This part is covering Alexandros' military reforms and programs; His domestic policies will be covered in the next section
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Part III: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves
The Trapezuntine Empire that Alexandros inherited was one that was in a truly horrible position. As previously mentioned, Trapezous was surrounded on all sides by states with varying degrees of hostility, and the Trapezuntine army was a pathetic, disorganized mess. To even take the throne Alexandros had been forced to offer servitude to the Genoese, a move which delegitimized him by default amongst many of his subjects and emboldened the usual destabilizing elements across all Byzantine and Byzantine-derived states. He had few, if any, ties with the landed aristocracy, who were a perennial problem, while the church viewed him with open suspicion due to his time in the west. To secure himself and his realm, Alexandros would be facing an uphill battle against innumerable opponents, both domestic and foreign.
His first step was to act against his brothers’ supporters, who were the most likely to attempt to counter-coup him in favor of one of his extended family. As Ioannes had been supported primarily amongst the large land-owners, Alexandros set off on a campaign of breaking up the plantations and distributing the land to the Lazic lower classes, in many cases just turning around and giving the land to the serfs who already worked it. This angered many amongst the upper classes and sparked a chain of assassination attempts (Alexandros dodged the knife three times and lost six food tasters between 1450 and 1455), but it never spilled over into civil war due to a general lack of soldiery.
Alexandros also moved against this problem as well. Trapezous had long been crippled by manpower problems, as its small size and inefficient agricultural system (which we will cover next time) meant the basileus always had a hell of a time getting men together for campaigns both foreign and domestic. To resolve this, Alexandros attempted to revive the theme system, or at least enact a system similar to it. The new group of land-holders, as well as pre-existing small holders across the country, were grouped together in districts called ‘bandons’, which in times of war would be mobilized into units of two hundred men per bandon. To ensure that the bandons actually did as they were intended too, Alexandros instituted a policy of crushing taxes for this new group of farmers, all of which would be relieved if they provided a single male member of the household in times of war. The new farmers, surprisingly, actually took to this policy rather well. In attempting to create a ridiculously crushing tax code, Alexandros had inadvertently reduced the total loss of many of the farmers, as the pronoiai had induced almost farcical levels of indemnities to keep their subjects poor[1]. This both caused the size and strength of the bandons to increase rapidly, while ingratiating many amongst the lower classes to the new basileus.
At the head of each bandon was the moirarch, who was appointed directly from Trapezous and was charged with drilling the bandon during times of peace and leading it during times of war. Many of the moirarchs, who were often mercenaries from Italy or Greece, were barely fluent in Greek and didn’t understand a word of Lazic--to be fair, Lazic is notoriously difficult for westerners to pick up--and so Greek became the language of the army by default. The western origin of the moirarchs also had a sizeable impact on the training and capability of the bandons, as the Italian mercenaries introduced the new, post-Crecy military doctrines of western Europe, which emphasized the training of infantry as a counter to superior cavalry. Because of this, the bandons were trained with a rigor and regularity that was unmatched in the region. Several sources attest that every man in the formation was expected to be able to fight ‘proficiently’ with the bow, spear and axe. They were also expected to fight in and rapidly move between five different formations, unfortunately only one of which has survived to us[2]. This may seem excessive to us, or even impossible to orchestrate, but remember, these were medieval farmers--they had a good deal of down time between planting and harvest, and all of this training was strung out over several years. The long-term impact of the bandon system was that it allowed the Trapezuntines to mobilize (comparitavely) large numbers of men with great speed to produce an army of high (for a non-professional force) quality.
The bandons were not the only military reform, however. Alexandros took a leaf out of the Muslim world’s handbook and created a force of slave soldiers. ‘Freed’ from Italian or Muslim servitude in a series of raids on the slave ports of Crimea and Circassia, these men were put through exhaustive drilling and training, once again by Italian mercenaries, and enlisted in the armies of the aftokrator. If they survived fifteen years of service, they would be given land and native brides to farm and establish families. While still slavery, this was still a far better deal than they would’ve received anywhere else, and so these freedmen were very loyal to Alexandros and his dynasty[3]. The eleutheroi, as they were called, were established as a hybrid guard/field regiment, consisting of ten bandons garrisoned in Trapezous and the lands surrounding it[4]. Alexandros also tended to the pre-existing pronoiai system, which furnished the Trapezuntines with heavy cavalrymen on the relative cheap. However, they had a tendency towards disloyalty and often refused to take orders from those who they considered their lessers. As such, Alexandros divided his cavalry forces, inviting the Goqoyunlu (see below) to settle in the thinly-populated eastern borderlands and forcing the pronoiai to compete for their positions as chief cavalry officers. This prevented revolt, but it can be argued that it hurt the empire in the long term by kneecapping the domestic cavalry.
