Sorry guys, no time for comment response tonight. I'll do it tomorrow
Part LIX: The Arsenal (1527-1531)
The Qutlughid invasion of the Sultan of Rûm should have been a one-sided curb stomping by all rights. However, due to bad planning on the part of the Persians and a mixture of luck and daring on the part of the Turks it would be drawn out into a much longer and bloodier affair. With seemingly no other option available to him, Kadir would make one last frantic rush for victory and provoke the escalation of the First Rûmite-Qutlughid War into a horrific taste of things to come….
As Kadir and the Rûmite army made their way through the wilds of northern Iran that autumn, they faced a truly grim situation. After receiving word of the disaster at the Cilician Gates, the sultan had ordered all contact with the outside cut so that they couldn’t be tracked on their march. Nonetheless, word of the defeat and the sack of the capital that would almost certainly follow it spread through the ranks like wildfire. There were only 25,000 men in the formation, a number that was slowly but constantly worn down by exhaustion, desertion and attacks by the bandits and Qizilbaş (at many times one and the same). With seemingly no chance of victory as they marched away from their vulnerable homes, discontent also grew within the ranks of the army. Whispers of mutiny became commonplace both in the camp and on the march.
These tensions came to a head in late August, as the army camped beside the Murat River near the small Turkmen town of Omuzbaşi. The region which the Rûmites were marching through was quite arid, and the already uncertain men flat-out refused to abandon the river as the sultan wished them to with no sign of victory present. The common soldiers occupied the camp and demanded a number of concessions from Kadir, one of the most common ones being a request for peace with the Qutlughids before they all died for essentially nothing. The sultan was left with a few thousand nafjayş and loyal soldiers from a separate camp, but many of their commanders doubtlessly hoped their ruler would cave rather than leading them down this suicidal path. However, Kadir refused. He rode into the camp at midday and stood in his stirrups, gesturing towards his crotch and asking the mutineers if they were more cowardly than a eunuch, in slightly more crude terms. He then bluntly informed the soldiers that they would be going to Tabriz, and that they would be awarded immensely with gold, spices, cloth and slaves taken from one of the richest cities in the world. The combination of this--a carrot and a stick, practically--succeed in quelling the mutiny. A few dozen men would desert over the next two nights, but most of the 25,000 were still present and willing to follow the sultan in a march across the scrubland.
After a long and harrowing march, the army reached the Zangar River on 2 September , a tributary of the Aras that allowed them to replenish their depleted supplies and briefly rest. Within three days they were on the march again, pressing south through the rough hill country towards the crown jewel of the Qutlughid Empire. There were frequent skirmishes with the tribal hillmen and ranging nomads that dwelled in the region, which were unable to meet the column head on but still quite determined to show their displeasure with the Turks’ presence. Despite the near frequent low-scale battles, the Rûmites’ advance was unknown to Qutlughid authorities until they reached the plains of Khoy in late September, a mere three weeks’ march from Tabriz itself. They had been able to advance in such secrecy thanks to the isolation of the country they were moving across and Kadir’s strict control of outside contact, helped along a great deal by a gap in Qutlughid defenses in the region.
However, things wouldn’t be as easy as simply marching into the capital. The city was already heavily defended, bearing a garrison and arsenal proportional to the power of the Qutlughid state, and its viceroy, Mohammed Ustajlu, was a capable and quick-thinking man. Upon being informed of Kadir’s approach, Ustajlu leapt into action at once. He ordered the farmers residing around the country to be taken into the city and their harvests either collected or burned to deny them to the enemy. Any workmen or beggars in the city were put to work repairing the walls, while as many men as possible were hastily trained in defensive warfare. By the time Kadir reached the city on 12 October, 50,000 of the 250,000 residents of the city were under arms, and any hope of victory he might have held was effectively gone.
The grimness of his position couldn’t have been lost on Kadir as he approached Tabriz in the second week of October. The long march across mountains, hills and great stretches of desert had severely depleted his supplies, and the destruction of the vital food he had hoped to find outside the town was quite the bitter blow. Even worse, he had lost or been forced to abandon most of his siege train, leaving only the lightest of his guns to press the siege. Still, a final chance for victory was available to him. While the Tabrizians could easily overwhelm his host, he knew Ustajlu was a fairly cautious man from his history of raiding across the border, and so decided it was unlikely that this could come to pass. However, the large population of the city required a large food supply, and if he could keep the city under siege for long enough it was possible they might fold. With retreat meaning dethronement at best and death at worst, Kadir decided to settle in for the long haul.
