Wonderful update ! It seems that David untirely returned the situation in a EU4 style !Part LV: The Best Defense (1526 - 1527)
By the time David and whatever forces he could scrape together from the east returned to Trapezous, things were rapidly spiraling out of hand. The Rûmites had overrun much of Inner Paphlagonia and now seemed poised to finish the job, as Kadir and his forces approached with enough firepower to level Boyabad and Kastamone, the only fortresses standing between the Turks and the Pontic lowlands. The bandons were scattered across the country and would need time to be reorganized into a fighting force, time that neither David or Trapezous had. Trapezous was on the verge of being crippled or utterly destroyed and nothing seemed able to stop it, except for maybe a miracle….
The aftokrator landed in his capital on 25 March, having spent the last three weeks on a manic march across the plains of Imereti before taking ship in Vatoume and making a harrowing voyage back to Trapezous, buffeted by fierce winds and waves as he went. He was greeted on the docks by a small crowd led by Alexios Kaballarios, his megas domestikos, who told the aftokrator that he had escaped from prison the day before, only hours before his scheduled execution, and had had to hide in a drain pipe until he spotted the returning monarch. David had left a bureaucrat named Thomas Papadopoulos as his regent before departing for Kartvelia the year prior, hoping that his timid nature and all-around tepidity would keep him from getting any ideas in his absence. This had worked for a time, but as soon as word of the Rûmite invasion came, the glorified desk jockey panicked and handed the regency off to an experienced general fresh from the provinces. This was a fairly smart move, and had he summoned, say, the megas domestikos, who was at that time dealing with what he thought were some Turkmen raiders in the Lykos Valley, it could have led to a smooth transition of power that would help the Trapezuntines face down the invaders. Hell, if he had called up one of moirarkhs from Trapezous’ hinterlands, it could have helped create a united front. Instead, Papadopoulos summoned Sabbas Tarkhaneiotes from Sinope and appointed him regent, without even bothering to inform David of doing this[1].
Tarkhaneiotes had moved at once. This was a golden opportunity, if he was able to route the Rûmites now, he would be the savior of all Trapezous and all Greeks and he could finally, finally, have enough legitimacy to overthrow the Komnenoi and install himself as aftokrator. He summoned Kavallarios to the capital and then arrested him, along with anyone else who would have the desire to inform the aftokrator of this quasi-usurpation. Kavallarios had been particularly troubling, and so after getting the greenlight from the Patriarch he scheduled his execution before gathering up the bandons from the surrounding region and marching west to join the fray. Kavallarios had managed to dodge his execution, of course, and now David was very, very angry at this upstart. He and his men quickly went through the city, freeing all of Tarkhaneiotes’ political prisoners and arresting all of his supporters, installing Kavallarios as his new regent. He then set about scraping together a force of bandons, mercenaries and slave soldiers to deal with the invading hordes, and this one prick of a subcommander. He had managed to assemble a ragged and makeshift force by the middle of April; 5,000 veterans from Ananuri, 17 (4,250) bandons, 2,500 mercenaries and 500 conscripted vagabonds and slaves with no value other than acting as human shields. With this semblance of a campaign army, he set out along Tarkhaneiotes’ trail two months behind.
By the time he reached the Alys Gorge, things had changed dramatically once again. Kadir had arrived in Paphlagonia only two days behind David himself, and like Tarkhaneiotes he had immediately leapt into action. Splitting off two forces of 2,500 men each, his lieutenants had laid siege to Kastamone and Boyabad, respectively, pinning down the two largest Trapezuntine forces on the plateau and threatening the ancestral capital of the Megalokomnenoi itself in one smooth move[2]. He sent cavalry forward to scout and probe Trapezuntine defenses in Outer Paphlagonia and western Pontos, while he kept the bulk of his forces in reserve on the Plateau, where they would be free to strike at will. He had, in his mind at least, placed himself into the ultimate advantageous position; if the Trapezuntines or Nikaians struck out at him, he could intercept them and crush them; if they cowered on the other side of the mountains, then Kastamone and Boyabad would be taken with ease, opening the road across the mountains and attaining his goals for this first war. Of course, it would be preferable if the Ponts came out into the open so he could slaughter them but hey, it was his day to lose either way.
Special vigor was devoted to the assault on Kastamone, as Kadir calculated that a determined and prolonged assault there would serve best to draw out the Trapezuntines. Dozens of cannons were brought up to the city, subjecting the defenders and their families to round-the-clock bombardment from all directions. The city’s walls had been rebuilt under Ratetas, so the Trapezuntines were able to withstand the punishing bombardment with relatively light casualties. Cannonballs and other projectiles--the former soon nicknamed ‘Kadir’s stones’ pounded away at the city’s defenses for hours on end, crews of gunners rotating in and out to keep the assault constant and only breaking when the guns threatened to overheat and explode. Gradually, the hastily-erected dirt berms which had been raised around the city were worn down[3], clearing the way for direct assault, and the stone and mortar walls of the city seemed as if they would be next. Khaltzes, knowing that the defenders would be unable to repulse a direct assault, raced to put together a response, and eventually, figured one out. The cannons on the city’s walls were too exposed to Rûmite artillery and would be blow to hell if their crews tried to man them there; given the primitive stage of cannon development, this meant that they could be barely used at all and thus were able to lay down suppressing fire to lessen the constant bombardment. Khaltzes ordered the cannons taken off the walls and raised levers so that their barrels just barely rose above the top of the wall and then opened fire, his men missing most of their shots but succeeding in forcing the Turkish cannonade to be pulled back, which bought them and their comrades more time. The Trapezuntines had just invented the howitzer. Kadir used this as an excuse to desist from any assaults, but in truth he didn’t wish to lose any men on what was supposed to be a bait attack. Throughout May and June, the worst months of the siege, he waited in his camp, which lay some twenty miles east of the city, for news of a Trapezuntine response, but none seemed to mobilize. At the same time, his scouts didn’t report any concentration of men other than the smallish force that was holding the Alys Gorge. Would David not only sacrifice two of his cities, but leave a highway into his heartland barely defended? The Trapezuntines must have been gutted by the war in Kartvelia, he concluded, there was no way in hell that they would do something as stupid as this! What the hell was going on?
This abnormally quiet state of affairs continued for the next six weeks, throughout the end of June and all of July. Kastamone itself was forced to surrender due to starvation on July 14, but Kadir treated the starving defenders with surprising mercy, calculating that dangling the threat of razing the city and massacring its inhabitants over the Trapezuntines would be worth more than just doing so outright and throwing away such a lovely opportunity for extortion. The main point of attack was shifted to Boyabad; the continued presence of a Pontic garrison there made any advance down the Alys nigh-on impossible, and holding it would essentially slash the heel of any future Pontic offenses into Inner Paphlagonia. Cannonade pounded away at the city’s formidable citadel, which rose some two hundred feet above the surrounding plain and had been fortified by successive rulers ever since the Çandarid anarchy in the 1460s. The Rûmites, meanwhile, merged their siege forces together and dispatched 5,000 men to test the Nikaian section of the frontier for any weakness, keeping some 25,000 men behind at Boyabad All the while, Kadir sent further probing expeditions down the Alys, wondering where the Trapezuntine army was. He would soon find out.
On the evening of 10 August, a ragged and dazed-looking rider came into the Rûmite siege camp outside Boyabat, asking to be brought to see the sultan. When Kadir met him, the man informed him that he was the commander of one of his Zaza formations, and that everyone else in his unit was dead. He wove a tale of woe and destruction, speaking of how his and several other Zaza formations, as well as several thousand militiamen and would-be ghazis from the eastern edge of the sultanate had come together west of Ezurum to meet a supposed Trapezuntine invasion force. The Rûmites, numbering some 6,000 strong, had made contact with and given chase to an estimated force of seven bandons up the Lykos Gorge, where that river’s valley narrowed to only a few dozen feet wide and was surrounded by sheer cliffs. The horsemen were able to enter with relative ease, as a dry summer had weakened the river to a bare tickle. They had rounded a bend in the canyon to see the Ponts scrambling up the cliffs on rope ladders and a torrential wall of water--supposedly fifty feet high--surging towards them. The lucky captain had managed to grab hold of one of the ladders and cling to it as the flood swept his men and his comrades downstream to their deaths. Once the floodwater had receded, he had found a horse and ridden with all speed to Boyabad to inform the sultan of this disaster, for there were no more fighting men left in the east. The captain then drew his sword and fell upon it.
Couriers flooded in from all directions in the following days, bearing confused and panicked messages from all across the northern half of the Rûmite Sultanate. Seeming hordes of Ponts had come swarming out of the mountains, catching the unsuspecting Turks completely off-guard and supposedly carrying the day wherever they went. Hundreds, no, thousands, of Rûmite soldiers and militia had been slain, thousands more wounded or deserted, dozens of towns had been captured or burned, and hundreds of Greek and Armenian slaves freed. Kadir was overwhelmed with it all and struggled to sort through the influx of pleas for aid and salvation, spending all of his time trying to get a handle on the situation and subsequently not paying attention to the events playing out to the north as his army grew ever more splintered….
Back in early May, David had arrived at the Alys Gorge to find Tarkhaneiotes camped before its mouth with an army slightly smaller than his own, dug in after barely repelling a Rûmite reconnaissance in force a few days before. The aftokrator stormed into the camp demanding to know what the hell Tarkhaneiotes thought he was doing and threatening to send him on the next ship to Alexandria, only to be met by a smug general who ignored his threats. Tarkhaneiotes explained that this army was loyal to him after he successfully turned back the Turkish assault, and as they were about a third of the total Trapezuntine force in the field at that point, David couldn’t do anything; punish or try to kill him, and he would make him a martyr. The young ruler stormed out in cold silence, plotting already.
Tarkhaneiotes woke two days later with a bag over his head and a horse between his legs, head stuffed from the cocktail of sedatives a loyal officer had placed in his drink. After a few moments, his ears stopped ringing and the sack was roughly pulled off, revealing a cold David shouting to the assembled army how he had caught Tarkhaneiotes trying to slip out of the camp with maps of the camp and formations written in Persian, doubtless meant for the Rûmites. The eleutheroi had to beat back the angry mob of men that rushed the bound general, and it was only with great effort that David calmed the soldiers. Tarkhaneiotes was sent back to Trapezous under armed guard, with orders for Kaballarios to throw Tarkhaneiotes in a sunless hole under constant surveillance, to be killed if anyone tried to break him out--as he repeatedly told the bastard--and to then had the regency over to Ionela and come join him as soon as possible.
David then turned his attention to the situation at hand, finding it not to his liking. While the nominal strength of his force was equal to the Rûmite army that laid siege to Kastamone, it was equal to the Turks only on paper, and the Trapezuntines would certainly be defeated if they attempted to meet the Rûmites on an equal field, and likely even if an action took place on ground that was to the Ponts’ favor. However, he couldn’t just leave Kastamone and especially not Boyabad out to be conquered, as their loss would give the Rûmites an open road into the Pontic heartland. After some time, he concluded that his best option was to try and pull off Rûmite forces so that he could strike against the bulk of their force and relieve Boyabad.
Once Kaballarios arrived in the Trapezuntine camp, David was able to begin implementing his plan. Eight of the twenty bandons which had accompanied him to Ananuri and back would be broken off, along with sixteen bandons either freshly raised or from Tarkhaneiotes’ army, giving him a force of some 6,000 men and leaving 15,000 men to hold the pass. Kaballarios was charged with whipping the motley bands into a true fighting force in David’s absence, and to give backbone to this force the surviving eleutheroi and most of the Trapezuntine artillery train were left with him. Meanwhile, David sent a coded message to Lakharnas in Nikaia, asking him to begin an offensive southward on the day after the Transfiguration[4]. Meanwhile, the aftokrator and his newly-mounted force of infantry[5] rushed eastward; timing must be tight if David’s plan were to work.
On the designated day, the offensive began. Lakharnas’ force exploded out of the Bithynian hills, moving with alacritous speed for an entirely infantry force. The Rûmites had focused the bulk of their forces at Gerede and Nalisaray, as these had been the expected sites for a counter-attack, and so they were completely unprepared for 5,000 Nikaian footmen to coming streaming south-west out of the mountains, running along the edge of the Ottoman frontier before swinging out to attack Eskişehir on 10 August. The city’s garrison had been transferred to Nalisaray, and so the militia of the town were unprepared for such a sudden attack. The Nikaians feasted and pillaged the city--Lakharnas had turned his army into a giant flying column, prioritizing speed and maneuverability over supply--before moving out two days later, continuing his south-westward run. Five days later, the Nikaians arrived at Kütahya, a major trading city on the western edge of the plateau. Once again, the defenders were caught off guard and the city was taken, but rather than pillaging as in Eskişehir they burned the city, smashing the kilns of the city’s ceramic district and destroying anything that couldn’t be nailed down. They then turned north and made for Nikaia, Lakharnas being forced to abandon his desired burning of Eskişehir by the arrival of several thousand Rûmite horsemen. The Nikaians would manage to escape back across the frontier near Kolpazar, the Turks nipping at their heels. The operation, in the west at least, was a complete success.
