I don't think Trebizond attacked the Ottomans yet, and even if they tried, they'd either fail miserably or are forced to pull out thanks to the political infighting.
The Undying Empire: A Trebizond Timeline
- Thread starter Eparkhos
- Start date
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Eparkhos
Banned
Alexios was not a complete idiot, and knew that purging his own guard corps was *probably* a bad idea. That and regular pay increases kept the eleutheroi loyal.
I'll work on this and try to get back to you tomorrow.
If I ever write a novel derived from this TL, it will probably focus on this period.
Indeed. It honestly feels strange not writing a major civil war since what, 1466?
The Trapezuntine army is severely reduced, yes, but their navy is in good condition as Ratetas effectively had/has the pick of the litter, per se. Given the fairly large distance between the Ottoman and Trapezuntine heartlands, naval warfar will play a large role in future conflict.
Thank you.
Why yes, yes there is.
Part XXXV: The Two Houses (1512-1514)
Eparkhos
Banned
Part XXXV: The Two Houses (1512-1514)
The Second Ottoman Civil War marks the beginning of the Crisis of the 16th Century, the opening of a century-long period of war, destruction and change that swept over Europe and the Near East. It would be a fitting start, unleashing a nearly decade-long period of civil war that would see the death of nearly a million people and the displacement of many more. The conflict would be earth-shaking, throwing the Eastern Mediterranean into a period of chaos and confusion that would define it in the years following. The House of Osmanli and the Ottoman Empire itself would both be radically changed by the fallout from this brewing storm….
The division of the Ottoman Empire between the supporters of Mehmed and those of Ebülhayr Paşa came down mostly along ethnic lines, as previously mentioned. There was also a great deal of religious conflict inherently implicit within the war. The Orthodox and Catholics could be fairly certain that the liberalizing reforms[1] that had been undertaken by the Paşa would continue in the event of his victory. The Jews[2] and Muslims, on the other hand, were doing quite well beneath the existing system and feared having their advanced status being revoked by the reformist regime. The grand vizier had the backing of most of, if not all, Greek-majority lands, while the sultan was supported by the older Turkish aristocracy, especially the recently-settled groups in Bulgaria and the heavily militarized regions of the western Balkans which had only recently been wrested from Albanian and Epirotes control. Mehmed had an edge in terms of standing forces, as most of the frontier zones, in which resided the majority of the army, had gone over to him. However, he lacked the infrastructure necessary to keep such large armies in the field for consecutive campaigns, and had limited manpower reserves to replenish his losses from. Ebülhayr Paşa, on the other hand, had smaller forces, but a much larger manpower pool, as he controlled the heavily-populated Ottoman heartland. He also had control of most of the tax infrastructure, which was a great boon to his cause, and most of Ottoman navy. The primarily Ottoman naval centers were Constantinople, Thessalonike and Smyrne, all of which had remained under his control. Mehmed, in contrast, only had the small force of corsairs stationed at Sarandoz (Sarandë), the sole Ottoman port on the Ionian Sea.
The geographic nature of the Ottoman Empire was also of great importance during this internecine conflict, as it is in all wars of this nature. The eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula was a land of rolling hills and plains punctuated by the severe Balkan Mountains and the Rhodopes, while the western half was a mess of tiny valleys and sharp mountains that made movement very difficult. In Anatolia, meanwhile, the landscape was dominated by plains, valleys and the occasional mountain ranges along the coast, all of which faded into dry pseudo-steppe across the mountains in the interior of the region. These geographical barriers posed a major problem to strategic maneuvers by sectioning off the Ottoman Empire into its component regions. Because of this, Mehmed’s position was stronger than it would have appeared on paper. His forces controlled the Bulgarian plain and much of the Balkan Mountains, were supported by garrisons scattered across the western frontier, and had the backing of the horsemen on the far side of the Bithynian mountains, attacking any of which would force an enemy forces to fight through a set series of narrow passes, which is just screams ‘Ambush!’. However, this was a double-edged sword, as by using the mountains to secure his areas of control, the sultan was effectively yielding control of the areas beyond the mountains, as Ebülhayr Paşa could mobilize forces to put down any assembling forces with far more haste than he could send an army to reinforce them. This was not lost on Ebülhayr Paşa, who immediately set about making his own preparations to use the mountains. Just as they protected the sultan’s forces, they could also be used to corner them, pin them down and keep them from helping their comrades in other regions.
The civil war got off to a slow start, both men not wanting to cause unnecessary damage to ‘their’ empire, and hoping to avoid the involvement of foreign powers which is inevitable in domestic conflicts fought on such a large scale. Couriers flew back and forth between Tarnovo and Constantinople, but in spite of their breakneck interchange there was little agreement to be had. Mehmed demanded that Ebülhayr Paşa step down entirely and recognize him as legitimate sultan, which went about as well as you think it would, while Ebülhayr Paşa (through his puppet, Orkhan II[3]) demanded that Mehmed step down entirely and recognize his brother as the legitimate sultan, which also went about as well as you think it would. Of course, neither of them truly cared if negotiations went nowhere; it was merely a way to stall for time. Between March and August 1512, Ebülhayr Paşa raised an army of 30,000, a mixture of militia, quickly-trained volunteers, and veterans called out of retirement, supplemented with several thousand mercenaries from Italy. Mehmed, meanwhile, mobilized 35,000 men in Europe--mostly ethnically Turkish soldiers and veterans, with a small number of Bulgarian or Greek conscripts to be used as human shields--and 15,000 in Anatolia, the latter host being made up almost entirely of Turkmen and commanded by one Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, the governor of the Anatolian Vilayet. The last negotiations ceased on 16 July, when Mehmed ordered Ebülhayr Paşa’s emissaries executed as traitors. The war would now begin in earnest.
Mehmed struck directly for Constantinople. Ebülhayr Paşa had deliberately fed him misinformation (he had far better knowledge of the sultan’s spy network than Mehmed thought he did) about him and his army departing for Anatolia to fight the numerically inferior Mehmedist forces there. Because of this, Mehmed believed that Thrake would be devoid of defenders and saw an easy opportunity to break the back of the enemy with little opposition. As such, except for some outriders, he did little to scout ahead of him and expected to reach the capital without anything more than a few skirmishes. As such, he was surprised when his scouts reported the presence of a large army at Edirne. Ebülhayr Paşa had chosen to ignore the ongoing struggle in Anatolia in favor of meeting Mehmed in Europe and repulsing him from the capital. There were nearly 20,000 Paşist soldiers camped around Edirne, in opposition to the 25,000 soldiers Mehmed had in his van.
