The Undying Empire: A Trebizond Timeline
- Thread starter Eparkhos
- Start date
- Status
Well the TL is kinda balanced but things like the suicidal attack of the Ottomans destroying Hagia Sophia, the meteoric rise of Albania from a civil war ridden place to a Balkan Empire and stuff like that are kinda extreme, not improbable but unlikely. Still even under David the Romans had step backs like the invasion of Arslan and the subsequent vassalization to the Persians. Even the City that was retaken is an almost ruin.
Part LXXIII: Looting a Burning House (1544-1551)
Eparkhos
Banned
Well, here goes nothing.
Part LXXIII: Looting a Burning House (1544-1551)
The sharp and sudden decline in Qutlughid power that occurred during the civil war caused the equally sudden unraveling of the western half of their empire. The tribes and clans of the region, be they Armenian, Kurd or Qizilbash, had been fighting for land and hegemony for years by this point, but in the power vacuum that the civil war brought they became the epicenter of a regional power struggle that would slowly spread outwards in all directions, drawing in all those lands which surrounded Greater Armenia and Kurdistan like a maelstrom. Of course, the state in the best position to exploit this power vacuum was Rhomaion, and after centuries of absence Roman armies would march into the former Armenian heartland in the 1540s….
In the aftermath of Siyavash’s failed invasion of the Trapezuntine Empire in the early 1540s, the eastern half of the realm briefly came under the threat of food shortages, caused by the bandons being in the field for too long, bad weather and minor crop failure in Crimea. Faced with following up his victory over the shahanshah or letting this relatively minor problem spiral outwards into a serious crisis, David reluctantly chose to deal with his internal issues and stood down most of his army in Khaldea, allowing them to return to their fields while he stood guard over the border. It was a fortuitous decision, both because any fears of a famine were belayed by hastily-arranged grain shipments from the untouched eastern half of Kartvelia and an excellent spring harvest in 1545, and because the lack of a Trapezuntine invasion in that year or the next gave the governors of the Qutlughid west just enough rope to hang themselves. With the central government humiliated and weakened, the always independent-minded governors and headmen of the Taurus began to scheme against each other, jockeying for power and influence and quickly descending into infighting as the civil war raged on to the east. In other words, it was the perfect opportunity for Trapezuntine expansion.
The Armenian Highlands, a vaguely-defined region stretching across the broad arc of the region’s mountains and plateaus, had been one of the heartlands of the old Qoyunlu Horde decades before, and had seen heavy settlement by Turkmen coming from both east and west. When most of these Turkmen were killed or driven out by Arslan during the early part of his reign, the old regional rivalries and hatreds which their presence had sequestered through weight-of-numbers came back with a vengeance, and the Qultughids had no small deal of trouble dealing with them. The Armenians had lived in the region for literal millenia, and though the Turkish invasions had driven many of them out of the region or into urban settlements, a number of them still lived in the hills and valleys of the interior highlands; meanwhile, the Kurds were also ancient and native to the region, but unlike the Armenians they had profited from the Turkish migrations by not occupying the Turkmen’s pastureland, thus effectively standing on the sidelines while the Armenians and the Turkmen went at it. Once the Armenians were weakened, they moved into the region and began pushing them outwards in a slow but steady process of raids and irregular warfare. The Armenians reciprocated in kind, and with the Persians occupied elsewhere this slow, long-term and low-intensity warfare suddenly exploded outwards into a bloody(er) major conflict, the sort which could not be ignored but which Tabriz was in no position to deal with. The governors of the region were either killed or cast their lots in with one faction or another, and within a few short years the Armenian Highlands were engulfed in flame.
The conflict proper began in mid-1545 and was sparked by the massacre of a dozen Armenian merchants by the Kurdish governor of Bitlis, Shamsaddin Rokji after one of them got into an argument with Rokji over an unpaid bill. Rokji had been nothing but cruel to his Armenian subjects before this, and as soon as word began to spread of the massacre many of them panicked and assumed that the governor would try to kill them all, which was entirely possible given existent tensions and conflict between the two groups. Unfortunately for Rokji, both the city of Bitlis and the province of Bitlis had a sizable Armenian majority, and it wasn’t long until an angry group of militiamen dragged him out of his palace and threw him off of the city walls, then burned his corpse for good measure. Word of this spread rapidly, reprisals began, and by the time winter hit the region was consumed in all-out war.
