This one was also written a while ago and may be subject to rewriting
Part LVIII: All or Nothing (1527-1530)
As the Golden Horde collapsed on the far side of the Black Sea, the Sultanate of Rûm appeared to be on the verge of doing the same. Surrounded on all sides by hostile powers, armies swarmed over the battered sultanate’s frontiers, Konya itself seeming to be the preeminent target. No allies and no succor seemed possible, and the armies of the Turkish sultanate were already exhausted and weakened. It would take a miracle for Kadir to reverse the situation, but miracles weren’t unheard of in Rûmite history….
Arslan II had long wished to deal a killing blow to the Rûmites. In a one-on-one fight, he and his empire would certainly prevail against the significantly weaker state, but Kayqubad and his successors’ ability to keep just out of reach and strike only when the Qutlughids were distracted with other affairs and couldn’t respond in force. Such had been the case when Malatya had fallen to the Turks, and when they had raided the Çandarids who were, as he intended to remind them, were Qutlughid vassals. But now that he had his affairs in order and the Uzbeks were busy dealing with the Golden Horde, the time to strike was at hand. The old shah could feel his age, and wished to rain hell down upon the insolent Rûmites and repay them for their constant provocations if it was the last thing he did. The ascension of Kadir who was, by all reports, an inexperienced (if quite unnerving in person) ruler, provided a golden opportunity, and Arslan began gathering his armies. Better yet news arrived the next year with reports of the Rûmite invasion of the Trapezuntine Empire, effectively serving a perfect casus belli to Tabriz on a silver platter. In the spring of 1517, an official declaration of war was sent to Konya. Two Qutlughid vassals had been attacked, and it was time to launch a war of righteous fury.
From the beginning of his reign, Kadir had suspected that a conflict with the Qutlughids would eventually occur. This fear had helped motivate his attack against the Trapezuntines--after all, they were technically Qutlughid vassals, and it was entirely possible that their presence on his flank could disastrously derail a defensive war. His plan was to cripple the Trapezuntines’ war-making abilities, then turn to meet the Qutlughids and force them to fight through the mountains, hopefully gaining enough breathing room to turn his gaze southward and push into the void left by the Çandarid’s departure from Syria. However, he had not considered that Arslan himself would intervene, believing that the great sultan--who was by 1527 more than seventy-six years old--wouldn’t rouse himself from what Kadir believed to be an aged stupor, let alone take the field himself. As such, he left behind only some 400 nafjayş to guard the Cilician Gates, on the understanding that they could muster out militiamen to supplement their numbers in the event of a strike from that direction. Unfortunately for the Rûmites, he was mistaken on all three counts. The mobilizations of the previous year and the subsequent strain it placed on the Cilician harvests necessitated that the regional militia stand down and keep farming to avoid starvation. Arslan, meanwhile, was more than willing to take the field in person, inspiring the great hordes of men that could be raised from the breadth of the Qutlughid realm and forcing him to face one of the greatest living generals of the period. Finally, it was only by quickly suing for peace after Boyabad that Kadir was able to turn and meet the Qutlughids, leaving a barely defeated and only slightly weakened but now very, very pissed-off Trapezous on his flank.
The Qutlughid Empire stretched from the Euphrates in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east and even a string of distant ports in India and Arabia[1], and it could field armies respectively of its vast size. Even with forces needing to be left behind to ward off the Uzbeks, Golden Horde and the Rajputs[2], Arslan mustered 90,000 men for his invasion of the Rûmite Sultanate, many of them veterans of his many campaigns in the Caucasus and the east. The first army, to be commanded by his general Sharif al-Din Ali Shirazi would number 35,000, 15,000 of which was cavalry, and would attack the Rûmites from the east head-on, while the second army would be commanded by the shah himself, numbering some 40,000 (10,000 of which were cavalry) which would finish off the Çandarid rump state in Aleppo and continue north into Cilicia and hopefully Konya itself. A reserve of 15,000 men would hang back in the vassal territory of Bitlis to intercept any attempts to invade Mesopotamia or attack Tabriz. Arslan’s hope was that Kadir would rush into battle against Shirazi, pinning down his army there while the shah marched on his capital. Even if he did not, the Qutlughid pincer would be sure to utterly crush the Rûmites, forcing them to fight on two fronts against superior forces. Before beginning his invasion, he also sent a missive to David, informing him that he ought to join him in his assault and avenge the losses of the previous years’ combat. On 16 June 1527, Shirazi’s host approached Erzurum, marking the effective beginning of the invasion.