In the east, David and his mounted infantry began their offensive on the same date, striking south from Neokasieria on horseback. They struck first at Tokat, succeeding in drawing the garrisons of Erzincan and much of the Rûmite east into a pursuit down the Lykos Gorge. David had intended to pin them down and massacre his pursuers in the narrow valley, but as it turned out it was much easier to just overload the irrigation dams on the southern end of the valley and then blow them, hence annihilating the Rûmite force with shockingly few losses. He then advanced to Erzincan on 24 August, advancing without cannons or a baggage train in another instance of speed prioritization. Erzincan was one of the few Shiite centers of Anatolia and as such had little love for the Konya regime, and David was able to strike a deal with the Qizilbaş, a militant Shiite order from the surrounding hill country; the Shiites would keep the Trapezuntines supplied, and in exchange the Pontics would leave them unmolested.
David then left his expeditionary force, riding with all speed north-westward accompanied only by a small group of guards. As planned, he met with Kaballarios en route and confirmed that everything was going to plan, after which the two commanders continued their ride, completing their switching of commands. While the aftokrator continued Kaballarios’ training of the makeshift army, the megas domestikos continued David’s breakneck offensive. He dispatched two bandons to seize Erzurum, the far easternmost possession of the Rûmites, in an ultimately doomed expedition.. Kaballarios then continued his southward advance, taking the cliffside citadel of Çemişgezek by deception, then using its captured artillery to pound the mountaintop fortress of Harput into submission before advancing on Malatya, raiding the lands around the city before retreating.
These raids had the desired effect of forcing Kadir to split his forces, as the fall of a city as large and prominent as Malatya would be a nightmare for a regime such as his, and some 10,000 of the 25,000 Rûmite soldiers in Paphlagonia were hastily sent eastward or westward to supplement the local militias that were doing the bulk of the fighting against the Pontic raiders. Even worse, as far the sultan was concerned, Boyabad remained defiant and the campaign season was drawing to a close, meaning that he would have to dismiss the militia in his already reduced army, only further weakening his position. With great reluctance, the sultan gave the order in early November, hoping that the snows and the frost would keep the Trapezuntines at bay for long enough for him to reassemble his army in the spring. David, meanwhile, was eagerly awaiting the end of the winter, having already committed his forces to winter camp; the Rûmite levies would be forced to traipse back and forth across their realm to return to their homes and then back to the field army, while the bandons would have to cross only a tenth of that distance.
The future of Rûm and Rome hung in the frosty winter air….
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[1] Papadopoulos would later claim that his message to David had been lost at sea, but the veracity of this is undeterminable.
[2] Kadir had done a great deal of research on Trapezuntine governance and mentality before his invasion, and the significance of Kastamone was not lost upon him.
[3] Dirt berms were commonly raised to prevent cannonballs from impacting directly on the ramparts of a fortress, making enemy assault much more difficult
[4] That is, 7 August.
[5] Mounted infantry are just that, infantry who ride to and from the battle but cannot actually fight in the saddle.
The Undying Empire: A Trebizond Timeline
- Thread starter Eparkhos
- Start date
- Status
Wonderful update ! It seems that David untirely returned the situation in a EU4 style !
Eparkhos
Banned
Thank you, that means a lot to me.
I hope you're doing alright, and I hope you enjoy the story once it returns. David won't be going away for a while yet, so I think I should be able to keep him consistent and competent.
Thank you all, I'll be back as soon as I feel ready.
a) Thanks
b) Would you say the narrative or non-narrative sections are more appealing, e-book wise?
Eparkhos
Banned
Thank you, Flos. I've actually heard a lot of EU4 comparisons, but that has nothing to do it. I haven't played it since last year, actually.Take your time
Part LVI: Boyabad (1527)
Eparkhos
Banned
Part LVI: Boyabad (1527)
The Trapezuntines would begin their march to destiny in February 1527. The ground was hard and frozen, and the air was bitterly cold and fierce, driven by winds of the Black Sea, and David couldn’t help but be reminded that marching under similar conditions had led to the death of Maurikios a millennium before. Still, he felt that it was a risk that must be taken; the bandons would need to be stood down for the spring planting soon, while the Rûmite levymen would return as well. His strength was great, Kadir’s was not, and he needed to strike now while he still had the advantage.
The chief reason out of many why David chose to break winter camp before the coming of the spring thaw was sheer numbers. As previously mentioned, the bandons would have to be stood down before the spring planting, and further reinforcements would be unable to arrive until well after the passes had melted and/or the Black Sea had calmed, as additional men would need to be brought in by sea from the west or through the passes from the east. This would put him at a crucial disadvantage for two to three months, at the same time as Rûmite reinforcements would be streaming north, both from the reraised levies and from the dispersed forces across the Plateau that had been sent out the year before. If he did not move swiftly, then he would lose the advantage he had put so much effort into creating previously. There was also the issue of Boyabad itself; the fortress had managed to hold out against the Rûmites for six months despite dwindling supplies and constant bombardment, and its garrison had dwindled to only a few dozen sickly men, who would be unable to resist from the battered ruins of the fortress for a few weeks more, if that. His golden opportunity was here, a month ahead of his intended date but close enough that it was worth the risk. And, so, the aftokrator and his 15,000 men broke camp and marched upriver on 9 February 1527.
Meanwhile, outside of Boyabad, Kadir continued his siege, the conflict by now having transformed into one of necessity if nothing else. The sultan had spent the last six months banging his heads against the fortress walls, pounding them with hundreds of pounds of stone and lead thrown by thousands of pounds of powder, and had nothing to show for it other than some pockmarked walls and several hundred men dead or crippled by failed assaults. If he gave up now and withdrew, he would’ve humiliated himself upon the world stage, something which he could ill afford, as well as given up a great opportunity for a crushing victory against a weak opponent and the spoils of such a conquest. By seizing the city, he would also accomplish his long-desired strategic aim of opening the road into Pontos. By this point, with his army weakened by the winter and dispersed across the breadth of Anatolia, he had secretly begun to despair of a crushing victory, but felt that it was absolutely necessary bar the intervention of God himself for the above mentioned reasons. He had also resolved to seize a city on the far side of the passes either on the field or on the negotiating table, so he didn’t have to go through this mess again. And so he remained in position throughout the winter, and when word came of the aftokrator’s approach he turned his force to meet David rather than fleeing as would have benefited his circumstances.
By the time battle was joined, the Rûmite army was clearly inferior in most regards. They were outnumbered by a factor of a time and a half (1:1.5, ~10,000 against ~15,000) or thereabouts, and would be forced to keep up the siege against Boyabad while fighting the Trapezuntines. They had been forced to spend the winter in siege camps with a poor, if not completely terrible supply situation due to the devastation visited upon Inner Paphlagonia the year before. The Trapezuntines, on the other hand, had been able to keep fairly well supplied throughout the winter, as they had been integrated into Alexandros II’s pan-Pontic supply system[1]. In terms of discipline, the Rûmites held a slight advantage, as David had, after a period of great struggle, been able to integrate and coordinate his new, makeshift army, but it was still less than the nafjayş of Kadir’s host. Both armies had fairly high morale, driven by promises of plunder and the support of God on the Rûmite side and the desire to drive back the invaders and the support of God on the Trapezuntine side, but they wavered in some regards, namely the lack of faith in David in his army and the typical discontent of soldiers made to winter on campaign in Kadir’s. The only area where the Turks held a decisive advantage was in raw firepower, as Kadir was able to pull cannons, many of them truly massive siege guns, from their position to support his line, giving him some 58 guns to David’s 26, the latter being composed primarily of smaller, more maneuverable but less deadly cannons.
The Trapezuntines advanced to a days’ march east of the city (four miles) on 26 February, camping on the left bank of the Amnias River. David feared that his men would be exhausted by the march and so slowed his advance despite knowing it would give the Rûmites time to redeploy to meet him. Kadir did just that, arranging the bulk of his forces along a ridge running between Boyabad and the river. Battalions of militia and nafjayş alternated down the line, the two southernmost units, standing where the ridge was lowest and where the main east road ran, were the heaviest armed and slightly overstrength in comparison to the others. 2,000 men were kept in reserve, one battalion to keep up the siege and another on a ridge running semi-parallel to the main ridge to the north as a reserve. Thirty-four of the Rûmite cannons were positioned along the main line, the rest remaining with the reserve or in the siege lines. The far northern edge of the line was secured by a mixed force of Zazas, Turkmen mercenaries and light infantry, the most mobile forces available to Kadir. The Rûmites waitied tensely that night, mostly confident but still rattled by their numerical inferiority and exhaustion from the long siege.
Meanwhile, across the river, David was alternating between prayer and planning as scouts and infiltrators brought back reports of the Rûmite position. The atmosphere in the Trapezuntine camp was filled with more than the usual amount of nervousness. It was common knowledge that this battle could decide the fate of the war if things went badly enough, and the forces left behind to hold the pass would almost certainly be insufficient to hold off a determined assault. If they failed, would their homes and families be subject to the invaders? No-one could be certain one way or the other, and in some ways not knowing was worse than anything else. Then David emerged from his tent shortly before sunset , wild-eyed and manic. He ordered a cannon shot off to wake his sleeping men, then had every non-clerical, non-soldier follower escorted out of camp. Thousands of groggy and irritated soldiers then assembled in the center of camp, whence David gave a rambling and barely-coherent tirade that was equal parts rousing speech and brimstone sermon. Shockingly, it actually worked in rallying his men, and for the next several hours the camp was turned into a makeshift cathedral, as dozens of priests gave sacraments. As instructed by the voices in his head, David had every shield in the camp painted with the chi rho as another sign of victory before he and his men retired.
David then woke his men once again the following morning, an hour before dawn. Eating and arming themselves quietly in the winter cold, they then took the field in the following manner; 3,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them footmen and the rest cavalry, on the right/northern flank, 4,000 infantry in loose formation in the center, backed by 2,000 tightly-organized heavy infantry as a reserve, and 4,000 heavy and/or veteran infantry on the left/southern flank. The bulk of the cannons were deployed on a ridge on the far bank of the river, but several more were dug in behind the center, a note taken from the Mongols at Ananuri. David was many things, among them fairly inexperienced and mentally unstable, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized that Kadir planned to lure the bulk of the Trapezuntine force into attacking his understrength southern flank before slamming down into them with the army on the ridge, splitting the Trapezuntine host in twain. To counter this, David planned to bombard the Rûmite center before attacking with his own center, pinning them down and throwing his best men against the hopefully isolated Rûmite right, pushing them back or routing them as his own right smashed through their lighter counterparts and swung into the rear of the enemy center, hopefully inspiring an all-out rout.
With all preparations made, David rode up to his main battery as the sun rose behind the Trapezuntine ranks. With a simple command of “Wake them with thunder.” the guns roared to life. The Battle of Boyabad had begun.
The Rûmite soldier had camped in formation, and so this sudden bombardment inflicted far more damage than it had any right to, briefly throwing the ranks of the men along the ridge into confusion. Kadir, leading by example, had camped with a company of his mamluks in the center of the line, and so he was able to scramble into action and restore order in the center within half an hour of the bombardment beginning. Still, the Rûmites were fighting with a sizable handicap, having missed their breakfast due to the sudden attack and being forced to stand and rapidly organize in the bitter cold. They were also forced to squint into the rising sun to make out the advancing foe, all three of these together being quite demoralizing. Kadir and many of his men expected that he would have until the bombardment ended to fully reorganize, and so they were shocked to meet the Trapezuntine while the cannons still roared from across the valley.
1,000 lightly-armed skirmishers formed the leading edge of the Trapezuntine center, racing forward as a broad wave of men, firing against them at distance with arrows before closing to fight with axes and swords. The Rûmites were caught off-guard, still trying to reposition themselves, and so the light infantry made almost absurd progress against them, cutting down men left and right with blows to the back and head, a rout before the battle had even begun! Then the skirmishers ran headlong into the nafjayş that Kadir had quietly posted behind the militia, the result approximating a watermelon hitting a brick wall at the speed of sound. The skirmishers were sent reeling and quickly fell back down the ridge, buying the Turks the time they needed to form up on the ridge--the advance of the standard bandons was delayed by the retreating skirmishers’ disordered withdrawal.