With this being an effective war to the death, it didn’t take for long leaders and centers of power to emerge. By the end of 1546, the situation was as follows: The Armenians had rallied around the governor of Beyazit-in-the-east, Levan Kardashian, and held many of the walled cities of the region as well as their heartlands, the lowlands around the upper Aras Valley, the eastern shore of Lake Sevan and the lowlands surrounding Lake Van. Kardashian had nominal command of tens of thousands of subjects, but in practice could muster only around 20,000 men of good fighting quality, a force too small to take the offensive in any meaningful way. As such, he used the Trapezuntine/Kartvelian borderlands and the mountains around Lake Sevan to support the small number of regular soldiers and much greater number of militiamen in the north-east, while he fought a desperate and increasingly losing struggle to hold the less defensible region around Lake Van and the isolated cities to the north and west. The Kurds, meanwhile, were much more decentralized--without the pressures the Armenians were facing, some clans were inclined to stay neutral or loot the burning house that was Persia--and had a number of clans which were fighting both the Armenians and each other, but the most powerful figure and their nominal leader was Khalil Ayyub, the satrap[1] of Hisyn Kayfa who had managed to unite many of the south-eastern Kurds under his banner before the war and was currently making quite the name for himself by making the Armenians’ lives hell. While he lacked the forces to directly besiege any major settlement, his light horsemen could ride circles around the primarily infantry-based Armenian forces, and used this to harry the countryside around the walled towns, spreading the defenders thinner and thinner as they were gradually worn down and their supplies destroyed. Bit by bit by Bitlis the outlying settlements were starved out and destroyed both by Ayyub’s forces and others, and as the streets of Beyazit (renamed Daruynk), Bitlis and countless others were swelled with refugees, Kardashian and his commanders began to grow increasingly desperate and exhausted. They were putting up as good a fight as they could, but they were surrounded, outnumbered and often outgunned, and it seemed as if the walls were closing in.
Up to this point, the Qizilbash had been mostly neutral. This wasn’t because of any moral compunction, and indeed their ‘neutrality’ was essentially raiding both Kurds and Armenians at roughly equal rates, as well as forays against the relatively undefended Persians and Azeris to the east, but instead because of orders from Erzincan itself. Esmail was quite miffed at the Qutlughids about the whole ‘trying-to-kill-him-and-annihilate-his-followers’ thing, and given that the Kurds were more closely related to the Persians than the Armenians that was enough justification to deny them his support. And that was what he was doing, most of his men despised the Armenians as urbane weaklings and would doubtless side with the Kurds if they had to pick a side. There was also another reason for the nominal neutrality of the Qizilbash, that being David.
David’s...interesting….religious beliefs will be dealt with in the next update, but though there was little love lost between he and the Armenian Apostolic Church, he regarded the latter as being lost or confused Christians, a step above the devilish infidels and ultimately a necessary ally in the war against Antichrist. On a practical level, the Armenians would also be more likely to support Pontic rule than the Kurds would, both from the basic differences in terms of lifestyle and from the decades of raids and counterraids. As such, David watched the ongoing struggle in the highlands with open support for the Armenians, but hesitated to send aid, both because of the conflict he was facing down between the different branches of the Orthodox Church within his borders over the inclusion of new Apostolic subjects, and because of a hurried series of legal and military reforms to retool the Trapezuntine state for large-scale warfare. He had plans, very big plans that he needed Armenian support for, and didn’t want to screw up his best opportunity to be welcomed as a liberator by angering their church. Once these issues began to be wrapped up in the autumn of 1546, though, he was more than eager to intervene on the Armenian’s behalf….