The sultan was far from an experienced soldier (as evidenced by his blunder in terms of scouting) but he was not a complete idiot and had a basic understanding of strategy and tactics. It appeared that Ebülhayr Paşa had arrayed all of his forces along the Tunca River, which flowed into Edirne from the north, no doubt hoping to force Mehmed into a bloody forced crossing. Mehmed in turn appeared to accept this gambit, lining up on the opposite bank of the river on the night of 3 August. In fact, he had sent 5,000 horsemen and light infantry across the Ebros to circle around and attack the Paşists in the rear the following day, when battle was joined. Presuming that this detachment was proceeding on schedule, Mehmed assaulted the Paşa’s forces, advancing across the broad, slow-moving river to attack the other bank. For several hours, the two forces met in bitter hand-to-hand combat, the air filled with screams and shouts and the smell of blood and death. The Turkish infantry threw themselves at their Greek counterparts, both equally well-armed and armored. Neither made much progress, any advance being quickly beaten down and ford by the surrounding ranks. Mehmed began to wonder where his flanking force had gone, about the same time that Ebülhayr Paşa was doing likewise. Both commanders had sent flanking forces across the Ebros, and by sheer dumb luck they had blundered into each other. After an hour of fighting, the more lightly-armed Mehmedists were forced to retire, the Paşists pursuing all the way. However, the Mehmedists were able to stage enough of a rearguard on the Ebros for Mehmed to rush reinforcements to prevent an encirclement. Then, the sultan ordered his forces to pull back across the Tunca.
After several days of light skirmishing, Mehmed broke camp once again and withdrew northwards to the mountains, pursued by Ebülhayr Paşa. The two forces’ outriders fought a running battle as the rearguard and the vanguard struggled to perform their respective tasks. By September, however, Mehmed was able to withdraw across the mountains, defeating an attempt to pursue him at Shipka Pass. Ebülhayr Paşa made camp in Upper Thrake, not wanting to risk getting trapped in the mountains during the winter, while Mehmed holed up at Tarnovo. Neither army had taken especially heavy losses, but the Paşists were better able to replenish what losses they had taken and furthermore raise more men.
The fighting resumed in the spring of 1513. Mehmed made another thrust into Thrake, launching an unexpected assault in the east after a false build-up in the west. Ebülhayr Paşa rushed to cut him off, inadvertently allowing the western army, which was not as fake as had been expected, to break out of the mountains. The vizier appeared to be on the verge of being pincered, and was forced to retreat down the valley to keep his army intact. However, his force, while outnumbered on a theater-wide basis, was larger than either of the sultan’s armies. In to win, he rolled the dice. Rather than trying to meet either of these armies, Ebülhayr Paşa instead led his army north-east across the coastal foothills of the Balkan Mountains, threatening an offensive into Bulgaria itself. Mehmed, hoping to prevent this, turned his personal force about and marched to pursue, leaving the second force to lay siege to Edirne.
The sultan and the vizier chased each other around the eastern edge of the Bulgarian plain for the next three months, never quite able to gain the advantage that they felt would secure them a decisive victory. That was, until mid-July, when Ebülhayr Paşa’s force had the misfortune of encountering a Wallachian raiding force in Dobruja[4]. The resulting battle was shockingly bloody, but the worst casualty were the cannons, which were captured and spiked before the Vlachs were driven off. With his field artillery gone, the vizier moved eastwards, hoping to hole up in a port so he could either evacuate or resupply. Unfortunately for him, this battle was observed by some of Mehmed’s outriders, and within hours he was marching to intercept.
The two forces met each other near the village of Sredina, about seventy kilometers north of Varna, beneath dark and ominous clouds. Ebülhayr Paşa had barely managed to scramble across the valley of a small, nameless river, and his forces formed up on its southern side, forcing any attackers to climb out of the gorge and into their waiting pikes and arquebuses. This was a sound plan, and it seemed to be working as the first wave of Mehmed’s men to come charging up the slope were cut down en masse. Another line charged up the gorge and fell with the bark of muskets and the sound of metal tearing flesh. To Ebülhayr Paşa, it appeared as if his enemy had lost his mind and any knowledge of tactics. However, what he failed to account for was the superiority in numbers and quality of the Mehmedist cavalry. Even as waves of men charged to their deaths (most of whom were Greek and Bulgarian conscripts) several thousand horsemen were thundering towards his flank. Mehmed’s foolishness, as Ebülhayr Paşa believed the cause of the continued assault to be, quickly proved not to be entirely foolish as the cavalry emerged from a stand of trees on the Paşist left. The vizier hurriedly ordered his flank to about-face to meet the new threat, but as the cavalry entered the field Mehmed ordered his actual trained infantry to advance. The simultaneous slam of the cavalry into the chaotic left and the charge of the veterans into the Paşist center broke Ebülhayr’s force. The vizier was left to fight a desperate rearguard as his army streamed away behind him, and it was only by good luck that the clouds opened up, releasing a deluge that allowed the Paşists to retreat under cover. Ebülhayr Paşa quickly regrouped his forces and fled south-eastwards, barely managing to make it to the small but defensible port of Kavarna.
While Ebülhayr Paşa waited for evacuation by the Ottoman Navy, Mehmed quickly turned his attention to resuming the offensive in Thrake. Leaving behind a force large enough to keep the grand vizier treed, he and the majority of his army rushed southwards once again. Edirne was taken once word of the disaster got there, and with the second city of the Empire in his hands, Mehmed ranged across Thrake, taking several major cities and quickly solidifying his control over the region by force of arms. Given the extreme anti-Hellenism and anti-Orthodoxy (heterodoxy? Nah, sounds weird) of his army, several thousand Greeks were massacred, many more sold off into slavery with their homes and villages burned to the ground. This was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, as you might imagine, and so as Mehmed and his armies advanced towards Constantinople, they met increasing resistance, both from disperate Greek militias and smaller contingents of official soldiers using hit-and-run tactics. Mehmed mostly shrugged these off, but this complacency was halted in mid-September, when his army arrived at Selymbria. He was shocked to meet Ebülhayr Paşa, at the command of some 15,000 men. Ebülhayr Paşa and his army had been hastily evacuated from Kavarna and relanded in the capital, where he had rallied many of the Greek militias to his banner, as well as transporting the garrisons of Bithynia across the Bosphorus to join his army.
This serves as an excellent segway back to the Trapezuntine Empire and its interests. Regardless of the events playing out in Europe, it would be the years of massacre, enslavements and all around brutality that befell the undefended Anatolian Greek population that would stir the Trapezuntines to intervene in the civil war in mid-1516….
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[1] This term is a definite anachronism, but it gets the point across well enough.
[2] The Spanish Jews were resettled in the Ottoman Empire as in OTL, but this time the position of Thessalonike only a few scant miles from the Thessalian border kept its native population in place, as Angelovic Pasa didn’t want to risk putting an ethnic group of questionable loyalty so close to such a volatile frontier district.
[3] ‘Orkhan’ is a transliteration of اورخان غازی that I feel is more accurate than the usual ‘Orhan’.
[4] The Danubian Principalities remain under Hungarian hegemony, and the current voivode sees the ongoing Ottoman civil war as a chance to get revenge for all of the Turkish raiding and hopefully put the fear of God into the Turks so raiding will reduce in severity and frequency.
The Second Ottoman Civil War marks the beginning of the Crisis of the 16th Century, the opening of a century-long period of war, destruction and change that swept over Europe and the Near East. It would be a fitting start, unleashing a nearly decade-long period of civil war that would see the death of nearly a million people and the displacement of many more. The conflict would be earth-shaking, throwing the Eastern Mediterranean into a period of chaos and confusion that would define it in the years following. The House of Osmanli and the Ottoman Empire itself would both be radically changed by the fallout from this brewing storm….
