The Second Intermediate Period and the rise of the Odrysian Dynasty
The next few decades were extremely chaotic, and almost impenetrable for the contemporary historians thanks to the large lapses that occurred in the Trojan Royal Archives; what is sure is that the imperial edifice fractured, with fringe areas occupied by foreign invaders and local kingdoms, cities and tribes freed from the Trojan joke.
When the dust settled, the situation had somewhat stabilised with the coagulation of a few different post-Trojan polities: Ilion and the Troad, still the prestigious centre of the Eastern Mediterranean, survived damaged but under the cumbersome protection of Lydian warlords; Phrygia reasserted its independence and imposed its hegemony over central Anatolia ousting roving bands of Cimmerians and Schytians; the Thracians Kingdom of Odrysa occupied the coast up to Lygos [9], and clashed with the Paeonians, which in turn attempted to impose its control over Achaea defeating the Molossians and Iolcos; Miletos built a vast but ramshackle thalassocracy in the southern Aegean, clashing with Thapsos and Maliquart [10]; The Syro-Hittites reasserted their independence and forged stronger ties with the Phoenician cities to the south, to resist Phrygian and Schytian meddling.
This equilibrium persevered for more than a century, as the Post-Trojan Kingdoms jostled for supremacy and the Free Poleis fought for their Freedom. In Thrace the Kingdom of Odrysia slowly but surely strengthened and Trojanised, growing out of its tribal roots and developing into a veritable autocratic monarchy much like its southern neighbours. The process culminated in 453 BC when the young King Amatokos, known by his Trojan mother as Polydoros, crossed the Propontis to seize what he perceived as his birthright: Ilion, the centre of the Western World.
The Thracians struck at a particularly fortuitous time, as the Lydian warlords that controlled the city just exhausted themselves repelling a Phrygian invasion, and the Trojans themselves were increasingly incensed by their Anatolian overseers. Amatokos was thus able to enter Ilion without any meaningful resistance, and was cheered by its citizens when his mother crowned him King Polydoros.
The event rocked the unstable equilibrium of the Post-Trojan world. The growing might of the Thracian Kingdom paired with the prestige and the wealth of Ilion greatly unnerved its neighbours, prompting the creation of a coalition between Lydia, Phrygia and Miletos. Polydoros met their vast but disorganised army of their enemies at Thymbra [11]; discord between the Anatolian powers and the betrayal of the Mileteans allowed the Thracians to overcome their more numerous enemies and score a decisive victory.
Polydoros quickly seized the opportunity and retaliated against his enemies: Lydia was devastated, Sardis once more torched, and its leaders forced to bend the knee; Phrygia was beaten back and while Gordion was spared, they were forced to cede Doryleum and much of the Western border towns; Ionia and Lycia followed the example of Miletos and accepted Trojan suzerainty.
Now the undisputed leader of Western Anatolia, Polydoros returned to the Trojan Citadel and decreed the resurrection of the (now Third) Empire of Ilion. Many were not enthused, both outside (in Phrygia and Achaea) and inside the Kingdom (especially the Thracian nobility), but the military strength and prestige accrued by the new Trojan King allowed the new Empire to thrive.
In the following century Trojan armies advanced without much pause and piece by piece rebuilt their previous domain. Two wars broke the resistance of the Paeonian Kingdom and its hegemony over Achaea, with many of the Poleis easily swayed by the prospect of Trojan control instead of the northern barbarian; a coalition of Thapsos and Maliquart was beaten soundly at Korkyra ceasing the interferences of the western states in the Aegean; the defeat of Phrygia sealed the passing of the Trojan mantle from the old Anatolian lords to the new Thracian upstarts, and opened the gates to the conquest of the rest of the peninsula, from Tabal to Lycia, Kizzuwatna and Colchis.
The Great Revolt and the conquest of the Near East
The seemingly inexorable rise of the Third Empire of Ilion came to a screeching halt around 360 BC, when the first forays of Trojan armies in Syria and Mesopotamia were soundly beaten by the Filastinians and the Schyto-Medes and the Trojan fleet was sunk during a particularly daring raid to Thrinacia. The perceived weakness of the Kingdom emboldened the Odrysian nobles, incensed by the perceived neglect of the Thracian homeland by the ever-Trojanized Kings, and the still powerful local elites in Phrygia and Paeonia.