As the spring of 1547 dawned, and horsemen pillaged the land around Daruynk and Karakilisa, three armies crossed the Pontic Mountains. The first was a small reserve force of around 5,000 to reinforce the garrisons of the frontier fortresses with the hope of keeping raiders out of Khaldea. The second was a Kartvelian force of some 15,000 footmen and 10,000 cavalry under a Svan named Mikheil Oniani, which emerged onto the Samtskheote plain in April and crossed the frontier into Armenian-held territory less than a month later. The largest, of course, was under David himself and numbered 15,000 footmen and 20,000 cavalry (many of them qizilbash) when it marched out from Erzurum on 26 April, not counting the small artillery corps and the men who tended it. Of note was the presence of Evangelos Kantakouzenos Megalokomnenos, a dynast who David had coaxed back to the Empire to be groomed for the throne[2] and who was present to gain experience as a general. As usual, most of the Trapezuntine army were veterans or at the very least well-drilled bandonoi, and with all the propaganda that had flooded Trapezous and Pontos at large since the previous autumn, describing (often fictitious) atrocities committed against the Christians of Armenia most of the Ponts, Lazes and Pontic Armenians were raring for a fight.
As soon as they had crossed the frontier, David made a beeline for Arjesh, one of the lakeside cities under the most dire siege. Advancing before the army of Trapezous was an army of papers as bulletins printed in both Greek and Armenian were circulated in all directions promising support and protection for all Armenians who supported the Romans and warning the Kurds of the region to flee or be crushed. The latter had about as much effect as telling a murderer not to kill people, but the propagandic boost it offered was enormous, as many of the besieged and outlying Armenian settlements were swept through and refortified by Roman soldiers and the pall of certain coming doom which had hung over the Armenians of the region the season before was lifted by news of a powerful and official ally. Most importantly, Romano-Kartvelian forces from Samtskhe allowed forts to be expanded and freed up Kardashian’s men to begin their first real counter-offensive. In the six weeks it took the Romans to reach Arjesh, the road between Daruynk and Karakilisia was cleared of raiders and relief forces were rushed to Lake Van to bolster the garrisons of the cities along its edges.
Khalil Ayyub, meanwhile, recognized that the balance of power had suddenly and dramatically shifted against him and moved to rectify this. He would only have one shot at victory, he knew, because as soon as he showed weakness his coalition of tribes would shatter and their budding victory would be lost. However, he did not allow this to force him into a rushed and hasty attack. After all, the highlands were bare and riven with hills and valleys that would be excellent for ambushes and the Romans weren’t exactly familiar with it. The Ayyubids could wait until they passed through a choke point and then waylay them. As April turned into May and then into June, the largest Kurdish host of about 10,000 hurried north-west to stalk the path of the invaders. Unfortunately for them, the Romans would reach Arjesh without passing through any such choke point under the right conditions to attack, and Khalil was forced to draw back into the hills and continue waiting for the right moment to attack. This opportunity would never come, as despite the attacks on smaller outlying fortresses and occasionally even columns on the march, Ayyub was unable to provide the dramatic victory which his subordinates desired. Over the following months and years, chieftains and clans would drift away, either making (almost always failed) direct attacks on Roman and Armenian forces or gradually drifting away to the east or to the west.
Meanwhile, boats and ships of all kinds criss-crossed the surface of Lake Van, bringing supplies and reinforcements to the populations huddled behind the string of walled cities that surrounded it. The Romans had no shortage of experience in fighting off hosts of irregular raiders, and with their support the battle-hardened Armenian militias soon began to turn the tide. By the end of the year, most of the lowlands surrounding the lake had been more or less secured, with their defenses varying from place to place in the form of forts or berms or other defenses, always as the first line before the fortified towns. Unlike David’s following wars there would be no climactic victory that decided it all, no great battle where centuries of hostility were poured out onto the field. Instead there would be dozens if not hundreds of smaller battles between individual clans or tribes and the unforgiving steel of the Armenians and their allies. Gradually, lines of fortification would be dug further and further out into the countryside and gradually, one by one or in small clusters the Kurdish clans would be crushed or driven suitably far away and the lands they vacated doled out to Armenians or Romans. There were Kurdish victories, of course, but against the combined weight of the qizilbash and the Romans they lacked the organization and desperation necessary to obtain victory. To a modern audience this seems anticlimactic, but to the Romans and Armenians it was perfectly satisfactory: After all, a decisive victory would have been nice, but as long as the Kurds were no longer a threat it was well enough, and besides, nobody’s ever wanted to be the last guy killed in any war.