The division of the Ottoman Empire between the supporters of Mehmed and those of Ebülhayr Paşa came down mostly along ethnic lines, as previously mentioned. There was also a great deal of religious conflict inherently implicit within the war. The Orthodox and Catholics could be fairly certain that the liberalizing reforms[1] that had been undertaken by the Paşa would continue in the event of his victory. The Jews[2] and Muslims, on the other hand, were doing quite well beneath the existing system and feared having their advanced status being revoked by the reformist regime. The grand vizier had the backing of most of, if not all, Greek-majority lands, while the sultan was supported by the older Turkish aristocracy, especially the recently-settled groups in Bulgaria and the heavily militarized regions of the western Balkans which had only recently been wrested from Albanian and Epirotes control. Mehmed had an edge in terms of standing forces, as most of the frontier zones, in which resided the majority of the army, had gone over to him. However, he lacked the infrastructure necessary to keep such large armies in the field for consecutive campaigns, and had limited manpower reserves to replenish his losses from. Ebülhayr Paşa, on the other hand, had smaller forces, but a much larger manpower pool, as he controlled the heavily-populated Ottoman heartland. He also had control of most of the tax infrastructure, which was a great boon to his cause, and most of Ottoman navy. The primarily Ottoman naval centers were Constantinople, Thessalonike and Smyrne, all of which had remained under his control. Mehmed, in contrast, only had the small force of corsairs stationed at Sarandoz (Sarandë), the sole Ottoman port on the Ionian Sea.
The geographic nature of the Ottoman Empire was also of great importance during this internecine conflict, as it is in all wars of this nature. The eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula was a land of rolling hills and plains punctuated by the severe Balkan Mountains and the Rhodopes, while the western half was a mess of tiny valleys and sharp mountains that made movement very difficult. In Anatolia, meanwhile, the landscape was dominated by plains, valleys and the occasional mountain ranges along the coast, all of which faded into dry pseudo-steppe across the mountains in the interior of the region. These geographical barriers posed a major problem to strategic maneuvers by sectioning off the Ottoman Empire into its component regions. Because of this, Mehmed’s position was stronger than it would have appeared on paper. His forces controlled the Bulgarian plain and much of the Balkan Mountains, were supported by garrisons scattered across the western frontier, and had the backing of the horsemen on the far side of the Bithynian mountains, attacking any of which would force an enemy forces to fight through a set series of narrow passes, which is just screams ‘Ambush!’. However, this was a double-edged sword, as by using the mountains to secure his areas of control, the sultan was effectively yielding control of the areas beyond the mountains, as Ebülhayr Paşa could mobilize forces to put down any assembling forces with far more haste than he could send an army to reinforce them. This was not lost on Ebülhayr Paşa, who immediately set about making his own preparations to use the mountains. Just as they protected the sultan’s forces, they could also be used to corner them, pin them down and keep them from helping their comrades in other regions.
The civil war got off to a slow start, both men not wanting to cause unnecessary damage to ‘their’ empire, and hoping to avoid the involvement of foreign powers which is inevitable in domestic conflicts fought on such a large scale. Couriers flew back and forth between Tarnovo and Constantinople, but in spite of their breakneck interchange there was little agreement to be had. Mehmed demanded that Ebülhayr Paşa step down entirely and recognize him as legitimate sultan, which went about as well as you think it would, while Ebülhayr Paşa (through his puppet, Orkhan II[3]) demanded that Mehmed step down entirely and recognize his brother as the legitimate sultan, which also went about as well as you think it would. Of course, neither of them truly cared if negotiations went nowhere; it was merely a way to stall for time. Between March and August 1512, Ebülhayr Paşa raised an army of 30,000, a mixture of militia, quickly-trained volunteers, and veterans called out of retirement, supplemented with several thousand mercenaries from Italy. Mehmed, meanwhile, mobilized 35,000 men in Europe--mostly ethnically Turkish soldiers and veterans, with a small number of Bulgarian or Greek conscripts to be used as human shields--and 15,000 in Anatolia, the latter host being made up almost entirely of Turkmen and commanded by one Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, the governor of the Anatolian Vilayet. The last negotiations ceased on 16 July, when Mehmed ordered Ebülhayr Paşa’s emissaries executed as traitors. The war would now begin in earnest.
Mehmed struck directly for Constantinople. Ebülhayr Paşa had deliberately fed him misinformation (he had far better knowledge of the sultan’s spy network than Mehmed thought he did) about him and his army departing for Anatolia to fight the numerically inferior Mehmedist forces there. Because of this, Mehmed believed that Thrake would be devoid of defenders and saw an easy opportunity to break the back of the enemy with little opposition. As such, except for some outriders, he did little to scout ahead of him and expected to reach the capital without anything more than a few skirmishes. As such, he was surprised when his scouts reported the presence of a large army at Edirne. Ebülhayr Paşa had chosen to ignore the ongoing struggle in Anatolia in favor of meeting Mehmed in Europe and repulsing him from the capital. There were nearly 20,000 Paşist soldiers camped around Edirne, in opposition to the 25,000 soldiers Mehmed had in his van.
The sultan was far from an experienced soldier (as evidenced by his blunder in terms of scouting) but he was not a complete idiot and had a basic understanding of strategy and tactics. It appeared that Ebülhayr Paşa had arrayed all of his forces along the Tunca River, which flowed into Edirne from the north, no doubt hoping to force Mehmed into a bloody forced crossing. Mehmed in turn appeared to accept this gambit, lining up on the opposite bank of the river on the night of 3 August. In fact, he had sent 5,000 horsemen and light infantry across the Ebros to circle around and attack the Paşists in the rear the following day, when battle was joined. Presuming that this detachment was proceeding on schedule, Mehmed assaulted the Paşa’s forces, advancing across the broad, slow-moving river to attack the other bank. For several hours, the two forces met in bitter hand-to-hand combat, the air filled with screams and shouts and the smell of blood and death. The Turkish infantry threw themselves at their Greek counterparts, both equally well-armed and armored. Neither made much progress, any advance being quickly beaten down and ford by the surrounding ranks. Mehmed began to wonder where his flanking force had gone, about the same time that Ebülhayr Paşa was doing likewise. Both commanders had sent flanking forces across the Ebros, and by sheer dumb luck they had blundered into each other. After an hour of fighting, the more lightly-armed Mehmedists were forced to retire, the Paşists pursuing all the way. However, the Mehmedists were able to stage enough of a rearguard on the Ebros for Mehmed to rush reinforcements to prevent an encirclement. Then, the sultan ordered his forces to pull back across the Tunca.
After several days of light skirmishing, Mehmed broke camp once again and withdrew northwards to the mountains, pursued by Ebülhayr Paşa. The two forces’ outriders fought a running battle as the rearguard and the vanguard struggled to perform their respective tasks. By September, however, Mehmed was able to withdraw across the mountains, defeating an attempt to pursue him at Shipka Pass. Ebülhayr Paşa made camp in Upper Thrake, not wanting to risk getting trapped in the mountains during the winter, while Mehmed holed up at Tarnovo. Neither army had taken especially heavy losses, but the Paşists were better able to replenish what losses they had taken and furthermore raise more men.
