conquer the coast for real. The disorganized chiefdoms west of San Marcos [Fortaleza] fell quickly to this tactic, but Tatolamaayo resisted longer, as the Moors had beaten them to set up competing freeports on the coasts and their allies in that kingdom were more organized and better armed. They would still prove no match for Ispania, and a royal expedition, led by Pau Nunes-Juares de Murtia, was able to dispatch the pagan kingdom of Tatola Mayor in the early-mid 1200s. As new Captain-General of San Valentino, he attempted to establish control over Tatola Menor [the lands inland from the Atlantic coast]; local chiefs were expected to swear fealty to him, ignoring traditional ties of clan and tribal loyalty. In dealing with the Fula in particular, de Murtia was relied on a number of his men who had taken Fula brides and had clan connections that extended across long distances. By providing a market for their cattle, he was able to get the distant Misigenna herdsmen on the high savannah to stop raiding and start trading; on the other hand, the Gennayuru and Binyaala chiefdoms, just up the Rio Tatola, became a nucleus for escaped slaves and resistance to Ispanian rule. De Murtia's successors would fight multiple inconclusive wars with these chiefdoms; they typically knew the terrain better and could use it to their advantage. The push to secure the sugar plantations of Tatola Mayor led to a campaign which finally broke Gennayuru, leaving it a chastened vassal of the Captain-General of San Valentino. As Ispanian settlers increasingly enclosed plantations along the coast, Fula clans who had not married into the Ispanian hierarchy would migrate further inland, and this chiefdom became an important meeting place between the riders of the savannah and their more settled brethren. The hill kingdom of Binyaala, OTOH, would remain the last holdout of pagan Fula and escaped slaves even after the Moors proclaimed the Tatolamaayo Kingdom reborn.

After the Moorish "liberation", the Atlantic forests would become an important source of timber for Amuricush and the Two Africas, whose expansive fleets were threatening to deforest their homeland, despite already supplementing it with wood from the African coast... While the Maghreb had avoided much of the deforestation and desertification that came with OTL's Arab invasions, the explosive growth of the Mauri merchant empire, and its industries, was now beginning to impose some comparable ecological strains. Sourcing of naval products, particularly wood, would become an increasingly larger motivation in their colonial strategy. Meanwhile, the loss of access to their effective brazilwood dye monopoly would be a blow to the Ispanian textile industry and a boost to the Moorish one.

In the Xasar lands, forest management took a different path. The steppe-dwelling Xasars had little initial incentive to establish state control over the woodlands, leaving them to local tribes and communities, who tended to guard their privileges. Frequently, they were Christian, as the Buddhist horsemen themselves preferred the plains. Seizing control of these lands was often one motivator for purges of important Christian nobles, and the imperial expansion project could be seen in one light as a ploy to seize Christian forestlands. Significant swathes of Italy and Anatolia were deforested to feed the Shah's naval shipyards at Isfalat [Split, Croatia] and Konstantikhert, simply because it was easier for the Shah to exploit new conquests than to negotiate with the multitude of small rightsholders needed to supply wood for the fleet.

After the Great Votive War, the loss of this arrangement would itself be a body blow to the Xasar shipbuilding industry, and contribute to their increasing humiliations at the hands of Knightly and Mauri corsairs. The aftereffects of this occupation and decades of war would leave Italy more dusty and barren than it was in OTL. Italy at least would begin to recover under Burgundian rule; Aloysian-era forest domains and were restored to the protection of the King, and stewardships, among other titles, would be distributed to prominent Votivists, as were much of the mines, pastureland and so forth that had previously belonged to the Xasar state or its settlers. However, in the chaos of the war, many cities had come to manage these resources themselves again as the Shah's authority had broken down, and they resented this being taken away to reward Burgundian nobles. This was another factor that would spur the rebellion of the cities against King Giovanni of Italy at the start of the War of the Popes...

