Isaac's Empire 2.0
- Thread starter Basileus Giorgios
- Start date
Good few updates on damn fool things in the Balkans!
Thanks! More like this to come.
Nice Work
Nice updates, BG!
Thanks guys!
I'm currently trying to do some research on medieval Bulgaria and its aristocracy, so I can write a little about the Prienensid Bulgarian state of the 1183-1228 period. If anyone could point me in the direction of some sources, I'd be very grateful.
Coming up next: I think we'll take a quick look at the Christian kingdoms of the Caucasus.
Here's a quick taste of another new character bio I'm going to write: of Maria Prienensis, the fairly bad-ass daughter of John of Priene and sister to Tsars.
1198: Maria and her twin brother Symeon are born to Tsar Ivan's Hungarian wife Margit.
1201: Tsar Ivan I dies besieging Constantinople. Maria's elder brother Ivan II succeeds him, at the age of five.
1204-5: A revolt against the Prienensid regime is put down with Hungarian support.
1210: Ivan II dies. Maria and Symeon are imprisoned for a few months, before Symeon is put on the throne. Maria is married off against her will to the forty eight year old nobleman Vladimir Surname.
1214: At the age of fifteen, Maria delivers Vladimir a son, Ivan.
1216: Vladimir Surname becomes the leading noble at the court of Symeon II.
1219: Death of Vladimir Surname.
1220: Maria is betrothed to a rebellious Serbian princeling, Petrislav Surname. While travelling to Serbia, however, she manages to escape and takes refuge in Croatia.
1221: Marriage of Maria and the handsome young Stephen III of Croatia.
1222: Birth of Jelena, Maria and Stephen's first daughter.
1226: Birth of Vekenega, Maria and Stephen's second daughter. Death of Maria's brother Tsar Symeon. Stephen III arranges for the coronation of his wife as Tsarina, with her son Ivan named her heir. In Ochrid, Symeon's nine year old daughter Katherine is proclaimed.
1227: Birth of Petar, Maria and Stephen's son. War of the Margus begins.
1198: Maria and her twin brother Symeon are born to Tsar Ivan's Hungarian wife Margit.
1201: Tsar Ivan I dies besieging Constantinople. Maria's elder brother Ivan II succeeds him, at the age of five.
1204-5: A revolt against the Prienensid regime is put down with Hungarian support.
1210: Ivan II dies. Maria and Symeon are imprisoned for a few months, before Symeon is put on the throne. Maria is married off against her will to the forty eight year old nobleman Vladimir Surname.
1214: At the age of fifteen, Maria delivers Vladimir a son, Ivan.
1216: Vladimir Surname becomes the leading noble at the court of Symeon II.
1219: Death of Vladimir Surname.
1220: Maria is betrothed to a rebellious Serbian princeling, Petrislav Surname. While travelling to Serbia, however, she manages to escape and takes refuge in Croatia.
1221: Marriage of Maria and the handsome young Stephen III of Croatia.
1222: Birth of Jelena, Maria and Stephen's first daughter.
1226: Birth of Vekenega, Maria and Stephen's second daughter. Death of Maria's brother Tsar Symeon. Stephen III arranges for the coronation of his wife as Tsarina, with her son Ivan named her heir. In Ochrid, Symeon's nine year old daughter Katherine is proclaimed.
1227: Birth of Petar, Maria and Stephen's son. War of the Margus begins.
I see much potential for the House of Surname
New update to come tonight. Lots of Jurchen action, with an introduction to several foreign peoples who've not been mentioned in the narrative so far. And, social history too! I'm quite pleased with it all, really. Keep checking back!
Chapter Nineteen: Demetrios the Regent
Chapter Nineteen: Demetrios the Regent
"All profit made by trading was regarded as dishonourable for the patricians"
Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome
"All profit made by trading was regarded as dishonourable for the patricians"
Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome
With the flower of the warrior aristocracy cut down in the badlands of the Anatolian plateau, and the remainder thoroughly cowed, the Regent Demetrios could settle down to rule without fear of any further upset. It was hardly a prospect, one imagines, that he could ever have imagined as a young man, but the practicalities of governance came naturally to the Thracian peasant (i) and he governed the Empire with a sure and steady hand.
