It is too bad that the Assyrians didn't take the opportunity to secure Persia before the rise of Timur. Very excited to see how (if?) they can weather this storm!
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If we do make it to EU4 Assyria should be in a really interesting position for colonization; we could get quite the empire in the Indian Ocean
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Oh yeah, very much reminds me of the Ottoman relationship to Atjeh. A Assyrian monopoly on Asian trade could be a very profitable buisness
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Poor Isho. Even his wife rebelled against him.
Is Kurdistan independent? Is the reign of Assyria ending or being delayed?
Interested to see how Timur effects things!
Is Kurdistan independent? Is the reign of Assyria ending or being delayed?
Interested to see how Timur effects things!
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The Iron Khan – 1369-1388
The Iron Khan – 1369-1388
The Khazars were among the most consequential people of the Medieval Middle East. In the early twelfth century the Turkic Jewish nation had migrated from their homeland north of the Caspian, outcompeted by fiercer Cuman rivals, to the Sea’s southern shore – settling in a crescent of territory from Tabriz and Baku in the west to Tabaristan in the east. Their invasion brought the Seljuk empire to the verge of collapse – seeing it withdraw from Syria and Mesopotamia and in doing so facilitate the rebirth of Assyria. Ultimately, however, the Turks recovered and eventually reconquered the short-lived Khazar Khanate. Nonetheless, while their polity did not survive, their demographic reconfiguration of northern Persia changed the region permanently.
Under Seljuk rule, the Turks looked to the northern Khazar lands as their most reliable military mustering grounds – allowing a Khazar warrior caste influence right across the Iranian world. It is notable that during this period Khazar society divided, with the western lands around Baku and Tabriz remaining bastions of Judaism, while the tribes in Tabaristan and especially Gilan drifted towards the Sunni Islam of their Turkish masters. After the collapse of the Seljuk empire in the aftermath of the Black Plague, Khazars eagerly joined the squabbling factions fighting for supremacy across Iran – serving every manner of warlord, Emir and Satarap yet failing to join together to create an independent homeland of their own.
The Khazar role in post-Seljuk Persia was disrupted by the Mongols’ brutal conquest of the Caucuses in the mid-fourteenth century. Following the sacred will of their high god Tengri, the Mongols inflicted a systematic slaughter in their conquest of Azerbaijan – massacring the population of Baku and ejecting Khazars from many of the prime grazing sites in the area. The Mongols’ actions drove tens of thousands of Jewish Khazars to flee eastward into Tabaristan, where they fought with and put to the sword many of their ethnic kin who had converted to Islam, and in doing so abandoned the way of the Torah. These Jewish Zealots would continue their conquests far beyond Tabaristan, invading Khorosan and expanding their reach as far north as the rich trading city of Khiva. This was the Zandid empire, the greatest Jewish Kingdom since the fall of the Temple.
While the Zandids were an imposing power in their own right, history would remember them more for the enemies they made than their own feats. One of these was a young Sunni Muslim Khazar named Timur. Hailing from Tabaristan, he had seen his family slaughtered as a teenage boy and fled south, into Persia to escape the Jewish horde. There, he fought as a bandit and mercenary at the services of the feuding fiefs of the region. In 1362 he seized control of the city of Rayy for himself and soon became a beacon for the Sunni faithful throughout Iran. By the fourteenth century Sunni Islam was in a sorry state. Most of the Middle East had fallen to the Christians – from Egypt to the Levant and Mesopotamia. In Persia, the Jewish Zandids ran rampant while Zoroastrianism was still widespread and a powerful political force. More concerning, a heretical Islamic movement known as Zikrism had swept through the country – upturning the authority of the Sunni elite and capturing the hearts of millions. Timur presented himself as the restorer of Islam and Iranian civilisation and the liberator of the Muslim Khazars.
In 1362 he invaded the Zandid empire, triggering a mass revolt of the Muslims of Tabaristan against Jewish rule. The next six years were consumed by an existential struggle. At his lowest point, Timur fled into the desert with a few dozen retainers – surviving for days in the scorching sun, with little water and being forced to drink the blood of their horses to survive before being rescued by a friendly caravan of Turks. Yet, once he had gained the upper hand, Timur showed no mercy – massacring entire Jewish tribes, and targetting cities for complete destruction if they refused to turn themselves over to him. By 1368, the Zandids were no more and Persia had a new power.
