ImperatorAlexander: There’s a verse in the Old Testament that says something like ‘Egypt is a frail reed. Whenever someone leans on it for support, it breaks and pierces their hand.’ To be fair to the Egyptians though, they only made up half of the army and they were outnumbered over 8-to-5, which are steep odds.
Sometime during the reign of Justinian II IOTL he took a bunch of Slavic prisoners and settled them in the east. They defected which helped the Arabs score a major victory on his forces. It’s a nice idea but the Romans wouldn’t want to risk a reprise. After all, the Ottomans are acting like allies, even if they aren’t really, but do the Romans realize that (or care)?
HanEmpire: The Idwaits at the moment are staying quiet, although some volunteers are slipping across the Red Sea to join the Arab army. But with the Egyptian army gutted and the Ethiopians tied down in other areas they’re getting ideas.
Remember that the Romans with the Ottoman rearguard first (Ibrahim was still positioned facing south, as he’d been the day before while beating the African army) which would help explain why the first 20-30 minutes were so bad for the Ottomans. There were professional Roman troops with the advantage of surprise hitting green levies that had been posted in what had been the rear ranks during yesterday’s battle. No wonder they got wrecked so quickly and so totally.
That’s a really good idea linking the orphanages with the Prostitutes’ Guild, offering commissions for live births. Although the Orthodox Church would throw a fit. However Demetrios’ mistress is the head of the Prostitutes’ Guild of Constantinople…
TheCataphract: Demetrios III says “As a matter of fact, I do have some old-school eyeball knives, Macedonian dynasty vintage. Purely for historical interest, mind you.”
The situation in India will be covered in the next update.
Namayan: There’ve been several rebellions, each put down with a lot of deaths and massacres, but no systematic genocidal effort.
Your analysis of Ibrahim is spot on. If he’d known that 3 months after invading the Romans would be fielding 100000 troops (Syrian and Mesopotamian armies) against him, he would’ve decided to do something else with his time. Although he might have ostentatiously lounged around in Mesopotamia for a while to force the Romans to leave a few tagmata on the eastern front just in case in order to make the Romans’ lives more difficult.
Boa: Right now Theodoros wants to limit any low-hanging fruit the Ottomans/Arabs/rebels might try to grab. He doesn’t want another Homs. His primary target is Ibrahim’s army. If he can smash that, it doesn’t matter how many fortresses the rebels have taken; they’ll die. If he has to spend time and resources on defending Damascus, they’re not available for attacking Ibrahim.
Thanks for noticing the typo. Fixed it.
At the start of the summer, 20000. At the end, 30000. Keep in mind that all these regional updates are happening simultaneously.
Aqaba only having one road out of it and that via the Wadi Itm route is what existed IOTL as late as the First World War (I got the whole idea regarding that from a biography of Lawrence of Arabia). My guess for that is a narrow but short route with water (in the side ravines) beats a long desert route with no water.
Kerak at the moment is still holding out, although with the rebels controlling the countryside supplies are an issue. I intend to give Palestine more attention next time; the action was mainly in Syria/Lebanon this update despite the title I gave it.
Catconqueror: Yeah, the four million was probably just a typo. Accidentally added a zero at the end; could happen to anybody. (For the record, I have a soft spot for Herodotus.)
JohnSmith: That would be the worst-case scenario, especially as inland Syria by itself can’t support an army of that size (Million-ish supporting a 90000 strong army in this time period-never going to happen).
Triunes and Spanish can both go toe-to-toe with the Romans in eastern waters with regional variations in strength, a lot depending on where various local allies are based. Triunes and Spanish combined would flatten the Romans, but there’s no way the two could ever cooperate long enough to do so.
InMediasRes: Yeah, the Romans are suffering from the classic two-front problem they faced constantly through their OTL history. If they can concentrate on just one-front they do pretty well but if they have to split their forces, things become problematic. The Romans are fielding a lot of troops but they’re divided between Bulgaria, Italy, Georgia, Syria-Palestine, and Mesopotamia.
Right now in Iberia the Spanish are currently grinding down Al-Andalus with the explicit goal of wiping it out after the Sultan stupidly allied himself with the Marinids. So no population exchange possible there. Demetrios III really wants King Ferdinand happy with him. Getting more Russians or Vlachs or just forcing people from western Anatolia to move would be the best option.
I think the Kama Sutra first showed up in Rhomania during the reign of Andreas I, who probably got it and took notes. But it was used to encourage the birth rate at the beginning of Helena I’s reign.
Wolttaire: Well, the Despotates weren’t designed to be a big source of additional troops. That’s what more themes are for. They were meant to be a way of securing indirect rule over large distant provinces without the expense and hassle of centralized control.
Evilprodigy: Precisely. The Despotates were instituted for political and economic reasons, not military.
Lascaris: Keep in mind a lot of the casualties were wounded, so they’ll return to the ranks, but the same can be said for a lot of the Roman casualties too. But Ibrahim definitely does not want to face the main Roman army in the open field again.