The Rûmites set up two camps on either side of the long circuit of walls, positioned in just the right spot to cut off any hope of resupply. Keeping his men busy and at their peak with constant drilling, the sultan sent out foraging expeditions in all directions to gather as much food as possible. Meanwhile, what cannons were available were hauled up onto the heights to the north of the city, where they began bombarding garrison strongpoints, arsenals and granaries in hopes of weakening the defenders’ will to fight. Finally, he also sent several thousand men to damn the Mehranruhd River, which flowed through the heart of the city. In doing so, he hoped to in one move deny the crowded city much of its vital water supply and secure water for his own army. Chances of victory were slight, but he was determined to make the best of a bad situation.
Meanwhile, in Anatolia, Arslan was making the best of an excellent situation. After shunting aside the Rûmite forces in the Cilician Gates, his army had advanced swiftly on Konya, swatting aside small forces of militia that tried to stop them. Most of the locals were more concerned with preserving their properties than with any grand notion of geopolitics, and so except for the unfortunates who lived directly along Kayqubad’s Road and opportunistic Turkmen who sometimes attacked the supply train, the Qutlughids went on undisturbed. Konya had surrendered without a fight, as its denizens weren’t particularly loyal to Kadir, and by the end of August the capital of the Sultanate of Rûm was in Arslan’s hands.
Arslan was a cagey ruler--you don’t get to have a reign lasting more than five decades by being anything less--and was quite familiar with how to treat an occupied country. Rather than installing a governor or some other vassal directly and propping him up with immediate force, it was far easier to locate a member of the previous royal family and install him as a regional satrap. This was a perfect opportunity to do so. After a brief period of inquiry, the sole surviving brother of Kadir, a quiet clergyman named Ibrahim, was located and raised to the throne. He was quite reluctant, but the idea that he would be saving the lives of his new subjects by accepting the office was sufficient to sway him over. His first act, on Arlsan’s ‘recommendation’ was to declare Kadir an outlaw and order all his followers to abandon him. All in all, he was willing to be quite merciful, so long as his dominance and hegemony were respected by his new vassal.
Upon being informed of the sultan’s attack on Tabriz, his geniality vanished like steam in the desert. He had campaigned against numerous enemies for literal decades, but not once had any of them been so insolent as to try and attack Tabriz itself. Even so, he had stationed an army in Bitlis to prevent any such thing from happening, which meant that Kadir had already either defeated them or the army's commander was a fool or traitor. Either way, he was going to have the heads of everyone involved on a pike. Leaving behind a small force to prop up Ibrahim, he turned and marched with 35,000 men, murder in his heart. He had built up a great number of roads across his empire to facilitate troop movements, but even with this boon and the ability to requisition supplies (somewhat) peacefully, he knew it would still take more than six months to reach Tabriz, a feat he couldn’t accomplish before the winter set in and the passes froze. After a brief back-and-forth, he decided that his best option was to make for the capital with all haste, eating up as much of the road as he could with his literal army while his figurative army of servants and governors organized the construction of a supply depot large enough to keep his force supplied throughout the winter, preferably as close to Tabriz as possible. Meanwhile, he would send as many light forces against the Rûmites as he could, hopefully grinding them down with constant harassment attacks that they could be defeated by the capital garrison or better yet forced to make a winter retreat across the mountains. He made little effort at keeping the latter plan a secret, as it was the most logical thing to do given his situation. Nonetheless, he was fully expectant of a coming victory as he made eastwards throughout the autumn of 1527.
The winter of 1527-1528 was a hard one, even by the standards of the Lesser Caucasus. A great dust storm had whipped up over Central Asia that autumn and drifted over the Caspian, creating a much hotter and wetter clime that had spawned the mother of all lake-effect storms. The first snows fell in November, forcing Arslan to make camp at Lake Van instead of Lake Urmia, and severely affected Kadir’s siege plans. The sultan had planned to continue his bombardment until December, as well as his various other tactics such as marching his armies around the city to make it look like he was stronger than he actually was. He had constructed his camps to be winterable, but still, the more time an army spent in winter camp the less able it would be come springtime. Nonetheless, the Rûmites were in quarters by the 1st of December.