Unsurprisingly, given his background, the new Regent had a distinct suspicion of the landed aristocracy, who in turn generally disliked him. It is little surprise, then, that much of his time in power was marked by a search for talented commoners, and a celebration of those who had prospered before him. In 1248, for example, Demetrios embarked upon a major restoration of the four hundred year old New Church of Basil I, and to it relocated the tomb of the great Parakoimomenos Basilios, in doing so bringing together the two men on whom Demetrios seems to have explicitly modelled himself upon (ii). That Christmas, he caused a minor scandal by using the Twelve Days of celebration to indulge in what seems to have been a sort of talent contest amongst the urban poor, to find boys to be brought up in the Palace as elite administrators. The magnates were appalled, but luck was not with them. Demetrios would go on to demonstrate clear divine approval for his programme.
Early in 1249, the commander of Demetrios’ five thousand or so Jušen mercenaries revolted over a dispute over pay. We know frustratingly little about this commander: even his birth name is a mystery, although he was baptised (unhelpfully, for narrative purposes) as Demetrios, taking the name of his godfather the Regent (iii). Whoever he was, the Jušen commander caused havoc in Thrace that spring, and came close to securing an alliance with the young and ambitious Bulgarian Tsar Ivan III (iv). Only the early death of the Tsarina Dorothea stopped the threat of a permanent Jušen base in Bulgaria, with the fractious Bulgarian aristocracy descending into another brief bout of civil war. With Bulgaria in chaos, Demetrios the Jušen fled north and crossed the Danube into the loose Cuman kingdom of Wallachia (v). There, Jušen hegemony was quickly established.
Demetrios the Jušen was not the only warlord of his kind nibbling at the fringes of Europe. The last years of Šurhaci Khan’s remarkable reign were largely focused on the Caucasus, and the intervention in Rhomania in 1246 is best understood in the context of an all-powerful monarch securing the loyalty of his various clients and vassals (vi). In that same year, another young Jušen commander, who took the Arabo-Iranian name of Jalāl (vii), subdued the three Kartvelian kingdoms of Kartli, Lazikē and Tao (viii) and in an obscure campaign soon afterward he also managed to smash the power of the restive ātābeg of Ardabil.
The death of Šurhaci in 1250 brought a brief halt to Jušen expansion in the region, and also provided a crucial bit of breathing space for the beleaguered Regency government in Constantinople. Wúqǐmǎi might have been Šurhaci’s favoured and most capable heir, but he had to deal with an array of problems in the opening years of his reign, as other family members challenged him, and Islamic uprisings wracked the Jušen Khanate. The Romans might have been thoroughly cowed, but their armies remained intact, and Wúqǐmǎi Khan was sufficiently wary to offer huge cash amounts to Demetrios the Regent in exchange for peace. These Demetrios used to good effect, engaging in a programme of public works across the Empire intended to demonstrate God’s support for his regime. The ruse worked, although a flare up in the Peloponese in 1251 was only prevented from developing into a full blown revolt by the death of its instigator, the messianic preacher Paul of Messenia (ix) and the quick intervention of the imperial armies thereafter.
By this point, the young Emperor Constantine X was rapidly approaching his maturity. In January 1254, shortly after Constantine’s eighteenth birthday, Demetrios formally divested himself of his duties as Regent, and instead settled for a much lower office, that of the Grand Logothete. It was a shrewd decision. By placing himself in the court position that headed much of the bureaucracy Demetrios could ensure a continuing degree of control over the government while avoiding the ire of the nobility. Initially, the dynasts welcomed the new state of affairs, but within a year it was becoming increasingly clear that Constantine lacked much interest in the business of ruling and preferred instead to paint, sing and write, while all the while returning ever more responsibility to his uncle.