Meanwhile, the Rûmites had managed to regain their footing, and the cannons on the ridge roared to life, thundering against their counterparts or down upon the advancing infantry. This further slowed down the advancing bandons, although they failed to have any great effect on the bulk of the men. Still, the Trapezuntines advanced, seemingly uncaring of their casualties despite the beating they were taking from the cannonade. David was among them, riding atop a white horse[2] in resplendent armor, encouraging his men to keep their advance and rallying them to the chi rho-defaced Pontic eagle that fluttered above the battalions. An hour after dawn, the main line made contact with their Rûmite counterpart. Blinded by the rising sun and already fairly tired by their alarm and the previous action, the Rûmites were unable to stand against the Trapezuntines, and foot after foot the Ponts began to push them back. The air was filled with the smell of death and blood, and supposedly so many corpses littered the ground that the soldiers fought atop and upon bloated bodies because of the lack of open ground. The Trapezuntine advantage soon began to wane, however, as Kadir himself and his guards appeared in the line opposite to David and exhorted his men to hold the line, joined by many ulema from the various camps. The line stabilized along the spine of the ridge, but the Rûmites failed to turn the tide. For the next three hours, the lines remained nearly static as men fought and died upon each other, unable to advance or retreat from the sheer weight of numbers there. Gradually, more Trapezuntine reinforcements advanced, as the commander of the reserve, Mikhael Stephanides, decided that his men were needed to turn the tide. As he had hoped, the Rûmites at last began to flag and started to be pushed back once again, but this advance was nearly a fatal mistake.
Meanwhile, to the south, the Trapezuntine left was advancing against the Rûmite right. As previously mentioned, this Rûmite flank was the least concentrated, and because of this they appeared to number more than they actually did. The commander of the Trapezuntine left, an eleutheros named Iosephos Osolos, decided that the best response to this would be to try and intimidate the Rûmites in turn, and so ordered the four battalions beneath his command to advance at a dead walk, keeping them fresh and hopefully scaring the shit out of the Turks with the sight of a wall of 4,000 heavily-armed veterans advancing in dead silence. This slowed the Trapezuntine advance and opened them to bombardment from the ridge, but few of the Rûmite guns were in the right position to hit them, and those which did had little effect. An hour after the beginning of the attack, the two flanks made contact. About half of the Rûmites in this section were from the nafjayş, but even they were unable to stand against the monolithic advance of the Ponts. The militia who made up most of the flank fled at once, and the remaining Turkish forces were ground down in less than an hour. The eleutheroi and the heavy bandons were essentially unfatigued thanks to their early waking and slow advance, and so they were able to batter down Rûmite resistance with little effort. The road to Boyabad was scattered with corpses and the ground around it turned red from the sheer amount of corpses scattered across it. Osolos famously quipped that so many Rûmites had met the devil there that the worms spoke Turkish, and at the very least they did not speak Pontic. Osolos then ordered one battalion to advance toward Boyabad to cut off any enemy reinforcements while the other three swung up to flank the forces on the ridge. However, the eleutheroi hadn’t even completed this latter maneuver, nor had the flaming spires of Boyabad come into view, before a rider came from David’s position, frantically summoning Osolos back to the north to cut off an enemy flanking maneuver.
On the northern side of the battle, things had gone disastrously wrong. Some 800 horsemen, 1500 light infantry and 700 fairly inexperienced bandons had been grouped together under the command of Alexios of Oph, instructed to advance against the Rûmite cavalry opposite them and encircle the ridge from behind. They had accomplished the first task admirably, smashing into the unprepared Zazas and Turkmen at the break of dawn and routing them in a few scant minutes, the former leaving a trail of corpses and riderless mounts as they fled down the valley to Boyabad. Oph, inexperienced in anything other than skirmishing with bandits on the Kartvelian frontier, ordered his men to give chase, and the Trapezuntine horsemen soon thundered off behind their counterparts, leaving the light and medium infantry strung out and exposed behind them. The merry chase had ended abruptly fifteen minutes later, as the Rûmite horsemen about faced and met the surprised Trapezuntines with bows and sabers. The Ponts slammed into them with little organization, and the two lines of horsemen began roiling back and forth across the plain. As the infantry approached, the cliffs to their north suddenly exploded into cannonfire, as the Rûmite reserves and their batteries entered the fight, followed by guns from the main ridge. Suddenly enfilated, the infantry advance slowed, then halted. Then the reserves themselves charged down from the heights, slamming into the side of the disorganized and confused formation and putting them to flight almost at once. A small number of Rûmites pursued them, continuing to whip out the Trapezuntines across the breadth of the plains, ensuring they couldn’t complete their mission or panic the main line of infantry by their presence. They then swung down into the rear of the Trapezuntine cavalry, encircling them and slaughtering them to the man in a few scant minutes. The Rûmite formations were soon joined by the battalion left to secure Boyabad, which had set fire to the gatehouse and hurled firebrands over the walls to keep the garrison distracted while they took the field. The Rûmite formation then turned and made up the valley in the inverse of the Pontic advance.
They quickly advanced into the Amnias valley, swinging out into the broad lands around the river and charging down it towards the Trapezuntine force. Although they numbered only 2,500 strong if that, the sudden arrival of a force of any real size on the Trapezuntine flank had its typical demoralizing effects, and as they began to press in on their flank the Pontic right began to buckle. David darted back and forth across the breadth of his force, trying to shore up his faltering flank while keeping up the pressure on Kadir so he couldn’t make things any worse. The eleutheroi were slow in coming, and he feared, no, he knew that if they did not arrive in time then the battle would be lost. The Trapezuntine cannons had fallen silent, probably taken by the Turks, and he could feel the morale of his men sapping every second. Something needed to be done before it was too late, and the voices were telling him exactly what.
Just as the battle seemed to be lost, David and twenty of his guards charged into the center of the Rûmite line, aiming for Kadir’s standard and the presence of the sultan himself. Mounted on heavy chargers, they managed to hack a swathe through the teeming lines of men, coming within a few scant feet of Kadir’s own guard unit. The sultan was ordered to flee by his chief mamluk, who rode to meet the attackers, but it was not Kadir that the Trapezuntines were aiming for. To the confusion of many, the eleutheroi instead attacked the sultan’s bannerman, hacking the poor bastard down and ripping down the sultan’s standard and fleeing back towards their lines. All but David and three of his guards would be killed, but the day had been won.
The fall of the sultan’s banner led many to believe that the attack had succeeded in killing Kadir, and the Rûmites began to waver. This gave just enough time for Osolos and his men to arrive like the metaphorical cavalry[3] and drive back the flanking force, pushing them back up the hill and eventually around into the Rûmite rear, sparking the hoped-for retreat. The Rûmite army shattered and fled the field, most running south or west, away from both the Ponts and Boyabad. David and his army were exhausted, and so he ordered only a few bandons to pursue them, leaving the rest to collapse into rest. It wasn’t even noon yet.
That afternoon, Boyabad was at long last relieved. The city was more of a morgue than a city by this point, heavily burned and scoured of anything edible by the surviving garrison of skeletal men, but it had served its purpose and held against all odds. David entered the city in a triumphal procession, and as the sun set that night the newly-created eagle with chi rho was raised above the city’s ramparts. Celebratory masses were held in the city’s cathedral, which was pockmarked by cannon balls and other projectiles. Total losses from Boyabad were quite staggering by Renaissance standards. The Trapezuntines had lost 4,500 out of the 14,000 men who had taken the field, as well as several of their cannons which had been spiked by the retreating Rûmites. Rûmite losses were even worse, having lost 6,000 of their 10,000 men that day, as well as all but three of their cannons spiked or captured. Without a doubt, the Trapezuntines had won the day.
However, things were far from over. While the passes over into Pontos had been defended and the gateway city held, most of Inner Paphlagonia still languished under the Rûmite yoke and would need to be liberated. Trapezous itself was also teetering on insolvency thanks to the near-famine the previous year, and the bandons would need to be stood down soon to prevent things from spiralling out of control. The road to Kastamone and beyond would be long and arduous, and David was quietly unsure that he could do it within the next two years, if that. As such, he was willing to negotiate when Kadir sued for peace. The fears of domestic unrest which had caused the sultan to undertake this war in the first place would almost certainly take place now that his army had been shattered. Reinforcements were coming, sure, but they were needed for more important things. Kadir hoped to make peace now, before David became aware of these facts and he could thus negotiate with a strong hand. David was willing to tender negotiations, and after some back and forth an agreement was reached;
Beypazar, Gerede and Nalisaray, which were untenable and already taken by the Rûmites, respectively, would be ceded to Konya. Their populations were composed mostly of Turks, and a wholesale massacre would be needed to bring them back to anything approaching loyalty, something which David believed God would frown upon. In exchange, Erzincan would pass under Trapezuntine rulership. As payment for Beypazar and Nalisaray (see below) Konya would give over several dozen pounds of gold and silver, as well as two thousand weights of grain. The Peace of Kastamone, as it would be known, shows a surprising regard for honor by the rulers of the opposed polities. Kadir had given promises of protection to the Nalisarayans and the Geredeans, which David would not force him to void, and vice versa with David and the Qizilbaş of Erzincan. After the peace, the terms were swiftly carried out, and by the end of April the borders had effectively changed.
That summer, of course, Kadir’s woes would expand from domestic rebels to foreign foes….
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[1] I kind of neglected the last decade of Alexandros II’s reign, I’ll fix that if I ever do a redux.
[2] David, ever the theologian, always rode a white horse on public occasions and/or battle, using it to tie himself to the conquering White Horseman of Revelations. Prior to the 19th Century, the White Horseman was considered to be symbolic of the spread of Christianity itself, not with the power of Antichrist as it is now.
[3] The eleutheroi fought on foot. Even if they had wanted to mount, all of the horses were gone with Kaballarios’ raid, so it’s not like they could have.
The Trapezuntines would begin their march to destiny in February 1527. The ground was hard and frozen, and the air was bitterly cold and fierce, driven by winds of the Black Sea, and David couldn’t help but be reminded that marching under similar conditions had led to the death of Maurikios a millennium before. Still, he felt that it was a risk that must be taken; the bandons would need to be stood down for the spring planting soon, while the Rûmite levymen would return as well. His strength was great, Kadir’s was not, and he needed to strike now while he still had the advantage.
The chief reason out of many why David chose to break winter camp before the coming of the spring thaw was sheer numbers. As previously mentioned, the bandons would have to be stood down before the spring planting, and further reinforcements would be unable to arrive until well after the passes had melted and/or the Black Sea had calmed, as additional men would need to be brought in by sea from the west or through the passes from the east. This would put him at a crucial disadvantage for two to three months, at the same time as Rûmite reinforcements would be streaming north, both from the reraised levies and from the dispersed forces across the Plateau that had been sent out the year before. If he did not move swiftly, then he would lose the advantage he had put so much effort into creating previously. There was also the issue of Boyabad itself; the fortress had managed to hold out against the Rûmites for six months despite dwindling supplies and constant bombardment, and its garrison had dwindled to only a few dozen sickly men, who would be unable to resist from the battered ruins of the fortress for a few weeks more, if that. His golden opportunity was here, a month ahead of his intended date but close enough that it was worth the risk. And, so, the aftokrator and his 15,000 men broke camp and marched upriver on 9 February 1527.
Meanwhile, outside of Boyabad, Kadir continued his siege, the conflict by now having transformed into one of necessity if nothing else. The sultan had spent the last six months banging his heads against the fortress walls, pounding them with hundreds of pounds of stone and lead thrown by thousands of pounds of powder, and had nothing to show for it other than some pockmarked walls and several hundred men dead or crippled by failed assaults. If he gave up now and withdrew, he would’ve humiliated himself upon the world stage, something which he could ill afford, as well as given up a great opportunity for a crushing victory against a weak opponent and the spoils of such a conquest. By seizing the city, he would also accomplish his long-desired strategic aim of opening the road into Pontos. By this point, with his army weakened by the winter and dispersed across the breadth of Anatolia, he had secretly begun to despair of a crushing victory, but felt that it was absolutely necessary bar the intervention of God himself for the above mentioned reasons. He had also resolved to seize a city on the far side of the passes either on the field or on the negotiating table, so he didn’t have to go through this mess again. And so he remained in position throughout the winter, and when word came of the aftokrator’s approach he turned his force to meet David rather than fleeing as would have benefited his circumstances.
