Fair warning, this wasn't written under the best of circumstances, and so I hope that getting the general ideas of the story across will suffice.
Part LXVII: Crusade of the Willing (1521-1540)
The century and a half of Ottoman hegemony over the Balkans had seen much of the region laid waste by its new overlords as an empire notable for its cruelty even during an age of cruel empires asserted its dominance over the existing peoples. The constant bloodshed, slavery and near-wanton violence, not to mention the on-and-off religious persecution and incessant slaving raids into the lands beyond its frontiers had made the Ottoman Empire a vast legion of enemies, and now that years of civil war and infighting had bled it nearly white, all those enemies would come against it one final time. The crows were coming home to roost on the spires of the New Palace of Mehmed[1]....
The Second Ottoman Civil War had been a bloody and effectively pointless affair. The great armies and the expansive bureaucracy that had fired the empire’s expansion into the Balkans were ripped apart in a near-fratricidal structure, and though the Grand Vizier Ebulhayr Paşa would eventually emerge triumphant, he didn’t win much of a prize. Julius of Hnugary’s invasion in 1521 should have by all rights ended the Ottomans, but good fortune, the quality of the remaining soldiers and Ebulhayr’s skill as a leader and general had just barely managed to stave off disaster. However, they had not been able to completely defeat the Second Holy League: In the west, Joze Shkoze and the Albanians still menaced the frontier with frequent irregular raids, while to the north a new foe was emerging even as the Moldovans exited the war.
The Bulgarians had been subjects of the Ottomans to one degree or another since the 1370s, and this had imbued them with a fiery hatred of all things Turkish and Muslim. During the civil war, the Bulgarians of Bulgaria had formed many militias and local self-defense groups to ward off marauders, as there were next to no Bulgarian converts and they were thus seen as more or less expendable by both factions of the conflict. Thus, even though the more inclusive pro-Vizier faction triumphed, the Bulgarians were left out in the cold and heavily armed. Even with their prospective Hungarian benefactor dead, they had had more than enough of Ottoman rule and refused to bend the knee for one day longer. The militias were reinforced by surviving Crusaders and other allied soldiers who were determined to go on fighting the Turks, and though they were by no means a legendary army they were still a force to be reckoned with. As the Hungarians retreated over the winter of 1522-23, they turned over the fortress town of Vidin to the Bulgarians; their de facto leader, Nikifor of Lom, proclaimed the establishment of the Third Bulgarian Empire on Orthodox Christmas, with himself as ‘regent’ for any prince or king willing to take the cross and aid them.
Under ideal circumstances, Ebulhayr Paşa would have countermarched at once to crush Nikifor and his allies, but in ideal circumstances these were not. The Ottomans had only one surviving army, and the Rumite force crossing the Anatolian frontier was a far more dangerous enemy than some peasant rebels in Bulgaria, no matter how many letters to the west they were writing. As such, he hastily transferred his army across the straits into Asia Minor in the spring of 1523, under the watchful gaze of a Moreote squadron, and rushed south to meet Kilij Arslan’s host. However, the Vizier would have an unfortunate run-in with a bottle of poison en route--why is unknown, but likely due to an ongoing affair he was having with a married woman back in Constantinople--and with his death in June 1523 the Ottoman Empire finally and decisively entered its death spiral.
Although Kilij Arslan would be forced to turn back by rebels back in his own sultanate, the Sultanate’s enemies pressed in from the north and west without relief. While the Moreotes and Moldovans had both been nominally bought off, in practice they were more than happy to kick the Turks while they were down, not to mention the ongoing war with Albania and Bulgaria. After Ebulhayr Paşa’s death, a rotating series of viziers took power, with a total of nine holding power between 1523 and 1540, and in this period of rampant instability there was little that the Ottomans could do to ward off their many enemies.
With quiet Moldovan support, Nikifor of Lom’s forces swept eatwards across the Danubian Plain. The ravages of the civil war had killed most of the region’s Turks or driven them into easily-isolated fortress towns, and the Ottomans in Bulgaria proper were hopelessly outnumbered. A dozen small battles were fought between 1523 and 1529, when the Turks were finally and permanently driven across the mountains, the largest of them pitting less than 3,000 Turks against 10,000 Bulgarians, Crusaders and Moldovans. With the Turks safely expelled, Bogdan then openly took the throne of Bulgaria, expanding his control south of the river and giving himself a number of additional ports on the Black Sea in one fell sweep. However, he limited himself to Varna and the Balkan Mountains, citing their use as a nature defense but secretly fearing that further expansion would make it impossible for him to properly govern his new conquests.