The Trapezuntine navy was also refurbished and expanded during Alexandros’ reign, having long languished under the previous emperors. Alexandros’ network of spies in the Ottoman Empire informed him that the Ottoman navy was almost comically small, numbering only thirty or so galleys[5], and he resolved to surpass that number and thus establish superiority at sea. Using the vast Trapezuntine trade income, he laid down forty ‘oared transports’ over the first six years of his reign, supplanting the sixteen galleys already in Imperial service. To further strengthen his navy, he purchased several dozen cannons from Italy for use on both land and sea, a move that could have helped prolong the life of the Palaiologian Empire had they not been so set in their ways. By 1459, the Trapezuntine navy numbered more than fifty galleys and two dozen transport ships, vastly outnumbering any potential enemy armada other than that of the Genoese themselves. The old megas doux, who had fled at the first sign of combat, was summarily executed and replaced with an experienced captain named Konstantinos Psarimarkos[7]. Psarimarkos took his new force out on a series of pirate-hunting campaigns across the Black Sea, both as experience-building exercises and dry runs for attacks on Ottoman seaports.
Alexandros then turned to his realm’s tenuous diplomatic position. While the Empire had nominal protection from the Genoese, Genoa was a long way away and, worse yet, on the far side of the straights. As such, Alexandros turned to his immediate neighbors in an effort to secure his position. In 1451, he made an alliance with King Giorgi of Kartvelia, betrothing his young son Alexios (b.1439) to the Kartvelian princess Keteon (b.1442) to secure it. Giorgi was beset with domestic enemies, however, and Alexandros was forced to bankroll a force of mercenaries in one of these rounds of civil wars. This nearly caused the alliance to collapse, but Giorgi was able to stabilize his position, execute his opponents and become the undisputed lord of the western Caucasus. Alexandros made alliances with Aq Qoyunlu and Qara Qoyunlu, the two bickering Turkic hordes that dominated Mesopotamia and Armenia. As previously mentioned, neither of these hordes were integrated states, with the many clans and bands of Turkmen that were nominally part of them often paying only lip service to the beylerbeys. However, they were still formidable opponents, and so Alexandros endeavored to sway them to his cause. In 1455, he married his niece, Theodosia, to Uzun Hasan of Aq Qoyunlu and in 1456 he married another one of his nieces, Eirene, to Jahan Shah of Qara Qoyunlu. The Qoyunlus both pledged to protect the Trapezuntines from the Ottomans, although their intention of actually doing so was suspect, to say the least. They also took the opportunity to rid themselves of troublemakers or syncretic[6] tribes by dispatching them to serve Alexandros as the Goqoyunlu. Finally, Alexandros made a secret defensive alliance, with the Venetians promising to come to the Trapezuntines’ aid in case of a Turkish invasion, and vice versa. The Venetian incentive for doing this was Trapezous itself, as the Doge calculated that this would be the best way for the Venetians to annex or establish a puppet regime in the distant city.
Finally, Alexandros began fortifying the eastern borderlands with the Çandarids/Ottomans. This region had some of the roughest country in Pontos, with the Paphlagonian and Pontic mountains mingling together and producing a series of sheer valleys and dense forest that would make any offensive campaigning difficult in the extreme. Alexandros constructed several rings of fortresses along important valleys, at multiple points on strategic roads and in isolated valleys. The former were to prevent troop or supply movements along the rivers, the hinter to control strategic roads and force any invaders to string out their forces in a series of small sieges, and the latter were to act as bases for bands of irregulars. Alexandros’ plan for any conflicts with the Ottomans was to force them to move slowly across the frontier along pre-scouted positions that would leave them exposed to constant harassment by bands of Trapezuntine irregulars. Their supply lines would also be ripe for the plundering, given how the difficult terrain forced them along narrow, isolated paths through the forests and hillsides. Ideally, the Ottomans would either be so exhausted by these constant attacks that they would either pull back or be so exhausted by the time they reached Trapezous proper they could be easily defeated in battle. To further this goal, he also assigned the garrisons of these forts various defensive tasks, such as destroying forage to hurt Ottoman cavalry, scattering bands of caltrops to delay troop movements, felling trees to impair roads or cutting out sluice channels to wash out roads in heavy rain. Finally, he readied the Goqoyunlu to range out onto the Anatolian Plateau and try and incite a Turkmen revolt by attacking isolated Ottoman outposts as well as attacking herds of stock and grain fields to further extend Ottoman supply lines.
That wraps up Alexandros’ preparations for war, now let’s move on to his domestic policies….
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[1] This sounds bizarre, but by the end of the Trapezuntine Empire the pronoiai had reached a similar state to their Palaiologian counterparts a century previous, where they taxed their hapless subjects at rate three to four times their actual taxes for personal gain.
[2] This formation, know simply as ‘Formation Gamma’, was as the following; The first rank numbered 125 in ranks three deep, with the rear rank numbering 75 in ranks two deep. The left-most and right-most 25 men in the first rank are armed with axes, the first line of the first rank is armed with bows, while the rest have spears.
[3] This sounds bizarre to the modern reader, but this was apparently a common occurrence in pre-modern history.
[4] All of this is taken directly from Byzantium’s Resurrection: A Second Alexiad. Credit to
@Eparkhos.
[5] Following The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1650 by Halil Inalcik. Butterflies mean that Zagan Pasha is never appointed Kapudan Pasha and thus never expands the Ottoman fleet.
[6] Many of the Turkmen were only nominally Muslim, with many either retaining their old Tengri beliefs or adopting the beliefs of their Armenian subjects
[7] No relation to a certain general