By the time battle was joined, the Rûmite army was clearly inferior in most regards. They were outnumbered by a factor of a time and a half (1:1.5, ~10,000 against ~15,000) or thereabouts, and would be forced to keep up the siege against Boyabad while fighting the Trapezuntines. They had been forced to spend the winter in siege camps with a poor, if not completely terrible supply situation due to the devastation visited upon Inner Paphlagonia the year before. The Trapezuntines, on the other hand, had been able to keep fairly well supplied throughout the winter, as they had been integrated into Alexandros II’s pan-Pontic supply system[1]. In terms of discipline, the Rûmites held a slight advantage, as David had, after a period of great struggle, been able to integrate and coordinate his new, makeshift army, but it was still less than the nafjayş of Kadir’s host. Both armies had fairly high morale, driven by promises of plunder and the support of God on the Rûmite side and the desire to drive back the invaders and the support of God on the Trapezuntine side, but they wavered in some regards, namely the lack of faith in David in his army and the typical discontent of soldiers made to winter on campaign in Kadir’s. The only area where the Turks held a decisive advantage was in raw firepower, as Kadir was able to pull cannons, many of them truly massive siege guns, from their position to support his line, giving him some 58 guns to David’s 26, the latter being composed primarily of smaller, more maneuverable but less deadly cannons.
The Trapezuntines advanced to a days’ march east of the city (four miles) on 26 February, camping on the left bank of the Amnias River. David feared that his men would be exhausted by the march and so slowed his advance despite knowing it would give the Rûmites time to redeploy to meet him. Kadir did just that, arranging the bulk of his forces along a ridge running between Boyabad and the river. Battalions of militia and nafjayş alternated down the line, the two southernmost units, standing where the ridge was lowest and where the main east road ran, were the heaviest armed and slightly overstrength in comparison to the others. 2,000 men were kept in reserve, one battalion to keep up the siege and another on a ridge running semi-parallel to the main ridge to the north as a reserve. Thirty-four of the Rûmite cannons were positioned along the main line, the rest remaining with the reserve or in the siege lines. The far northern edge of the line was secured by a mixed force of Zazas, Turkmen mercenaries and light infantry, the most mobile forces available to Kadir. The Rûmites waitied tensely that night, mostly confident but still rattled by their numerical inferiority and exhaustion from the long siege.
Meanwhile, across the river, David was alternating between prayer and planning as scouts and infiltrators brought back reports of the Rûmite position. The atmosphere in the Trapezuntine camp was filled with more than the usual amount of nervousness. It was common knowledge that this battle could decide the fate of the war if things went badly enough, and the forces left behind to hold the pass would almost certainly be insufficient to hold off a determined assault. If they failed, would their homes and families be subject to the invaders? No-one could be certain one way or the other, and in some ways not knowing was worse than anything else. Then David emerged from his tent shortly before sunset , wild-eyed and manic. He ordered a cannon shot off to wake his sleeping men, then had every non-clerical, non-soldier follower escorted out of camp. Thousands of groggy and irritated soldiers then assembled in the center of camp, whence David gave a rambling and barely-coherent tirade that was equal parts rousing speech and brimstone sermon. Shockingly, it actually worked in rallying his men, and for the next several hours the camp was turned into a makeshift cathedral, as dozens of priests gave sacraments. As instructed by the voices in his head, David had every shield in the camp painted with the chi rho as another sign of victory before he and his men retired.
David then woke his men once again the following morning, an hour before dawn. Eating and arming themselves quietly in the winter cold, they then took the field in the following manner; 3,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them footmen and the rest cavalry, on the right/northern flank, 4,000 infantry in loose formation in the center, backed by 2,000 tightly-organized heavy infantry as a reserve, and 4,000 heavy and/or veteran infantry on the left/southern flank. The bulk of the cannons were deployed on a ridge on the far bank of the river, but several more were dug in behind the center, a note taken from the Mongols at Ananuri. David was many things, among them fairly inexperienced and mentally unstable, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized that Kadir planned to lure the bulk of the Trapezuntine force into attacking his understrength southern flank before slamming down into them with the army on the ridge, splitting the Trapezuntine host in twain. To counter this, David planned to bombard the Rûmite center before attacking with his own center, pinning them down and throwing his best men against the hopefully isolated Rûmite right, pushing them back or routing them as his own right smashed through their lighter counterparts and swung into the rear of the enemy center, hopefully inspiring an all-out rout.
With all preparations made, David rode up to his main battery as the sun rose behind the Trapezuntine ranks. With a simple command of “Wake them with thunder.” the guns roared to life. The Battle of Boyabad had begun.
The Rûmite soldier had camped in formation, and so this sudden bombardment inflicted far more damage than it had any right to, briefly throwing the ranks of the men along the ridge into confusion. Kadir, leading by example, had camped with a company of his mamluks in the center of the line, and so he was able to scramble into action and restore order in the center within half an hour of the bombardment beginning. Still, the Rûmites were fighting with a sizable handicap, having missed their breakfast due to the sudden attack and being forced to stand and rapidly organize in the bitter cold. They were also forced to squint into the rising sun to make out the advancing foe, all three of these together being quite demoralizing. Kadir and many of his men expected that he would have until the bombardment ended to fully reorganize, and so they were shocked to meet the Trapezuntine while the cannons still roared from across the valley.
1,000 lightly-armed skirmishers formed the leading edge of the Trapezuntine center, racing forward as a broad wave of men, firing against them at distance with arrows before closing to fight with axes and swords. The Rûmites were caught off-guard, still trying to reposition themselves, and so the light infantry made almost absurd progress against them, cutting down men left and right with blows to the back and head, a rout before the battle had even begun! Then the skirmishers ran headlong into the nafjayş that Kadir had quietly posted behind the militia, the result approximating a watermelon hitting a brick wall at the speed of sound. The skirmishers were sent reeling and quickly fell back down the ridge, buying the Turks the time they needed to form up on the ridge--the advance of the standard bandons was delayed by the retreating skirmishers’ disordered withdrawal.
Meanwhile, the Rûmites had managed to regain their footing, and the cannons on the ridge roared to life, thundering against their counterparts or down upon the advancing infantry. This further slowed down the advancing bandons, although they failed to have any great effect on the bulk of the men. Still, the Trapezuntines advanced, seemingly uncaring of their casualties despite the beating they were taking from the cannonade. David was among them, riding atop a white horse[2] in resplendent armor, encouraging his men to keep their advance and rallying them to the chi rho-defaced Pontic eagle that fluttered above the battalions. An hour after dawn, the main line made contact with their Rûmite counterpart. Blinded by the rising sun and already fairly tired by their alarm and the previous action, the Rûmites were unable to stand against the Trapezuntines, and foot after foot the Ponts began to push them back. The air was filled with the smell of death and blood, and supposedly so many corpses littered the ground that the soldiers fought atop and upon bloated bodies because of the lack of open ground. The Trapezuntine advantage soon began to wane, however, as Kadir himself and his guards appeared in the line opposite to David and exhorted his men to hold the line, joined by many ulema from the various camps. The line stabilized along the spine of the ridge, but the Rûmites failed to turn the tide. For the next three hours, the lines remained nearly static as men fought and died upon each other, unable to advance or retreat from the sheer weight of numbers there. Gradually, more Trapezuntine reinforcements advanced, as the commander of the reserve, Mikhael Stephanides, decided that his men were needed to turn the tide. As he had hoped, the Rûmites at last began to flag and started to be pushed back once again, but this advance was nearly a fatal mistake.
Meanwhile, to the south, the Trapezuntine left was advancing against the Rûmite right. As previously mentioned, this Rûmite flank was the least concentrated, and because of this they appeared to number more than they actually did. The commander of the Trapezuntine left, an eleutheros named Iosephos Osolos, decided that the best response to this would be to try and intimidate the Rûmites in turn, and so ordered the four battalions beneath his command to advance at a dead walk, keeping them fresh and hopefully scaring the shit out of the Turks with the sight of a wall of 4,000 heavily-armed veterans advancing in dead silence. This slowed the Trapezuntine advance and opened them to bombardment from the ridge, but few of the Rûmite guns were in the right position to hit them, and those which did had little effect. An hour after the beginning of the attack, the two flanks made contact. About half of the Rûmites in this section were from the nafjayş, but even they were unable to stand against the monolithic advance of the Ponts. The militia who made up most of the flank fled at once, and the remaining Turkish forces were ground down in less than an hour. The eleutheroi and the heavy bandons were essentially unfatigued thanks to their early waking and slow advance, and so they were able to batter down Rûmite resistance with little effort. The road to Boyabad was scattered with corpses and the ground around it turned red from the sheer amount of corpses scattered across it. Osolos famously quipped that so many Rûmites had met the devil there that the worms spoke Turkish, and at the very least they did not speak Pontic. Osolos then ordered one battalion to advance toward Boyabad to cut off any enemy reinforcements while the other three swung up to flank the forces on the ridge. However, the eleutheroi hadn’t even completed this latter maneuver, nor had the flaming spires of Boyabad come into view, before a rider came from David’s position, frantically summoning Osolos back to the north to cut off an enemy flanking maneuver.
On the northern side of the battle, things had gone disastrously wrong. Some 800 horsemen, 1500 light infantry and 700 fairly inexperienced bandons had been grouped together under the command of Alexios of Oph, instructed to advance against the Rûmite cavalry opposite them and encircle the ridge from behind. They had accomplished the first task admirably, smashing into the unprepared Zazas and Turkmen at the break of dawn and routing them in a few scant minutes, the former leaving a trail of corpses and riderless mounts as they fled down the valley to Boyabad. Oph, inexperienced in anything other than skirmishing with bandits on the Kartvelian frontier, ordered his men to give chase, and the Trapezuntine horsemen soon thundered off behind their counterparts, leaving the light and medium infantry strung out and exposed behind them. The merry chase had ended abruptly fifteen minutes later, as the Rûmite horsemen about faced and met the surprised Trapezuntines with bows and sabers. The Ponts slammed into them with little organization, and the two lines of horsemen began roiling back and forth across the plain. As the infantry approached, the cliffs to their north suddenly exploded into cannonfire, as the Rûmite reserves and their batteries entered the fight, followed by guns from the main ridge. Suddenly enfilated, the infantry advance slowed, then halted. Then the reserves themselves charged down from the heights, slamming into the side of the disorganized and confused formation and putting them to flight almost at once. A small number of Rûmites pursued them, continuing to whip out the Trapezuntines across the breadth of the plains, ensuring they couldn’t complete their mission or panic the main line of infantry by their presence. They then swung down into the rear of the Trapezuntine cavalry, encircling them and slaughtering them to the man in a few scant minutes. The Rûmite formations were soon joined by the battalion left to secure Boyabad, which had set fire to the gatehouse and hurled firebrands over the walls to keep the garrison distracted while they took the field. The Rûmite formation then turned and made up the valley in the inverse of the Pontic advance.
They quickly advanced into the Amnias valley, swinging out into the broad lands around the river and charging down it towards the Trapezuntine force. Although they numbered only 2,500 strong if that, the sudden arrival of a force of any real size on the Trapezuntine flank had its typical demoralizing effects, and as they began to press in on their flank the Pontic right began to buckle. David darted back and forth across the breadth of his force, trying to shore up his faltering flank while keeping up the pressure on Kadir so he couldn’t make things any worse. The eleutheroi were slow in coming, and he feared, no, he knew that if they did not arrive in time then the battle would be lost. The Trapezuntine cannons had fallen silent, probably taken by the Turks, and he could feel the morale of his men sapping every second. Something needed to be done before it was too late, and the voices were telling him exactly what.
Just as the battle seemed to be lost, David and twenty of his guards charged into the center of the Rûmite line, aiming for Kadir’s standard and the presence of the sultan himself. Mounted on heavy chargers, they managed to hack a swathe through the teeming lines of men, coming within a few scant feet of Kadir’s own guard unit. The sultan was ordered to flee by his chief mamluk, who rode to meet the attackers, but it was not Kadir that the Trapezuntines were aiming for. To the confusion of many, the eleutheroi instead attacked the sultan’s bannerman, hacking the poor bastard down and ripping down the sultan’s standard and fleeing back towards their lines. All but David and three of his guards would be killed, but the day had been won.