Meanwhile, the Xasars redoubled their logging efforts in western Anatolia, which was increasingly being degraded into a scrubby badlands, and became dependent on the Rusichi to supply high-grade timber for their ships. Much as in Odisa, imperial surveyors were seen in Anatolia as heralds of the loss of everything they had. The alienated Hellenes and Hephtalites of the interior were increasingly likely to simply make these agents disappear. The heavy hand the Xasars now felt the need to use in Anatolia would, in time, play a role in the rise of the Latreia movement, which is a story for another day... Attempts by future Shahs to exploit the great forests of Kluch [Transylvania] to rebuild the navy would be a sore spot that would spur future unrest among the long-restive Rumana of the region...

[1] AKA the Campeche or logwood tree
[2] More on this in an incoming post...

 

[Practical Lobster]

Volta do Mar

The hegemony Mzishima enjoyed was made possible by the White Elephant Concordats, by the fact that entire categories[1] of trade goods for export were required by law to be stored at certain warehouses operated by the royal trade guild (a company partly owned and certainly well-funded by the famous Maratha-owned Cevirukkai banking house), where they could be assessed and taxed. From there, goods would be sold to waiting merchants, with merchant houses favored by the Chandratreya enjoying significantly discounted prices. This system made the royal house of Mzishima incomparably rich. But wealth and power, especially absolute wealth and power, breed complacency.

This was a dangerous moment for complacency. In 1364, the Cevirukkai banking house, the great sponsor of the Chandratreya, was flung into unexpected hardship when the Chandratreya monarchy announced that it was reneging on the loans it had signed. The Chandratreya themselves had taken body-blow after body-blow. Their ponderously expensive fleet, which had atrophied as land war had become the order of the day, was rapidly falling into disrepair as the financial titans of the day withdrew their tendrils. In other words, the great backer of Mzishima hegemony could no longer meaningfully guarantee it.

This was an immediate cause of alarm for the bankers and traders of Mzishima, the powerful figures who controlled the weak-willed, often drunk seventeen-year old Raja of Mzishima, Shivansh. However there was no obvious immediate power willing to take the Chandratreya’s place. Overtures to the Lankans were seen as politically impossible - the Savahilanama movement, with its shopkeepers and petty merchants were Buddhist fifth columnists waiting for a Buddhist patron to overthrow their good, sensible high society. The Tamil banking houses might invest, but the Pandya were seen as far more hands-on of a partner than the Chandratreya, far more keen on military intervention and direct interference. No-one else likely had the interest or the strength to directly challenge the Chandratreya for the role. The decision was made to simply wait and hope the Chandratreya could ride out the storm.

In 1366, two years after the Chandratreya state entered into its death spasms, the Lankans, who by now had begun viewing themselves invincible, entered into quiet negotiations with the Pandya court, their ancient enemies. Both parties, it was agreed, would benefit from striking a blow against Mzishima. The Pandya ruler, Srivallabha, agreed to look the other way and not interfere, as long as their interests were safeguarded, with an implicit threat that if those interests were not protected, things might get messy for Lanka.

It was not long after that Kumaraya Ratta and his fleet were dispatched. Mzishima had substantial defenses of its own, of course. The city was defended by numerous heavy cannons built into seaward walls and bastions. The expectation had been that Ratta, rather than risk his fleet and men, would enter into negotiations. A new arrangement would be agreed upon, one that benefited the two great powers of South India (and of course primarily benefited Lanka). The Concordat would be ended unilaterally.

But Ratta had other ideas, and his veteran sailors were accustomed to getting the chance to loot at least a little, after his prior voyages. There wouldn’t be much opportunity to loot if he simply blockaded the city and waited for them to come to terms. So under the cover of darkness, he led a small cadre of men to land, and they scouted the landward defenses of the city, finding a section of landward wall that was in ill-repair. Ratta developed a risky plan, one which would require his best soldiers to mount an attack on a city that was undoubtedly expecting such a thing, in the one weak point undoubtedly known to the city and guarded. Still, Ratta had never been one adverse to physical risk, and he hoped to combine the assault with a naval bombardment.

