The Fortunate Ones in Egypt and Beyond
The Bakhtiyar state of Akhsau Mansar did not long outlive his death, and even in his old age it was collapsing. The ensuing wars of successors would see the emergence of great warlords but few real polities. Akhsau had possessed the pseudo-divine charisma and gravitas to yoke the fractious Tayzig tribes together and bring many previously distinct Arab clans into his new factitious identity of Bakhtiyar. His successors lacked this charisma, and accordingly, the whole enterprise fell into disorder with remarkable swiftness.
The governor of Syria, Gashayar Harun, made the clearest case to succeed Akhsau Mansar as a Regent of sorts over the whole Empire, a title he referred to as “Khalefeh” or Steward. Despite having several wives, Mansar had only a single child, a sickly daughter who was rumored to be a bastard in any case. Once the Great Shah’s corpse was cold, these rumors flared out into the open. At first, Gashayar worked to suppress these rumors, but as the other successors turned against him, he simply dispensed with all formality and had the daughter, Asma, strangled to death. Henceforth, he and the other kings would refer to themselves as Sah or Malkusah. The title of Khalefeh would come to represent a sort of vizier figure who held substantial power in the state.
Unlike the Khardi, the Tayzig identity proved more robust throughout the Near East. Where the Khardi often assimilated into local groups, especially the Ifthal, the Tayzig remained distinct and often incorporated others into itself. Various reasons have been proposed for this – the first, and perhaps most simple, is that the Khardi themselves identified as Iranians, but even in their triumphs saw their own culture as inferior to the broader Iranian civilization of which they were a part. They emulated the Ifthal and Iranian nobility they conquered. Another theory relates to the agricultural collapse of Mesopotamia in the wake of the Tayzig invasions and the great plague – silted and salinized fields saw an end to Khardi agricultural practices and led to their rapid assimilation into the conquering Tayzig. Whatever the case, the remaining Khardi were ultimately driven into the northern hill country in many cases. While substantial populations endured in northern Mesopotamia and around Susa, the central Khardi successor states were overrun. A final theory, and the most recent and widely accepted one, is simply that the term Tayzig, with its origins as a vague ethnic slur for pastoralists, was broadened to accommodate more and more people – that the Khardi, Arabs, and Ifthal all simply became “Tayzig” and in time linguistic and cultural barriers were redefined as regional dialects and differences.
By the dawn of the thirteenth century, the Bakhtiyar successors ruled five major states – Egypt, centered on the old Khardi Satrapy; Syria, a sprawling state encompassing Palestine, Cilicia, Syria itself, and parts of Osrhoene; Asoristan, centered on Nasibin; and Zwaristan, centered on the southern city of Herat-on-the-Euphrates; and Iran itself, whose rulers were the half Turkish Ansara Suf dynasty. Anatolia had fallen to the Xasar in its entirety, and a new, Christian kingdom of Armenia was on the rise in the north, reasserting itself after centuries of Buddhist dominion. Isolated and fortified, it gained a reputation as a sort of hermit kingdom, an antique and out of place state, but it nevertheless survived the horrors of the Plague and the brutal ravaging of the Bakhtiyar.
After the Great Plague, the Bakhtiyar would emerge as the bringers of a new golden age. If their era was more warlike or brutal than what had come before, it was also an era of philosophical and technological achievement, spurred on by proximity to India and the constant flow of travelers from Europe to Asia and vice versa. Philosophers such as Khatir the Red educated the Malkusah of Egypt, Wahrama Mansar, leaving him with a life-long love of learning. Iskandara on the Nile, a city which had long suffered under the Khardi, was restored and resettled by the Tayzig. The Yippokupti, brutal enforcers whose widely corrupt rule was associated with Khardi despotism, were removed from power. If the Tayzig brought in many settlers from overcrowded Arab regions, they were also extremely, unprecedentedly tolerant. The brutality of the Khardi was overnight replaced with lenience. The Patriarch of Alexandria was allowed to return to Iskandara, and the Tayzig, despite being largely Buddhists and Pagan-Buddhists, hosted religious debates and scholars of all creeds in the capital, allowing Arab Nestorians to play an equal role in government alongside them. Indeed, it was the Nestorian Arab architect Isa al-Jaffani who constructed the great Buddhist monastery at Artaxserabad and was for three decades royal architect, designing the distinctive Tayzig Quarter of Iskandara, and the new Royal Palace. Hesanopolis was abandoned and reclaimed by the desert, a sign of both Coptic and Khardi rule that the Bakhtiyar had no desire to associate themselves with.
