Land of Spite – 1395-1413
Throughout the medieval era Assyria, and Mesopotamia in particular, had been one of the richest places in the world. Not only did it sit at the intersection of crucial trade routes, it possessed bountiful agricultural lands that produced large surpluses upon which the Assyrian nation had grown rich. Yet the ecosystem upon which this agrarian foundation was built was very fragile, dependent on complex systems of irrigation and a favourable climatic conditions. The end of the fourteenth century had seen both of these factors undermined, with dire consequences for the realm. The Timurid invasion of the 1390s had badly damaged the region’s crucial agriculture, disrupting several harvests and drastically reducing both the amount of land available for farming and the productivity of that which remained under plough. Worse still, the period around the turn of the century was punctuated by a sustained dry spell – weakening the flow of the two mighty rivers that gave life to the land and allowing for the creeping advance of the desert. Going into the new century, Mesopotamia would be a poorer, hungrier and more unhappy land.
Despite the grandiosity of their incredible feat of turning away Timur and the Jihad, there was little unity or triumphalism in the Assyrian elite. Instead, they were absorbed in regional, personal, ethnic and religious rivalries and power struggles. Having sidelined Manfred di Lorenzo and his Cuman allies in the closing stages of the Jihad, Nestorian Mesopotamian elites – both Assyrian and Arabic – sought to re-establish their dominance over the realm. They pushed out the Catholics who had increasingly intruded into courtly life in Nineveh, importantly reducing the seniority of Cuman chiefs within the military, and placed limits upon the autonomy of the Kingdoms of Philistia and Syria. King Nechunya II, still very young, played little role in these developments – largely allowing policy to be guided by the Church and nobility. Many of the Mesopotamians were eager to continue the fight against the Arabs, aligning with the Nestorian Bedouin tribes of the Gulf to invade Oman and conquer the strategic port city of Muscat in 1399.
The King took a much more active interest in enacting bloody revenge against the Messalians, whose evil had led his elder brother to his terrible fate and still dominated Damascus and Galilee. Indeed, while the Assyrian military fought for the survival of Christendom in the Near East during the latter stages of the war with Timur, the Messalians had launched ambitious raids throughout the Levant – even going to far as to besiege Acre and force its Count to pay a large ransom for them to retreat back to their home territory. Between 1396 and 1400 Nechunya personally oversaw a campaign of repression against the Messalians, recapturing Damascus and their many fortresses and massacring the heretics in their thousands.
What directed Nechunya away from his quest to annihilate his brother’s mutilators was the belief that they were being aid by a foreign power – the Romans. The Byzantines still had one last small fragment of their Syrian province in the exclave port of Tripoli, just to the north of the Messalians’ territory. From here, the Greeks had clandestinely supported the heretics with gold, supplies and sanctuary from where to evade Assyrian forces and plan raids through the rest of the Levant. Frustrated by this support, Nechunya placed the city under siege in 1400 and demanded the Byzantines evacuate the city – expecting the Greeks to withdraw rather that face down a foe that had bested them repeatedly over the last century. Yet rather than give in, the Byzantines, now more united than they had been in generations, declared war and promised to liberate the all Greek Christians of Syria.
Fielding an imposing force, the Assyrians stormed Tripoli and moved to face down the Grecian armies that were making their way through the Cilician Gates. Despite numerical superiority, the Assyrian armies performed unexpectedly poorly on the field – suffering heavy causalities even in victory before running into complete disaster at the Battle of Bile in which the King led his men to almost complete destruction, barely escaping with his own life. After Bile, the Byzantines proceeded to occupy Edessa and then march on Antioch and Aleppo while much of Syria stirred in sympathetic revolt with the invaders. What had begun as an effort to bully a regional rival into a minor territorial concession now posed a greater risk to the Assyrian order in the Syria as a whole.
With the course of the war running poorly, opposition to the King and his command of the military coalesced around Manfred di Lorenzo and the factions who had been pushed to the side over the past decade. Assembling an alliance of Philistians, Cumans and disgruntled Mesopotamian nobles, Manfred demanded that Nechunya surrender control of the prosecution of the war to himself and surrender power and position to his allies. As the King refused and rallied in his Mesopotamian heartlands, the Catholic-led coalition went to war in 1402.