The fighting resumed in the spring of 1513. Mehmed made another thrust into Thrake, launching an unexpected assault in the east after a false build-up in the west. Ebülhayr Paşa rushed to cut him off, inadvertently allowing the western army, which was not as fake as had been expected, to break out of the mountains. The vizier appeared to be on the verge of being pincered, and was forced to retreat down the valley to keep his army intact. However, his force, while outnumbered on a theater-wide basis, was larger than either of the sultan’s armies. In to win, he rolled the dice. Rather than trying to meet either of these armies, Ebülhayr Paşa instead led his army north-east across the coastal foothills of the Balkan Mountains, threatening an offensive into Bulgaria itself. Mehmed, hoping to prevent this, turned his personal force about and marched to pursue, leaving the second force to lay siege to Edirne.
The sultan and the vizier chased each other around the eastern edge of the Bulgarian plain for the next three months, never quite able to gain the advantage that they felt would secure them a decisive victory. That was, until mid-July, when Ebülhayr Paşa’s force had the misfortune of encountering a Wallachian raiding force in Dobruja[4]. The resulting battle was shockingly bloody, but the worst casualty were the cannons, which were captured and spiked before the Vlachs were driven off. With his field artillery gone, the vizier moved eastwards, hoping to hole up in a port so he could either evacuate or resupply. Unfortunately for him, this battle was observed by some of Mehmed’s outriders, and within hours he was marching to intercept.
The two forces met each other near the village of Sredina, about seventy kilometers north of Varna, beneath dark and ominous clouds. Ebülhayr Paşa had barely managed to scramble across the valley of a small, nameless river, and his forces formed up on its southern side, forcing any attackers to climb out of the gorge and into their waiting pikes and arquebuses. This was a sound plan, and it seemed to be working as the first wave of Mehmed’s men to come charging up the slope were cut down en masse. Another line charged up the gorge and fell with the bark of muskets and the sound of metal tearing flesh. To Ebülhayr Paşa, it appeared as if his enemy had lost his mind and any knowledge of tactics. However, what he failed to account for was the superiority in numbers and quality of the Mehmedist cavalry. Even as waves of men charged to their deaths (most of whom were Greek and Bulgarian conscripts) several thousand horsemen were thundering towards his flank. Mehmed’s foolishness, as Ebülhayr Paşa believed the cause of the continued assault to be, quickly proved not to be entirely foolish as the cavalry emerged from a stand of trees on the Paşist left. The vizier hurriedly ordered his flank to about-face to meet the new threat, but as the cavalry entered the field Mehmed ordered his actual trained infantry to advance. The simultaneous slam of the cavalry into the chaotic left and the charge of the veterans into the Paşist center broke Ebülhayr’s force. The vizier was left to fight a desperate rearguard as his army streamed away behind him, and it was only by good luck that the clouds opened up, releasing a deluge that allowed the Paşists to retreat under cover. Ebülhayr Paşa quickly regrouped his forces and fled south-eastwards, barely managing to make it to the small but defensible port of Kavarna.
While Ebülhayr Paşa waited for evacuation by the Ottoman Navy, Mehmed quickly turned his attention to resuming the offensive in Thrake. Leaving behind a force large enough to keep the grand vizier treed, he and the majority of his army rushed southwards once again. Edirne was taken once word of the disaster got there, and with the second city of the Empire in his hands, Mehmed ranged across Thrake, taking several major cities and quickly solidifying his control over the region by force of arms. Given the extreme anti-Hellenism and anti-Orthodoxy (heterodoxy? Nah, sounds weird) of his army, several thousand Greeks were massacred, many more sold off into slavery with their homes and villages burned to the ground. This was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, as you might imagine, and so as Mehmed and his armies advanced towards Constantinople, they met increasing resistance, both from disperate Greek militias and smaller contingents of official soldiers using hit-and-run tactics. Mehmed mostly shrugged these off, but this complacency was halted in mid-September, when his army arrived at Selymbria. He was shocked to meet Ebülhayr Paşa, at the command of some 15,000 men. Ebülhayr Paşa and his army had been hastily evacuated from Kavarna and relanded in the capital, where he had rallied many of the Greek militias to his banner, as well as transporting the garrisons of Bithynia across the Bosphorus to join his army.
This serves as an excellent segway back to the Trapezuntine Empire and its interests. Regardless of the events playing out in Europe, it would be the years of massacre, enslavements and all around brutality that befell the undefended Anatolian Greek population that would stir the Trapezuntines to intervene in the civil war in mid-1516….
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[1] This term is a definite anachronism, but it gets the point across well enough.
[2] The Spanish Jews were resettled in the Ottoman Empire as in OTL, but this time the position of Thessalonike only a few scant miles from the Thessalian border kept its native population in place, as Angelovic Pasa didn’t want to risk putting an ethnic group of questionable loyalty so close to such a volatile frontier district.
[3] ‘Orkhan’ is a transliteration of اورخان غازی that I feel is more accurate than the usual ‘Orhan’.
[4] The Danubian Principalities remain under Hungarian hegemony, and the current voivode sees the ongoing Ottoman civil war as a chance to get revenge for all of the Turkish raiding and hopefully put the fear of God into the Turks so raiding will reduce in severity and frequency.
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Looks like the Trapezuntine Empire is gonna get involved with Pasa side pretty quickly. Maybe he might even cede territory to them t gain their support
Did the Grand Viziers actually make the mistake of culling the imperial house?They should have let more princes live so that they could use them against unruly sultans.
My question is, will we be seeing neighboring powers and ethnicities see this and make a play to win independence and/or expansion at Ottoman expense?
Just binged this TL. Fine writing thus far (and good luck with the day's exams)!
It is highly likely that the Trapezuntines will be able to gain territory through intercession in the war, the questions are "where" and "how much." I have steep doubts about their ability to advance into former Optimatoi just yet, but they could easily move at least to the Filyos/Billaeus River with little issue. Then again, I may be underestimating the amount of Trapezuntine support by persecuted Anatolian Greeks, the strength of the divided Ottoman Empire, or in converse the weakness of the divided sultanate. Of course, if things really are bad enough, who knows how much of Anatolia the Komnenoi can overrun?
There is at least one aspect heavily limiting the realistic extent of Trapezuntine gains beyond the Black Sea coast, both in this war and into the foreseeable future: their aforementioned lack of strategic depth, which really hurts them the further they are from Pontus proper. Not only does having poor logistics across the central plateau from Trapezous hurt administering more loyal coastal pieces overland, but those regions are both full of Turkmen/Seljuks and necessary for the production of high quantities of decent cavalry.
Between the political and geopolitical realities of it, I think Trebizond will have to start cutting into the Karamanids before it can make serious gains even in western parts of inland Anatolia. No direct land borders to worry about, but government and logistics of those territories will be enforced solely by the (admittedly formidable) Komnenian navy, which is a pretty big lability.
It is highly likely that the Trapezuntines will be able to gain territory through intercession in the war, the questions are "where" and "how much." I have steep doubts about their ability to advance into former Optimatoi just yet, but they could easily move at least to the Filyos/Billaeus River with little issue. Then again, I may be underestimating the amount of Trapezuntine support by persecuted Anatolian Greeks, the strength of the divided Ottoman Empire, or in converse the weakness of the divided sultanate. Of course, if things really are bad enough, who knows how much of Anatolia the Komnenoi can overrun?