After the death of the King in 353 BC the growing tension finally exploded into a multi-sided civil war between the army, a couple of Royal pretenders, and the local separatists, called by future historians “The Great Revolt”; after a few gruelling years, when the Empire appeared to be on the brink of destruction, the brother of the actual heir of the previous King took charge of the army and scored an impressive victory over the Phrygians at Akroinon forcing them to submit.
The battered but galvanised Trojans, bolstered by Phrygian auxiliares and led by their new talented general, swiftly reversed the tide of the conflict, isolating and defeating the insurgents one by one. In 345 BC the battle of Uskodama [12] brought the demise of the rebellious Thracians and the end of the war; the untimely (but strangely fortuitous) death of King Priam IV allowed the rise of his brother, Aleksandar, the hero of the war, as the new King.
The new energetic and charismatic leader of Ilion embarked in a widespread program of reforms: the old system of tributaries, vassal kingdoms and local potentates subservient to Trojan suzerainty was swept away and reorganised into a number of ordered provinces controlled by hand-picked governors; the army was restructured, widening the recruitment pool to the more loyal subjects, and bolstered by a Heavy Infantry core of Trojans and Thracians; finally Ilion was remade as a city of marble, a true imperial capital.
King Aleksandar spent much of his reign fighting against the opponents of his reforms, but when his son, Polydoros II, became king, he was ready to exploit the strength of the reformed and revitalised empire. The second phase of Trojan expansion brought the border of Ilion farther than ever before: Mesopotamia was taken from the Schyto-Medes after a couple of gruelling wars that ended when Babylon and its citizens welcomed with open arms the Trojan liberators from the barbarian yoke, allowing Polydoros II to crown himself as King of Kings; Syria and Canaan where quite more difficult to conquer as the Filastinians put up much more resistance, but eventually city after city fell to the Trojans, and only a pyrrhic Filastinian victory at Gaza prevented the invasion of Aegyptos proper.
Trojan expansion unsettled the surrounding powers, who attempted strike against Ilion before it was too late: Thapsos and the Achaean colonies, Maliquart and the Phoenician colonies, Paeonians, Illyrians, Cimmerians, Schyto-Medes, Urartians, Filastinians and even some Trojan colonies from the Euxinus and the Western Mediterranean, a vast coalition of states, tribes and people attacked Ilion by land and by sea, but after some early successes, the Trojans where the one to come up on top.
From 280 BC the expansionist push of the Third Empire of Ilion basically ceased, as the Trojans elites were largely convinced that their attained hegemon of the Near East was unassailable, and because the strain of the constant wars was greatly straining the royal coffers. Some of the more independent-minded provinces were increasingly incensed by the heavier and heavier fiscal pressure imposed by the governors, and a large part of the army was frequently preoccupied by the need to suppress local revolts, mainly in Phrygia, Syria and Babylon (where the honeymoon with the newcomers quickly turned sour).
The Galatian Invasion
Around 250 BC, malcontent in Paeonia erupted into open revolt, but despite the large popular support for the insurgents, the Trojan Army reacted quickly and converged on Aegae [13]. The Paeonian rebels on the brink of defeat attempted to turn the tide inviting in the area the Celtic tribes lurking on the border of the Trojan world, in particular the Boii, the Eravisci and the Senones, promising control over Thracia and uncountable riches. The first sparse Celtic war bands were defeated by the Trojans, and the Paeonians were subdued, but it was only the beginning of the invasion: in 248 two large armies, led by the brothers Biatex and Vindox (called by the chroniclers the “Galatian Twins”) ravaged Paeonia and then split, one invading Thrace and the other Macedonia and Thessaly.