The Jewish Khanate was only the beginning. From the dawn of the 1370s, Timur embarked on a blistering set of expeditions across Persia – south towards the Isfahan, Shiraz and the Gulf, west to liberate Mongol-ruled Baku and north into central Asia. During this orgy of expansion, the Iron Khan marched against the Assyrian exclave in Tabriz in 1376. The region, although largely populated by Khazars, Persians and Kurds, was dominated by a Cuman warrior class and been the centre of their powerbase in Assyria for decades. As the Timurids entered the territory, the Cuman Khan sent a plea for aid to Nineveh. However, at the time King Niv III was focussed on affairs in the Levant. Indeed, with much of his court was inherently suspicious of the Cumans, and there were those in the capital who believed the loss of Tabriz would strengthen rather than weaken the realm by reducing their influence. With no aid forthcoming, the Cumans of Tabriz duly abandoned their loyalties to Assyria, and accepted Timur as their master.
While the mid-fourteenth century saw the reunification of Persia under Timurid leadership, the Byzantines similarly moved beyond a long period of internal division and conflict. The unending religious struggle between the Paulician reformers and the traditionalists of Old Orthodoxy was finally ended by emperor Leo IX. A Paulician, he not only crushed his internal enemies but for the first time in generations extended Byzantium’s borders outwards. In the north he destroyed the Bulgarian Khanate, that had united Cuman dominions on the Danube and in Anatolia, extending the northern frontier beyond even the great river itself, while also waging successful campaigns in southern Italy – a region that had been slowly slipping out of the Greek world.
Not all were satisfied with this restoration. In Byzantine Syria, ironically one of the greatest hotbeds of popular Paulicianism but one in which the nobility were implacably hostile to the new religious regime, the general Michael Kantakouzenos rebelled and took most of the province with him in 1375. It was this crisis that absorbed Assyrian attention while Timur’s armies swept through Persia and seized Tabriz. In the following years, the Assyrians, eager to further cement their domination of the Levant, acted as fierce guardians of Kantakouzenos against Constantinople’s desires to restore its control – ultimately absorbing his domains into the Kingdom of Syria in 1380 in exchange for wealth, religious guarantees and influence in the north western portion of the Assyrian realm.
By the late fourteenth century, the culture of the heartland of the Assyrian realm in Mesopotamia was in the midst of drastic transformation around three key features: the expansion of the use of the Syriac language, an even broader growth in the Church of the East and finally, and most interestingly, the emergence of a shared cultural identity across the diverse peoples of the region that appealed beyond language, ethnicity and sect.
First among these factions, onward march of the ethno-linguistic core of the empire – the Assyrians. When Saint Ta’mhas established the embers of an Assyrian state, his people were a small minority in Mesopotamia, and an even more marginal force across the wider Middle East. Yet in the following centuries, the revival of their culture and status of Syriac as the prestige language of a mighty Kingdom led to a complete reversal of hundreds of years of Arabisation. By the late fourteenth century, Assyrian was the majority language and ethnic identity of the peoples of northern Mesopotamia from Palmyra and Edessa in the west to Irbil in the east. Its influence had extended southwards as well. Indeed, Syriac had overtaken Arabic as the most spoken language in Baghdad – albeit with the city remaining polyglot den of a dozen major languages at least. Further south, Arabic had remained dominant, although the minority Syraic speaking-community had grown. In the more recently acquired, and legally distinct, Levantine Kingdoms of Syria and Philistia, Syriac was a notably weaker force – with scarcely any cultural imprint in the Holy Land, but a rather strong influence in Syria, particularly in the major cities.