There is at least one aspect heavily limiting the realistic extent of Trapezuntine gains beyond the Black Sea coast, both in this war and into the foreseeable future: their aforementioned lack of strategic depth, which really hurts them the further they are from Pontus proper. Not only does having poor logistics across the central plateau from Trapezous hurt administering more loyal coastal pieces overland, but those regions are both full of Turkmen/Seljuks and necessary for the production of high quantities of decent cavalry.
Between the political and geopolitical realities of it, I think Trebizond will have to start cutting into the Karamanids before it can make serious gains even in western parts of inland Anatolia. No direct land borders to worry about, but government and logistics of those territories will be enforced solely by the (admittedly formidable) Komnenian navy, which is a pretty big lability.
Eparkhos
Banned
Today's update will be a bit shorter, because I got assigned an essay due on Monday, even though I already wrote two fucking essays this week and we aren't even covering anything new, but no, the school can't have any of their students have one fucking regular weekend or their shriveled-up hearts would stop.
Eparkhos
Banned
I actually had that in an earlier draft but decided to can it.
No, there are still a few dynasts kicking around out there.
As darthfanta said, this is the case.
Thank you all. I got an 85 on my Physics test and 96 on my Spanish, so I think I'll do alright. The Math one hasn't been graded yet, but I think I did well.
You are entirely correct about stratgeic depth and the Karamanids, and the two states are on an effective collision course.
Magnet school in the South. Won't say more than that.
I'm going for a general "Crisis of the 16th Century" across Europe.
Part XXXVI: Martyrs (1514-1516)
Eparkhos
Banned
Part XXXVI: Martyrs (1514-1516)
The Greeks of Anatolia had spent the past two centuries or more languishing beneath the Ottoman yoke, left behind after their brethren fled across the Bosphorus in hopes of escaping the ever-expanding Turkish empire. As the Byzantines departed the region, the Turkmen moved in in their wake, subjecting the Orthodox to all sorts of humiliations and depredations. For two score decades, the poor farmers and artisans had managed to eke out a living despite their oppressive circumstances, allowed to just barely skate through by the Sublime Porte, who by now saw them solely as tax cows and recruiting grounds for the janissaries. As Imperial governance in the region began to collapse as the civil war spiralled out, however, things only became worse. Bands of roving marauders and ghazis came down from the interior mountains, ravaging the countryside and butchering Greeks for the crime of mere existence. Across north-western Anatolia, entire villages were sacked or burned, their inhabitants massacred or carried off into the chains of slavery. Churches were levelled, bloated corpses piled atop their foundations to further defile the spot, and priests and monks tortured to death[1]. As hundreds were killed and thousands more sold into slavery, there was but one option left to the Greeks of Bithynia and Paphlagonia; Revolt or die.
The lives of the Anatolian Greeks under Ottoman rule had never been especially pleasant, but it had always been at least tolerable. They were treated as conquered subjects by the Sublime Porte, not an unusually cruel fate given the time period, and were lesser than their Muslim brethren in nearly all aspects of society. Greeks were forbidden to build their houses taller than those of their Muslim neighbors, their churches had to be smaller than every mosque in whichever city or town they resided in. They paid extra taxes, both the jizya and the çalviafsarone, the latter of which saw many of their sons taken away as slaves to join the armies of the sultan and the vizier. They were forbidden to carry weapons or potential weapons of any sort, ranging from arquebuses to certain types of cookware, and the sentence for owning a horse was death. Despite these many restrictions, most of the Anatolian Greeks got along with no more than a good bit of grumbling, willing to put up with these draconian laws so long as they were able to live in peace.
However, the ability of the Sublime Porte to ensure peace in the region was dramatically thrown into question with the outbreak of the civil war in 1512. The western regions of Anatolia universally struck for Mehmed, while Bithynia and Paphlagonia proper both remained under the control of Ebülhayr Paşa and his men. Of course, as the war raged on in Thrake, the vizier was forced to hastily transfer many of the garrison soldiers to Europe to help him in the titanic struggle there. This, naturally, led to the advance of the Mehmedist horsemen from the interior, as there was next to no army present to stop them from doing so. Ebülhayr Paşa allowed only for a handful of milia units to be raised to defend Bithynia from the raiders, fearing the uprising of the repressed natives more than he did the invasion of his arch-rival’s forces. As such, by the end of 1513 the entire region had been overrun by the Turkmen.
These Turkmen were a wild bunch, more accustomed to the semi-nomadic and raiding lifestyles of the inner Plateau than to the bureaucratic and systematic governance of settled regions, such as the aforementioned sanjaks of Bithynia and Paphlagonia. They were fanatical Muslims, considering themselves to be the warriors of God, Swords of the Faith, Soldiers of the Prophet, ghazis and mujahideen alike[2]. The pre-existing Turkish conceit that the Greeks had been delivered into their servitude because of their cowardice, intemperance and worst of all, their refusal to accept the faith was magnified by the easy triumph of these fanatical nomads over the defenseless Christians, and their leader, the former governor of the Anatolian Elayet, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, began demanding that all Christians submit to Islam. This went over as well as could be expected, and several of the ulema sent out to proselytize in more isolated Greek villages wound up ‘disappearing’ into the surrounding wilds.
However, the persecutions that wound up sparking the Greek revolt did not begin in earnest until the outbreak of Nikolaidis' Revolt in July 1514. Kalpazar (OTL Bilecik) was one of the largest urban areas that had been relatively unaffected by the civil war, supporting large populations of Greeks and Armenians. It was one of the few areas of the former Byzantine Empire to have managed to preserve its silk works, and so it was quite the wealthy business center. The city had a number of Orthodox and Apostolic[3] churches, and was a minor pilgrimage center in the region. Seeing the significance which the city held to the Christians, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey sent a force to the city in July 1514, demanding the razing of the churches and the conversion of the city to Islam. Obviously, this wasn’t likely to go over well, so the imam, one Kaykhusraw of Saray, had a sizable military escort. This military escort got him through the gate, but it is frankly shocking that none of the horsemen thought better of riding into a warren of side streets and tall buildings populated by natives whose feelings towards them ranged from restiveness to outright hatred. Nonetheless, they rode directly into the city center, where the town mayor was bluntly and publicly informed by the imam that the city was to be converted to the true faith and its churches pulled down. There were several minutes of stunned silence before a silk worker grabbed a brick and attacked the imam from behind, whacking him over the head with it and knocking him out of the saddle. The Kalpazaroi then swarmed the rest of the Turkish horsemen, who were barely able to defend themselves given the narrow confines of the city and were quickly cut down en masse. An elderly sipahi[4], Nikolaos Nikolaidis, quickly relived the mayor and took command of the situation, raising the standard of his old force in revolt.
The Kalpazar Flag, one of the great symbols of Greek nationalism
Nikolaidis quickly set about organizing the revolt, training men, procuring/making weapons and stockpiling food from the surrounding regions. The city’s walls were hastily rebuilt and expanded, while one singular cannon was hauled out from an Angelovic-era former border fort. This was no great army, but God-willing, the rag-tag bunch of fanatics and militiamen would be able to hold the walls against the Turkmen until help arrived. He sent riders out to the Karamanids, to other Greek cities and even one all the way to Trapezous, begging for help. He received little aid from his fellow Anatolian Greeks, however, most of whom feared retribution for aiding what looked to be a lost cause.