By the time the fighting began to subside in 1550, the Romano-Armenians had secured most of the Armenian Highlands, from about Chapaghjur (Bingol) in the west to Gedikbasi in the south-east to about Qaban and the Trans-Aras region in the northeast. A great deal of raiding still occurred, but the bulk of the Kurds had been pushed into the more difficult terrain beyond the region. Now with victory seemingly confirmed, the usual bouts of infighting that followed a major conquest began to loom. Kardashian had never officially declared himself King of Armenia, fearing a sudden Qutlughid resurgence, but he had been treated as such by most of his followers. However, now that the Romans had helped springboard independence and David was making remarks about the importance of ecumenicism in a world where the End of Days and the war against Antichrist could come at any time, the future of the Armenian state, assuming that it even was a proper state now and not a de facto Roman province, which it might have been, or about to become a Roman province, which was a serious possibility, was in doubt. Deciding that the risk of trouble down the road was better than forcing a confrontation now, David and Kardashian sidestepped the issue: Kardashian would be officially titled ‘Satrap’, a title which the Qutlughids had used for both independent tributaries and semi-autonomous governors, and the use of which did little but kick the can down the road.
By 1551, the newly-liberated territories of Armenia were still quite unstable and prone to conflict both internal and external. The logical thing to do would have been to wait and consolidate the gains which had been made there, but by now David had begun his bizarre downward spiral. There would be, no, there could be no waiting. God had set a deadline, and David intended to fulfill it. As the campaign season dawned, the Trapezuntines would cross the mountains and descend into the plains of Syria, overstretching their supply lines and crossing far beyond the realm of good sense….
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[1] ‘Satrap’ was used for both semi-autonomous (and often semi-hereditary) governorships and foreign tributaries.
[2] Evangelos (b.1525) was born in Calvi to one of the exiled Megalokomnenoi dynasts, Markos, and the Phanariot Anna Kantakouzena, and was named as such because his parents feared that they were infertile before his birth. Despite speaking Greek as his birth tongue, the limited Greek population of Calvi meant that he would speak for the rest of his life with a Maniot accent, and consequently did a great deal of fighting in his boyhood in both the Italian and Maniot fashion. After getting involved in a clan feud in 1539, the Kantakouzenoi Megalokomnenoi fled Calvi and went to Trapezous, hoping for a new life in their ancestral homeland. Unfortunately, Markos caught ill and died on the voyage, but because of his death Evangelos was left as the only male Megalokomnenoi in Trapezous upon his arrival. He and David met, found each other tolerable and quite promising, respectively, and afterwards became the heir apparent. Already fluent in Greek and Latin, he learnt Farsi, Turkish, Armenian and Kartvelian as well as the usual education for noblemen of the period, taking well to financial and mathematical topics but little else. By the time of the story he had gained a (correct) reputation for being short-tempered and prone to fits of rage, but otherwise somewhat kind.
Part LXXIII: Looting a Burning House (1544-1551)
The sharp and sudden decline in Qutlughid power that occurred during the civil war caused the equally sudden unraveling of the western half of their empire. The tribes and clans of the region, be they Armenian, Kurd or Qizilbash, had been fighting for land and hegemony for years by this point, but in the power vacuum that the civil war brought they became the epicenter of a regional power struggle that would slowly spread outwards in all directions, drawing in all those lands which surrounded Greater Armenia and Kurdistan like a maelstrom. Of course, the state in the best position to exploit this power vacuum was Rhomaion, and after centuries of absence Roman armies would march into the former Armenian heartland in the 1540s….