The second string to the land’s cultural transformation was religion. In the western territories, the Church of the East had made a weaker imprint. In Syria, the areas east of the Euphrates had been heavily Assyrianised, bringing with it a strong Nestorian character while the Church had also had some success in the area around Damascus. Yet it remained a more marginal force – far outweighed by the power of Catholicism in Philistia and the strength of a scattering of other, mostly Greek-rite, Christian denominations in Syria. The situation was very different in Mesopotamia. There, the Church was assuming an increasingly dominant, and unifying, position. The growing Assyrian-speaking communities were naturally solidly Nestorian, yet the Church had achieved great success in expanding its appeal beyond its ethnic core. From the thirteenth century Basra had emerged as the heart of an Arabic Nestorian tradition, distinct from the Syriac-speaking core to the north that helped to drive the Church’s missionary efforts yet further. Similarly, the Kurds had been drawn towards the Church in very large numbers – with only those tribes who lived closer to the Zagros Mountain range maintaining their Islamic roots. By the 1380s, Islam – divided between sizeable Shia, Sunni and Zikri communities within Mesopotamia – was a fading force, attracting a majority of the population only in a band of territory between Baghdad and Basra.
Building upon the foundations of the growing prestige and weight of Syriac culture and Nestorian religion, a blended culture was emerging in Mesopotamia that unified Assyrians, Arabs and Jews into the core of a Mesopotamian identity.
Away from the sphere of culture, to the relief of the Middle Eastern world, the rapacious conqueror Timur turned his gaze away from the Near East following the consolidation of his power in Persia in the 1360s and 1370s. Instead, he moved east – extending his power over Afghanistan and then into the teeming lands of northern India. His victories had done much to reinvigorate the Sunni world, and solidify the authority of the Sulayman Sunni Caliph in Mecca – whose empire was spread across Arabia, Oman and Upper Egypt. As the 1380s worse on, the Caliph became consumed with the dream of using the Khazar warlord’s military power to smash down the Christian empires of the Middle East and restore Islam’s supremacy over the old lands of the Rashidun Caliphs. Coaxing Timur to move away from his warring in the rich lands of India, the Caliph formed a pact with him to join together in a holy Jihad to destroy the Assyrian empire. In 1388, Assyria found itself caught in a Jihadi pincer between Timur in the east and the Muslim Arabs in the south that threatened its very existence.
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The Assyrians need a friend to help against the evil Jihadists. Thank you for updating
So I actually ended up manually triggering the event for Timur in this game as he wasn't coming on his own and I felt we needed some late game spice to keep things interesting. That led to him being a Muslim Khazar - so a different than usual backstory! It's taken a little while for him to come for us, but now we are facing a Sunni Jihad against a fairly beefy Arab Caliph to the south and mighty Timur himself in the east. In game they are targetting the Kingdom of Iraq (Babylonia to you and me!) - the loss of which would wrench out the heart of my empire - including Baghdad and Basra.
We lost Tabriz without much of a fight at all. Now is the real test.
And the time for warring is now! Even if we can survive the coming onslaught, the Byzantines finally getting their act together after a very long time of internal chaos and external weakness should be another medium to long term worry in terms of the powers encroaching around us. It's been a long time since they were so united a force.
After a period with only minimal warfare - abandoning Tabriz with little fight and managing to take most of what remained of Byzantine Syria (outside of Tripoli) without having to fight a major war. But now the vultures are swooping in.
In terms of retinue, the Assyrian monarchs are actually fairly weak - with a much smaller core retinue than would be expected for a realm so large. We have become heavily reliant on using our wealth to pay to roll out the Cumans at times of war, they acting as a core to an army then filled with feudal levies on the side.
He turned out to be a Khazar! But the rest of this description was quite accurate. He has reunited the Turco-Persian world into an empire at least as strong as the Seljuks were and, with his revivalist Sunni faith, has allies in the remnant of the Muslim world. Let us see if he can restore what once was.
Only time will tell if we can hold on against what is about to come, and if we do what the consequences will be.
We've been swept entirely out of Persia now with the loss of Tabriz coming not long after the Kurdish revolt. With Timur there now, it will be very hard to return anytime soon, even if the coming horde can be held back.
Now I don't want to jinx anything as this is almost exactly where we got to in the Persian AAR before my computer destroyed everything - but I have converted the game to EU4. So long as nothing goes wrong we will continue into the new era. And yes, the Indian Ocean is very interesting - particularly with our historic links to India.
In game, I received a rebellion for the Kingdom title of Persia. Almost all of my provinces in that region were Kurdish, and the state that emerged was Kurdish too. So certainly an independent Kurdistan of sorts - although they actually had the Persian King-tier title. Timur, of course, wiped them away just as he did the short-lived Jewish Khanate (which had actually replaced a Zoroastrian Satrapy that ruled in Khorosan for a few decades in that post-Seljuk interregnum).