Babyrage: The disastrous first half-hour where the Romans wiped out the Ottoman rearguard was mainly the levies getting smashed to pieces, with resistance stiffening as the Romans lost the element of surprise and ran into more experienced troops posted further south. The fighting later in the day would’ve fallen on the professional soldiers most. So overall casualties were about evenly split between veterans and green troops.
Duke of Nova Scotia: That’s been one of the main arguments in my mind for not having the Romans go full population-expulsion mode. The Syrians would shuffle over to Mesopotamia and then probably give the eastern frontier all kinds of flak. IOTL when the Spanish expelled the Moriscos a lot set up shop in North Africa and went ‘corsair’ on the Spanish coast, causing a lot of damage and suffering to the Spanish.
Which is why if the Romans did go full population-expulsion, there’s a very high chance they’d just drive the refugees into the desert to die.
Stark: Logistics only would hamper any major deployments to eastern waters on the part of the Triunes. They could send some, say 7-10 battle-line ships plus escorts at most, which would make a big difference but wouldn’t be an unstoppable tidal wave. Even if somehow the Triunes scraped together enough supply ships to maintain 30-40 battle-line ships to Bengal, all of a sudden the Spanish might discover a lot of unused dock space in Lisbon and be willing to discuss a rent agreement with the Megas Doux.
You’re absolutely right about the war in Syria. The frontier there is mostly wide-open which means even the loss of a few forts is a major problem.
Ironically your setup sounds a lot like the way Egypt was organized between the Roman conquest and the Time of Troubles. The regional governor (Andreas Niketas’ Coptophile son) had a great deal of autonomy, acting much like a Viceroy, but Egypt was part of the theme structure with the military districts and officers reporting to Constantinople as part of the Roman army. Although said themes were full of Coptic soldiers that then rallied to the Coptic governor when he revolted during the Time of Troubles so it had issues.
Aristomenes: I figure the Romans/Egyptians/Ethiopians underestimated the Arab threat so didn’t see the need to divert a sizable force to the Hedjaz. More importantly, Ibrahim and the main Ottoman army are the only serious threat. Without that tying down Theodoros, the Arabs and rebels are at best annoying. So it makes sense to concentrate absolutely overwhelming force against Ibrahim, ignoring the minor threats for the time it takes to smash the Shah, at which point the Arabs can be swept up at leisure.
We will see the Ethiopian and Eastern Romans fleets in action next update. However since the naval alliance with the Triunes, the Ottoman fleet is much more formidable than it’s ever been before.
Ethiopian army I’d say is around 50-60000 (including the Aqaba expedition) although a lot is tied down in far-flung garrisons and can’t be moved around quickly. Ethiopia has a lot of very rugged terrain and its infrastructure in a lot of places isn’t up to Roman standards. The navy I’d put at 15-20 battle-line ships (mostly of the smaller types, 50 or 60 guns instead of the 90+ monsters the Romans and Triunes are starting to field) with thirty fregatai and smaller warships.
Bergioyn: You should know better by now not to tempt me like that, tsk tsk.
GodEmperorG: One of the biggest advantages the Romans have right now is that their supply issues, by comparison with those of their enemies, are minuscule.
Cryostorm: So the dates may be a bit off because I’m going off of memory but the timeline so far has been:
1500ish-Andreas Niketas conquers the Mameluke Sultanate
1535ish-Massive uprising during the Time of Troubles
1570ish-Major uprising during the War of the Rivers
1595ish-Major uprising during the Great Uprising/Eternal War
1632-Another uprising.
So that’s four big rebellions in about a century, give or take a few years. Something’s got to change; this can’t keep going like this.
RogueTraderEnthusiast: I like the Indonesia idea. Regarding the war on depopulation, the Empire for centuries has issued a ‘head tax’ based on the number of people per household. It’s varied based on age/gender of those heads but with tax reform coming up, fiddling with that would be a way to incentivize larger families via tax breaks.
All the major cities have slums of various sizes. There’s a precedent; after the Time of Troubles Constantinople’s slums were cleared out and the inhabitants given landholdings in depopulated areas. So a repeat would be easy to manage.
Emperor Joe: How does he know the file number of our plan?...Spy! Burn him!
On Patreon: I’ve just established a new tier on Patreon, the ‘Megas Kyr’-Great Lord tier ($2). For that tier I’ve just posted the PDF of
An Age of Miracles Part 2: The First Decade of the Komnenoi, 1414-1425. It covers the fallout of the War of the Five Emperors, the birth of the Kingdom of Vlachia, and the Gunpowder Crusade, plus lots of other goings-on in France, Italy, and Hungary. It’s 99 pages total.
I’ll be posting the rest of the TL in PDF files of about 100 or so pages, with the goal of a new section at least every two weeks. Once the PDF conversion is caught up to the written TL, that tier will offer special updates on niche topics suggested by patrons. Those won’t happen until after the PDFs are done but I’ll start taking topic suggestions now if people are interested.
Thank you again for your support!