However, fortune smiled upon him. Before Ratta could launch what might well have been a suicidal assault, news reached the city that the Vihara of Sonuttara in Kintradoni had been sacked by a Hindu mob, part of a series of ongoing clashes between the Buddhist followers of the Savahilanama movement and the broader, largely Shiavist and devotionalist Hindu population, who included much of the old guard elites, including the Raja of Mzishima. Rioting broke out in Mzishima almost overnight, and the town guards, a mixture of Tayzig and Arab mercenaries (whose Buddhist sympathies were blatantly well known) and local military guilds (whose Hindu sympathies were equally obvious) were so divided that Arab mercenary units simply refused to disperse the mobs the military guilds themselves became involved in the sack of a prominent Buddhist stupa within the city walls.

This incredible and unprecedented breakdown in professionalism had a simple cause. The Mzishima garrison had simply never really had to fight in any meaningful capacity. The frontier of Kapudesa had pushed deep inland, and the defense of Kapudesa was guaranteed by Chandratreya forces. Even the hiring of mercenaries had been a snap decision, one motivated by the collapse of the Chandratreya. The military guilds were a political organization like any other, and the mercenaries were new hires without great institutional loyalty.

Ratta, seeing smoke pouring from the city and learning what had transpired, launched his attack immediately, securing large portions of the defenses while the city crumbled into internecine communal violence. The sack of the Raja’s palace that followed was a legendary moment in Ratta’s career… except that it completely undercut the entire plan orchestrated by Lanka. With Mzishima in flames, and no clear negotiating partner emerging from said flames, any attempt to secure power in Kapudesa was immensely more complicated, a question of negotiating with numerous cities which would likely assert independence. He had enriched himself and his fleet immensely, but at the cost of hoping to carry out his objective quickly or easily.

Furthermore, Ratta was not the only vulture who would be attracted if Kapudesa became a corpse. All bets were off with the Tamil. Sindh and Kannada would undoubtedly want a piece of the pie. The Cevirukkai and Rakta Hamsa[2] were still very much relevant power players even as their patron dynasty floundered. He immediately sailed north, hoping to work some personal gunship diplomacy to try to keep things together.

However, Shivansh, the Raja of Mzishima had not been killed in the fighting as many suspected, or perhaps more accurately, hoped. Fleeing inland, he was able to take refuge with his feudatories, who rallied to his banner. Future events will show that this sudden upswell of support for a leader who by no means had been popular or effective in his reign was perhaps not as altruistic as it appeared.

The new circle of friends Shivansh found himself in were feudatories from the very periphery of the old Kapudesan world, primarily Bantu-language speakers - lords whose suzerainty was recognized and granted by Mzishima. Three prominent chiefs of these federates made a sort of triumvirate, whose names are recorded as Haikarudra, Ndesamburo, and Kiringa. Each had distinguished themselves in border wars against migrating Bantu groups, or against the Chwa Kingdom of Lake Nyanza. They stood out among the Kw’adza and other South Cushitic speaking landed nobility, whose personal names were generally Indo-Iranian and had been for several generations.[3] Although this was in a time of written records, an era born into the light of history, the triumvirs each sought to carve out a place for themselves as essentially mythic figures - it is possible for example, that their single names were noms-de-guerre. Perhaps they wished to intentionally affiliate themselves with the Bantu tribes of the interior, who they relied upon to serve as trained mercenaries.

By now, Shivansh had fled deep inland, to the newly founded tea and zanj plantations around Lake Rukwa, and his power was at a nadir. The triumvirate of local rulers who kept him safe scarcely obeyed his orders with some patronizing nod or smile. Certainly they did not maintain the lofty court protocols he had come to expect his entire life. Whatever emerged out of the chaos to come, it would not be his world to own.


[1] Of note, one category of good traditionally exempted from this system was enslaved persons. The Mzishima Rajas traditionally viewed slavery as a degrading business of which they wanted no part, not that this moral judgment stopped them from profiting from massive slave estates. The trade in enslaved persons was a valuable thing, it was actively involving themselves in it which the Rajas despised.