These preparations were well-warranted, for in early August Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey arrived with several thousand horsemen. Light cavalry, which was the bulk of the force, isn’t exactly good for assaulting cities, and so Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey settled in for a siege, establishing a blockade of the city to keep anything from getting or going out. He also flung the corpses of his own men, many of whom had died from the usual camp diseases, over the wall in hopes of spreading plagues amongst the populace. Both of these strategies were highly effective, as the sizable population of the city required a great deal of food and Nikolaidis had been unable to send away the non-combatants as was usual in siege warfare. By the end of October, food stores were almost non-existent, diseases were rampant amongst the Kalpazaroi and there seemed to be no prospect of help. Nonetheless, Nikolaides and the city’s bishop, Alexios of Kalpazar, were able to buoy the spirit of the defenders, who were increasingly filled with the grim determination of doomed men. As November dragged on, the Turkmen began bombarding the walls, forcing defenders to congregate to meet them, then hurling diseased bodies at those spots. This only worsened the ongoing disease problem, and as the end of the month drew nearer, it became apparent that they would soon have to surrender. The question was put to a vote, and the Kalpazaroi resolved to face death rather than defeat. On 21 November, the Feast of the Presentation of the Mother of God, Nikolaides and several hundred poorly-armed men arrayed themselves at the southern gate. Meanwhile, the women and children of the city began throwing themselves off of the northern wall, which sat atop a series of cliffs, rather than facing a lifetime of torture and slavery. The Kalpazaroi charged out of the battered gate, screaming war-cries as their ragged bands swarmed across No-Man’s Land and into the Turkmen camp. Most of them were killed quickly, being poorly armed and even worsley(?)-armored, but the Turkmen too fell in droves. The air was filled with screams and shouts of the dead and dying, the whistle of arrows and the thunder of the few cannons present. The Turks were caught by surprise but quickly rallied, surrounding the Kalpazaroi and grinding them down with swords and arrows. At long last, the battle was over. The Turkmen then rushed into the city, finding it mostly abandoned, looting anything that wasn’t nailed down and burning or smashing the rest. Most of the Kalpazaroi had followed through with their pact and laid dead either on the field or at the foot of the cliffs, but a few hundred still remained. The fates of these poor souls were….unpleasant….to say the least, but worst of all was their execution. Furious at the city’s insolence, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey ordered the survivors to be crucified along the road leading back to Eskişehir for a period of three days, then burned any who still lived upon their crosses. The city was then demolished wholesale.
This was the spark that lit the powder keg. The Anatolian Greeks were willing to put up with a lot, but crucifying brothers and sisters in the faith--many of them children!--and then burning those crosses was too much. As word of the atrocities spread, the stories became inflated, describing the Turkmen beating and raping the entirety of the city’s population before nailing them onto flaming crosses and hurtling them off a cliff, or people being tied to crosses by their own intestines, or having nails driven up their genitals, etc, etc. Special attention was given to the fate of the churches within the city and their priests and monks, all of whom had been tortured even more than the other Kalpazaroi. By the spring of 1515, the general consensus was that the Turkmen were going to do the same to all of them, and that the Anatolians needed to strike first before they faced the same fate as their brethren. Men across the region were preparing to take up arms against their oppressors after so long subject to their yoke.
The Great Rising began on 19 January 1515, the Feast of the Epiphany. The men of Magnesia on the Sangarios (Gevye) silently took up arms on the rainy night, slipping through the streets of the city to pick off the Turkish garrison piecemeal. With their occupiers slaughtered, the Bishop of Magnesia, Gabriel Lefkos, proclaimed the restoration of the Empire of Nikaia. Within weeks, cities across the region followed Magnesia’s lead, slaughtering or driving out their garrisons. For a time it seemed as if all of Bithynia would rise and the Turkmen would be forced to flee for their lives, but this never came to pass. While the urban mobs of the cities were good at defeating horsemen in street fighting, they were significantly less capable in open-field battles, which the Turkmen excelled at. Because of this, several cities were recaptured by the Turks after their military force, per se, rushed out to attack the horsemen on foot and were surrounded and mowed down. However, for the most part they remained holed up behind their walls or in the immediately surrounding area, forcing the Turks to spread themselves thin to keep them all pinned down. Many of the rural rebels took to guerrilla tactics, waylaying patrols and isolated detachments of enemy riders. They joined forces with the klephts--brigands who nominally robbed for the sake of an Imperial restoration--and quickly turned all but a few major roads into death zones for Turkish cavalry, further limiting them.
One of these klephts, a Pont[5] by the name of Basileios Panagiokhristophorites, quickly became something of a commander in the revolt after killing a bey in single combat in May 1515. Panagiokhristophorites was a short, ugly man with a short temper, excellent fighting skills and unusual piety, who had fought under Ebülhayr Paşa during his invasion of Eprios and was familiar with the tactics with which Epirote irregulars had confounded the invaders. Under Panagiokhristophorites’ command, the klephts joined with the armatoloi[6], as the militia were coming to be called, in the systematic targeting and destruction of significant Turkish forces. The self-proclaimed katepano would follow Turkish forces as they rode between points, waiting until they were vulnerable before striking like a bolt from on high. He famously broke the sieges of Prusias (Duzce) and Angelokastron (Inegol) in August 1515, moving with shocking speed across the breadth of the region held by the rebels by the end of the campaign season of 1515, the rebels had carved a broad swath of land away from either of the Turkish combatants, all of which was proclaimed the property of the Emperor of Nikaia.
But who, exactly was to become the Emperor of Nikaia? A number of local magnates had been proposed, but the general feeling was that a pre-existing monarch would be needed to secure the newly-independent state. The logical candidate for this was the Trapezuntine Emperor, but the ongoing regency for a literal child made this unappealing, to say the least. The Morean Despot was also floated around, as well as several of his relatives, but upon contact all of them refused. This question continued to occupy the attentions of many of the rebel leaders throughout the autumn of 1515 and into the spring of 1516, when it was suddenly overshadowed by other events.
While many Turkmen soldiers and officers had been killed, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey had not been one of them. He had been able to withdraw back into Anatolia proper during the late summer of 1515, where he had set about raising another army. Many of the Turkmen, both in the Ottoman realm and beyond, were used to raiding and warfare and were hungry for battle, while many others were Ottoman-aligned bands that had been pushed north by the Karamanid invasion the previous year. As such, he was able to raise a large number of horsemen and even a respectable number of infantrymen by the time the next spring came. In April 1516, he crossed back into rebel territory with 8,000 horsemen and 2,500 infantry, relieving Eskişehir and then fighting through rebel-held territory all the way to Angelokastron and beyond. By the beginning of April, he had reached Bursa, former capital of the Ottoman state, and reestablished a presence in Bithynia, a serious blow to the rebel cause. Even worse, the civil war in Europe seemed to be winding down in the vizier’s favor, so they soon may have to deal with an invasion from another army, or several. With few other options, Lefkos and Panagiokhristophorites finally broke down and formally invited David I of Trapezous to take the throne of the Nikaian Empire.
Ratetas eagerly agreed and began assembling a fleet and expeditionary force at once. It still remained to be seen, however, if he would arrive in time to turn the tide once again….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] All of these were really done by Ottoman irregulars putting down the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876, known to history as the Bulgarian Horrors
[2] All of these were titles that historic Muslim warriors had bestowed upon them by either themselves or others of the same ilk.