As the weather worsened, Kadir’s camp--which was already short on supplies--became increasingly grim. Food, proper food, ran out by the end of January despite careful rationing, and water had be taken from holes broken in the ice atop the damned river. As in most bad sieges, the soldiers had to resort to eating leather and other such scraps of food to survive, including some truly disgusting things like leaves coated in animal piss to provide some sort of nutrition. In a manner quite similar to Mehmed’s siege of Trapezous fifty years before, disease became completely rampant. The usual suspects, typhoid, pneumonia and other such respiratory diseases were joined by syphilis[1] due to contaminated food supplies and an utterly immense amount of food poisoning from the same cause. Kadir took measures to alleviate this, such as sending sick men to separate quarantine camps and shuffling men about to keep frostbite from setting in, but he was fighting a losing battle. Desperate, he decided his best option was to make sure he wasn’t the only one weakened by the outbreaks. He began hurtling bloated, rotting corpses over the city walls in hopes of spreading the contagion, as well as stuffing dead bodies down wells frequented by Qizilbaş. It was a desperate strategy, but it worked. By the time the winter finally faded in late March, he’d lost more than 10,000 men from his host of 25,000, while 50,000 Tabrizians and an unknown number of Qizilbaş had passed as well.
While winter was undoubtedly terrible, the coming of spring left Kadir in an even worse position. His army had been decimated by the cold, but the Tabrizians, while exhausted by hunger and disease, still stood firm. Arslan’s army closed in from the west, and it was becoming more apparent by the day that his final desperate gamble had failed. After a brief period of deliberation, during which he was informed of his brother’s ascent, he decided that his best option was to break the siege and try to evade the pursuers. No, scratch that, he could be easily run down by the more cavalry-dominated Qutlughid armies. He needed to put himself in a position where he could escape any potential encirclement. After another brief period of consideration, he decided the best place for this would be Ardabil. From there, he could go north, south, east or west as need be, able to vanish into the mountains with little warning to the enemy. He broke camp on 6 April and moved with all haste eastwards.
Arslan gave chase, moving a good bit faster than the Rûmites, who were slowed by their poor state of conduct and the constant raiding of the Turkmen tribes who resided in the area. The Qutlughids had made it through the winter in much better shape, and so it should be no surprise that they were able to run down the Turks. That they did not do this is frankly bizarre, and the exact reason why is unknown. Nonetheless, as the two armies rushed towards Ardabil that spring, the Qutlughids nipping at the heels of the Rûmites, Arslan’s vengeance was at hand.
That the agents of his vengeance would not be Persian was quite unexpected. Mamia of Kartvelia had spent the previous year campaigning on the north shore of Lake Sevan against the Lord of Arishni’s followers there. The latter’s favor with the Golden Horde, which was still at the height of its power at this point, was proving to be difficult to surmount, and after some time Mamia had concluded that he should pursue a similar, albeit less dominating, relationship with the Qutlughids. Word of Kadir’s attack had proven to be the perfect chance for him to get it in good with Arslan, and as the snows slackened he rose from his winter camp and rushed southwards, adjusting his track as word came from the Qizilbaş scouts he was employing. On 16 May, some 10,000 Kartvelians intercepted Kadir’s force outside the clan fortress of Sehrahi (OTL Lahrud), holding them long enough for the Qutlughids to catch up.
The Battle of Sehrahi does not bear to be repeated in great detail. The Rûmites were exhausted and outnumbered by four to one, so the result was never really in question. Kadir formed up in a square, hoping to ward off the enemy and inflict enough casualties to get a clement peace from it. The defenders were swarmed by Qizilbaş, only further wearing them down before the actual assault began. After two hours of constant attack, the Qutlughids and Kartvelians attacked on three sides, smashing through the Rûmite flanks like a sledgehammer through brick[2]. The Rûmites streamed out through the open direction, only to be ridden down and fallen upon by the Turkmen horsemen. Only a few hundred, mostly nafjayş, escaped along Kadir, fleeing into the nearby mountains. By the end of the day, some 15,000 men were dead and several thousand more captured, bringing the total death toll of the expedition to 80,000.
