Isho the Unlucky – 1320-1342
The son of Niv II, Isho, although fairly talented, was blighted by frequent misfortune. Coming of age in the midst of the Palestinian Wars, he spent more than a decade serving as a lieutenant in his fathers armies. In 1314, at the disastrous battle of Krak de Moab, he was captured by the Shia, aged thirty six. For the next six years the Arabs held him in captivity at a fortress of Tabuk. There he suffered all manner of humiliations, torture and confinement, until his release was finally negotiated as a part of the truce that brought the long running Levantine conflict to and end. Gaunt and weakened, he would rejoin his ageing father in Nineveh in 1320. There would be little time for happy reunions, as conflict began to brew once more within a year of the Crown Prince’s return.
Through the King’s two decades of gruelling campaigning in the west, many of the Assyrian nobility in Mesopotamia had taken the opportunity to pursue their own interests. For some, this had meant small incursions eastward into the power vacuum in Persia. But the largest expansion came in the south east, where Malik Ahai of Basra spearheaded half a dozen campaigns into the Persian Gulf and eastern Arabia. Capitalising on alliances with local Nestorian tribes, Ahai conquered a swathe of land stretching all the way to Qatar, with influence deep into the Arabian Desert. Although angered by the growing Christian presence, local Muslim powers remained too weak and divided to retaliate. This was until the conclusion of the Palestinian Wars in the west. During the conflict the Shia tribes of western Arabia had mobilised thousands of fighters and revived a spirit of holy war. Many of these same ghazi would flock to the east the join the banner of the exiled Caliph Lot, who promised to expel the Assyrians from the Gulf as he embarked on a new Jihad in 1321.
As the Muslims swarmed into the region in their tens of thousands, Malik Ahai’s defences were utterly overwhelmed and he was forced to flee back to Basra while Caliph Lot established a court on the island of Bahrain. As Ahai plead to Nineveh for assistance, Niv donned his battle armour one last time – leading a some twenty thousand men south to face down this new threat. Unfortunately for the battle hardened sovereign, he had woefully underestimated the scale of the threat facing him. After several months of sparring between Muslim and Assyrian forces, the full weight of the Caliph’s power was brought down upon the Hammer at the battle of Avan in 1323. King Niv II, after four and a half decades on the throne – the large majority of which was spent at war, was slain in the field – dying every inch the warrior king. Isho meanwhile failed to prevent the collapse of the Assyrian resistance in the chaotic aftermath of his father’s demise – leading a disorderly retreat back to Basra with the remnants of his army. Now King in his own right, Isho agreed to surrender Assyrian Arabia to the Caliph, sparing Basra but enduring his realm’s largest territorial contraction since the loss of Malabar.
Defeat in war and the death of the respected King Niv II was a mortal blow to the standing of the Assyrian monarchy. Furthermore, the abandonment of the Gulf left the Basrans fearful of their insecurity and abandonment. The realm soon feel into civil war. The rebels were led by a young woman of great power and ambition – Samiyah Karamalish, the Malikah of Edessa. The niece of Ahai of Basra, Samiyah ruled a sprawling domain that snaked from its heartland around her seat of power in Edessa, along the Euphrates and into central Babylonia and the Zagros Mountains. With royal Qatwa blood flowing through her veins from the maternal line, through which she had inherited her southern lands, she claimed the Assyrian crown for himself – promising to restore the primacy of the Mesopotamian heartland, Beth Nahrain, and the Assyrian people.
With the royal army battered from its defeats to the Muslims, Isho was ill equipped to face down Samiyah’s threat. Although success in capturing Basra from Ahai, who had sided with his niece, Isho abandoned attempts to defend Baghdad, allowing it to fall to the rebels, in order to secure Nineveh itself. With the Cumans of Tabriz having remained loyal to the crown, fearing the patriotic rhetoric of the pretender and her followers, Isho pushed back against Samiyah in the east, capturing her territories in the Zagros and fighting a bloody stalemate in central Babylonia. At the same time however, the King lost ground in the west, with the rebels pushing towards Palmyra and Damascus, the Levantine provinces still being too devastated from the Palestinian Wars to adequately defend themselves.