King Aleksandar IV, perceiving the Celtic threat but arrogantly underestimating it, levied a medium sized army and met Biatex on the field near Sytalkea [14]: the Trojans fought valiantly, but were eventually overwhelmed, and the king slaughtered. The Empire of Ilion was severely shaken by the Disaster of Sytalkea, but after some months of understandable paralysis during which the Celts ravaged Thrace, Paeonia and Northern Achaea, it reacted surprisingly well. The new King, Troilos III, emerged victorious after a brief dynastic squabble, then rallied a much larger army and crossed the Propontis to meet Biatex still busy sieging Ainos [15]; the Trojans, now more ready to their enemy, were able to defeat the invading Galatians and scatter the Eastern army, albeit with considerable losses.
The western army of Vindox instead continued to pillage Northern Achaea for years, and while their attempted crossings of the Thermopylai were repelled, some smaller bands managed to reach Delphi and partially loot the sanctuary. Troilos III attempted to dislodge the roving Galatians numerous times, but Vindox, wary of the disastrous defeat of his western brethren, avoided the sieging of fortified settlement and divided his army in smaller and nimbler detachments; in the end, the exhausted Trojans managed to push the invaders in Molossia, but were forced to recognise Vindox as a feudatary lord of the area, which would be quickly called Galatia.
Ilion was not broken by the Celtic debacle, but the loss of a king in battle and the inability to oust the invaders from its borders, coupled with the partial looting of Delphi, shook the Empire to the core and dispelled its myth of invincibility developed over the course of the Near East conquests. Until the end of the 3rd Century revolts against Trojan authority became almost endemic, from Achaea to Mesopotamia, but their inability to coordinate as a united front allowed the Empire to quash them one after the other, not without considerable difficulty and strain for the Royal coffers. Absorbed by military matters, the subsequent Kings almost never spent more than a few months in Ilion, neglecting the administration of the Kingdom, placed in the trusted hands of the court, and the dire need of reforms.
The campaigns of Hector IV
The militarization of Trojan society, enforced by the constant revolts, provoked the third phase of expansion at the start of the 2nd century BC, when the internal conflicts were largely suppressed by increasingly independent and feudal-like local governors. In 198 BC a young and restless King, Hector IV, rose to the throne; raised hearing the stories of the conquerors of old such as Aleksandru, Hector I and Polydoros, and in charge of a large but progressively unused army, he began new wars of conquest.
His objective was the Kingdom of the Bactrians, who in the previous decades had taken over control over the Iranian plateau from the Schyto-Medes and attempted an abortive invasion of Mesopotamia in 229 BC. The Trojan invasion met great successes at first, entering triumphantly Ispahn in 196 BC, but the quite large army of Hector IV got quickly bogged down by Bactrian harassment and logistic hurdles; eventually a tactical defeat at Pasargadae forced the invaders to retreat. After a couple of years of back and forth, eventually Hector IV met King Pharnaspes in Susa, where they signed a peace treaty; despite the little successes, the Trojans were still able to secure control over Media as an autonomous Satrapy, and the young King was still celebrated in Ilion as the conqueror of the East.
The King did not wait much before embarking in his next campaign, this time against Filastin. The north African Kingdom had bounced back after the loss of its Canaanite territories, and in the past decades it became the linchpin of an anti-Trojan alliance in the Central Mediterranean (with Thapsos, Maliquart and many other poleis); its pirates harassed merchants deep into the Aegean, much to the displeasure of the court.
In 187 BC Hector IV finally struck against his enemy, but despite years of preparation, the invasion quickly became a veritable quagmire: Gaza resisted more than a year the Trojan siege, and even after its fall the passage of large armies through the land bridge was severely hampered by Filastinian hit-and-run tactics; the invaders attempted numerous naval landing to bypass the desert, but with the help of the other naval powers of the Mediterranean Filastin held for long the control of the sea, and the few small landings that succeeded, such as in Odysseia [16] in 184 BC, were eventually defeated and slaughtered due to the lack of support.
Eventually the Trojan army, bolstered by a large contingent of Arab and Getic mercenaries and helped by the exit of Thapsos from the war (due to an untimely war with a coalition of western Mediterranean powers, perhaps engineered by Trojan diplomacy), broke through Filastinian defences and, in 179 BC, captured the capital, Herakleopolis [17], and won the war. The last King-Pharaoh fled to Thapsos, and while some cities along the Nile escaped conquest and preferred Kushite suzerainty instead, Filastin was reduced to a Trojan province. The hegemony of Ilion over the western Mediterranean was now sealed, and further reinforced by the subjugation of Maliquart as tributary after a brief war in 176 BC, but the cracks in the Trojan imperial edifice were already showing and widening.