However, this exemption was of little practical benefit, since by the fourteenth century Kapudesa was a net importer of slaves.

[2] It should be noted that the fortified compounds of both companies within Mzishima were largely untouched in the fighting.

[3] Apart from Haikarudra, which is a Shaivist theophoric name (lit. “Thanks be to Rudra”).


Izaoriaka

In 1358, Ispanian ships, seeking to provoke the Lankans to war, raided (among other things) the coastal market-towns and ports of Izaoriaka and found them quite undefended. The Izaoriakans had mustered a navy to their collective defense, but it was paltry by the standards of the time - Arab style trading vessels with deck-mounted guns that could not hope to withstand the Count de Ispalis’ superior firepower, just as the Ispanian ships in turn could not hope to withstand the innovations that the Lankan fleet had embraced. Izaoriaka in the late thirteenth century had become a puppet of Mzishima and thus, by extension, a puppet of the Chandratreya.

This political and economic domination had meant that once again royal authority was on the decline. The architects of the short lived Buddhist social revolution that had concentrated power in the crown watched for several generations as their hard-won gains were squandered by a succession of tragically long-lived and tragically hedonistic rulers. The new Kapudesan traders were largely absentee landlords, replacing the vaguely feudal tribal management system with plantations, buying out the rights of village assemblies (often with coercion) and turning them into tenants on their own land. The temples, of course, were exempt from this harsh treatment, and although they remained a place of blistering critique for the existing regime, they lacked real power to effect change. They did their best to provide charity, but these were hard times. Many Izaoriaka sold themselves and/or their families into debt peonage or worse. Those forced to sell themselves outright would in short order find themselves as far afield as South Solvia and New Guinea, their owners knowing well that geographic dispersion of slaves had a tendency to ensure obedience.

Those at the top - the new royal court created by the rebellion - enjoyed positions of relative luxury within this new system. Since land had ostensibly been returned to the sangha and the feudal lords had been curtailed, they were now the figures responsible for the legal distribution of land and the creation of the new aristocracy. They had access to all the finest imported luxuries, and their patronage created a middle class of sorts - prosperous company men - merchants, legal experts, small-time bankers and the like who unlike the old aristocracy were servants of guilds, rather than landholders in their own right.

This process was shocking more for it's swiftness than anything else. Not for nothing was Indravarma's rebellion discussed centuries later as a sort of "proto-revolution" by political philosophers. They identified in his dramatic rewriting of society all the failings and flaws that could corrupt a political movement once it was victorious, and set about identifying ways to correct them. But for now there was little succor for the common people, those who had not been in the inner cadre of ruthless Buddhist holy warriors whose victory had placed them in the bosom of power.

Many of those same philosophers have asked why the result of this takeover was not simply a new rebellion, as the old grievances resurfaced under new masks. But the answer is actually quite simple. There were countless peasant uprisings within the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. However, the state possessed considerable resources that it had not several generations previously. The royal arsenal of snaplocks, steel weapons and armor, and cannon made organized resistance on the island a difficult prospect at best. The result of these peasant rebellions was generally fodder for the small slave markets growing up on the coast. Similarly, although resistance of certain Sakalava-affiliated nobles and their retinues lasted under 1302, these highland fortresses were all ultimately crushed under heel.

Denied the ability to directly resist state power, the workers sought other avenues. Although ideology and later political considerations did not enter into it, and there was nothing uniform such as a “strike” there were frequent work stoppages, acts of petty resistance, and sabotage. Izaoriaka peasants would feign laziness or stupidity and work these new guild fields as little as possible. However, coordinated rebellion was also made more difficult by the steady erosion of tribal networks and the dislocation of peoples from their traditional villages, as well as the arrival of slaves from Kapudesa and Southeast Asia, who, unfamiliar with the local people and customs, were considered more pliant and less likely to escape into the highlands. Izaoriaka culture and civilization was dying a death of a thousand cuts, preserved only in the spheres of elite power and the remaining temple complexes.