The fall of the sultan’s banner led many to believe that the attack had succeeded in killing Kadir, and the Rûmites began to waver. This gave just enough time for Osolos and his men to arrive like the metaphorical cavalry[3] and drive back the flanking force, pushing them back up the hill and eventually around into the Rûmite rear, sparking the hoped-for retreat. The Rûmite army shattered and fled the field, most running south or west, away from both the Ponts and Boyabad. David and his army were exhausted, and so he ordered only a few bandons to pursue them, leaving the rest to collapse into rest. It wasn’t even noon yet.
That afternoon, Boyabad was at long last relieved. The city was more of a morgue than a city by this point, heavily burned and scoured of anything edible by the surviving garrison of skeletal men, but it had served its purpose and held against all odds. David entered the city in a triumphal procession, and as the sun set that night the newly-created eagle with chi rho was raised above the city’s ramparts. Celebratory masses were held in the city’s cathedral, which was pockmarked by cannon balls and other projectiles. Total losses from Boyabad were quite staggering by Renaissance standards. The Trapezuntines had lost 4,500 out of the 14,000 men who had taken the field, as well as several of their cannons which had been spiked by the retreating Rûmites. Rûmite losses were even worse, having lost 6,000 of their 10,000 men that day, as well as all but three of their cannons spiked or captured. Without a doubt, the Trapezuntines had won the day.
However, things were far from over. While the passes over into Pontos had been defended and the gateway city held, most of Inner Paphlagonia still languished under the Rûmite yoke and would need to be liberated. Trapezous itself was also teetering on insolvency thanks to the near-famine the previous year, and the bandons would need to be stood down soon to prevent things from spiralling out of control. The road to Kastamone and beyond would be long and arduous, and David was quietly unsure that he could do it within the next two years, if that. As such, he was willing to negotiate when Kadir sued for peace. The fears of domestic unrest which had caused the sultan to undertake this war in the first place would almost certainly take place now that his army had been shattered. Reinforcements were coming, sure, but they were needed for more important things. Kadir hoped to make peace now, before David became aware of these facts and he could thus negotiate with a strong hand. David was willing to tender negotiations, and after some back and forth an agreement was reached;
Beypazar, Gerede and Nalisaray, which were untenable and already taken by the Rûmites, respectively, would be ceded to Konya. Their populations were composed mostly of Turks, and a wholesale massacre would be needed to bring them back to anything approaching loyalty, something which David believed God would frown upon. In exchange, Erzincan would pass under Trapezuntine rulership. As payment for Beypazar and Nalisaray (see below) Konya would give over several dozen pounds of gold and silver, as well as two thousand weights of grain. The Peace of Kastamone, as it would be known, shows a surprising regard for honor by the rulers of the opposed polities. Kadir had given promises of protection to the Nalisarayans and the Geredeans, which David would not force him to void, and vice versa with David and the Qizilbaş of Erzincan. After the peace, the terms were swiftly carried out, and by the end of April the borders had effectively changed.
That summer, of course, Kadir’s woes would expand from domestic rebels to foreign foes….
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[1] I kind of neglected the last decade of Alexandros II’s reign, I’ll fix that if I ever do a redux.
[2] David, ever the theologian, always rode a white horse on public occasions and/or battle, using it to tie himself to the conquering White Horseman of Revelations. Prior to the 19th Century, the White Horseman was considered to be symbolic of the spread of Christianity itself, not with the power of Antichrist as it is now.
[3] The eleutheroi fought on foot. Even if they had wanted to mount, all of the horses were gone with Kaballarios’ raid, so it’s not like they could have.
Great TL, one of the best I've seen in a long time! I wish you speedy recovery from your accident and I hope you return from your break soon!
You're welcome. It's because I used the exact same strategy in EU4 to fight in Anatolia
Wonderful victory of Trapezous ! Peace came backPart LVI: Boyabad (1527)
The Trapezuntines would begin their march to destiny in February 1527. The ground was hard and frozen, and the air was bitterly cold and fierce, driven by winds of the Black Sea, and David couldn’t help but be reminded that marching under similar conditions had led to the death of Maurikios a millennium before. Still, he felt that it was a risk that must be taken; the bandons would need to be stood down for the spring planting soon, while the Rûmite levymen would return as well. His strength was great, Kadir’s was not, and he needed to strike now while he still had the advantage.
The chief reason out of many why David chose to break winter camp before the coming of the spring thaw was sheer numbers. As previously mentioned, the bandons would have to be stood down before the spring planting, and further reinforcements would be unable to arrive until well after the passes had melted and/or the Black Sea had calmed, as additional men would need to be brought in by sea from the west or through the passes from the east. This would put him at a crucial disadvantage for two to three months, at the same time as Rûmite reinforcements would be streaming north, both from the reraised levies and from the dispersed forces across the Plateau that had been sent out the year before. If he did not move swiftly, then he would lose the advantage he had put so much effort into creating previously. There was also the issue of Boyabad itself; the fortress had managed to hold out against the Rûmites for six months despite dwindling supplies and constant bombardment, and its garrison had dwindled to only a few dozen sickly men, who would be unable to resist from the battered ruins of the fortress for a few weeks more, if that. His golden opportunity was here, a month ahead of his intended date but close enough that it was worth the risk. And, so, the aftokrator and his 15,000 men broke camp and marched upriver on 9 February 1527.
Meanwhile, outside of Boyabad, Kadir continued his siege, the conflict by now having transformed into one of necessity if nothing else. The sultan had spent the last six months banging his heads against the fortress walls, pounding them with hundreds of pounds of stone and lead thrown by thousands of pounds of powder, and had nothing to show for it other than some pockmarked walls and several hundred men dead or crippled by failed assaults. If he gave up now and withdrew, he would’ve humiliated himself upon the world stage, something which he could ill afford, as well as given up a great opportunity for a crushing victory against a weak opponent and the spoils of such a conquest. By seizing the city, he would also accomplish his long-desired strategic aim of opening the road into Pontos. By this point, with his army weakened by the winter and dispersed across the breadth of Anatolia, he had secretly begun to despair of a crushing victory, but felt that it was absolutely necessary bar the intervention of God himself for the above mentioned reasons. He had also resolved to seize a city on the far side of the passes either on the field or on the negotiating table, so he didn’t have to go through this mess again. And so he remained in position throughout the winter, and when word came of the aftokrator’s approach he turned his force to meet David rather than fleeing as would have benefited his circumstances.
By the time battle was joined, the Rûmite army was clearly inferior in most regards. They were outnumbered by a factor of a time and a half (1:1.5, ~10,000 against ~15,000) or thereabouts, and would be forced to keep up the siege against Boyabad while fighting the Trapezuntines. They had been forced to spend the winter in siege camps with a poor, if not completely terrible supply situation due to the devastation visited upon Inner Paphlagonia the year before. The Trapezuntines, on the other hand, had been able to keep fairly well supplied throughout the winter, as they had been integrated into Alexandros II’s pan-Pontic supply system[1]. In terms of discipline, the Rûmites held a slight advantage, as David had, after a period of great struggle, been able to integrate and coordinate his new, makeshift army, but it was still less than the nafjayş of Kadir’s host. Both armies had fairly high morale, driven by promises of plunder and the support of God on the Rûmite side and the desire to drive back the invaders and the support of God on the Trapezuntine side, but they wavered in some regards, namely the lack of faith in David in his army and the typical discontent of soldiers made to winter on campaign in Kadir’s. The only area where the Turks held a decisive advantage was in raw firepower, as Kadir was able to pull cannons, many of them truly massive siege guns, from their position to support his line, giving him some 58 guns to David’s 26, the latter being composed primarily of smaller, more maneuverable but less deadly cannons.
The Trapezuntines advanced to a days’ march east of the city (four miles) on 26 February, camping on the left bank of the Amnias River. David feared that his men would be exhausted by the march and so slowed his advance despite knowing it would give the Rûmites time to redeploy to meet him. Kadir did just that, arranging the bulk of his forces along a ridge running between Boyabad and the river. Battalions of militia and nafjayş alternated down the line, the two southernmost units, standing where the ridge was lowest and where the main east road ran, were the heaviest armed and slightly overstrength in comparison to the others. 2,000 men were kept in reserve, one battalion to keep up the siege and another on a ridge running semi-parallel to the main ridge to the north as a reserve. Thirty-four of the Rûmite cannons were positioned along the main line, the rest remaining with the reserve or in the siege lines. The far northern edge of the line was secured by a mixed force of Zazas, Turkmen mercenaries and light infantry, the most mobile forces available to Kadir. The Rûmites waitied tensely that night, mostly confident but still rattled by their numerical inferiority and exhaustion from the long siege.
Meanwhile, across the river, David was alternating between prayer and planning as scouts and infiltrators brought back reports of the Rûmite position. The atmosphere in the Trapezuntine camp was filled with more than the usual amount of nervousness. It was common knowledge that this battle could decide the fate of the war if things went badly enough, and the forces left behind to hold the pass would almost certainly be insufficient to hold off a determined assault. If they failed, would their homes and families be subject to the invaders? No-one could be certain one way or the other, and in some ways not knowing was worse than anything else. Then David emerged from his tent shortly before sunset , wild-eyed and manic. He ordered a cannon shot off to wake his sleeping men, then had every non-clerical, non-soldier follower escorted out of camp. Thousands of groggy and irritated soldiers then assembled in the center of camp, whence David gave a rambling and barely-coherent tirade that was equal parts rousing speech and brimstone sermon. Shockingly, it actually worked in rallying his men, and for the next several hours the camp was turned into a makeshift cathedral, as dozens of priests gave sacraments. As instructed by the voices in his head, David had every shield in the camp painted with the chi rho as another sign of victory before he and his men retired.
David then woke his men once again the following morning, an hour before dawn. Eating and arming themselves quietly in the winter cold, they then took the field in the following manner; 3,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them footmen and the rest cavalry, on the right/northern flank, 4,000 infantry in loose formation in the center, backed by 2,000 tightly-organized heavy infantry as a reserve, and 4,000 heavy and/or veteran infantry on the left/southern flank. The bulk of the cannons were deployed on a ridge on the far bank of the river, but several more were dug in behind the center, a note taken from the Mongols at Ananuri. David was many things, among them fairly inexperienced and mentally unstable, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized that Kadir planned to lure the bulk of the Trapezuntine force into attacking his understrength southern flank before slamming down into them with the army on the ridge, splitting the Trapezuntine host in twain. To counter this, David planned to bombard the Rûmite center before attacking with his own center, pinning them down and throwing his best men against the hopefully isolated Rûmite right, pushing them back or routing them as his own right smashed through their lighter counterparts and swung into the rear of the enemy center, hopefully inspiring an all-out rout.
With all preparations made, David rode up to his main battery as the sun rose behind the Trapezuntine ranks. With a simple command of “Wake them with thunder.” the guns roared to life. The Battle of Boyabad had begun.
The Rûmite soldier had camped in formation, and so this sudden bombardment inflicted far more damage than it had any right to, briefly throwing the ranks of the men along the ridge into confusion. Kadir, leading by example, had camped with a company of his mamluks in the center of the line, and so he was able to scramble into action and restore order in the center within half an hour of the bombardment beginning. Still, the Rûmites were fighting with a sizable handicap, having missed their breakfast due to the sudden attack and being forced to stand and rapidly organize in the bitter cold. They were also forced to squint into the rising sun to make out the advancing foe, all three of these together being quite demoralizing. Kadir and many of his men expected that he would have until the bombardment ended to fully reorganize, and so they were shocked to meet the Trapezuntine while the cannons still roared from across the valley.
1,000 lightly-armed skirmishers formed the leading edge of the Trapezuntine center, racing forward as a broad wave of men, firing against them at distance with arrows before closing to fight with axes and swords. The Rûmites were caught off-guard, still trying to reposition themselves, and so the light infantry made almost absurd progress against them, cutting down men left and right with blows to the back and head, a rout before the battle had even begun! Then the skirmishers ran headlong into the nafjayş that Kadir had quietly posted behind the militia, the result approximating a watermelon hitting a brick wall at the speed of sound. The skirmishers were sent reeling and quickly fell back down the ridge, buying the Turks the time they needed to form up on the ridge--the advance of the standard bandons was delayed by the retreating skirmishers’ disordered withdrawal.