The rebels and loyalists met in the centre of the empire, near the banks of the Euphrates at Tikrit. To the King’s horror he suffered another heavy defeat, the superior command of Manfred and agility of his Cuman cavalry overwhelming Nechunya’s forces. From that point on, the Assyrian realm was essentially divided. In the east, Nechunya continued to rule, while in the west Manfred assumed control and redirected his attentions to deal with the Byzantine threat. The situation grew even graver for Nineveh in 1404 as Timur launched an opportunistic invasion to seize control of Basra, and with it domination of trade through the Persian Gulf, with minimal resistance from the reeling Assyrian authorities.
The loss of Basra, and threat of further Timurid incursions, convinced Nechunya to come to terms with the rebels in 1405 – offering to accept Manfred’s demands, appointing him as his martial, abandoning direct command of the army, restoring the influence of the Cuman chiefs and autonomy of the western Kingdoms. Reunited, two wings of the Assyrian lion joined together against their common Greek enemy. In the years between his victory at Tikrit and end of hostilities with the crown, Manfred and his faction had already stemmed the tide of the Greek advance – quashing sympathetic Syrian rebellions, finally suppressing the Messalians and preventing the Greeks from taking either Aleppo or Antioch. With the support of the King’s men, the Latin lord was able to finally dislodge the Byzantines from Edessa in 1406 and then conduct raids into Cilicia – forcing the Emperor to come to terms, surrendering the largely indefensible port of Tripoli in exchange for peace.
Less than a year after the end of the war with the Byzantines, Nechunya was calling on Manfred to liberate Basra – control of which was crucial to Mesopotamian commerce and Assyrian ambitions in the Gulf and Arabian Seas. Despite uncertainty that the realm had had time to recover from many years of fighting, the Latin general proceeded to march on the city in 1407. Timur had expected an attack at some point, and took personal command of his armies – seeing a chance to avenge the failures of the Jihad in the 1390s – and pinned Manfred to a pitched battle at Al-Najaf where he inflicted a horrendous defeat on the Assyrians. As Manfred scurried north with his survivors, Timur in close pursuit, he chose abandon Baghdad with nothing more than a small garrison in order to regroup in northern Mesopotamia.
With the main Assyrian army withdrawing from the field, Timur hoped to take the shining city of Baghdad, that had eluded him the previous decade, by storm. Hopelessly outnumbered, a young Arab nobleman and Zikri Muslim named Nour Hussein led the defence of the city – holding out against all odds as the great conqueror unleashed a terrifying assault involving ceaseless attacks and, for the first time in Near Eastern history, a new weapon from the east – gunpowder. After several months of fighting an outbreak of cholera forced Timur to break off his siege and withdraw back south to Basra. Baghdad has been saved, and Nour Hussein was elevated to heroic status. With much of the Mesopotamian nobility eager to eject the Catholics from influence, a number of the most powerful Maliks in the realm turned to Nour to lead them forward – providing them with a banner to unite around as they coaxed him to march north from Baghdad. With his army melting away, Manfred attempted to hold back the tide by meeting Nour in battle at Mount Sinjar, but was slain on the field, his army defeated. The humble Babylonian warrior now had the entire empire at his feat.
Even greater fortune awaited the Assyrians. To the south, the outbreak of disease that had forced Timur to withdraw from Baghdad claimed the life of the conqueror himself in 1408. His sprawling empire – stretched from Basra and Baku to Multan and Lahore and from Khiva to the waters of the Indian Ocean – soon began to slide into a succession crisis as his sons squabbled over their father’s inheritance and other local forces sought their chance to restore their freedom. With a grander drama to concern them, the majority of the Timurid army in southern Babylonia withdrew – leaving only a hardy garrison in Basra. Fresh from his victory over Manfred to the north, Nour Hussein marched on the port city and brought it under a long siege – finally reclaiming it in 1410, restoring Assyria’s eastern boundaries.
United and at peace, Assyria desperately needed a period of calm, stability and normality in which it could restore its prosperity of old. Unfortunately for the realm, its King, Nuchunya II, died in 1413 following a bout of flu at the age of thirty three. This left Kingdom in the hands of his only teenage son, Sabrisho’, and a regency headed by his wife, the wily Nazaneed Red-Cheeks who possessed close sympathies with the Muslim tribes of central Babylonia whom she grew up with, and the recently emerged generalissimo Nour Hussein.
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