The collapse of the Mzishima hegemony and thus Kapudesa as a whole at first had relatively little impact on Izaoriaka. The supply of trade goods coming to and from the island was not immediately disrupted, and the state - defended by the descendants of the small cadre of landed partisans whose victory had created it - was not immediately plunged into dire circumstances. Of course, the royal court was concerned. There was no reason that Kumaraya Ratta could not sail down to the growing harbor-town of Toamasina and seize it, and then make the quick inland march to his fortified rova. Unlike the fortified palaces of the old tribal nobility, his compound was walled, yes, but mostly designed to be a splendid royal center for hosting Kapudesan and Indian merchants. It had been decades since there had been a major conflict on the island, and Indravarma’s fears prompted a new round of panicked fortification attempts.

But the red and white sails of Ratta’s now-infamous fleet did not appear on the horizon. It did not need to. With Kapudesa having fallen into anarchy, the vultures were circling. Tamil merchants who claimed to be Ainnurruvar arranged a meeting in the south of the island, finding a band of rebels and dropping off a massive stockpile of firepowder and tufenj. The old tribal allegiances had been shattered, but there were still partisans of the old ways in the hills. One of these partisans was a wily old pirate named Andrianjaka, who in another history might have been born of noble blood as a Randryan (or at least so he claimed).

Others would follow, representatives from Thana and from the Kannada banking houses, from the Raktahamsa of Khambayat and the Migamuva Sresthin from Lanka. They alternately attempted to jockey for position with various rebel groups or members of the royal family, and soon the island once again fell into outright civil war, a situation which benefitted no-one except the wealthy banking houses of the subcontinent, who were soon agitating for an expeditionary war.

They would get their wish, but not as quickly as they hoped. Only once the great Majachaiya War began would Indian forces under arms find their way to Izoariaka, but once they arrived, they arrived to stay.


As always, I welcome questions, comments, etc. to break up the vast wall of text that myself, Delhi, and Hobelhouse are building. If you're wondering what's happening in a given location, feel free to post that too! Just know that extremely open ended questions like that get filed under "regions I need to get back and cover" rather than immediate responses, since generally they require research and coordination!

 

[Quinkana]

it's really fun reading about the Europeans and the Indians fighting each other as thats so different than otl!

 

[Jito]

It seems like the groundwork is being laid for future social revolutions but the weaving of so many cultural influences and ideologies makes it difficult to anticipate what revolutionary conflicts will really look like in this world. Is there a burgeoning revolutionary Buddhist movement in the Indo-sphere, or is it a more typical sectarian conflict?

 

[Hobelhouse]

It seems like the groundwork is being laid for future social revolutions but the weaving of so many cultural influences and ideologies makes it difficult to anticipate what revolutionary conflicts will really look like in this world. Is there a burgeoning revolutionary Buddhist movement in the Indo-sphere, or is it a more typical sectarian conflict?

Sort of... suffice to say we're not planning things too far out in advance, but there's a definite proto-commercial revolution in India with the makings of liberalism - at least in terms of property rights. The more democratic, individualistic elements of OTL liberalism are TTL, concentrated in modern China.

The way things are going, the late 14th-15th century in Majachaiya is going to be TTL's 30 years war. We will see what shakes out after that...

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

the weaving of so many cultural influences and ideologies makes it difficult to anticipate what revolutionary conflicts will really look like in this world.

Oh yeah, we definitely hope this sort of thing keeps the early modern era (which we are currently in!) exciting to read about

Is there a burgeoning revolutionary Buddhist movement in the Indo-sphere, or is it a more typical sectarian conflict?