This religious tolerance should perhaps not be too surprising. The original followers of Akhsau contained substantial Nestorian Arab and Saihist pagan elements, and although Akhsau himself was a Buddhist-Pagan whose religious beliefs had a profound effect on the later convictions of his followers, such tolerance was actually relatively commonplace in Tayzig Arabia, particularly in the early decades before the Bakhtiyar became more solidified as a movement with distinctly Iranian religious overtones.
Egypt prospered as well by the Canal of Akhsau – built with the help of a vast force of (paid) levied labor, and the expertise of Sindhi mathematicians and monks, the Grand Canal once again linked the Nile and the Red Sea - allowing the efficient transport of goods and ensuring that sailors would only have to pay a single royal tariff to go from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The guild placed in control of its management was a joint Bakhtiyar and Bharukacchan venture, speaking to the increasing political influence of Bharukaccha and the secondary status of Copts even in the new tolerant regime. The mercantile and urban class of the new Egypt would be Buddhist Arab-Iranians and their Indian trading partners.
[Most of the Bakhtiyar states will primarily be discussed in post-Flowering-Flesh pages, as will the state of Iran and Armenia. However, I felt that another Egyptian update would be good. The Khardi left deep scars in Egypt when they conquered it, but I felt the region deserved something of a break. While they’re still under foreign rule, at least the Bakhtiyar are relatively unconcerned with persecution and exploitation.]
Ethiopia
The Horn of Africa has long been called the “Tapestry of Nations” and not without reason. As a descriptor it reaches back to the antique era of the Hawiya monarchy, when Jains, Christians, Buddhists and Saihists lived in harmony and perhaps a hundred different tribes and languages coexisted under the benign hegemony of the Hawiya Kings. To the south dwelled the Somali, a people largely under the thumb of the Pazudesada – coastal cities such as Makdish, Zeil, and Barbira provided trade ports and entrepots, but did primarily for the Savahila to their south, whose guilds made unequal partnerships with the ruling clans of the Somalia cities. Inland, the tribes, who some travelers to the region confused with the Berbers, were cattle-herders and generally pastoralist and deeply divided. Feuding and raiding prevented the rise of an organized polity to equal the Hawiya, and left the whole region rather destitute in the eyes of travelers seeking to spread the word of Christ or the Dharma. Merchants generally avoided the interior, given the aridity of the region. The potent spice and coffee growing regions were either in Arabia, or better reached from other ports.
The interior and highlands were Christian regions, with substantial communities who did trade in Zanj drink and coffee. While contemporary histories describe various warrior-kings, with Kushitic names such as Yikunno and Amdesiyo, there is little evidence, archeological or otherwise, for any sort of stable polity in the region. The rich urban centers of the highlands existed in a symbiotic relationship with their monastery communities. The monasteries provided centers of education, hospitals, and staffed the churches of the region, and in exchange they were fed and defended by the townsfolk. The monastic communities preserved the ancient poetry and oral traditions of the Amhara and Shoa, and provided schooling to the rural gentry’s sons.
The monastery communities had an informal series of alliances based on the “Lake Hayk School” – most of their leaders had studied under someone who had studied at Lake Hayk, and accordingly routine pilgrimages were made back to this holy site. Every few years, these gatherings would discuss the broader politics of the region, but given the rarity of these meetings and the dangers involved in getting to them, it was an ineffective and reactive institution at best.