Kadir, meanwhile, was facing down the opposite problem; a severe shortage of just about everything. The Sultanate of Rûm sat upon a region with a limited amount of fertile soil, and as such its population--and hence its manpower pool--were quite limited. Kayqubad had tried to make up for this fact by keeping a standing army, but it too took time to be replenished after losses in war, and time was something that Kadir didn’t have. He had had some 35,000 men under arms at this time a year before, a number which had been whittled down to only 25,000 mostly at the expense of his most experienced units. If he attempted to raise more men, he would risk a famine and obtain only poor quality units unsuited for anything other than throwing themselves on Qutlughid spears. Still, that might be better than the current state of affairs, by which he was severely outnumbered by both of the invading armies. He put out a desperate call for mercenaries, but was able to muster only a few thousand exiled Kartvelians and Arabs, experienced but not especially competent, and a handful of Venetian crossbowmen from Cyprus, neither of which were tide-turners. He wrote to Ömer Paşa, who had succeeded his father Ebülhayr as the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, begging for help against the eastern horde, only for his emissaries to be laughed out of the Sublime Porte. Ömer Paşa was having enough trouble dealing with the Albanians and the White Army, he had nothing to spare for the Rûmites and wouldn’t give them succor if he could. The Golden Horde wasn’t in any position to help, while the Mamluk rump state was barely clinging to life and the Çandarids still hated them with a passion. Konya was out in the cold, Kadir must have known as he marched to meet the invaders, and there was little he could do to save her.
However, he was by no means resigned to his fate, as Shirazi soon learned to his ruinous surprise. The Persian general had laid siege to Erzurum in the first days of July, safe in the knowledge that Kadir was more than three months away and lacked the cannonade to seriously damage his army. As such, he set up for a siege of the city with little concern for assaults by any force other than the Qizilbash horsemen who still roamed over much of the region. As such, he was caught completely off-guard when the small force of pickets he had bothered to set up reported that a large Rûmite army was approaching from the west. Kadir wasn’t an idiot, and his spies within the Qutlughid realm had informed him of the buildup north of Tabriz; from there, the only logical targets were Erzurum and Erzincan, the latter being held by the Trapezuntines. As soon as he had conducted a peace with David, he had marched eastwards, and though still outnumbered he was ready for a fight. The Rûmite army circled north of the city, camping across a dry marshland from the Qutlughid siege camp and opening fire with what little artillery they still possessed.
After a day and a half of such bombardment, Shirazi decided his best option was to take the field and meet the Rûmites in the open. According to his scouts, he still held a numerical advantage of 35 to 25--in truth it was closer to 35 to 20--and he wished to press this before any possible reinforcements arrived. He also hoped that a speedy defeat might inspire the defenders of Erzurum to surrender quickly, which would allow him to advance deeper into Rûmite territory with great haste. As such, on 6 July, Shirazi’s men marshalled north of the city, leaving behind only 5,000 men to press the siege, and began to advance on the Rûmite camp. Despite the noise that is endemic to any large number of troops, few seemed to stir inside the enemy camp, and Shirazi concluded he could take the enemy by surprise and crush them. He ordered an all-out assault, and his army rushed forward into the dry marsh. They were in the thick of it now, the cavalry vanguard beginning to emerge from the reeds and into the Rûmite camp.
It was then that the long-burning fuses of the mines scattered across the marsh reached their quick. They exploded into balls of fire, throwing shrapnel and sparks into the tight formations of men. Startled and confused, most of the soldiers halted, a fatal mistake. The sparks caught and spread like, well, wildfire, and within minutes the marsh was a blazing, smoky inferno. Panicking men rushed left and right, trampling each other in their desperation to escape the flames and the choking cloud of ash and throwing the entire army into complete chaos. Blackness soon overwhelmed the area, and those men who did manage to claw their way to the edge of the marsh were met by ranks of unsmiling Turks carrying pikes. All but a handful of noblemen were killed on the spot, and by the time the fires finally burned out the wetlands were a combination pyre and charnel house.