Meanwhile, the Rûmites had managed to regain their footing, and the cannons on the ridge roared to life, thundering against their counterparts or down upon the advancing infantry. This further slowed down the advancing bandons, although they failed to have any great effect on the bulk of the men. Still, the Trapezuntines advanced, seemingly uncaring of their casualties despite the beating they were taking from the cannonade. David was among them, riding atop a white horse[2] in resplendent armor, encouraging his men to keep their advance and rallying them to the chi rho-defaced Pontic eagle that fluttered above the battalions. An hour after dawn, the main line made contact with their Rûmite counterpart. Blinded by the rising sun and already fairly tired by their alarm and the previous action, the Rûmites were unable to stand against the Trapezuntines, and foot after foot the Ponts began to push them back. The air was filled with the smell of death and blood, and supposedly so many corpses littered the ground that the soldiers fought atop and upon bloated bodies because of the lack of open ground. The Trapezuntine advantage soon began to wane, however, as Kadir himself and his guards appeared in the line opposite to David and exhorted his men to hold the line, joined by many ulema from the various camps. The line stabilized along the spine of the ridge, but the Rûmites failed to turn the tide. For the next three hours, the lines remained nearly static as men fought and died upon each other, unable to advance or retreat from the sheer weight of numbers there. Gradually, more Trapezuntine reinforcements advanced, as the commander of the reserve, Mikhael Stephanides, decided that his men were needed to turn the tide. As he had hoped, the Rûmites at last began to flag and started to be pushed back once again, but this advance was nearly a fatal mistake.
Meanwhile, to the south, the Trapezuntine left was advancing against the Rûmite right. As previously mentioned, this Rûmite flank was the least concentrated, and because of this they appeared to number more than they actually did. The commander of the Trapezuntine left, an eleutheros named Iosephos Osolos, decided that the best response to this would be to try and intimidate the Rûmites in turn, and so ordered the four battalions beneath his command to advance at a dead walk, keeping them fresh and hopefully scaring the shit out of the Turks with the sight of a wall of 4,000 heavily-armed veterans advancing in dead silence. This slowed the Trapezuntine advance and opened them to bombardment from the ridge, but few of the Rûmite guns were in the right position to hit them, and those which did had little effect. An hour after the beginning of the attack, the two flanks made contact. About half of the Rûmites in this section were from the nafjayş, but even they were unable to stand against the monolithic advance of the Ponts. The militia who made up most of the flank fled at once, and the remaining Turkish forces were ground down in less than an hour. The eleutheroi and the heavy bandons were essentially unfatigued thanks to their early waking and slow advance, and so they were able to batter down Rûmite resistance with little effort. The road to Boyabad was scattered with corpses and the ground around it turned red from the sheer amount of corpses scattered across it. Osolos famously quipped that so many Rûmites had met the devil there that the worms spoke Turkish, and at the very least they did not speak Pontic. Osolos then ordered one battalion to advance toward Boyabad to cut off any enemy reinforcements while the other three swung up to flank the forces on the ridge. However, the eleutheroi hadn’t even completed this latter maneuver, nor had the flaming spires of Boyabad come into view, before a rider came from David’s position, frantically summoning Osolos back to the north to cut off an enemy flanking maneuver.
On the northern side of the battle, things had gone disastrously wrong. Some 800 horsemen, 1500 light infantry and 700 fairly inexperienced bandons had been grouped together under the command of Alexios of Oph, instructed to advance against the Rûmite cavalry opposite them and encircle the ridge from behind. They had accomplished the first task admirably, smashing into the unprepared Zazas and Turkmen at the break of dawn and routing them in a few scant minutes, the former leaving a trail of corpses and riderless mounts as they fled down the valley to Boyabad. Oph, inexperienced in anything other than skirmishing with bandits on the Kartvelian frontier, ordered his men to give chase, and the Trapezuntine horsemen soon thundered off behind their counterparts, leaving the light and medium infantry strung out and exposed behind them. The merry chase had ended abruptly fifteen minutes later, as the Rûmite horsemen about faced and met the surprised Trapezuntines with bows and sabers. The Ponts slammed into them with little organization, and the two lines of horsemen began roiling back and forth across the plain. As the infantry approached, the cliffs to their north suddenly exploded into cannonfire, as the Rûmite reserves and their batteries entered the fight, followed by guns from the main ridge. Suddenly enfilated, the infantry advance slowed, then halted. Then the reserves themselves charged down from the heights, slamming into the side of the disorganized and confused formation and putting them to flight almost at once. A small number of Rûmites pursued them, continuing to whip out the Trapezuntines across the breadth of the plains, ensuring they couldn’t complete their mission or panic the main line of infantry by their presence. They then swung down into the rear of the Trapezuntine cavalry, encircling them and slaughtering them to the man in a few scant minutes. The Rûmite formations were soon joined by the battalion left to secure Boyabad, which had set fire to the gatehouse and hurled firebrands over the walls to keep the garrison distracted while they took the field. The Rûmite formation then turned and made up the valley in the inverse of the Pontic advance.
They quickly advanced into the Amnias valley, swinging out into the broad lands around the river and charging down it towards the Trapezuntine force. Although they numbered only 2,500 strong if that, the sudden arrival of a force of any real size on the Trapezuntine flank had its typical demoralizing effects, and as they began to press in on their flank the Pontic right began to buckle. David darted back and forth across the breadth of his force, trying to shore up his faltering flank while keeping up the pressure on Kadir so he couldn’t make things any worse. The eleutheroi were slow in coming, and he feared, no, he knew that if they did not arrive in time then the battle would be lost. The Trapezuntine cannons had fallen silent, probably taken by the Turks, and he could feel the morale of his men sapping every second. Something needed to be done before it was too late, and the voices were telling him exactly what.
Just as the battle seemed to be lost, David and twenty of his guards charged into the center of the Rûmite line, aiming for Kadir’s standard and the presence of the sultan himself. Mounted on heavy chargers, they managed to hack a swathe through the teeming lines of men, coming within a few scant feet of Kadir’s own guard unit. The sultan was ordered to flee by his chief mamluk, who rode to meet the attackers, but it was not Kadir that the Trapezuntines were aiming for. To the confusion of many, the eleutheroi instead attacked the sultan’s bannerman, hacking the poor bastard down and ripping down the sultan’s standard and fleeing back towards their lines. All but David and three of his guards would be killed, but the day had been won.
The fall of the sultan’s banner led many to believe that the attack had succeeded in killing Kadir, and the Rûmites began to waver. This gave just enough time for Osolos and his men to arrive like the metaphorical cavalry[3] and drive back the flanking force, pushing them back up the hill and eventually around into the Rûmite rear, sparking the hoped-for retreat. The Rûmite army shattered and fled the field, most running south or west, away from both the Ponts and Boyabad. David and his army were exhausted, and so he ordered only a few bandons to pursue them, leaving the rest to collapse into rest. It wasn’t even noon yet.
That afternoon, Boyabad was at long last relieved. The city was more of a morgue than a city by this point, heavily burned and scoured of anything edible by the surviving garrison of skeletal men, but it had served its purpose and held against all odds. David entered the city in a triumphal procession, and as the sun set that night the newly-created eagle with chi rho was raised above the city’s ramparts. Celebratory masses were held in the city’s cathedral, which was pockmarked by cannon balls and other projectiles. Total losses from Boyabad were quite staggering by Renaissance standards. The Trapezuntines had lost 4,500 out of the 14,000 men who had taken the field, as well as several of their cannons which had been spiked by the retreating Rûmites. Rûmite losses were even worse, having lost 6,000 of their 10,000 men that day, as well as all but three of their cannons spiked or captured. Without a doubt, the Trapezuntines had won the day.
However, things were far from over. While the passes over into Pontos had been defended and the gateway city held, most of Inner Paphlagonia still languished under the Rûmite yoke and would need to be liberated. Trapezous itself was also teetering on insolvency thanks to the near-famine the previous year, and the bandons would need to be stood down soon to prevent things from spiralling out of control. The road to Kastamone and beyond would be long and arduous, and David was quietly unsure that he could do it within the next two years, if that. As such, he was willing to negotiate when Kadir sued for peace. The fears of domestic unrest which had caused the sultan to undertake this war in the first place would almost certainly take place now that his army had been shattered. Reinforcements were coming, sure, but they were needed for more important things. Kadir hoped to make peace now, before David became aware of these facts and he could thus negotiate with a strong hand. David was willing to tender negotiations, and after some back and forth an agreement was reached;
Beypazar, Gerede and Nalisaray, which were untenable and already taken by the Rûmites, respectively, would be ceded to Konya. Their populations were composed mostly of Turks, and a wholesale massacre would be needed to bring them back to anything approaching loyalty, something which David believed God would frown upon. In exchange, Erzincan would pass under Trapezuntine rulership. As payment for Beypazar and Nalisaray (see below) Konya would give over several dozen pounds of gold and silver, as well as two thousand weights of grain. The Peace of Kastamone, as it would be known, shows a surprising regard for honor by the rulers of the opposed polities. Kadir had given promises of protection to the Nalisarayans and the Geredeans, which David would not force him to void, and vice versa with David and the Qizilbaş of Erzincan. After the peace, the terms were swiftly carried out, and by the end of April the borders had effectively changed.
That summer, of course, Kadir’s woes would expand from domestic rebels to foreign foes….
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[1] I kind of neglected the last decade of Alexandros II’s reign, I’ll fix that if I ever do a redux.
[2] David, ever the theologian, always rode a white horse on public occasions and/or battle, using it to tie himself to the conquering White Horseman of Revelations. Prior to the 19th Century, the White Horseman was considered to be symbolic of the spread of Christianity itself, not with the power of Antichrist as it is now.
[3] The eleutheroi fought on foot. Even if they had wanted to mount, all of the horses were gone with Kaballarios’ raid, so it’s not like they could have.
I think they'll rest for a bit then go fight the Mongols as they wait for the Neo-Rumites to collapse due to the Qutlughids (they're the Persians right?) wrecking them.
And once again, Trebisund is saved. The peace was really moderate from both sides, but we know already the two Anatolian realms will clash again so they would lick their wounds for a future war.
But at least David saved the indipendence of the Pontic Greeks, even if now is surrounded by the Rumite and the Mongols. But now could look again towards the Caucasus...
But at least David saved the indipendence of the Pontic Greeks, even if now is surrounded by the Rumite and the Mongols. But now could look again towards the Caucasus...
Part LVI: Boyabad (1527)
The Trapezuntines would begin their march to destiny in February 1527. The ground was hard and frozen, and the air was bitterly cold and fierce, driven by winds of the Black Sea, and David couldn’t help but be reminded that marching under similar conditions had led to the death of Maurikios a millennium before. Still, he felt that it was a risk that must be taken; the bandons would need to be stood down for the spring planting soon, while the Rûmite levymen would return as well. His strength was great, Kadir’s was not, and he needed to strike now while he still had the advantage.
The chief reason out of many why David chose to break winter camp before the coming of the spring thaw was sheer numbers. As previously mentioned, the bandons would have to be stood down before the spring planting, and further reinforcements would be unable to arrive until well after the passes had melted and/or the Black Sea had calmed, as additional men would need to be brought in by sea from the west or through the passes from the east. This would put him at a crucial disadvantage for two to three months, at the same time as Rûmite reinforcements would be streaming north, both from the reraised levies and from the dispersed forces across the Plateau that had been sent out the year before. If he did not move swiftly, then he would lose the advantage he had put so much effort into creating previously. There was also the issue of Boyabad itself; the fortress had managed to hold out against the Rûmites for six months despite dwindling supplies and constant bombardment, and its garrison had dwindled to only a few dozen sickly men, who would be unable to resist from the battered ruins of the fortress for a few weeks more, if that. His golden opportunity was here, a month ahead of his intended date but close enough that it was worth the risk. And, so, the aftokrator and his 15,000 men broke camp and marched upriver on 9 February 1527.
Meanwhile, outside of Boyabad, Kadir continued his siege, the conflict by now having transformed into one of necessity if nothing else. The sultan had spent the last six months banging his heads against the fortress walls, pounding them with hundreds of pounds of stone and lead thrown by thousands of pounds of powder, and had nothing to show for it other than some pockmarked walls and several hundred men dead or crippled by failed assaults. If he gave up now and withdrew, he would’ve humiliated himself upon the world stage, something which he could ill afford, as well as given up a great opportunity for a crushing victory against a weak opponent and the spoils of such a conquest. By seizing the city, he would also accomplish his long-desired strategic aim of opening the road into Pontos. By this point, with his army weakened by the winter and dispersed across the breadth of Anatolia, he had secretly begun to despair of a crushing victory, but felt that it was absolutely necessary bar the intervention of God himself for the above mentioned reasons. He had also resolved to seize a city on the far side of the passes either on the field or on the negotiating table, so he didn’t have to go through this mess again. And so he remained in position throughout the winter, and when word came of the aftokrator’s approach he turned his force to meet David rather than fleeing as would have benefited his circumstances.