We lost Tabriz without much of a fight at all. Now is the real test.
And the time for warring is now! Even if we can survive the coming onslaught, the Byzantines finally getting their act together after a very long time of internal chaos and external weakness should be another medium to long term worry in terms of the powers encroaching around us. It's been a long time since they were so united a force.
After a period with only minimal warfare - abandoning Tabriz with little fight and managing to take most of what remained of Byzantine Syria (outside of Tripoli) without having to fight a major war. But now the vultures are swooping in.
In terms of retinue, the Assyrian monarchs are actually fairly weak - with a much smaller core retinue than would be expected for a realm so large. We have become heavily reliant on using our wealth to pay to roll out the Cumans at times of war, they acting as a core to an army then filled with feudal levies on the side.
He turned out to be a Khazar! But the rest of this description was quite accurate. He has reunited the Turco-Persian world into an empire at least as strong as the Seljuks were and, with his revivalist Sunni faith, has allies in the remnant of the Muslim world. Let us see if he can restore what once was.
Only time will tell if we can hold on against what is about to come, and if we do what the consequences will be.
We've been swept entirely out of Persia now with the loss of Tabriz coming not long after the Kurdish revolt. With Timur there now, it will be very hard to return anytime soon, even if the coming horde can be held back.
Now I don't want to jinx anything as this is almost exactly where we got to in the Persian AAR before my computer destroyed everything - but I have converted the game to EU4. So long as nothing goes wrong we will continue into the new era. And yes, the Indian Ocean is very interesting - particularly with our historic links to India.
In game, I received a rebellion for the Kingdom title of Persia. Almost all of my provinces in that region were Kurdish, and the state that emerged was Kurdish too. So certainly an independent Kurdistan of sorts - although they actually had the Persian King-tier title. Timur, of course, wiped them away just as he did the short-lived Jewish Khanate (which had actually replaced a Zoroastrian Satrapy that ruled in Khorosan for a few decades in that post-Seljuk interregnum).
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The jihad might actually be a lucky break. You can win a losing jihad by converting, but there's no such escape valve from a regular invasion. Hopefully it won't come to that, though.
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I shudder at the sight of the powerful enemies of Niv. As I am sure he is too.
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Timur is a great threat, but he is only one man. An assassination should solve the problem nicely.
If Timur is gone, I imagine that the Jewish Khazars and the Kurds would like to restore their independence - and maybe get revenge.
If Timur is gone, I imagine that the Jewish Khazars and the Kurds would like to restore their independence - and maybe get revenge.
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I had been excited by the possibility of a Jewish Timur. I guess as an Islamic it would serve just as well as a steamroller.
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I can't help but wonder if the loss of such a Cuman stronghold might actually strengthen Assyria as postulated in removing a rival power center- that is, if we survive this clash of titans in a position to consolidate that power
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Still working my way through the last few chapters, Tommy, but I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I've nominated you for the Character WritAAR of the Week award!
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Caught up with the last few chapters at last. After a couple of very poor monarchs, one historically unlucky and one just plain bad, the arrival of Timur adds late game spice and then some! Let's hope Nineveh isn't left to face the pincer all alone…
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The Khan, the Caliph and the Bishop – 1388-1395
The Khan, the Caliph and the Bishop – 1388-1395
In the opening stages of the war the Arabs of the Sulaymans Caliphate quickly overran the Persian Gulf region, while a large Timurid army brought Basra under siege – seeking to cut Assyria off entirely from the eastern seas. King Niv III spent some time gathering a large force from every corner of his empire, more than thirty thousand strong, to confront the looming threat. In 1389, the Assyrians faced down the Timurid threat around the walls of the southern city and completely overwhelmed them. In this moment of glory, everything seemed possible and Niv deployed probing attacks into the Gulf to regain the territories lost from the Arabs, suffering heavy casualties but regaining Bahrain and Qatar.