As the Royal army was preoccupied in external wars, the local Governors took up more and more prerogatives from the state to fund personal armies to use against local insurgents; the Royal coffers were quite drained by the military expenses, as Hector IV kept the foreign mercenaries on the payroll as an answer to wayward Governors, forcing the increase of the fiscal weight on merchants, cities and tributaries alike; the King, taking great pride in his conquest, spent money he didn't have, to build lavish palaces in Ilion, Babylon, Herakleopolis and Rhodes (where he even thought to move the capital, before being convinced by his more level-headed advisors).
The Siege of Thapsos
Nevertheless, the Empire of Ilion lumbered along, too strong to fall but too large to reform. Its weakness was not apparent to its neighbours until the last great Trojan war, launched by the new king, Hector V, in 160 BC. Frail and grown in the shadow of his father, Hector V was eager to strengthen the legitimacy of his reign (his many brothers circled like vultures in the court), so he and his advisors opted for a glorious war, the war to conquer Thapsos.
The Thrinacian polis, always a veritable thorn in the Trojan side, had over the last centuries built a strong hegemony over Héspere Achaea [18], lording over Achaeans, Trojans and Phoenicians alike, and its fleet reached from Gaza to Tarshis, with strong links with Filastin, thanks to never forgotten cultural links between the Achaeans and Filastinian elites; their intervention in the invasion of Hector IV and the flight of the King-Paraoh to Thrinacia much irked the court of Ilion, and the new King, stirred by his advisors, choose Thapsos as his new conquest, and maybe even a springboard for the conquest of the Western Mediterranean.
Soldiers from all over the empire were brought to Ilion, from Scythians, Armenians and Syrians to Phrygians, Trojans, Thracians and Celts, and innumerable ships sailed the Aegean and past Archaea. After a brief and fortuitous clash with the enemy fleet beyond Korkyra, the Trojan army reached Thrinacia, and approached Thapsos; the Thapsian Lawagex [19] hastily rallied an army and met the invaders at Katane, but the battle ended up as a resounding Trojan victory.
As they approached Thapsos and besieged the city, victory appeared to be within grasp for Hector V and his generals, but after a few weeks the Trojan navy was surprised and destroyed by the regrouped Thapsians, who in turn had managed to resolve its conflicts in the Western Mediterranean and with few concessions rallied many allies and resources to fight the Trojans.
The soldiers of Ilion were now stranded in the enemy land, tasked to conquer a city that still held with an iron fist supremacy over the waves, assuring a constant stream of resources that fed its defenders and maintained its walls. Nevertheless, Hector V wasn’t despairing, as his army was still unchallenged on the field and his fleet was going to be rebuilt and conquer the waves. As weeks, months, and eventually years passed, the arrogance of the Trojan King progressively turned into anger. The invading army continued the land siege against Thapsos and laid waste to the island, looting the fields and surviving with its resources, while the Thapsians opted to avoid further land battles and retreated into their fortified cities, focusing on supremacy on the sea.
Many Trojan attempts to break the naval shield protecting Thapsos were rebuked over and over, same as their attempts to land other invading armies on the mainland to divide the enemy resources. Still, some reinforcements periodically still managed to land in Thrinacia and bolster the invaders, who in turn actually managed to conquer and laid waste to a number of minor Thrinacian cities; the better-defended ones, in particular Thapsos the Defiant, still resisted.
Ten years passed, much like the ten-year long Siege of Ilion a thousand of years before. This time, alas, the Trojans were the invaders, and as the Achaean of old, nothing they could do would break the stalemate; Hector V and his court drained to the bone the provinces of the Empire to pay the enormous expenses to fund the war, but no amount of mercenaries, siege weapons and most importantly ships (as the Thapsian sunk fleet after fleet) would turn the tide. Many had begun clamouring, more or less openly, to end the ruinous war, and some governors, especially in the more rebellious eastern provinces, were now refusing to send more soldiers to their death.