By the time battle was joined, the Rûmite army was clearly inferior in most regards. They were outnumbered by a factor of a time and a half (1:1.5, ~10,000 against ~15,000) or thereabouts, and would be forced to keep up the siege against Boyabad while fighting the Trapezuntines. They had been forced to spend the winter in siege camps with a poor, if not completely terrible supply situation due to the devastation visited upon Inner Paphlagonia the year before. The Trapezuntines, on the other hand, had been able to keep fairly well supplied throughout the winter, as they had been integrated into Alexandros II’s pan-Pontic supply system[1]. In terms of discipline, the Rûmites held a slight advantage, as David had, after a period of great struggle, been able to integrate and coordinate his new, makeshift army, but it was still less than the nafjayş of Kadir’s host. Both armies had fairly high morale, driven by promises of plunder and the support of God on the Rûmite side and the desire to drive back the invaders and the support of God on the Trapezuntine side, but they wavered in some regards, namely the lack of faith in David in his army and the typical discontent of soldiers made to winter on campaign in Kadir’s. The only area where the Turks held a decisive advantage was in raw firepower, as Kadir was able to pull cannons, many of them truly massive siege guns, from their position to support his line, giving him some 58 guns to David’s 26, the latter being composed primarily of smaller, more maneuverable but less deadly cannons.
The Trapezuntines advanced to a days’ march east of the city (four miles) on 26 February, camping on the left bank of the Amnias River. David feared that his men would be exhausted by the march and so slowed his advance despite knowing it would give the Rûmites time to redeploy to meet him. Kadir did just that, arranging the bulk of his forces along a ridge running between Boyabad and the river. Battalions of militia and nafjayş alternated down the line, the two southernmost units, standing where the ridge was lowest and where the main east road ran, were the heaviest armed and slightly overstrength in comparison to the others. 2,000 men were kept in reserve, one battalion to keep up the siege and another on a ridge running semi-parallel to the main ridge to the north as a reserve. Thirty-four of the Rûmite cannons were positioned along the main line, the rest remaining with the reserve or in the siege lines. The far northern edge of the line was secured by a mixed force of Zazas, Turkmen mercenaries and light infantry, the most mobile forces available to Kadir. The Rûmites waitied tensely that night, mostly confident but still rattled by their numerical inferiority and exhaustion from the long siege.
Meanwhile, across the river, David was alternating between prayer and planning as scouts and infiltrators brought back reports of the Rûmite position. The atmosphere in the Trapezuntine camp was filled with more than the usual amount of nervousness. It was common knowledge that this battle could decide the fate of the war if things went badly enough, and the forces left behind to hold the pass would almost certainly be insufficient to hold off a determined assault. If they failed, would their homes and families be subject to the invaders? No-one could be certain one way or the other, and in some ways not knowing was worse than anything else. Then David emerged from his tent shortly before sunset , wild-eyed and manic. He ordered a cannon shot off to wake his sleeping men, then had every non-clerical, non-soldier follower escorted out of camp. Thousands of groggy and irritated soldiers then assembled in the center of camp, whence David gave a rambling and barely-coherent tirade that was equal parts rousing speech and brimstone sermon. Shockingly, it actually worked in rallying his men, and for the next several hours the camp was turned into a makeshift cathedral, as dozens of priests gave sacraments. As instructed by the voices in his head, David had every shield in the camp painted with the chi rho as another sign of victory before he and his men retired.
David then woke his men once again the following morning, an hour before dawn. Eating and arming themselves quietly in the winter cold, they then took the field in the following manner; 3,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them footmen and the rest cavalry, on the right/northern flank, 4,000 infantry in loose formation in the center, backed by 2,000 tightly-organized heavy infantry as a reserve, and 4,000 heavy and/or veteran infantry on the left/southern flank. The bulk of the cannons were deployed on a ridge on the far bank of the river, but several more were dug in behind the center, a note taken from the Mongols at Ananuri. David was many things, among them fairly inexperienced and mentally unstable, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized that Kadir planned to lure the bulk of the Trapezuntine force into attacking his understrength southern flank before slamming down into them with the army on the ridge, splitting the Trapezuntine host in twain. To counter this, David planned to bombard the Rûmite center before attacking with his own center, pinning them down and throwing his best men against the hopefully isolated Rûmite right, pushing them back or routing them as his own right smashed through their lighter counterparts and swung into the rear of the enemy center, hopefully inspiring an all-out rout.
With all preparations made, David rode up to his main battery as the sun rose behind the Trapezuntine ranks. With a simple command of “Wake them with thunder.” the guns roared to life. The Battle of Boyabad had begun.
The Rûmite soldier had camped in formation, and so this sudden bombardment inflicted far more damage than it had any right to, briefly throwing the ranks of the men along the ridge into confusion. Kadir, leading by example, had camped with a company of his mamluks in the center of the line, and so he was able to scramble into action and restore order in the center within half an hour of the bombardment beginning. Still, the Rûmites were fighting with a sizable handicap, having missed their breakfast due to the sudden attack and being forced to stand and rapidly organize in the bitter cold. They were also forced to squint into the rising sun to make out the advancing foe, all three of these together being quite demoralizing. Kadir and many of his men expected that he would have until the bombardment ended to fully reorganize, and so they were shocked to meet the Trapezuntine while the cannons still roared from across the valley.
1,000 lightly-armed skirmishers formed the leading edge of the Trapezuntine center, racing forward as a broad wave of men, firing against them at distance with arrows before closing to fight with axes and swords. The Rûmites were caught off-guard, still trying to reposition themselves, and so the light infantry made almost absurd progress against them, cutting down men left and right with blows to the back and head, a rout before the battle had even begun! Then the skirmishers ran headlong into the nafjayş that Kadir had quietly posted behind the militia, the result approximating a watermelon hitting a brick wall at the speed of sound. The skirmishers were sent reeling and quickly fell back down the ridge, buying the Turks the time they needed to form up on the ridge--the advance of the standard bandons was delayed by the retreating skirmishers’ disordered withdrawal.
Meanwhile, the Rûmites had managed to regain their footing, and the cannons on the ridge roared to life, thundering against their counterparts or down upon the advancing infantry. This further slowed down the advancing bandons, although they failed to have any great effect on the bulk of the men. Still, the Trapezuntines advanced, seemingly uncaring of their casualties despite the beating they were taking from the cannonade. David was among them, riding atop a white horse[2] in resplendent armor, encouraging his men to keep their advance and rallying them to the chi rho-defaced Pontic eagle that fluttered above the battalions. An hour after dawn, the main line made contact with their Rûmite counterpart. Blinded by the rising sun and already fairly tired by their alarm and the previous action, the Rûmites were unable to stand against the Trapezuntines, and foot after foot the Ponts began to push them back. The air was filled with the smell of death and blood, and supposedly so many corpses littered the ground that the soldiers fought atop and upon bloated bodies because of the lack of open ground. The Trapezuntine advantage soon began to wane, however, as Kadir himself and his guards appeared in the line opposite to David and exhorted his men to hold the line, joined by many ulema from the various camps. The line stabilized along the spine of the ridge, but the Rûmites failed to turn the tide. For the next three hours, the lines remained nearly static as men fought and died upon each other, unable to advance or retreat from the sheer weight of numbers there. Gradually, more Trapezuntine reinforcements advanced, as the commander of the reserve, Mikhael Stephanides, decided that his men were needed to turn the tide. As he had hoped, the Rûmites at last began to flag and started to be pushed back once again, but this advance was nearly a fatal mistake.
Meanwhile, to the south, the Trapezuntine left was advancing against the Rûmite right. As previously mentioned, this Rûmite flank was the least concentrated, and because of this they appeared to number more than they actually did. The commander of the Trapezuntine left, an eleutheros named Iosephos Osolos, decided that the best response to this would be to try and intimidate the Rûmites in turn, and so ordered the four battalions beneath his command to advance at a dead walk, keeping them fresh and hopefully scaring the shit out of the Turks with the sight of a wall of 4,000 heavily-armed veterans advancing in dead silence. This slowed the Trapezuntine advance and opened them to bombardment from the ridge, but few of the Rûmite guns were in the right position to hit them, and those which did had little effect. An hour after the beginning of the attack, the two flanks made contact. About half of the Rûmites in this section were from the nafjayş, but even they were unable to stand against the monolithic advance of the Ponts. The militia who made up most of the flank fled at once, and the remaining Turkish forces were ground down in less than an hour. The eleutheroi and the heavy bandons were essentially unfatigued thanks to their early waking and slow advance, and so they were able to batter down Rûmite resistance with little effort. The road to Boyabad was scattered with corpses and the ground around it turned red from the sheer amount of corpses scattered across it. Osolos famously quipped that so many Rûmites had met the devil there that the worms spoke Turkish, and at the very least they did not speak Pontic. Osolos then ordered one battalion to advance toward Boyabad to cut off any enemy reinforcements while the other three swung up to flank the forces on the ridge. However, the eleutheroi hadn’t even completed this latter maneuver, nor had the flaming spires of Boyabad come into view, before a rider came from David’s position, frantically summoning Osolos back to the north to cut off an enemy flanking maneuver.
On the northern side of the battle, things had gone disastrously wrong. Some 800 horsemen, 1500 light infantry and 700 fairly inexperienced bandons had been grouped together under the command of Alexios of Oph, instructed to advance against the Rûmite cavalry opposite them and encircle the ridge from behind. They had accomplished the first task admirably, smashing into the unprepared Zazas and Turkmen at the break of dawn and routing them in a few scant minutes, the former leaving a trail of corpses and riderless mounts as they fled down the valley to Boyabad. Oph, inexperienced in anything other than skirmishing with bandits on the Kartvelian frontier, ordered his men to give chase, and the Trapezuntine horsemen soon thundered off behind their counterparts, leaving the light and medium infantry strung out and exposed behind them. The merry chase had ended abruptly fifteen minutes later, as the Rûmite horsemen about faced and met the surprised Trapezuntines with bows and sabers. The Ponts slammed into them with little organization, and the two lines of horsemen began roiling back and forth across the plain. As the infantry approached, the cliffs to their north suddenly exploded into cannonfire, as the Rûmite reserves and their batteries entered the fight, followed by guns from the main ridge. Suddenly enfilated, the infantry advance slowed, then halted. Then the reserves themselves charged down from the heights, slamming into the side of the disorganized and confused formation and putting them to flight almost at once. A small number of Rûmites pursued them, continuing to whip out the Trapezuntines across the breadth of the plains, ensuring they couldn’t complete their mission or panic the main line of infantry by their presence. They then swung down into the rear of the Trapezuntine cavalry, encircling them and slaughtering them to the man in a few scant minutes. The Rûmite formations were soon joined by the battalion left to secure Boyabad, which had set fire to the gatehouse and hurled firebrands over the walls to keep the garrison distracted while they took the field. The Rûmite formation then turned and made up the valley in the inverse of the Pontic advance.
They quickly advanced into the Amnias valley, swinging out into the broad lands around the river and charging down it towards the Trapezuntine force. Although they numbered only 2,500 strong if that, the sudden arrival of a force of any real size on the Trapezuntine flank had its typical demoralizing effects, and as they began to press in on their flank the Pontic right began to buckle. David darted back and forth across the breadth of his force, trying to shore up his faltering flank while keeping up the pressure on Kadir so he couldn’t make things any worse. The eleutheroi were slow in coming, and he feared, no, he knew that if they did not arrive in time then the battle would be lost. The Trapezuntine cannons had fallen silent, probably taken by the Turks, and he could feel the morale of his men sapping every second. Something needed to be done before it was too late, and the voices were telling him exactly what.
Just as the battle seemed to be lost, David and twenty of his guards charged into the center of the Rûmite line, aiming for Kadir’s standard and the presence of the sultan himself. Mounted on heavy chargers, they managed to hack a swathe through the teeming lines of men, coming within a few scant feet of Kadir’s own guard unit. The sultan was ordered to flee by his chief mamluk, who rode to meet the attackers, but it was not Kadir that the Trapezuntines were aiming for. To the confusion of many, the eleutheroi instead attacked the sultan’s bannerman, hacking the poor bastard down and ripping down the sultan’s standard and fleeing back towards their lines. All but David and three of his guards would be killed, but the day had been won.