It was perhaps just as well. By 1255, Wúqǐmǎi Khan had thoroughly established his control over his empire, in the process displacing a number of younger relatives and rivals and their supporters. Foremost amongst these was Jalāl, the dashing young naturalised Jušen who had subdued the Kartvelians a decade previously. Expelled from the Khanate’s Mesopotamian heartlands, Jalāl and his retinue of several thousand warriors retreated to the Caucasus, but there was little obvious reason for them to stay in a region that would always struggle to feed a large host. In 1257, therefore, Jalāl crossed the Caucasus mountains and marched north-west, towards the tempting target of Kievan Rhos (x). The fate that had befallen the Saljūq Turks was repeated on a smaller scale to the unfortunate Rhos. Divided by civil war, the Jušen armies went through the hastily arranged forces of the unfortunate Rhos like a knife through butter. By the end of the decade, Jalāl, for evermore known to posterity as “Jalāl the Scythian” (xi) had full control of most lands north of the Black Sea. To add to his domains, an alliance was signed with the Wallachian kingdom of Demetrios the Jušen, linking together the two realms in a great confederacy in which Demetrios accepted Jalāl’s notional authority in exchange for a marriage pact for his beloved daughter. A great predatory new state now greedily eyed up the lands of Europe.
This is not the time or place to discuss the enormous changes riven on central and eastern Europe by the emergence of the Jušen Khanate of Kiev (xii). Suffice it to say that for a generation, Jušen warriors would repeatedly humiliate the armies of the Polish, Hungarian and German monarchs, as well as extending their dominion over the remaining free Rhos princes: all of which would prompt a massive degree of institutional and ideological restructuring in the affected states. Constantinople was able to avoid these attentions, but only due to the humiliation of being viewed by all of the Jušen entities as another vassalised kingdom. (xiii)
With hindsight, Roman writers would see the time as one of unbridled humiliation and shame, but the truth is that the 1250s and 1260s were actually decades of relative prosperity, in which the Empire was able to recoup many of the losses of the difficult half century that had preceded them. This was possible due to an important new development that arose due to the happy confluence of three factors: the dispossession of large numbers of eastern aristocrats thanks to Jusen success, the Empire’s inclusion into a Jusen dominated world that stretched from the Carpathians deep into Central Asia, and finally the political dominance of Demetrios Simeopoulos.
Mercantile trade had always been sneered at by the old elites of the Empire, a distaste that dated back to the days of classical Greece and the Roman Republic (xiv). Their wealth was based on the land, and the rents and profits they derived from it. Commerce, while it undoubtedly flourished, was largely left in the hands of the lower classes and especially the Italian client states. Although seeds of change can be detected earlier, a real step-change in attitudes took place in the reign of Constantine X, largely thanks to the influence of his uncle. With the vast domains of the Jušen now a great market, the profits merchants could make began to spiral. Previously this had counted for little- even rich men of commerce were frowned upon- but Demetrios, a keen patron of men like himself, took active steps to ensure the success of the emerging commercial classes. Witnessing profits being made, and eager to find a new source of income to replace their lost Syrian estates, the noble families began to dip a toe into the murky waters of international trade. By 1270, commerce was coming to play an active role in financing the Government, to the delight of the Grand Logothete, who was collecting unprecedented sums in taxation.
Demetrios Simeopoulos died in 1272, at the age of eighty. Despite the considerable challenges he had faced, he could look back proudly on a quarter of a century of quietly effective administration. His leadership had led to the Empire turning a new corner, surviving and thriving in a difficult world through embracing change. This is not to state that the man was a revolutionary. Far from it: Demetrios brutally crushed the nascent movement that would become the truly revolutionary Helots (xv) and was always happy to rule through his nephew, a man of such pedigree his blood practically ran purple. But unlike so many of his rivals, Demetrios was able to view the world as it existed in the middle years of the thirteenth century with a keen and dispassionate eye, rather than harking back to a halcyon age that had never truly existed, and in doing so directed the forces that ruled his world for the benefit of the Roman Empire that he ran. He can thus justly claim to perhaps be the greatest Emperor that Constantinople never had- without doubt he was the first great Grand Logothete, and his example would do much to inspire future generations.
Meanwhile, the Empire he had left behind him could face the future with a degree of confidence that was, on the face of it, less than well-founded. Constantine X, for all his cultured amiability, was a weak Emperor without a male heir (xvi) and the state he ruled was one with less control over its own destiny than it had had at any point since the ninth century. The Empire’s wellbeing depended largely on the goodwill of the Jušen Khan and, following the death of Wúqǐmǎi in 1274, this could no longer be guaranteed. Demetrios Simeopoulos had left a golden legacy: but it would be for a new generation to take his settlement into an uncertain and dangerous future.