In the aftermath of Siyavash’s failed invasion of the Trapezuntine Empire in the early 1540s, the eastern half of the realm briefly came under the threat of food shortages, caused by the bandons being in the field for too long, bad weather and minor crop failure in Crimea. Faced with following up his victory over the shahanshah or letting this relatively minor problem spiral outwards into a serious crisis, David reluctantly chose to deal with his internal issues and stood down most of his army in Khaldea, allowing them to return to their fields while he stood guard over the border. It was a fortuitous decision, both because any fears of a famine were belayed by hastily-arranged grain shipments from the untouched eastern half of Kartvelia and an excellent spring harvest in 1545, and because the lack of a Trapezuntine invasion in that year or the next gave the governors of the Qutlughid west just enough rope to hang themselves. With the central government humiliated and weakened, the always independent-minded governors and headmen of the Taurus began to scheme against each other, jockeying for power and influence and quickly descending into infighting as the civil war raged on to the east. In other words, it was the perfect opportunity for Trapezuntine expansion.
The Armenian Highlands, a vaguely-defined region stretching across the broad arc of the region’s mountains and plateaus, had been one of the heartlands of the old Qoyunlu Horde decades before, and had seen heavy settlement by Turkmen coming from both east and west. When most of these Turkmen were killed or driven out by Arslan during the early part of his reign, the old regional rivalries and hatreds which their presence had sequestered through weight-of-numbers came back with a vengeance, and the Qultughids had no small deal of trouble dealing with them. The Armenians had lived in the region for literal millenia, and though the Turkish invasions had driven many of them out of the region or into urban settlements, a number of them still lived in the hills and valleys of the interior highlands; meanwhile, the Kurds were also ancient and native to the region, but unlike the Armenians they had profited from the Turkish migrations by not occupying the Turkmen’s pastureland, thus effectively standing on the sidelines while the Armenians and the Turkmen went at it. Once the Armenians were weakened, they moved into the region and began pushing them outwards in a slow but steady process of raids and irregular warfare. The Armenians reciprocated in kind, and with the Persians occupied elsewhere this slow, long-term and low-intensity warfare suddenly exploded outwards into a bloody(er) major conflict, the sort which could not be ignored but which Tabriz was in no position to deal with. The governors of the region were either killed or cast their lots in with one faction or another, and within a few short years the Armenian Highlands were engulfed in flame.
The conflict proper began in mid-1545 and was sparked by the massacre of a dozen Armenian merchants by the Kurdish governor of Bitlis, Shamsaddin Rokji after one of them got into an argument with Rokji over an unpaid bill. Rokji had been nothing but cruel to his Armenian subjects before this, and as soon as word began to spread of the massacre many of them panicked and assumed that the governor would try to kill them all, which was entirely possible given existent tensions and conflict between the two groups. Unfortunately for Rokji, both the city of Bitlis and the province of Bitlis had a sizable Armenian majority, and it wasn’t long until an angry group of militiamen dragged him out of his palace and threw him off of the city walls, then burned his corpse for good measure. Word of this spread rapidly, reprisals began, and by the time winter hit the region was consumed in all-out war.
With this being an effective war to the death, it didn’t take for long leaders and centers of power to emerge. By the end of 1546, the situation was as follows: The Armenians had rallied around the governor of Beyazit-in-the-east, Levan Kardashian, and held many of the walled cities of the region as well as their heartlands, the lowlands around the upper Aras Valley, the eastern shore of Lake Sevan and the lowlands surrounding Lake Van. Kardashian had nominal command of tens of thousands of subjects, but in practice could muster only around 20,000 men of good fighting quality, a force too small to take the offensive in any meaningful way. As such, he used the Trapezuntine/Kartvelian borderlands and the mountains around Lake Sevan to support the small number of regular soldiers and much greater number of militiamen in the north-east, while he fought a desperate and increasingly losing struggle to hold the less defensible region around Lake Van and the isolated cities to the north and west. The Kurds, meanwhile, were much more decentralized--without the pressures the Armenians were facing, some clans were inclined to stay neutral or loot the burning house that was Persia--and had a number of clans which were fighting both the Armenians and each other, but the most powerful figure and their nominal leader was Khalil Ayyub, the satrap[1] of Hisyn Kayfa who had managed to unite many of the south-eastern Kurds under his banner before the war and was currently making quite the name for himself by making the Armenians’ lives hell. While he lacked the forces to directly besiege any major settlement, his light horsemen could ride circles around the primarily infantry-based Armenian forces, and used this to harry the countryside around the walled towns, spreading the defenders thinner and thinner as they were gradually worn down and their supplies destroyed. Bit by bit by Bitlis the outlying settlements were starved out and destroyed both by Ayyub’s forces and others, and as the streets of Beyazit (renamed Daruynk), Bitlis and countless others were swelled with refugees, Kardashian and his commanders began to grow increasingly desperate and exhausted. They were putting up as good a fight as they could, but they were surrounded, outnumbered and often outgunned, and it seemed as if the walls were closing in.