Not everything was rosy on the other side, also, as the League of Thapsos was seriously straining under the weight of the war; enormous sums were spent to maintain their naval supremacy, and tons of grain and other goods were extracted from Héspere Achaea, more and more forcefully, and shipped to Thapsos to keep the citizens and the large garrison alive and ready to fight. The other cities of the League were more and more incensed by the continuing war, and eventually the Lawagex was forced to sit at the negotiation table with the Trojans. Many in the court of Ilion were ecstatic about this development, as the Thapsian emissaries were ready to give ample concessions such as the (admittedly token) submission of the League to the Trojans, but their pleads fell on the deaf ears of the King: Hector V, embittered and enraged by a decade of war, only wanted the complete destruction of Thapsos, and thus killed the emissaries sending their heads to the Lawagex.
The outrage provoked by this blatant disregard of the laws of hospitality and diplomacy roused the cities of the League against the invaders. Resources were collected, money spent on mercenaries, allies gathered, all to muster an army to finally meet the invaders again on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the situation was deteriorating in the Trojan camp, as the umpteenth epidemic was killing many soldiers (and also many Thapsians, hastening the League’s response), and morale among the army and its generals was plummeting. In the end, the Thapsians dispatched another pitiful Trojan attempt to muster a navy, and disembarked in the south-west of the island near Sykara; most of the besieging army marched south to meet the newcomers, giving battle on the road to Thapsos.
It proved to be a quite close-fought affair, but in the end the more fresh army of the Thapsians prevailed, if barely; most of the Trojans retreated orderly to their camp, getting ready to fight to their death, but it was not to be: Dardanos, the leader of the invading army, publicly repudiated his King’s orders, and offered his surrender to the League’s forces. The ten-years long War of Thapsos finally concluded, and Ilion, much like the Acheans a thousand years before, was defeated. The Lawagex was very happy to accept Dardanos’ surrender, and even allowed an orderly retreat of the battered Trojan soldiers away from Thrinacia as he had every intention to ingratiate the upcoming new regime in Ilion. Things were sure enough stirring back in the Trojan capital, as the stubborn (and murderous) refusal by Hector V to end the war and bring back the by now beleaguered army and greatly incensed the court, a large part of the royal family, many generals and governors, and even the general populace.
Dardanos had been in constant contact with the anti-war faction in the last months, and finally engineered a forced policy change, something he actually shared with the Thapsians; he sailed back home with the Trojan army, having earned their loyalty thanks to having finished the useless war, disembarked in the Troad, and marched under the walls of Ilion. Hector V was increasingly enraged as he approached the city, and finally decreed his trusted advisors to recall troops from Anatolia to fight the upstart General; in the end, he was found dead in his room, and one of the servants was quickly apprehended and executed as the purported culprit. The death of Hector V in 150 BC, acclaimed by the court and the common people alike, would however mark the zenith of the Third Empire of Ilion, and the beginning of the end.
After a couple of years of reign of an old uncle of the deceased King, with Dardanos as the real power behind the throne, the Empire found itself engulfed in decades of civil war, between members of the Royal Family, ambitious generals (Dardanos even attempted seize the crown, unsuccessfully), and rebellious governors.
Royal authority generally broke down, peripheral provinces were lost to rebellions or external invasions (in particular from the newcomers of the East, the Sakans), and for a while the state even found itself divided in two part, Eastern and Western, between the 2nd and the 1st Century BC, but the Empire of Ilion still lumbered along, its hegemony irremediably shaken and its economy barely staying afloat.
The end would came at the end of the next century, when a particularly ambitious Sarmatian general called Argamênos after decades of extreme reliance of the Royal house on a large contingent of Sarmatian mercenaries, would kill the last Trojan King, Priam IX, and attempt to seize the crown; the last few loyal provinces would denounce the power-grab, leaving the Sarmat almost nothing outside the Troad. Many would try to embody the Trojan tradition and call themselves the heirs of Ilion, but the empire would never arise once more.