Meanwhile, the Moreotes were also exploiting the Ottomans’ dramatic misfortune, although in a far more cautious manner. Having only recently been a small Ottoman vassal, their ruler, Konstantinos I Palaiologos, was inclined to be quite cautious in his dealings with them, and was already having difficulty absorbing the new conquests in Thessaly. Nonetheless, a great number of ‘pirates’ operating out of Moreote ports appeared in the Aegean in the years after Ebulhayr Paşa’s death, and independent Greek forces began to move into the Giannitsa swamps in hopes of securing the plains west of Thessaloniki before the Albanians could get to them. In 1532, at the behest of the city’s Ottoman governor and after years of loose, irregular (and thus deniable) siege, a Moreote ‘protection force’ entered Thessaloniki in what was a triumphal procession in all but name. However, the bonanza for the Moreotes would end here, as Konstantinos’ slippage into senility prompted an internal civil war over the regency that would delay further expansion.
By far, though, the most steadfast, capable and provocative foe of the Sublime Porte throughout this period was Shkoze and his Albanians. Within a few short years he had risen from a bandit to a king, and now the former slave was eying hegemony over all the Balkans as well--in the name of Christ, of course.
Demographically speaking, Albania was almost completely irrelevant--its total population was roughly the same as the population of non-Turkish Muslims in the Ottoman Sultanate--but the Albanians were by now one of the most experienced groups of soldiers in Europe and had a society practically geared around warfare. Most importantly, Shkoze was aware of his country’s small population size, and was willing to bring foreign groups into a ruling coalition of sorts to ensure the destruction of the Ottomans. If nothing else, he was a good general and a charismatic leader, and was able to fold the many disparate groups of the Balkans into a coalition unified by a general hatred towards the Turks. Under most circumstances, such a thing would have collapsed in flames within weeks of its first creation, but Shkoze was able to keep it together, welding dozens of groups together into a third and final Holy League (in the Balkans, anyway), a crusade of all those who were willing.
The War of the Third Holy League (1525-1540) would be difficult to show on a map, as it was not a war of pitched battles and sieges but of raids and ambuscades in the mountains and villages of the highlands. Despite the Ottomans’ increasing weakness, there was a very real chance the smaller armies which Shkoze was forced to use could be caught out and destroyed piecemeal if the Ottomans caught them in the field, so the Albanians intentionally avoided pitched battles, favoring irregular tactics. Holy League light cavalry or infantry would advance through the narrow valleys and highland paths of the Vlach shepherds that roamed the Macedonian and Thracian mountains, slipping around fortresses and armies to attack the underbelly of the Ottoman state, the Balkan Muslims, where they were most vulnerable. They would attack without warning in the twilight, thundering down from the mountain to kill or enslave all Muslims, massacre non-Muslims suspected of supporting the Ottomans and then parse their possessions out to the others before disappearing back into the mountains. It was a fairly quiet war, a creeping war that the Ottomans were wholly unprepared to fight, and gradually everything beyond a chain of walled cities and fortified garrisons were lost to Constantinople. The Ottomans weren’t stupid, of course, they realized what was happening, but constant infighting limited their efforts, and it was nigh-on-impossible to fight an irregular, highly mobile force in the rough country of the southern Balkans. The few armies that were both large enough and willing to take the offensive against the few strongholds which the Holy League occupied in Ottoman lands were stalked through the mountains, worn down in running battles before chains of ambushes fell upon them, shattering the demoralized and exhausted columns and putting them to flight. By the end of the first phase of the war in 1532, Ottoman control barely extended past the walls of their increasingly isolated cities.