[3] That is, Orthodox and Armenian churches. A number of Armenian merchants and craftsmen had migrated to the region during the Rumite period and stuck around after their collapse.
[4] Prior to the 17th Century, non-Muslims were allowed to become Sipahis
[5] Here, Pont refers to the dialect of Greek spoken, as the Pontic-Paphlagonian dialect was spoken across the Black Sea littoral. Panagiokhristophorites was in fact a bog-standard Paphlagonian
[6] This is a serious anachronism, referring to the Venetian mercenaries-turned-Ottoman constables who resided in Thessaly and Epiros during this time period, eventually playing a major role in the Greek Revolution. I’m using it here because they were (very) roughly the same, and because I couldn’t come up with anything better.
The Greeks of Anatolia had spent the past two centuries or more languishing beneath the Ottoman yoke, left behind after their brethren fled across the Bosphorus in hopes of escaping the ever-expanding Turkish empire. As the Byzantines departed the region, the Turkmen moved in in their wake, subjecting the Orthodox to all sorts of humiliations and depredations. For two score decades, the poor farmers and artisans had managed to eke out a living despite their oppressive circumstances, allowed to just barely skate through by the Sublime Porte, who by now saw them solely as tax cows and recruiting grounds for the janissaries. As Imperial governance in the region began to collapse as the civil war spiralled out, however, things only became worse. Bands of roving marauders and ghazis came down from the interior mountains, ravaging the countryside and butchering Greeks for the crime of mere existence. Across north-western Anatolia, entire villages were sacked or burned, their inhabitants massacred or carried off into the chains of slavery. Churches were levelled, bloated corpses piled atop their foundations to further defile the spot, and priests and monks tortured to death[1]. As hundreds were killed and thousands more sold into slavery, there was but one option left to the Greeks of Bithynia and Paphlagonia; Revolt or die.
The lives of the Anatolian Greeks under Ottoman rule had never been especially pleasant, but it had always been at least tolerable. They were treated as conquered subjects by the Sublime Porte, not an unusually cruel fate given the time period, and were lesser than their Muslim brethren in nearly all aspects of society. Greeks were forbidden to build their houses taller than those of their Muslim neighbors, their churches had to be smaller than every mosque in whichever city or town they resided in. They paid extra taxes, both the jizya and the çalviafsarone, the latter of which saw many of their sons taken away as slaves to join the armies of the sultan and the vizier. They were forbidden to carry weapons or potential weapons of any sort, ranging from arquebuses to certain types of cookware, and the sentence for owning a horse was death. Despite these many restrictions, most of the Anatolian Greeks got along with no more than a good bit of grumbling, willing to put up with these draconian laws so long as they were able to live in peace.
However, the ability of the Sublime Porte to ensure peace in the region was dramatically thrown into question with the outbreak of the civil war in 1512. The western regions of Anatolia universally struck for Mehmed, while Bithynia and Paphlagonia proper both remained under the control of Ebülhayr Paşa and his men. Of course, as the war raged on in Thrake, the vizier was forced to hastily transfer many of the garrison soldiers to Europe to help him in the titanic struggle there. This, naturally, led to the advance of the Mehmedist horsemen from the interior, as there was next to no army present to stop them from doing so. Ebülhayr Paşa allowed only for a handful of milia units to be raised to defend Bithynia from the raiders, fearing the uprising of the repressed natives more than he did the invasion of his arch-rival’s forces. As such, by the end of 1513 the entire region had been overrun by the Turkmen.
These Turkmen were a wild bunch, more accustomed to the semi-nomadic and raiding lifestyles of the inner Plateau than to the bureaucratic and systematic governance of settled regions, such as the aforementioned sanjaks of Bithynia and Paphlagonia. They were fanatical Muslims, considering themselves to be the warriors of God, Swords of the Faith, Soldiers of the Prophet, ghazis and mujahideen alike[2]. The pre-existing Turkish conceit that the Greeks had been delivered into their servitude because of their cowardice, intemperance and worst of all, their refusal to accept the faith was magnified by the easy triumph of these fanatical nomads over the defenseless Christians, and their leader, the former governor of the Anatolian Elayet, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, began demanding that all Christians submit to Islam. This went over as well as could be expected, and several of the ulema sent out to proselytize in more isolated Greek villages wound up ‘disappearing’ into the surrounding wilds.
However, the persecutions that wound up sparking the Greek revolt did not begin in earnest until the outbreak of Nikolaidis' Revolt in July 1514. Kalpazar (OTL Bilecik) was one of the largest urban areas that had been relatively unaffected by the civil war, supporting large populations of Greeks and Armenians. It was one of the few areas of the former Byzantine Empire to have managed to preserve its silk works, and so it was quite the wealthy business center. The city had a number of Orthodox and Apostolic[3] churches, and was a minor pilgrimage center in the region. Seeing the significance which the city held to the Christians, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey sent a force to the city in July 1514, demanding the razing of the churches and the conversion of the city to Islam. Obviously, this wasn’t likely to go over well, so the imam, one Kaykhusraw of Saray, had a sizable military escort. This military escort got him through the gate, but it is frankly shocking that none of the horsemen thought better of riding into a warren of side streets and tall buildings populated by natives whose feelings towards them ranged from restiveness to outright hatred. Nonetheless, they rode directly into the city center, where the town mayor was bluntly and publicly informed by the imam that the city was to be converted to the true faith and its churches pulled down. There were several minutes of stunned silence before a silk worker grabbed a brick and attacked the imam from behind, whacking him over the head with it and knocking him out of the saddle. The Kalpazaroi then swarmed the rest of the Turkish horsemen, who were barely able to defend themselves given the narrow confines of the city and were quickly cut down en masse. An elderly sipahi[4], Nikolaos Nikolaidis, quickly relived the mayor and took command of the situation, raising the standard of his old force in revolt.
The Kalpazar Flag, one of the great symbols of Greek nationalism
Nikolaidis quickly set about organizing the revolt, training men, procuring/making weapons and stockpiling food from the surrounding regions. The city’s walls were hastily rebuilt and expanded, while one singular cannon was hauled out from an Angelovic-era former border fort. This was no great army, but God-willing, the rag-tag bunch of fanatics and militiamen would be able to hold the walls against the Turkmen until help arrived. He sent riders out to the Karamanids, to other Greek cities and even one all the way to Trapezous, begging for help. He received little aid from his fellow Anatolian Greeks, however, most of whom feared retribution for aiding what looked to be a lost cause.