The Qutlughids holding the camp quickly made themselves scarce, and Kadir was able to seize the complex almost intact, with barely any losses on his side and comparatively little damage to Erzurum. The first army had been entirely shattered and its artillery train, desperately needed to continue the war, taken with only one gun lost. Upwards of 80% of the Qutlughid army were dead, leaving only a few dozen prisoners and hundreds scattered across the rough country, likely to be picked off by the Qizilbash and other highlanders. It was a perfect victory.
Unfortunately for Kadir, his perfect victory happened to coincide with one of Arslan’s own. The shah had led his army into the remnants of the Çandarid beylik a few days after Shirazi began his offensive, and had met little resistance. After all, the truly valuable lands and opportunities lay in Egypt and lower Syria, and so all but a few old timers and some of the native Arabs had gone south in a hurry in the years before, leaving a small rump state at Aleppo. After promising them patronage in the Qutlughid system, the former capital had surrendered without a fight a week after crossing the river, leaving the road into Rûmite territory wide open. Arslan had dispatched a small picket force to warn of the unlikely approach of troops from the south before making for Cilicia at all due speed. A month later, 30,000 Qutlughid soldiers had arrived at the Cilician Gates with an artillery train sufficient to blow a hole in the Great Wall of China if need be. The Gates were held by 400 nafjayş soldiers and 800 conscripts, along with an indeterminate number of irregulars in the hills surrounding it. They wouldn’t have been able to hold the pass by themselves indefinitely, but they would make Arslan pay a steep price and blood and corpses to pass through it.
However, they had not considered that Arslan had brought with him some 500 Torghal mountaineers from the Hindu Kush, skilled in alpine warfare and capable of climbing up sheer cliffs barehanded. Within two days, the Torghalss had not only forged a trail across the saddle of a nearby mountain, but had strung lines across it so that some 1500 chosen soldiers could accompany them into the pass. That dawn they struck, hurtling screaming down the pass into the rear of the Turkish formation, catching them completely off-guard and unsuspecting. While the Rûmites struggled to meet the attack from their rear, Arlsan’s cannonade roared to life, hammering their front and pinning them down while several thousand more Qutlughids advanced under their covering fire to join the fray. The Rûmites fought well, but after several hours they were exhausted and, ultimately, dead. The Cilician Gates had been conquered with great speed and comparatively light casualties. The road to Konya was now open, and the seat of the House of Karaman lay only a month’s journey away. Arslan broke off small forces to hold the pass and secure the various fortresses he had bypassed--among them Kayqubadabad--then ordered his army into a forced march across the Plateau, hoping to take the city and put an end to this struggle once and for all.
Kadir was informed of the disaster only three days later, two dozen horses having been ridden to death to get him the news. The battle at the Gates had thrust Kadir into an unenviable position; his capital would soon be under siege and he could not intercept the attacking army due to both numbers and sheer distance. If Konya fell, then all of Anatolia was laid open to the Qutlughids and the war was surely lost. There was no way to defend the city, not at this range, and it seemed as if there was no path to victory. But a final, desperate option appeared to Kadir that night. If Arslan took Konya, he would seize the bulk of the Rûmite bureaucracy and the treasury. If Kadir took Tabriz, he would take not only the Qutlughid bureaucracy and treasury but also Arslan’s harem and family. If he failed it was suicide, but if he succeeded it might be the only path to victory. There was no army between him and Tabriz, and if he moved quickly he could reach the city before he was intercepted, and a quick siege might be successful under the right circumstance
In the game to win, the gambler rolled the dice. 80,000 would pay the price….
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[1] Although Paopantaros, the largest Qutlughid port in India wouldn’t be taken until 1542, Kaloupoli, the second largest Pontic port in the east, was founded in 1526
[2] The Rajputs had been pretty much embittered by Arslan’s attempts to shore up the Sultanate of Delhi, and the Qutlughid eastern frontier was constantly under assault by probing forces and raiders from across the mountains.