Despite weeks of pursuit, Kadir would eventually make his way northward. Hopping from mountain range to mountain range, harassed the entire way by Qizilbaş and sometimes even proper armies. His host would dwindle to a few dozen men, but by the end of the year they would escape across the mountains into Transcaucasia. This was bothersome to Arslan, but it didn’t distract him from his new mission. In his mind, Kadir’s invasion had revealed a weak spot; namely, the weakness of his alliance of client states. He already had a client who should have stopped Kadir--David of Trapezous--but had done nothing. If his empire were to survive his death, he needed to secure the chain of client states and satrapies that surrounded his empire on most sides and which stretched from Syria to India.
The first target of this program was, of course, Trapezous. Unlike the petty states or tribal confederacies that made up the bulk of the vassal sphere, the Trapezuntines could--and in fact did--function as an essentially independent state, paying their tribute on time but otherwise essentially being a sovereign princedom. As their betrayal (in Arslan’s mind, at least) indicated, they needed to be brought down a peg or two and fully pulled into Qutlughid hegemony. As such, after mopping up the Rûmite forces in Persia he turned his gaze westward. By the autumn of 1528, a Qutlughid army sat outside Erzurum, ready to cross the frontier into Trapezuntine territory if need be, while a smaller Kartvelian host rested just outside of Artane, the capital of Trapezuntine Samtskhe.
David had been busy overseeing a military reform and famine relief, and hadn’t at all expected sudden Qutlughid aggression. As such he had no choice--even under the best of circumstances he probably wouldn’t have had much of a choice--but to accede to Arslan’s demands. The Trapezuntines hadn’t been subject to anything more than nominal tribute for over a century, so the return of any yoke would be a bitter blow; Arslan certainly didn’t help. In addition to the more banal articles, such as an increase in annual tribute payment and a requirement to provide soldiers and servants, there were more extraordinary requirements.
In particular, there were three demands which David found especially heinous, so much so that he would list them by name in his history. Firstly was the requirement to furnish 100 Pontic and 400 Circassian young women to Tabriz for reasons that should be rather obvious. This was not just insulting in that it forced David to enslave his own subjects, but it also forced the famously Orthodox ruler to be actively complicit in the (predominantly Islamic) enslavement of coreligionists in one of the worst ways possible. Secondly, he would have to make a triannual journey to Tabriz to renew his homage and bring with him several dozen pounds of gold and a thousand slaves--once again, all Orthodox--as tribute. Thirdly, he would have to give up the title of aftokrator itself and be crowned as satrap by Arslan himself. This was profoundly insulting. Not only would David yield the title which his dynasty had held for two and a half centuries--thirteen generations--for a decidedly inferior and by definition subordinate title, Arslan was essentially imposing himself in the place of the Patriarch of Pontos. In the coronation ceremony, the Patriarch was essentially a conduit for God himself, and a Muslim inserting himself there had a number of implications which David found infuriating.
Even worse, few of these humiliations were visited upon Mamia’s Kartvelia. The Svan didn’t have to pay tribute in slaves, nor did he have to pay the raised standard tribute which Trapezous did, or provide soldiers. Indeed, he actually gained from Trapezous’ humiliation. Arslan ordered David to give over Vatoume, one of the chief ports of the empire, to Mamia in exchange for the hinterland city of Erzurum. To David, who had (or at least believed he had) created a covenant with Mamia, it felt like a complete and utter betrayal. He intended to repay it.
In hindsight, Arslan was setting his successor(s) up for a serious problem, but he probably didn’t know it. Whether or not he was senile has been a matter of much debate, but doubtless there was a brewing crisis. This crisis would come to a head with his death in 1531….
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[1] Despite some commentor’s remarks, syphilis spread very quickly after it reached the Old World. By 1495 hundreds of men were dying from it during the Italian Wars, and so it’s entirely possible Vakhtang could have had it in 1522.
[2] I had a summer job demolishing outbuildings, and brick usually shattered pretty solidly. Much easier to deal with than rock.