Unable to resolve the conflict on the field of battle, Isho sought a diplomatic solution. In 1326, Isho was forty four. His first wife had borne him three children, including a son – Nechunya, yet she had died of smallpox during his captivity in Tabuk the previous decade and he had never remarried. Meanwhile. Samiyah was twenty five, still in her prime childbearing years, and had not yet found a worthy suitor. Isho’s solution to the intractable civil war was therefore a union between its two protagonists. The King and the Malikah would wed and, most importantly, primacy in the line of succession would be given to any product of their marriage, effectively disinheriting Isho’s eldest son.
Dreams of harmony and internal peace were short lived. Less than two years after their marriage, the Malikah had risen in revolt once again in 1328 – claiming that Isho had failed to consummate their marriage, reneging on their political and matrimonial vows. Although personally humiliating, the King’s military position had strengthened during the interlude of peace and he was able to strike quickly and unwaveringly against his wife – scattering her armies and capturing the Malikah herself in 1329 as she attempted to withdraw behind the high walls of Edessa. With Samiyah captive in a well-guarded turret in Nineveh, away from his allies and influence through the rest of the realm, the civil war was now truly over.
The wave of social and political instability that the Black Death had unleashed across Eurasia had echoes enduring for decades. Perhaps the last great wave of unrest that the plague stimulated came in the Byzantine Empire, which in the first decades of the fourteenth century underwent a painful religious revolution. Greek Orthodoxy had been deeply shaken by the trauma of the attempted union with Rome and the following Byzantine Crusade a century before. For much of the thirteenth century, the Church was wracked by philosophical and theological debates and the rise and ebb of reform movements. The great plague only stimulated this inward looking energy more, providing the backdrop for the emergence of Paulicanism. The Paulicans took inspiration from the earlier Iconoclasts by seeking to strip back Orthodoxy and return to a purer, simpler and less stratified Church. In the early fourteenth century they made their bid for power – seizing control over the Patriarchate in Constantinople against the will of the Emperor in 1304 and setting off decades of religious warfare.
Assyria made an unexpectedly significant intervention into this power struggle in 1332 through a minor border dispute in Syria. Hoping to capitalise on the Greeks’ perceived weakness, the Assyrians occupied the town of Asas – the only Byzantine foothold along the Euphrates. Unwilling to surrender this land without a fight, the Emperor Methodios, a follower of Old Orthodoxy, sailed to Syria to eject the Assyrians. Unfortunately for the Romans, the resulting battle the two sides fought near Hama would be of far greater consequence than the small scrap of land they were fighting to defend. Although the fighting itself was somewhat inconclusive, both sides suffering heavy losses but neither able to decisively claim the field, Edgar, the head of the Varangian Guard and one of the Emperor’s most able allies, was slain on the field while Methodios himself was captured. Although the Basileus was quickly released in exchange for his surrender of Asas and a substantial tribute, his humiliation at Hama would badly shake his prestige and facilitate a Paulician resurgence that would bring down Old Orthodoxy for good.
Isho had not escaped from Hama unscathed either. A wound he sustained to his leg during the fighting duly grew gangrenous, leading to a crude amputation from the court physicians in Nineveh. Badly weakened, Isho would turn to his son, Nechunya, to take on a greater role in governing the realm. Having never forgiven his father for the betrayal of proposed disinheritance through his union with Samiyah the previous decade, Nechunya assumed significant control over his father’s care and would take the opportunity to flowing poison him with mercury and sideline him from the affairs of state – allowing the Prince to assume ever greater control over the realm. By the time Isho finally passed away in 1342 he was almost completely unable to function. So ended a most turbulent of royal lives.
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