In Kapudesa and Izaoriaka the religious movements are very much part of the regional context, there's not much of a global drama here. But the Izaoriakan revolution (I think the main cycle of posts on that is in the prequel thread) also brought about an economic reorganization, something more than just a class conflict-- there were extensive land reforms in an attempt to create a "temple economy", a general retreat from the colony in Watya (South Africa), and so on. I mean overall it's turned out somewhat badly for Izaoriaka but yes, sectarian conflicts have for some centuries had the potential to turn into something with a set of actual policies behind it.

 

[Hobelhouse]

A South Atlantic Interlude

The history of the Fula and Moors would be intricately intertwined. It was Moorish merchants that made Takrur what it was, and, increasingly, Moorish arms that sustained them. Fula nobles found it easier to raid than to administer lands far from the Senegal valley - accordingly the Yoruba, Ukwu, and Mossi became targets for their slave raids, as with those of their Malinike subject-kingdom of Kurama, who would soon eclipse them in slave-trading. These slaves would be shipped across the desert, to the Mauri lands, to be sold again and sent further north to the Pope's own armies. Or, they would go to Takrur, and from there to Europe, or more likely, to Solvia. The Moors increasingly ingratiated themselves into the state and provided them the more modern weapons and armor that made their raids effective. Under Mansa Sulanjai, the goldfields of Bambouk would be able to be fully exploited, as Moorish-supplied arms allowed the Fulani kingdom to vassalize the Jahanke. The maritime phase of the Fula seemed to have come to an end; the Mansas could obtain what they needed (primarily now, weapons) by trading with the Moors

Further south, the West African coast would see Christian and Indian worlds collide. After finding success taking over the islands of Sahodara and Sahodari (Reunion and Mauritius) in the mid 13th century and turning the long-isolated Kannada islanders into bosses on their slave-worked sugar plantations, the traders of Bharuch tried to repeat the feat with Galodugu and the Tatolamaayo kingdom. This inspired their rivals in the Red Swan Association, which had recently been evicted from the East Indies by its commercial rivals, to keep looking further afield. The Red Swans, most daringly, developed an outpost on the island of Abhivasatapa [Fernando Po] in 1271, which was a convenient stopover for their Solvian trade. Abhivasatapa was itself sparsely populated and had perfect weather for growing sugar, so it became a thriving plantation island itself and, indeed, was the site of the dissemination of sugar production to the Moors and Ispanians, the former of whom developed their own sugar plantations on nearby Sant Petru [Sao Tome] and would in time spread the innovation to the other Christian powers. Red Swan associates would also set up a healthy trading relationship with the Ukwu kingdom, which controlled the Nigerian and Benin coast and could offer ivory, exotic darkwoods, and rare textiles, and, from time to time, slaves. Ispanian traders also developed a close relationship with the Ukwu, trading the same things, and additionally relying on their realm to supply them slaves and Kru pepper [grains of paradise].

The Europeans had not stopped exploring further and further afield, however. Ispanian sailors would overwhelm the Andilander discoverers of Ferisland [the Azores] and Figenland [Madeira], while the Canarias and Bonaventu Islands[Cape Verde] were colonized by the Mauri, who went on to discover and claim Sant Petru. Ispanian merchants, late to the party, contented themselves with Isla Pasca [St Helena] which languished except as a naval depot, as it did not have the proper climate for exploiting much besides flax. The Moors would develop a close relationship with the Kurama of the Guinea coast and find them useful as slave suppliers and mercenaries, much as the Fula did, with devastating effects on their Kru and Temne neighbors. The Kurama kingdom of Kaabu, on the coast [roughly Guinea-Bissau], would see extensive Mauri influence, and developed a tradition of mounting seaborne slave raids from its capital of Itchassa [Bissau] that would reach as far as Biafra and the Ukwu kingdom.