These preparations were well-warranted, for in early August Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey arrived with several thousand horsemen. Light cavalry, which was the bulk of the force, isn’t exactly good for assaulting cities, and so Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey settled in for a siege, establishing a blockade of the city to keep anything from getting or going out. He also flung the corpses of his own men, many of whom had died from the usual camp diseases, over the wall in hopes of spreading plagues amongst the populace. Both of these strategies were highly effective, as the sizable population of the city required a great deal of food and Nikolaidis had been unable to send away the non-combatants as was usual in siege warfare. By the end of October, food stores were almost non-existent, diseases were rampant amongst the Kalpazaroi and there seemed to be no prospect of help. Nonetheless, Nikolaides and the city’s bishop, Alexios of Kalpazar, were able to buoy the spirit of the defenders, who were increasingly filled with the grim determination of doomed men. As November dragged on, the Turkmen began bombarding the walls, forcing defenders to congregate to meet them, then hurling diseased bodies at those spots. This only worsened the ongoing disease problem, and as the end of the month drew nearer, it became apparent that they would soon have to surrender. The question was put to a vote, and the Kalpazaroi resolved to face death rather than defeat. On 21 November, the Feast of the Presentation of the Mother of God, Nikolaides and several hundred poorly-armed men arrayed themselves at the southern gate. Meanwhile, the women and children of the city began throwing themselves off of the northern wall, which sat atop a series of cliffs, rather than facing a lifetime of torture and slavery. The Kalpazaroi charged out of the battered gate, screaming war-cries as their ragged bands swarmed across No-Man’s Land and into the Turkmen camp. Most of them were killed quickly, being poorly armed and even worsley(?)-armored, but the Turkmen too fell in droves. The air was filled with screams and shouts of the dead and dying, the whistle of arrows and the thunder of the few cannons present. The Turks were caught by surprise but quickly rallied, surrounding the Kalpazaroi and grinding them down with swords and arrows. At long last, the battle was over. The Turkmen then rushed into the city, finding it mostly abandoned, looting anything that wasn’t nailed down and burning or smashing the rest. Most of the Kalpazaroi had followed through with their pact and laid dead either on the field or at the foot of the cliffs, but a few hundred still remained. The fates of these poor souls were….unpleasant….to say the least, but worst of all was their execution. Furious at the city’s insolence, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey ordered the survivors to be crucified along the road leading back to Eskişehir for a period of three days, then burned any who still lived upon their crosses. The city was then demolished wholesale.
This was the spark that lit the powder keg. The Anatolian Greeks were willing to put up with a lot, but crucifying brothers and sisters in the faith--many of them children!--and then burning those crosses was too much. As word of the atrocities spread, the stories became inflated, describing the Turkmen beating and raping the entirety of the city’s population before nailing them onto flaming crosses and hurtling them off a cliff, or people being tied to crosses by their own intestines, or having nails driven up their genitals, etc, etc. Special attention was given to the fate of the churches within the city and their priests and monks, all of whom had been tortured even more than the other Kalpazaroi. By the spring of 1515, the general consensus was that the Turkmen were going to do the same to all of them, and that the Anatolians needed to strike first before they faced the same fate as their brethren. Men across the region were preparing to take up arms against their oppressors after so long subject to their yoke.
The Great Rising began on 19 January 1515, the Feast of the Epiphany. The men of Magnesia on the Sangarios (Gevye) silently took up arms on the rainy night, slipping through the streets of the city to pick off the Turkish garrison piecemeal. With their occupiers slaughtered, the Bishop of Magnesia, Gabriel Lefkos, proclaimed the restoration of the Empire of Nikaia. Within weeks, cities across the region followed Magnesia’s lead, slaughtering or driving out their garrisons. For a time it seemed as if all of Bithynia would rise and the Turkmen would be forced to flee for their lives, but this never came to pass. While the urban mobs of the cities were good at defeating horsemen in street fighting, they were significantly less capable in open-field battles, which the Turkmen excelled at. Because of this, several cities were recaptured by the Turks after their military force, per se, rushed out to attack the horsemen on foot and were surrounded and mowed down. However, for the most part they remained holed up behind their walls or in the immediately surrounding area, forcing the Turks to spread themselves thin to keep them all pinned down. Many of the rural rebels took to guerrilla tactics, waylaying patrols and isolated detachments of enemy riders. They joined forces with the klephts--brigands who nominally robbed for the sake of an Imperial restoration--and quickly turned all but a few major roads into death zones for Turkish cavalry, further limiting them.
One of these klephts, a Pont[5] by the name of Basileios Panagiokhristophorites, quickly became something of a commander in the revolt after killing a bey in single combat in May 1515. Panagiokhristophorites was a short, ugly man with a short temper, excellent fighting skills and unusual piety, who had fought under Ebülhayr Paşa during his invasion of Eprios and was familiar with the tactics with which Epirote irregulars had confounded the invaders. Under Panagiokhristophorites’ command, the klephts joined with the armatoloi[6], as the militia were coming to be called, in the systematic targeting and destruction of significant Turkish forces. The self-proclaimed katepano would follow Turkish forces as they rode between points, waiting until they were vulnerable before striking like a bolt from on high. He famously broke the sieges of Prusias (Duzce) and Angelokastron (Inegol) in August 1515, moving with shocking speed across the breadth of the region held by the rebels by the end of the campaign season of 1515, the rebels had carved a broad swath of land away from either of the Turkish combatants, all of which was proclaimed the property of the Emperor of Nikaia.
But who, exactly was to become the Emperor of Nikaia? A number of local magnates had been proposed, but the general feeling was that a pre-existing monarch would be needed to secure the newly-independent state. The logical candidate for this was the Trapezuntine Emperor, but the ongoing regency for a literal child made this unappealing, to say the least. The Morean Despot was also floated around, as well as several of his relatives, but upon contact all of them refused. This question continued to occupy the attentions of many of the rebel leaders throughout the autumn of 1515 and into the spring of 1516, when it was suddenly overshadowed by other events.
While many Turkmen soldiers and officers had been killed, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey had not been one of them. He had been able to withdraw back into Anatolia proper during the late summer of 1515, where he had set about raising another army. Many of the Turkmen, both in the Ottoman realm and beyond, were used to raiding and warfare and were hungry for battle, while many others were Ottoman-aligned bands that had been pushed north by the Karamanid invasion the previous year. As such, he was able to raise a large number of horsemen and even a respectable number of infantrymen by the time the next spring came. In April 1516, he crossed back into rebel territory with 8,000 horsemen and 2,500 infantry, relieving Eskişehir and then fighting through rebel-held territory all the way to Angelokastron and beyond. By the beginning of April, he had reached Bursa, former capital of the Ottoman state, and reestablished a presence in Bithynia, a serious blow to the rebel cause. Even worse, the civil war in Europe seemed to be winding down in the vizier’s favor, so they soon may have to deal with an invasion from another army, or several. With few other options, Lefkos and Panagiokhristophorites finally broke down and formally invited David I of Trapezous to take the throne of the Nikaian Empire.
Ratetas eagerly agreed and began assembling a fleet and expeditionary force at once. It still remained to be seen, however, if he would arrive in time to turn the tide once again….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] All of these were really done by Ottoman irregulars putting down the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876, known to history as the Bulgarian Horrors
[2] All of these were titles that historic Muslim warriors had bestowed upon them by either themselves or others of the same ilk.
[3] That is, Orthodox and Armenian churches. A number of Armenian merchants and craftsmen had migrated to the region during the Rumite period and stuck around after their collapse.
[4] Prior to the 17th Century, non-Muslims were allowed to become Sipahis
[5] Here, Pont refers to the dialect of Greek spoken, as the Pontic-Paphlagonian dialect was spoken across the Black Sea littoral. Panagiokhristophorites was in fact a bog-standard Paphlagonian
[6] This is a serious anachronism, referring to the Venetian mercenaries-turned-Ottoman constables who resided in Thessaly and Epiros during this time period, eventually playing a major role in the Greek Revolution. I’m using it here because they were (very) roughly the same, and because I couldn’t come up with anything better.
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