Despite the failures of his vanguard in the opening stages of the war, Timur possessed nearly endless resources to continue the fight. In 1390 he crossed over into Mesopotamia personally and moved against the Assyrian capital itself. After storming Irbil, he lured Niv III into bringing the largest part of his army north to protect Nineveh – forcing him into an open engagement. The two armies clashed at the Battle of Bartella just outside the city. As the Assyrians launched into a headstrong frontal assault against his army, Timur skilfully manoeuvred his cavalry to outflank his opponent. With the Assyrian Cumans unable to counter Timur’s Khazar riders, Niv’s army found itself surrounded and quickly fell into disorder. The King himself was cut down in the fighting, adding to the confusion – with the fallen sovereign's generals saving the realm from utter disaster by organising a flight from the field. While Assyria’s armies holed themselves into their walled cities and citadels, Timur unleashed his armies on the riches of Mesopotamia – ravaging the countryside from north to south and plundering whatever lightly defended towns and cities he could. Meanwhile, in Nineveh, Niv III’s sixteen year old son Eliya was crowned King of a nation in the depths of crisis.
With focus fixed on the battlefronts in the Mesopotamia, there were worrying developments in the west. The Messalians had first come to prominence in the anarchic period that follow the Black Plague in the late thirteenth century. In the social tumult of the era the populist religious movement rebelled against Nestorian orthodoxy with a creed that rejected clerical hierarchy, advocated redistribution and social revolutionary change and was intensely anti-Semitic. At its peak, it rocked Assyria to its core – its militants capturing Nineveh and infamously executing King Moqli in 1279, holding onto a burgeoning realm in the Assyrian heartland for the next decade before being defeated by King Niv the Hammer. In the aftermath of their defeat, Niv persecuted the movement to near extinction – wiping it out in Mesopotamia, with only a small band of Messalians escaping along a treacherous journey through the Syrian Desert. This exodus led them to the area north of the Sea of Galilee and west of Damascus, where they built a new home. From this seedling community, through the following century the Messalians actively spread their faith through the region, winning over scores of converts from other Christian denominations and Muslims alike among the local Arab population, despite a perennially testy relationship with the state and reigning elites. By the late fourteenth century, they formed a plurality of the population in Damascus and a majority in around their core bases to the west
While Timur ravaged Mesopotamia, the Messalians seized their opportunity to rise up in rebellion shortly after Eliya’s ascension in 1390, under the leadership of their spiritual master – Bishop Nuraddin. Although Messalian doctrine had evolved over the past century, with anti-Semitism in particularly fading in significance after the movement’s transplantation away from the Mesopotamia and its multitudinous Jewish communities, it remained a radical proposition. With no local force able to contain them, the zealots stormed Damascus and began seizing wealth and property, slaughtering merchants, nobles and minorities and in the countryside seeking to redistribute land to the faithful. Unable to dislodge Timur from Mesopotamia, the teenage King chose to divert his army to Syria to deal with the Messalian challenge and secure his position in the Levant. This campaign met with some early successes, with the powerful royal army retaking Damascus and driving forcing the largest part of their army into the Lebanese Mountains.
It was in a naive pursuit of the Messalians around Mount Hermon in 1392 that Eliya’s entire life came crashing down. Trapped in the high passes, his army was ambushed by the heretics and King himself captured. Subjected to horrific torture for months, Bishop Nuraddin agreed to his release on a number of conditions: the surrender of Damascus and recognition of a Messalian state under his leadership, the payment of a large sum of gold, Eliya’s promise that all persecutions of Messalianism in Assyria would cease and, as a final act of humiliation, Nuraddin would take the King’s eyes – acting upon a mystical belief among the Messalians that an individual’s eyes were a window into their soul, whether they remained in their skull or not. Still just eighteen years old, the tormented King Eliya had his eyes crudely gouged out in a dusty rebel stronghold, before being released to make his return to Nineveh.
Eliya did not reach as far as his capital. Instead he was intercepted near Palmyra by one of his generals, the Latin nobleman Manfred di Lorenzo. Under Manfred’s custody the King, deemed utterly unsuitable to rule in his pitiful state was killed by a hammer blow to the head and his fifteen year old younger brother named King Nechunya II under a military junta headed by Manfred. The wider strategic situation was dire but not insurmountable for the Assyrians. In the west, the Messalians were causing chaos through the Levant, yet lacked the means to hold territory beyond their fledging state. In the east, although Timur had reaped incalculable destruction throughout Mesopotamia he had failed to capture Baghdad, Nineveh or Samarra – his greatest prize being the port city of Basra, with the Arabs having occupied the Persian Gulf. Most crucially of all, in 1391 war had broken out in the Indus Valley between the Timurids and their Indian foes, leading to Timur taking taking a large part of his army with him away from the Middle East to confront this threat.