The fall of the sultan’s banner led many to believe that the attack had succeeded in killing Kadir, and the Rûmites began to waver. This gave just enough time for Osolos and his men to arrive like the metaphorical cavalry[3] and drive back the flanking force, pushing them back up the hill and eventually around into the Rûmite rear, sparking the hoped-for retreat. The Rûmite army shattered and fled the field, most running south or west, away from both the Ponts and Boyabad. David and his army were exhausted, and so he ordered only a few bandons to pursue them, leaving the rest to collapse into rest. It wasn’t even noon yet.
That afternoon, Boyabad was at long last relieved. The city was more of a morgue than a city by this point, heavily burned and scoured of anything edible by the surviving garrison of skeletal men, but it had served its purpose and held against all odds. David entered the city in a triumphal procession, and as the sun set that night the newly-created eagle with chi rho was raised above the city’s ramparts. Celebratory masses were held in the city’s cathedral, which was pockmarked by cannon balls and other projectiles. Total losses from Boyabad were quite staggering by Renaissance standards. The Trapezuntines had lost 4,500 out of the 14,000 men who had taken the field, as well as several of their cannons which had been spiked by the retreating Rûmites. Rûmite losses were even worse, having lost 6,000 of their 10,000 men that day, as well as all but three of their cannons spiked or captured. Without a doubt, the Trapezuntines had won the day.
However, things were far from over. While the passes over into Pontos had been defended and the gateway city held, most of Inner Paphlagonia still languished under the Rûmite yoke and would need to be liberated. Trapezous itself was also teetering on insolvency thanks to the near-famine the previous year, and the bandons would need to be stood down soon to prevent things from spiralling out of control. The road to Kastamone and beyond would be long and arduous, and David was quietly unsure that he could do it within the next two years, if that. As such, he was willing to negotiate when Kadir sued for peace. The fears of domestic unrest which had caused the sultan to undertake this war in the first place would almost certainly take place now that his army had been shattered. Reinforcements were coming, sure, but they were needed for more important things. Kadir hoped to make peace now, before David became aware of these facts and he could thus negotiate with a strong hand. David was willing to tender negotiations, and after some back and forth an agreement was reached;
Beypazar, Gerede and Nalisaray, which were untenable and already taken by the Rûmites, respectively, would be ceded to Konya. Their populations were composed mostly of Turks, and a wholesale massacre would be needed to bring them back to anything approaching loyalty, something which David believed God would frown upon. In exchange, Erzincan would pass under Trapezuntine rulership. As payment for Beypazar and Nalisaray (see below) Konya would give over several dozen pounds of gold and silver, as well as two thousand weights of grain. The Peace of Kastamone, as it would be known, shows a surprising regard for honor by the rulers of the opposed polities. Kadir had given promises of protection to the Nalisarayans and the Geredeans, which David would not force him to void, and vice versa with David and the Qizilbaş of Erzincan. After the peace, the terms were swiftly carried out, and by the end of April the borders had effectively changed.
That summer, of course, Kadir’s woes would expand from domestic rebels to foreign foes….
Somehow David did it. Sure it took a lot of luck, brains, and timing but in the end, David managed to save his empire
Appendix E: April 1527, Trapezous
Eparkhos
Banned
Why the hell didn't anyone tell me that LIV was titled 'Opening Shits'?
April 1527, Trapezous
David sloshed the wine in his cup, staring out from the palace window. The vista was beautiful, the tree-covered hills of the surrounding valleys burnished light shades of orange and pink by the setting sun and almost seemed to glow with vibrant energy. On any other night, it would have been captivating, but David had more pressing issues in mind, namely, his marriage.
He had returned from the front only yesterday, and had expected Ioncela to be….well, anything, really. Happy to see him, angry that he hadn’t bothered to visit her during his brief stopover in the capital, relieved that he had survived, disappointed that he had survived, lustful because of his long absence. Instead, he thought as he watched her knit, she had all the emotion of a hazelnut. She hadn’t even looked at him more than once or twice since he’d gotten back. A part of him was resentful, he was a busy man after all, and it had been difficult to clear his schedule for the several hours they had been sitting together. Wroth is a sin, he reminded himself, wroth is a sin. Still, it was strange that she hadn’t even spoken to him about affairs in the capital while she had been regent. That gave him an idea….
“Ioncela,” he said, sliding forward in his chair. It had been years, and he still hadn’t come up with a pet name. Ionca? Iona? “I don’t suppose anything of import happened while I was gone, did it?”
She paused, thinking for a second. Her skin seemed milky in the setting sun. “No.”
“Anything, anything at all? Not even merchants having it out on the docks or a random arson?”
Ioncela looked up from her knitting, then dropped her eyes once again. “No, not that I can remember. The details on everything that transpired should be in the report that Kantakouzenos will have for you tomorrow.”
“Who’s Kantakouzenos?” David asked, words tumbling from his mouth before he could think.
Ioncela blinked. “Oh, Kantakouzenos is my secretary. He was of immense help while you were gone, he probably deserves a promotion.”
“Your secretary?”
“Oh, yes. I couldn’t do everything by myself, you have quite the job. I believe he worked with your father.”
She resumed knitting without changing posture or expression. David sat tense like a coiled spring, hand clenched around his cup. With careful, strained deliberacy he set it down and rose, walking deceptively calmly out of the room. The second the doors were shut behind him he began to pace across the antechamber like a trapped lion.
I could have that bastard in one of the secret rooms under the palace in half an hour, he thought. I shouldn’t, of course, there’s no real grounds other than my suspicion, but I'd really, really like to. Besides, Kantakouzenos had it coming, he’d help enable some of the worst parts of my predecessor’s rampage, he’d even helped create the papiai. It’d be ironic, hoist with his own petard, as the Latins said. It was almost certain Ioncela had done something, even if she was a foreigner no one could spend three years in the palace without hearing of Kantakouzenos’ lechery and general blackguardness. She had taken him on as secretary, of all things! Secretary! I have every right to have them both arrested and tortured into giving up the scheme and then mounting their heads on pikes above the port gate!
But you won’t. Mgeli commanded, his voice stern and cold. You won’t execute your wife on grounds of paranoid delusion. At least your father had the decency to wait until your mother tried to kill him.
David sucked in a breath, ignoring Mgeli’s pointed reference to his predecessor. Him waiting was what caused his death. I’m no paranoid madman, and I can’t prove it, but I know they’re involved!
What you’re going to do is send papiai to tail both of them to see if anything is happening between them, so that if they are involved you won’t turn the entire city against you.
He sighed. Mgeli was right. He was dead certain that his wife was cheating on him, but if he moved without solid, tangible proof, then everyone in the capital and probably most of the Empire would conclude that he had gone insane like Alexios had and he’d be off the throne in weeks. He should wait to see if anything conclusive could be found before he acted.
He resumed pacing, at a much slower speed, while he tried to calm himself with other thoughts. He’d taken to writing hymns in the praise of the Lord, various saints and angels in an attempt to ape his namesake, and forcing himself to recite the frankly awful poetry was generally good at taking his mind off things. After reciting a few dozen stanzas likening the tribulations of the faithful to the shearing of sheep in the summer, he felt calm enough to ease open the door and return to his seat. He stared at his wife for several minutes, scrutinizing every inch of her uninterested visage for signs of deceit.
The outburst had brought him perilously close to an immensely sinful act, and he knew that he had to make things right with God again. It was only fair, after all, for him to repay the victory at Boyabad and the guiding voice that was Mgeli? It was high time he visited one of his orphanages, after all, he hadn’t seen any of them since he had left for Kartvelia two years before. He’d give alms, see to the ‘children of the aftokrator’ and pray for wisdom and support, then see what happened with Kantakouzenos and his wife. Of course, the papiai wouldn’t be letting either of them out of their sight for the next few….years, probably, but they would still be alive for the next while.
Thank you, he thought, unsure of what else to say to the spirit in his mind.
It’s my duty. Mgeli replied, his tone much softer.
April 1527, Trapezous
David sloshed the wine in his cup, staring out from the palace window. The vista was beautiful, the tree-covered hills of the surrounding valleys burnished light shades of orange and pink by the setting sun and almost seemed to glow with vibrant energy. On any other night, it would have been captivating, but David had more pressing issues in mind, namely, his marriage.
He had returned from the front only yesterday, and had expected Ioncela to be….well, anything, really. Happy to see him, angry that he hadn’t bothered to visit her during his brief stopover in the capital, relieved that he had survived, disappointed that he had survived, lustful because of his long absence. Instead, he thought as he watched her knit, she had all the emotion of a hazelnut. She hadn’t even looked at him more than once or twice since he’d gotten back. A part of him was resentful, he was a busy man after all, and it had been difficult to clear his schedule for the several hours they had been sitting together. Wroth is a sin, he reminded himself, wroth is a sin. Still, it was strange that she hadn’t even spoken to him about affairs in the capital while she had been regent. That gave him an idea….
“Ioncela,” he said, sliding forward in his chair. It had been years, and he still hadn’t come up with a pet name. Ionca? Iona? “I don’t suppose anything of import happened while I was gone, did it?”
She paused, thinking for a second. Her skin seemed milky in the setting sun. “No.”
“Anything, anything at all? Not even merchants having it out on the docks or a random arson?”
Ioncela looked up from her knitting, then dropped her eyes once again. “No, not that I can remember. The details on everything that transpired should be in the report that Kantakouzenos will have for you tomorrow.”
“Who’s Kantakouzenos?” David asked, words tumbling from his mouth before he could think.
Ioncela blinked. “Oh, Kantakouzenos is my secretary. He was of immense help while you were gone, he probably deserves a promotion.”
“Your secretary?”
“Oh, yes. I couldn’t do everything by myself, you have quite the job. I believe he worked with your father.”
She resumed knitting without changing posture or expression. David sat tense like a coiled spring, hand clenched around his cup. With careful, strained deliberacy he set it down and rose, walking deceptively calmly out of the room. The second the doors were shut behind him he began to pace across the antechamber like a trapped lion.
I could have that bastard in one of the secret rooms under the palace in half an hour, he thought. I shouldn’t, of course, there’s no real grounds other than my suspicion, but I'd really, really like to. Besides, Kantakouzenos had it coming, he’d help enable some of the worst parts of my predecessor’s rampage, he’d even helped create the papiai. It’d be ironic, hoist with his own petard, as the Latins said. It was almost certain Ioncela had done something, even if she was a foreigner no one could spend three years in the palace without hearing of Kantakouzenos’ lechery and general blackguardness. She had taken him on as secretary, of all things! Secretary! I have every right to have them both arrested and tortured into giving up the scheme and then mounting their heads on pikes above the port gate!
But you won’t. Mgeli commanded, his voice stern and cold. You won’t execute your wife on grounds of paranoid delusion. At least your father had the decency to wait until your mother tried to kill him.
David sucked in a breath, ignoring Mgeli’s pointed reference to his predecessor. Him waiting was what caused his death. I’m no paranoid madman, and I can’t prove it, but I know they’re involved!
What you’re going to do is send papiai to tail both of them to see if anything is happening between them, so that if they are involved you won’t turn the entire city against you.
He sighed. Mgeli was right. He was dead certain that his wife was cheating on him, but if he moved without solid, tangible proof, then everyone in the capital and probably most of the Empire would conclude that he had gone insane like Alexios had and he’d be off the throne in weeks. He should wait to see if anything conclusive could be found before he acted.
He resumed pacing, at a much slower speed, while he tried to calm himself with other thoughts. He’d taken to writing hymns in the praise of the Lord, various saints and angels in an attempt to ape his namesake, and forcing himself to recite the frankly awful poetry was generally good at taking his mind off things. After reciting a few dozen stanzas likening the tribulations of the faithful to the shearing of sheep in the summer, he felt calm enough to ease open the door and return to his seat. He stared at his wife for several minutes, scrutinizing every inch of her uninterested visage for signs of deceit.
The outburst had brought him perilously close to an immensely sinful act, and he knew that he had to make things right with God again. It was only fair, after all, for him to repay the victory at Boyabad and the guiding voice that was Mgeli? It was high time he visited one of his orphanages, after all, he hadn’t seen any of them since he had left for Kartvelia two years before. He’d give alms, see to the ‘children of the aftokrator’ and pray for wisdom and support, then see what happened with Kantakouzenos and his wife. Of course, the papiai wouldn’t be letting either of them out of their sight for the next few….years, probably, but they would still be alive for the next while.
Thank you, he thought, unsure of what else to say to the spirit in his mind.
It’s my duty. Mgeli replied, his tone much softer.
- Status