The Moors would also be the first Europeans to develop a freeport on mainland West Africa at the settlement of Anomansah [Elmina] in 1271, where were able to exploit the local gold fields between the Volta and Comoe rivers. These deposits were quite rich, by European standards at least, and spurred further European interest in the region. Ispania and the Twin Crowns would also attempt to develop forts in the area as well, but ultimately they would be shut out by the Moors as they developed a treaty with the Bonoman kingdom granting them exclusive foreign trade rights, and the Bonoman subjugated the local Ispanian and Twin Crowns allies, evicting their forts from the coast. The kingdom of Bonoman, whose Akan inhabitants had migrated centuries before from the collapsing empire of Ghana, would rise to power, exporting gold and slaves were to acquire weapons, which were used to acquire more gold and slaves. Nearly a third of the population of Bonoman consisted of slaves and indentured servants, who were employed to clear the dense forests that were present closer to the coast and plant food crops (often, now, cassava from Solvia) and Kru pepper. Bonoman would become an epicenter for further migrations as Akan merchants and venturers sought to control the goldfields of the Black Volta futher inland, where they would face competition from the Djula, a mercantile Mande group closely affiliated with the cities of Niani, Djenne, and Gao.

Another Akan group, the Nzema, forged southeast to the mouth of the Comoe river and set up a kingdom whose capital was Bassam (one of the few decent sites for a port in the region). The Moors initially attempted to set up large freeports here, but found their first settlements (and many others after) were destroyed by yellow fever and other tropical diseases. Nevertheless a few brave or foolhardy Mauri traders ventured up the rivers and a small but significant mulatto population, speaking a Mauri-Akan creole, would develop at Bassam, Anomansah, and in the Guinea highlands. Akan traders would join the Kurama raiders on the seas, as Mauri clans sought to invest in shipbuilding outside the Maghreb, where timber was growing increasingly sparse. The Akan already had a fairly sophisticated metalworking tradition and readily took to instruction in European crafting techniques...

Further east, much of the coast and central Niger Delta was loosely subordinate to the Ukwu hegemony, which had close relations with the Red Swans and Ispania. The Twin Crowns would cut off a slice of this kingdom; a Yoruba revolt, readily supported by the Twin Crowns, led to the establishment of the Ijebu kingdom on the coast, between the Niger and the Volta. Fort St Martin [Lagos, Nigeria] would become the premier depot for slaves shipped to New Frisia and the Twin Crowns' Antillean possessions.

The Red Swans cooperated with the Ispanians long enough to put the screws on the Bharukacchi, who, after an escalating proxy war of privateering, had their plantations in Galodugu seized by Ispanian Votivists. Afterwards, the bankrupted Bharukacchi traders were bought out by the Red Swans. The Red Swans had a healthy relationship with Mzishima (it being their largest foreign port, now that their East Indian ventures had been stymied) and they inherited the Bharukacchis' possessions on Sahodara and Sahodari (though not, as it would turn out, forever). So, with an even more secure supply line, they attempted to replicate the Bharukacchi playbook for profit again with Raktahamsabandara [Sao Paolo]. The Ispanians put a stop to that in 1351, however, and the Red Swans retreated to Abhivasatapa to lick their wounds.

By this point, the sugar trade had started to become their side hustle, however. As the primary trading partners of the Moors, they had exclusive access to the Moors' best asset - Novaquitainian silver. Sant Petru and Abhivasatapa would become hubs of Christian-Indian exchange, as the Moors brought silver to exchange for Indian goods of all types. As New Aquitaine, the Antillean islands, and Nova Ispania all had a ravenous need for slaves, the Red Swans were able to leverage their relationship with Mzishima to send East African slaves west to be traded on the markets of Barbuta and St Nicolas.

The Lankans were forced to sit up and take notice in the mid 14th century when silver began going east past Cape Watya in increasingly large quantities. Not content to take a cut, they sought to establish a working relationship with the Moors as well. They found it in the Kongo: the largest (and really, only) town of the Kingdom of the Kongo, Mbanza Kongo, was located at the mouth of the Kongo river, and had sprung into existence as a trading entrepot where the Moors traded European goods for African ivory, ebony, and African teak, which they increasingly built their ships from. The town was also a hub of the Kongo slave trade, with demand from the New World spurring raids deeper and deeper into the jungles upriver. The Lankans desired slaves as well, to populate the wastes of Watya, and so Lankan and Moor would strike deals for the fist time on the Kongolese shore. The Lankans developed a relationship with the Ngola of Ndongo, to the Kongo's south, to supply them with slaves, but ran into conflict with the Matemba chiefdom further inland.