To the desperate, downtrodden refugees that huddled inside the walls of Muslim strongholds, their ramparts must have been a blessed relief against the terrors that had stalked their nights for years now. In truth, thought, they were cages. Shkoze and his allies had spent years hounding all those who opposed them out of the countryside and into the cities, where they could be pinned up and slowly starved into submission. Now that that had been done, the rest was relatively simple. Taking a page from the Ottomans’ own conquest of Byzantine Anatolia, the Albanians and their allies would lay siege to the fortress towns two or three at a time, not pressing the wall with camps and cannons but instead camping in the hills surrounding the town and attacking anyone who tried to come or leave. If an Ottoman force too large to be successfully ambushed with complete certainty of victory approached the town, they would wait for them to either leave or dig in, at which point they would continue their attacks. Already stretched thin--armies of Orthodox soldiers had a tendency to turn into armies of Orthodox rebels if not paid regularly, an increasingly difficult task for the Porte--this was a devastatingly effective tactic, and the Ottomans spread themselves thin trying to stamp them out only to be gradually ground down from all sides. One by one, the cities fell, and the Ottomans were driven back towards Constantinople. Skopje was the first major city to fall in 1526, while the first city to be taken by long siege was Sofiya in 1534: By 1538, the Ottomans had lost all of their European holdings except for Burgas, Gallipoli and everything east of the hastily rebuilt Anastasian Long Wall.
Of course, the Ottomans did try to fight back, but it was difficult to do so when they were already drowning under foreign attacks. They sent out many armies to try and drive the attackers back, but most were either waylaid or had to run back and forth across a hostile countryside trying to ward off attacks on a half-dozen towns at once. There was one major pitched battle, though, the Battle of Edirne in 1534. The sitting vizier, one Sinan Ahmed Paşa, knew that Shkoze had to be stopped now, before the Ottomans lost any chance to do so, and managed to convince his domestic rivals to put aside their differences and raise as large a force as possible. Edirne, the former capital, was on the verge of being taken, and its loss would be an immense morale defeat. Sinan Ahmed Paşa managed to assemble 7,000 men of varying quality in Constantinople in May and marched on Edirne, hoping to force a pitched battle and turn the tide of the war. Enroute, they encountered supply difficulties and delays due to constant harassment, and the vizier considered that at least he would get a straight battle.
And a battle he would recieve. On the night of 26 June, the army camped in a semi-fortified defensive position within sight of the walls of Edirne, likely hoping to draw out the Albanians. Shortly before midnight, the night exploded into fire as the camp’s gunpowder stores were set alight and dark figures burst into the camp to hurl firebrands amongst the tents. Just as soon as they appeared they were gone, but the resulting chaos killed or maimed a few hundred Muslims and left the survivors demoralized. The battle proper began the following morning, as the vizier led his army out along the road towards Edirne and found the path blocked by a force of heavy infantry. Without their gunpowder, ranged combat was impossible, and the small force of heavy cavalry in the Ottoman army led the charge forward to try and clear the road. Now that they were properly strung out and demoralized, Shkoze struck. Cavalry and infantry exploded out of the hedgerows along the road, catching the Ottomans completely off-guard and ripping them to shreds, sending any who survived fleeing back down the road to the camp; it did them no good, and all but a handful of officers were slaughtered. Edirne surrendered a few hours later.
By 1538, the Ottomans had their back up against the wall. They still held territories on the eastern shore of the Aegean, although they were under increasing attack from the Moreotes, Venetians and Rumite exiles, but their holdings in Europe were all but gone. That autumn, Shkoze’s main army of around 8,000 and his many, many captured cannons blasted their way through the walls of Thrace just as a smaller force did the same against Gelibolu. The war had finally come to Constantinople itself. For the next year and a half, the Holy League pressed the walls of the City of Constantine, pounding them with cannonade around the clock. However, Mehmed’s reinforcements did their job well and held against the bombardment more or less intact, and the ferocity of the refugee Greek Muslims, who refused to be driven from their homes once again, drove back attacks on the walls and attempts to dig under the walls. The defenders were fed by grain and joined by reinforcements from Anatolia, and without a way to close the Marmora to the Turks it seemed that Shkoze had no way of truly winning. Another miracle of the House of Osman seemed to be unfolding, as volunteers from Rumite territory and mercenaries from Syria and Egypt came to join the defence. Shkoze’s coalition, meanwhile, which had only been kept together by his charisma and success, was beginning to splinter over this sudden, final failure to take the City of the World’s Desire.
Then, in May 1541, Trapezuntine sails appeared on the Bosphorus….
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Better known as the Topkapi Palace, which it was renamed to in the 1800s.
. To manage a rebuilding he needs a lot of time in peace and to siphon every penny around his Empire which could lead to some but situations. Also Constantinople needs a population injection and I don't know where those people will come from, I mean obviously from the Trapezountian heartland but that would leave the are underpopulated and decrease its defensive capabilities. Westerners could be invited to revive the Latin quarter of old but having a lot of them is a double-edge sword , like the eagle in the banners ok I'll stop the puns.