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(i) Demetrios’ precise origins are a matter of debate, with three competing versions existing: he may have been the son of a farmer, a butcher, or a crofter.
(ii) This church, the Nea Ekklesia, was consecrated in 880 by the common-born Emperor Basil I as part of his programme to emulate the acts of Justinian. In OTL, it never really achieved the prominence Basil had hoped for, but ITTL the church has a glowing future ahead of it, thanks in large part to Demetrios’ admiration for Basil and his works.
(iii) The baptism presumably took place at the same time as that of the Jurchen leader Wúqǐmǎi, in autumn 1246.
(iv) The grandson of John of Priene through his daughter Maria, Ivan III took the throne after the early deaths of both of his uncles.
(v) The Cumans settled into Wallachia in the later eleventh century. Missionary efforts from Bulgaria in the twelfth, as well as the policies of the Komnenid Emperors and Bulgarian Tsars of TTL have seen a loose kingdom emerge in the region, which largely holds to Christianity.
(vi) That’s how the Jurchens see things, of course: the Romans would certainly never begin to agree with this interpretation.
(vii) This third generation of Jurchen immigrants generally took “native” names.
(viii) Quite a footnote heavy update! The term “Georgia” is not one used by the Georgian people themselves, who call themselves Kartvelians. ITTL, the native name for the people and country is used. Medieval Georgia was united IOTL around the turn of the millennium, but Roman intervention ITTL saw it break up again around a century later into three kingdoms, all ruled by rival princes of the Bagrationi dynasty.
(ix) Paul’s teachings will rapidly become important.
(x) Another ATL term. In the IE universe, the Greek term “Rhos” is used instead of OTL’s “Rus’”.
(xi) Byzantine chroniclers referred to any and all steppe peoples indiscriminately as Scythians, in imitation of classical Greek writers.
(xii) It WILL be discussed elsewhere though.
(xiii) The Jušen of eastern Europe still see themselves as being notionally the followers of the distant Jušen of Baghdad, and therefore see Constantinople as one of their own clients, as well as a client of a rival.
(xiv) Roman Senators of the Republic were actually banned (at least in theory) from being involved in commercial deals.
(xv) The followers of Paul of Messenia: we’ll see more of them.
(xvi) Constantine’s marriage is childless, and his brother George died young, producing only a single daughter.
Does this mean we'll see a Jusen invasion of Germany and potentially Western Europe? It seems far more feasible since they don't have to travel to Karakorum every time the ruler dies.
Great update. Really looking forward to seeing who will attempt to Usurp the throne.
No, they're not. Several have been baptised, and there are influential Jurchens who venerate Christ: sometimes as one of many religious figures, sometimes as "proper" Christians. But the Jurchens as a whole are not Christian: plenty have accepted Islam, with some going for Judaism and Zoroastrianism. The dominant Jurchen deity remains the sky goddess Abka Hehe.
Well, we'll just have to see...
Great update. Really looking forward to seeing who will attempt to Usurp the throne.
Oh, so you think there'll be a usurpation, do you?
The Jurchen states are in theory arranged in a hierachy, with the Great Khan in Baghdad notionally holding overlordship over all other Jurchen warlords, including the Khans in Wallachia, Kiev and in eastern Iran. The European Khanates effectively function as independent allies, however, with the Iranian ones more tightly controlled.
And why would you wish death and destruction on Western Europe?! Do remember that the Jurchens are less destructive than their Mongol counterparts: they behave more like conquerors than simple invaders.
The prospect of Western Europe fighting off a steppe invasion intrigues me greatly, I think they got off lucky OTL.
Ahh. Well, in that case I can promise you that there will be some hot armoured knights on Jurchen action.
Deleted member 67076
Here's to hoping they can reform Attila's empire, even for just a bit.
There's certainly considerably more evidence floating around about the Huns ITTL than IOTL. The detailed writings on the Huns made by Priscus of Panium, a contemporary, were read and discussed by tenth century Byzantine writers including Constantine VII, so I think it's reasonable to state that they might very well still exist in the thirteenth century Empire, especially under another scholarly Emperor named Constantine.