The Ispanians, too, desired slaves, and along with buying from the Ukwu, they had established a working relationship with the smaller, vassal kingdom of Loango, to the Kongo's north. The Ispanians would arm the Loangolese against the kingdom of the Kongo's continued raids, and send them missionaries. Loango would become a raider and supplier of slaves, mounting raids to the north into Gabon. These raids, along with seaborne raids by the Kurama across the Bight of Biafra, would have a devastating effect on the population of the region. In addition to human cargo, however, they would also export fine quality copper and cloth. Loango and Kongo would vie for control of the region of Tio further upriver, but Kongo's command of the river mouth allowed them to win out and Kongo would gain control of much of its copper resources as well.

The Moors made quite the profit in the Kongo - but not enough to keep men from getting greedy. In 1356 King Mpanzu of the Kongo made a declaration banning the Moors and Lankans from their port - their sailors had taken to sailing upriver past the town and buying slaves directly from Bateke tribesmen, bypassing the King's own coffers, and in trading them directly for European goods (like weapons) rather than the shells the Kingdom gave them. Twin Crowns and Ispanian traders were welcomed in to fill the gap.

It would not last; the Moors had hired their hitmen. With Mauri arms, a cadre of Kurama raiders under Sundjata Sise sailed from Itchassa and overthrew the king of the Kongo, installing the former king's brother, who on Mauri instruction took baptism and the new Christian name of David. The new king was more or less a puppet however, and the new Kurama military class would lord themselves over the natives and become enthusiastic (and often, sadistic) slavetakers for the Moors despite their own nominal conversion to Christianity. Exiles from the Kongo kingdom would flee to Matemba in the south, generating future headaches for the Moors and Lankans alike... Furama raiders, particularly those from Bissau with a strong maritime tradition, would increasingly become widespread auxiliaries of Moorish navies, functioning as marines and shock troops, and played a significant part in the assaults on San Valentino and other Ispanian strongholds. With the humiliation of the Ispanian fleet, Isla Pasca was taken over by the Moors as well. Flax plantations on that island, Kurama migrants, and Akan craftsmen contributed to a sizeable shipbuilding depot in the Moorish quarter of Mbanza Kongo. The main thing preventing it from growing larger was the pestilential climate of the area - Europeans tended to die of the shaking sickness, but there were other native diseases besides that affected the Indians, like the sleeping sickness and dengue fever. That, and the Kongo River itself - which descended, 100 miles from the sea, down a set of cataracts themselves 100 miles long, blocking oceangoing ships from travelling any further upriver.

The Ukwu would find themselves pushed on all sides - with the Kanem and Hausa in the north, the Yoruba and the Kurama raiders in the west, the Loango in the south, and last but not least, the Shilawa in the east, a large inland kingdom dominated by a group of "Coptic" exiles who ran the kingdom like an army, and were infamous for their atrocities[1]. The Ukwu had struggled to adopt cavalry tactics, which limited their efficacy against the Hausa and Shilawa, and made their attempts to suppress a foreign-supported Yoruba revolt unsuccessful. The decentralized realm allowed the Ispanians and Red Swans to sway competing local headmen and nobles, who readily accepted their investment in forts as protection against the increasingly frequent raids. Here, though, their forts had been ignored by the Lankans, and in 1370s they were able to resist the native proxies set at them by the Red Swans, who were facing increasing troubles of their own sourcing slaves after the sack of Mzishima. Ispania, it seemed, would not be fully evicted from Africa quite yet...

[1]The Shiwala, who took their name for an insult from young Chalcedonians calling them "Old Bones", came to embrace the moniker after they took exile after Kanem's conversion, painting their faces with white skull motifs, which could not be worn by youths until they had killed their first man.