Up to this point, the Qizilbash had been mostly neutral. This wasn’t because of any moral compunction, and indeed their ‘neutrality’ was essentially raiding both Kurds and Armenians at roughly equal rates, as well as forays against the relatively undefended Persians and Azeris to the east, but instead because of orders from Erzincan itself. Esmail was quite miffed at the Qutlughids about the whole ‘trying-to-kill-him-and-annihilate-his-followers’ thing, and given that the Kurds were more closely related to the Persians than the Armenians that was enough justification to deny them his support. And that was what he was doing, most of his men despised the Armenians as urbane weaklings and would doubtless side with the Kurds if they had to pick a side. There was also another reason for the nominal neutrality of the Qizilbash, that being David.
David’s...interesting….religious beliefs will be dealt with in the next update, but though there was little love lost between he and the Armenian Apostolic Church, he regarded the latter as being lost or confused Christians, a step above the devilish infidels and ultimately a necessary ally in the war against Antichrist. On a practical level, the Armenians would also be more likely to support Pontic rule than the Kurds would, both from the basic differences in terms of lifestyle and from the decades of raids and counterraids. As such, David watched the ongoing struggle in the highlands with open support for the Armenians, but hesitated to send aid, both because of the conflict he was facing down between the different branches of the Orthodox Church within his borders over the inclusion of new Apostolic subjects, and because of a hurried series of legal and military reforms to retool the Trapezuntine state for large-scale warfare. He had plans, very big plans that he needed Armenian support for, and didn’t want to screw up his best opportunity to be welcomed as a liberator by angering their church. Once these issues began to be wrapped up in the autumn of 1546, though, he was more than eager to intervene on the Armenian’s behalf….
As the spring of 1547 dawned, and horsemen pillaged the land around Daruynk and Karakilisa, three armies crossed the Pontic Mountains. The first was a small reserve force of around 5,000 to reinforce the garrisons of the frontier fortresses with the hope of keeping raiders out of Khaldea. The second was a Kartvelian force of some 15,000 footmen and 10,000 cavalry under a Svan named Mikheil Oniani, which emerged onto the Samtskheote plain in April and crossed the frontier into Armenian-held territory less than a month later. The largest, of course, was under David himself and numbered 15,000 footmen and 20,000 cavalry (many of them qizilbash) when it marched out from Erzurum on 26 April, not counting the small artillery corps and the men who tended it. Of note was the presence of Evangelos Kantakouzenos Megalokomnenos, a dynast who David had coaxed back to the Empire to be groomed for the throne[2] and who was present to gain experience as a general. As usual, most of the Trapezuntine army were veterans or at the very least well-drilled bandonoi, and with all the propaganda that had flooded Trapezous and Pontos at large since the previous autumn, describing (often fictitious) atrocities committed against the Christians of Armenia most of the Ponts, Lazes and Pontic Armenians were raring for a fight.