The counterweight to these urban centers were the “camp kings” – a phenomenon commonplace among the Bedja and elsewhere among the Ethiopians – rulers whose power extended not far beyond their military camps. These rulers were effectively parasitic, demanding “tribute” and remaining constantly on a war footing so as to feed and pay their retainers. Despite being widely hated and feared by the populace, they had the only professional military forces in the country, and accordingly were indispensable during times of outside invasion, such as would happen near the dawn of the thirteenth century.
Along the coasts, there were two great city states, Gidaya and Adulis, both of whom clung to power along the hinterlands, and defied the anarchy of the interior. Adulis, the city of gardens, was an architectural miracle and a peaceful trading center defended by alliances with the local camp kings. The looming red sandstone walls and basalt palaces of the city made it an impossibly wealthy prize, but also one that could call on too many favors to be destroyed. By contrast, Gidaya had no such protection. The last stronghold of the Hawiya, its power to resist the camp kings gradually diminished until in 1163 it was overrun once and for all by a camp king by the name of Yakob-Dawit, who sacked the city and forced the Hawiya monarchy to flee to Yemen. With the defeat of the “last heathen king”, Yakob tore down the last Buddhist monastery on the Horn and made his camp several miles outside of Gidaya for the next few years, extorting the local landholders before moving onwards back into the interior.
Ten years later, in 1176, a full-scale Arab invasion of Ethiopia began. Aimed at placing a Hawiya monarch in control of as much of the region as possible, it was a curious venture, the first of its kind. Mahatitta, the great financial center of Sri Lanka, had paid for thousands of Indian guild-warriors and Arab mercenaries to assemble in Yemen, where they had the backing of a fleet of Arab merchant ships. Often called the “first colonial war” the Hawiya War was a curious and polyglot thing, utterly chaotic and completely without clear and orderly leadership. Mahatittan paymasters, exiled Hawiya lords, and Arab princes fought for who should be in charge of the venture, and by the time it launched, the expedition was on the verge of collapse.
Gidaya itself and its hinterlands could not support such a large army. The joint Arab-Indian army was forced to fan out across the countryside, where it encountered stiff resistance. The Camp-Kings unified under one of their number, a powerful warlord named Amdesiyo, who travelled to Lake Hayk and gained the blessing of the most senior Abbot there. Subsequently, he crowned himself King of Amhara and Defender of the Faith, and set out with a broad coalition to defeat the invaders.
His subsequent victories and final triumph at Gidaya became the foundational myth of the Ethiopian state. His army swept the Arab-Indian forces into the ocean, despite the enemies having vast stocks of firepowder and disciplined ranks of heavy archers and Arab cavalry. The battle, according to legend, lasted four days. The Arab horse were repulsed after an opening assault on the Gidaya camp, after which the Indian forces fortified the landscape around Gidaya, constructing earthen ramparts behind which firespears and archers could take cover. They inflicted horrific losses on the light cavalry of the Camp Kings, slaughtering wave after wave of horsemen with shrapnel blasts from the fire spears and disciplined volleys by some of the finest archers in the world.
However, by the third day the firepowder reserves were running dry, and reinforcements had arrived from the local hills. The town levies who came fought as archers and spearmen, and traded volleys at range before a lockstep wall of spearmen drove the firespears off the ramparts. The fourth day of battle was an assault on the ruined walls of Gidaya – close hand-to-hand fighting in which the pretender King of Hawiya fell. The fighting was visceral and intense, with the heavily armored infantry of the guilds fighting for their lives. The epic accounts of the day describe how it was exhaustion which saw them succumb in the end, and when Amdesiyo saw the carnage of the fighting, the ranks of men fallen in pooling blood, the horses and men gored by spears and riddled with arrows, the charred ruin of the ramparts where firepowder had been used to such horrific effect, he declared that there could be no celebrating their victory.
And yet, as the sun set on the final day, according to legend a cross was seen in the sky, a sign that God had brought his children a great triumph.
