Part CV: The East in 1369
When last we looked at the East it was a divided Levant, where Romans, Arabs, and Turks vied for control of the ancient region, with the Romans and Turks allied against the Arabs. That alliance is of course, over. When Katerina refused to aid the Turki Emperor the balance of power which had been maintained collapsed, and a full-scale war between the Arabs and the Turks commenced. This war began in 1321, and would only end in 1341 with both sides exhausted and deeply in debt. The war had begun with the well prepared Arabs driving the Turks back in Mesopotamia, recapturing the most important cities across several years. By 1332 the Turks had retreated to the mountain fortresses of the Zagros Mountains, while the Arabs attempted to lay siege to them.
This was not a situation the Caliph had particularly wanted. He had envisioned driving the Turks out of Mesopotamia over the course of several years, and then negotiating a peace which would see his territory expanded to the Eastern border of the First Caliphate. And from there potentially to attack Roman Syria as well. The Turks however refused to talk terms. The unfortunate Sack of Esfahan which will occur in the 1350s as the Servet Dynasty falls unfortunately destroyed the records of this time in the Basileos’s court, but surviving Roman and Arab records point to a major loss of prestige being unacceptable to the Basileos, who had already needed to grant additional autonomy to the steppe tribes to even wage the Arab war. If he the proceeded to lose that war Turki control over the steppes would be deeply threatened. So, behind the mountains the Turks regrouped and readied for a counter-attack.
This came in 1334, with a large Turki army invaded northern Mesopotamia out of Media, retaking Assyria and Babylon, as well as driving the Arabs south. Both sides heavily courted the Romans, the Turks to enter the war on their side, and the Arabs to stay neutral. Katerina of course, kept her neutral path, and was roundly cursed in Turkia for her refusal to honor the alliance. Fairly it must be said, as Katerina was aware. The Turki counterattack however was ultimately repulsed as they advanced south, the Arabs successfully retook their conquests. The Basileos was overthrown by his brother in 1336, and over the course of the next five years raiding, sporadic fighting, and sieges returned to the norm. Finally, in 1341 with both sides exhausted and out of money a truce was agreed to. The Arabs would return portions of their conquests to Turki administration, but the Turks would be forced to pay half of the tax revenue collected to the Caliphate each year. Other conquests however, including Babylon the most important city in the region, would remain in Arab hands.
The war had been immensely damaging to the Servet dynasty, and they now faced major unrest at home as steppe tribes rose in revolt, and they suddenly faced an enemy they hadn’t in a long time, the Persians. At the head of the Persian revolt was actually a Roman citizen, Paul of Armenia who claimed to be the heir of the last Sassanid King of Kings, who had fled across the border when that Empire was overthrown. And interestingly, he seems to have been telling, at least the partial, truth. The family had fled to Roman territory, and settled in as Roman citizens when it became clear intervention to restore their claim to the Persian throne was not forthcoming.
Paul might have had a legitimate claim, but he had little practical support. While Daylam, his initial invasion point was willing to support him his hoped-for mass uprising of Persians did not materialize. His family had long before converted from traditional Zoroastrianism still widely practiced in northern Persia, and the Persians who were embedded in the Turkish state were Nestorian Christians. Both groups weren’t keen on the generally less tolerant Catholic Orthodox regime Paul seemed to be bringing with him.
Ironically the group most likely to be amenable to Paul’s attempt at a new order were on the far side of the Empire, then called Srarmanoi, now known as Boutti from regions bordering northern India. These groups have not been relevant before, but enter the narrative proper as Turkish power began to retract in the aftermath of the Great Arab-Turkish War. These groups rose in revolt in 1344, and the overstretched Turki were forced to abandon their steppe holdings to deal with both of the closer to home threats.