As soon as they had crossed the frontier, David made a beeline for Arjesh, one of the lakeside cities under the most dire siege. Advancing before the army of Trapezous was an army of papers as bulletins printed in both Greek and Armenian were circulated in all directions promising support and protection for all Armenians who supported the Romans and warning the Kurds of the region to flee or be crushed. The latter had about as much effect as telling a murderer not to kill people, but the propagandic boost it offered was enormous, as many of the besieged and outlying Armenian settlements were swept through and refortified by Roman soldiers and the pall of certain coming doom which had hung over the Armenians of the region the season before was lifted by news of a powerful and official ally. Most importantly, Romano-Kartvelian forces from Samtskhe allowed forts to be expanded and freed up Kardashian’s men to begin their first real counter-offensive. In the six weeks it took the Romans to reach Arjesh, the road between Daruynk and Karakilisia was cleared of raiders and relief forces were rushed to Lake Van to bolster the garrisons of the cities along its edges.
Khalil Ayyub, meanwhile, recognized that the balance of power had suddenly and dramatically shifted against him and moved to rectify this. He would only have one shot at victory, he knew, because as soon as he showed weakness his coalition of tribes would shatter and their budding victory would be lost. However, he did not allow this to force him into a rushed and hasty attack. After all, the highlands were bare and riven with hills and valleys that would be excellent for ambushes and the Romans weren’t exactly familiar with it. The Ayyubids could wait until they passed through a choke point and then waylay them. As April turned into May and then into June, the largest Kurdish host of about 10,000 hurried north-west to stalk the path of the invaders. Unfortunately for them, the Romans would reach Arjesh without passing through any such choke point under the right conditions to attack, and Khalil was forced to draw back into the hills and continue waiting for the right moment to attack. This opportunity would never come, as despite the attacks on smaller outlying fortresses and occasionally even columns on the march, Ayyub was unable to provide the dramatic victory which his subordinates desired. Over the following months and years, chieftains and clans would drift away, either making (almost always failed) direct attacks on Roman and Armenian forces or gradually drifting away to the east or to the west.
Meanwhile, boats and ships of all kinds criss-crossed the surface of Lake Van, bringing supplies and reinforcements to the populations huddled behind the string of walled cities that surrounded it. The Romans had no shortage of experience in fighting off hosts of irregular raiders, and with their support the battle-hardened Armenian militias soon began to turn the tide. By the end of the year, most of the lowlands surrounding the lake had been more or less secured, with their defenses varying from place to place in the form of forts or berms or other defenses, always as the first line before the fortified towns. Unlike David’s following wars there would be no climactic victory that decided it all, no great battle where centuries of hostility were poured out onto the field. Instead there would be dozens if not hundreds of smaller battles between individual clans or tribes and the unforgiving steel of the Armenians and their allies. Gradually, lines of fortification would be dug further and further out into the countryside and gradually, one by one or in small clusters the Kurdish clans would be crushed or driven suitably far away and the lands they vacated doled out to Armenians or Romans. There were Kurdish victories, of course, but against the combined weight of the qizilbash and the Romans they lacked the organization and desperation necessary to obtain victory. To a modern audience this seems anticlimactic, but to the Romans and Armenians it was perfectly satisfactory: After all, a decisive victory would have been nice, but as long as the Kurds were no longer a threat it was well enough, and besides, nobody’s ever wanted to be the last guy killed in any war.
By the time the fighting began to subside in 1550, the Romano-Armenians had secured most of the Armenian Highlands, from about Chapaghjur (Bingol) in the west to Gedikbasi in the south-east to about Qaban and the Trans-Aras region in the northeast. A great deal of raiding still occurred, but the bulk of the Kurds had been pushed into the more difficult terrain beyond the region. Now with victory seemingly confirmed, the usual bouts of infighting that followed a major conquest began to loom. Kardashian had never officially declared himself King of Armenia, fearing a sudden Qutlughid resurgence, but he had been treated as such by most of his followers. However, now that the Romans had helped springboard independence and David was making remarks about the importance of ecumenicism in a world where the End of Days and the war against Antichrist could come at any time, the future of the Armenian state, assuming that it even was a proper state now and not a de facto Roman province, which it might have been, or about to become a Roman province, which was a serious possibility, was in doubt. Deciding that the risk of trouble down the road was better than forcing a confrontation now, David and Kardashian sidestepped the issue: Kardashian would be officially titled ‘Satrap’, a title which the Qutlughids had used for both independent tributaries and semi-autonomous governors, and the use of which did little but kick the can down the road.