Regrouping Assyria’s armies after the disastrous Messalian campaign, Manfred led his forced into Mesopotamia – seeking to regain control of the countryside from marauding Khazar raiders who had despoiled the land for years. With the Muslims weaker than they had been for years, the Assyrian counterattack found quick success, pushing the invaders out of north and central Mesopotamia following a number of small battlefield victories.
At this stage the unity of the Assyrian camp began to waver. Manfred, closely aligned with the Cumans – his Catholic co-religionists, wanted to lead the army west to crush the Messalians, while Nestorian cabal included the Mesopotamian nobility and the military-religious Order of Saint Addai wished to continue the campaign in the east. In the end, Manfred was forced out – the Latin leaving the royal army behind to take a band of Levantine troops with him into the west – and Malik Amin of Samarra, a close ally of the Patriarch who had served in the Holy Order in his youth, took control of the army.
The tired Assyrian army marched into the south and won a crucial victory north of Basra against a mixed Arab-Timurid army in 1394. With the Khan’s attentions now absorbed far to the east, there was little prospect for another major force to be deployed against Mesopotamia. The Sunni Caliph was on his own. Fighting continued for another year as the Assyrians probed the Gulf, attempting to re-establish control over the coastal regions and rouse the Christian tribes of the region to their banner once more. Finally, the two exhausted parties reached a truce in 1395. The Jihad had failed. Mesopotamia was unconquered. Yet Assyria’s western provinces remained in turmoil.
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We ended up managing to hold them at bay on our own, well, perhaps with a little help from the Indians. They certainly owed us after what happened to Malabar!
We were saved here by the Timurids perhaps never fully committing. In game they sent in one large army at a time rather than overwhelmingly me with a single massive force. Although I had to trade land for time at moments (especially during that disastrous war with the Messalians) - this allowed me to stay in the fight and eventually land a knockout blow (if a White Peace can be considered a knock out!) after their armies started to drift off to the east.
And who was to know that perhaps our greatest foe in this war would be the enemy within! With the Messalians causing almost as much chaos on their own as Timur did during his invasion.
We didn't need an assassin, only the geopolitics of controlling a sprawling empire with rivalries thousands of miles apart to prevent him from landing on us with his full strength. This is not to say that Timur, or a successor, will not come again
. Their empire is huge at this point, Jewish Khazars, Persians of many faiths (Sunnis, Zikris, Zoroastrians and even some Buddhists and Hindus), the Kurds, Indians, Turks, Pashtuns. The list goes on! It will not be easy to hold that collective together.
I did consider whether to have Timur spawn in as a Jewish Khazar, but part of me feels that CK2 always massively weakens the Muslims and they needed someone who could lead a resurgence.
This was indeed an important moment. There are still many Cumans in Assyria - chiefly in Assyria-proper in northern Mesopotamia and in Philistia - but their numbers and their coherence as a unit is greatly weakened by the loss of Tabriz, which had served effectively as their capital within the empire for some time now. We shall see whether they can continue to exert the sort of telling influence over the realm as they have for the past century and a half.
Still working my way through the last few chapters, Tommy, but I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I've nominated you for the Character WritAAR of the Week award!
Thank you Densley! I will make sure to find a good candidate to pass it onto.
And we managed to fit another variety of Kings into this latest update. The very ill fated Eliya, the untested Nechunya and perhaps the unfortunate Niv III.
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Turn the Messalian strongholds into pillars of salt. For blinding a king, I propose a hundred Messalian eunuchs and may their wives give birth to good Nestorian children. Thank You
Leaving aside the ethics of revenge in general or disproportionate revenge in particular, martyring people has historically proven to be a fairly ineffective method of suppresing a religious minority.
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A bitter, pyrrhic victory against the Jihad, and there's still a possiblity that Timur might intend to finish what the Jihad failed to do once he is done with his campaigns in India. Things are looking really hectic for the kingdom, no doubt there will be those who desire retribution for what the Messalians did to the king's brother.
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