Even as they did so, however, a final blow was struck, shattering Turkia and ending the Servet dynasty. The Plague. Possibly coming with Paul’s invasion force the Black Death swept across Turkia ahead of his army, devastating both his forces and those of his enemies, and then continuing to spread. The Basielos and his immediate family were killed, and civil war gripped the empire even more firmly. Over the next three decades Turkia would tear itself apart in war, breaking into a number of states. The largest was the restored Persian Empire led by Paul, which had managed to take most of the plateau, including the capital as Esfahan. To the East were a number of smaller states, either smaller Persian kingdoms, or Turkish enclaves. Paul’s Empire will ultimately be short-lived, and this could be seen virtually from the outset. It was simply too large given the small and weak base of support. The Daylamites backed Paul, and he was able to win over a reasonable number of his new subjects, but he had a long frontier, devoid of defenses after long years of relative peace in the Turkish heartland. The border soon came under attack from Turkish raiders to the east, forcing Paul to strip his western frontier of resources to shore up the east. Just in time for Roman client states that we will be discussing during John’s reign to take advantage and seize the mountain passes into Persia proper.
The most important of the Turkish states is that of the Ibrahim Dynasty, named after the man currently sitting upon its throne, Ibrahim Katharos Bey Strategos, or essentially Lord and Commander Ibrahim the Pure. Legend makes him a very pious man, who offered the Nestorian bishop of Esfahan refuge after the city fell to Paul and the bishop was expelled, to be replaced by a Catholic Orthodox opponent. Ibrahim’s little kingdom was centered around the city of Tammisha, then the primary embarkation point of trade traveling from India to Armenia across the Caspian Sea. This would decline after John’s reconquest of Egypt brought a better sea route for this trade, but as China largely began to restabilize it shifted to focus on the northern trade once again.
The effects of this we will focus on later, but suffice to say that Ibrahim’s dynasty will be a successful one.
West of Turkia their Arabi rival was little better off. While the Caliph had been victorious in his war with the Turks it had been an extremely expensive victory, one in which his supporters saw few returns or benefits. The Caliph was far from an absolute ruler of his realm, and the lack of results saw many of his most important supporters either turn on him, or simply turn neutral in the struggle which followed. Revolts broke out among the Bedawi tribes, as well as in Mesopotamia itself, where fighting had been heaviest. Worse for Arabia was to come however when the plague struck, inflicting numbers of deaths on the population, and in particular the more sedentary populations which made up the Caliph’s central support base. Particularly hard-hit was Egypt, which was still the wealthiest land controlled by the Caliph, and with that the most heavily taxed. Egypt saw a major decrease in its agricultural production as nearly a third of the population died over the next several years. Alexandria itself was for a time almost abandoned from the number of deaths inside the city.
This may have been born by the population, if tax levels had decreased to account for the loss of people and production. They did not however, and Egypt found itself crushed as taxes remained constant, but wealth declined. The result was inevitable, revolt. Beginning in 1361 and dragging on essentially for the next twenty-five years it would actually see little fighting beyond the initial battles, and subsequent skirmishing along the Sinai and in the Red Sea. The war is often listed as lasting for fifteen years, but this is misleading, as the revolt will essentially outlast the Second Caliphate itself, proceeding forward to be waged against the Romans when John leads his army out of Syria. It would be a full decade after that Egypt would return to the Imperial fold, and even longer before it would be a normal part of the Empire once again.
The Caliph, Marwan, simply did not have the manpower to invade Egypt at this time, as he dealt with revolts in Arabia itself, in a war that raged across the peninsula for years from 1359 until 1367. This stretched his already empty treasury to the breaking point, and directly caused the Egyptian revolt mentioned already. He would successfully reassert control over most of the peninsula by 1367, but his army was badly weakened by plague and years of fighting. But a final revolt broke out in 1368, far away in Markuria, where the local population wanted to reassert independence from the weakened Arabs, who could not longer project power into the area. Marwan was unable to even send an army to put them down, and the region soon was lost to his rule. His hope, revealed by papers captured when the capital at Acre fell revealed plans to rebuild in the Levant and Mesopotamia, use those forces to put down Egypt, and then march south to reassert control over Markuria. With this done his Empire would be restored. It might even have worked, had the northern border been quiet. But as 1369 began the border was anything but quiet. Roman troops were raiding south, clearly trying to push the border closer toward Palestina in the south, and to reclaim the old eastern border. Marwan, an old and probably bitter man at this point in his life, braced for the coming storm, and readied himself for whatever the Romans had to throw at him.
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