By 1551, the newly-liberated territories of Armenia were still quite unstable and prone to conflict both internal and external. The logical thing to do would have been to wait and consolidate the gains which had been made there, but by now David had begun his bizarre downward spiral. There would be, no, there could be no waiting. God had set a deadline, and David intended to fulfill it. As the campaign season dawned, the Trapezuntines would cross the mountains and descend into the plains of Syria, overstretching their supply lines and crossing far beyond the realm of good sense….
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[1] ‘Satrap’ was used for both semi-autonomous (and often semi-hereditary) governorships and foreign tributaries.
[2] Evangelos (b.1525) was born in Calvi to one of the exiled Megalokomnenoi dynasts, Markos, and the Phanariot Anna Kantakouzena, and was named as such because his parents feared that they were infertile before his birth. Despite speaking Greek as his birth tongue, the limited Greek population of Calvi meant that he would speak for the rest of his life with a Maniot accent, and consequently did a great deal of fighting in his boyhood in both the Italian and Maniot fashion. After getting involved in a clan feud in 1539, the Kantakouzenoi Megalokomnenoi fled Calvi and went to Trapezous, hoping for a new life in their ancestral homeland. Unfortunately, Markos caught ill and died on the voyage, but because of his death Evangelos was left as the only male Megalokomnenoi in Trapezous upon his arrival. He and David met, found each other tolerable and quite promising, respectively, and afterwards became the heir apparent. Already fluent in Greek and Latin, he learnt Farsi, Turkish, Armenian and Kartvelian as well as the usual education for noblemen of the period, taking well to financial and mathematical topics but little else. By the time of the story he had gained a (correct) reputation for being short-tempered and prone to fits of rage, but otherwise somewhat kind.
David is legitimately crazy at this point. He liberated Armenia, yes, but his current plans are a mere portent for an upcoming disaster for the Romans. The Qutlughids may be weakened by civil war, but they're not pushovers and I feel like he's going to ignore any hope of reason for the sake of this war with the "Antichrist".
This may be one of the few times that I want Mgeli to knock some sense into him, lest he ruin everything that the Trapezuntines have worked for at this point.
This may be one of the few times that I want Mgeli to knock some sense into him, lest he ruin everything that the Trapezuntines have worked for at this point.
Yes, at least there's hope that Trebizond won't be pulled into an even bigger mess once David dies.
He said “Unlike David’s following
wars there would be no climactic victory that decided it all, no great battle where centuries of hostility were poured out onto the field.” So did win a few at least.
" “Unlike David’s following wars there would be no climactic victory that decided it all" its wars not war, so its plural. Therefore David will have atleast one more war after this. From that we can kinda guess he will survive. Unless thats a typo.
A photo of the present day Queen of Armenia. Or Rhoman Empress Consort depending how the timeline goes. I'd also be interested to know how the son of a stonemason founded his own petty kindgdom.
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😂😂😂
A photo of the present day Queen of Armenia. Or Rhoman Empress Consort depending how the timeline goes. I'd also be interested to know how the son of a stonemason founded his own petty kindgdom.
Well...here's hoping that no matter how it ends the Armenians remember that they've got a friend in Trapezeous, sort of, instead of David being regarded by them as yet another in the long line of idiots to try and fail at being Alexander The Great. Or best-case scenario, a tragic death leads to the Armenians thinking of David the same way the Jews think of Cyrus through some revisionism down the line
Eparkhos
Banned
I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but as a foreword to the next bit of writing, I should just say that the next ~5 updates sees the Trapezuntines having an insanely good run of luck, followed shortly thereafter by reality coming crashing down like a tidal wave. I don't want to say anything else out of fear of spoilers, but I hope that this admittedly unlikely string of events doesn't break anyone's immersion, because it's not going to last more than three years before it stops abruptly, leaving them worse off than they were before by a long shot. I'm trying to sort of model the ups and downs of real history while keeping things thematically intact.
@Denliner
Could you PM me what you thought of the draft text?
@Denliner
Could you PM me what you thought of the draft text?
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