In the Shadow of the Ancients - An Assyrian AAR, Part Two

[Idhrendur]

What a reign. Despite that bloody war, Assyria is much better off. Here's hoping this trend continues.

 

[HistoryDude]

This civil war could prove disastrous, especially if other powers (like the Timurids or Byzantium) interfere...

Turning on the merchants - the people who manage money - is an amazing idea. It's not like it could lead to a huge decline in trade or anything.

 

[HIMDogson]

honestly it'd be pretty funny if assyria colonized some of the americas via south africa

 

[Ix:Risor]

A swing in the federalist direction, perhaps while retaining some of the more advantageous elements of the current government (such as a more centralized army), seems to me ideal at this stage. Still, it looks like a civil war is on the horizon, and I imagine this will not be the first fought over this issue. I would not be surprised if the political alignments we see developing now lay the foundations for partisanship much further down the line.

 

[TWR97]

hurtling towards civil war.

And here I thought that was Byzantium's gig. Geez another civil war on the horizon huh?

 

[Tommy4ever]

1627-1642 Royalists and Federalists​

At the death of King Yeshua in 1627, Assyria was immediately confronted with its gravest constitutional crisis since the Marian Revolution. The King’s deathbed decision to unilaterally dictate a new hereditary succession law, removing the Majlis’ last major political power, left the Four Kingdoms on an unstoppable path to conflict. After his uncle’s death, Gurgen Amarah declared himself King and received the backing of powerful members of the military, royal administration and Nestorian religious hierarchy.

Despite this, the Majlis was determined not to lay down without a fight. In the days after Yeshua’s death its aristocratic membership met in Nineveh to debate the succession and the legitimacy of the new succession law. The sitting was intense, angry and violent, involving brawls between rival factions and even seeing blood drawn in the chamber. Nonetheless, a clear majority of the Majlis rejected the new succession law and Gurgen’s claim to the throne and called for a new royal election. Conflict was now inevitable and had already started to spill out into the streets, with lines of ethnicity, religion and political affiliation blurring into inter communal violence across the diverse cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant. For two tense weeks there was a stand off, with Gurgen inhabiting the royal palace just outside the capital while the Federalist-controlled Majlis sat within the city with both sides rejecting the other as usurpers.

It would be Gurgen who would strike to break the deadlock in an act of shocking violence and barbarity. Having retained the loyalty of military leadership, he sought to stamp his authority by force of arms. A royal guard of elite Cuman troops – famed for the martial skill and violence – was sent into Nineveh, to restore order and crush the opposition of the Majlis. While many Federalists fled the city at the sight of the oncoming Cumans, a large portion of the Majlis’ members remained in place and prepared to protect the assembly building. Bombarded by cannons and overwhelmed by superior numbers, these Federalists were soon defeated. On the orders of Gurgen, the captured members of the Majlis were forced to either recognise him as their King or face execution. Dozens chose to hold on to their ideals, they were to a man beheaded and their heads paraded through the streets of Nineveh atop the Cumans’ pikes.

The horrors in Nineveh, and the fear that the light of Assyrian liberty was very nearly dead, led to a regathering of Federalist strength in the city of Aleppo in northern Syria. There, a Rump Majlis was convened by those who had escaped Nineveh, or been out of the capital at the time of the massacre, and various other oppositionists. Carrying out a royal election, they proclaimed the Malik of Antioch, Davit Shoana as King. Davit was a wizened and experienced opponent of Yeshua for decades, having long resisted the slow demise of Syria’s autonomy and the traditional dominance of the Greek Christians within it. As a Paulician, he was the standard bearer of Greek Christianity within Assyria and possessed close relationships with Constantinople to the west. Raising the flag of revolt, Shoana quickly found extensive support across Syria and western Armenia. But his most important allies in this early stage of the civil war were in the Persian Gulf.

While the traditional centres of Federalist power in the north and west closely aligned to Davit Shoana, another centre of opposition to growing power of the monarchy in Nineveh had emerged in the Gulf. There, the mercantile communities of Basra and Muscat – the conduits between the Middle East and the wider Assyrian colonial empire – were hostile to the monarchy’s interference in commercial and colonial affairs. Their interests intersected with independent mindedness of the Arab tribes of Gulf – both Christian and Muslim – and the inclinations of many southern nobles. This alliance of interests was completed when the general Gosdantin Pappa, previously stationed in Muscat, defected to the rebel cause to take control of its eastern front. Advancing from his Omani base and attracting tribal support as he went, Pappa captured Basra at the dawn of 1628 without resistance – effectively severing the Royalists from the empire – before defeating one of Gurgen’s armies a the Battle of Wasit just south of Baghdad in the spring.

Pappa’s impressive achievements in the south east were not matched by Shoana’s armies in the north west. In the Levant, the Federalists found stiffer resistance in southern Syria – settling into a long siege of Damascus from the middle of 1627, while the presence of Royalist troops in Philistia kept the restive coastal Latin nobility from throwing in their lot with the Federalist cause. To the east, Shoana had hoped to capture Edessa as a first step towards reclaiming Nineveh itself, but suffered heavy losses and was forced to withdraw in early 1628. Meanwhile, in eastern Armenia, both factions competed for the support of the strategic Oriental Orthodox Armenian communities around Lake Van. Playing on traditional suspicious of Byzantine influence, Gurgen was able to win other the Lake Van Armenians and use their support to harry the Federalists on their northern flank.

Having been crashed upon by a wave of rebellion, Gurgen and his Royalists struck back strongly from the end of 1628. Since his victory at Wasit earlier in the year, Gosdantin Pappa had prevented an existential threat to the Royalist cause – capable of sowing dissent, threatening Baghdad and launching raids throughout Mesopotamia. Gathering all their strength, the Royalists sought to counter this danger once and for all – pinning Pappa to a single decisive battle against an army twice his number. The Royalists’ losses were horrendous, yet the Federalist army in the south east was completely annihilated and Pappa himself captured and executed. Undefended, the lords and cities that had raised the banner of revolt soon switched their allegiances to the new King in Nineveh rather than face his wrath, even as many tribes in the Gulf continued their resistance – crucially giving Gurgen access to the riches of the colonies.

After their successes in the Gulf, the Royalists turned westwards to the demoralised core of the Federalist cause in Syria and western Armenia. Damascus had been under siege since the early stages of the war in 1627 and the city became the focus of the next stage of the conflict as Gurgen’s armies, depleted from the bloody campaign in Assyria-Inferior, sought to relieve the city. The siege became a battle of will and attrition, with starvation afflicted both its Royalist defenders and the Federalist besiegers while harrying efforts to break the siege proved indecisive. In early 1630, after three long years, typhoid hit the Federalist army outside the city and forced it to withdraw towards northern Syria. Exhilarated by this momentous step, the Royalists attacked aggressively and won a series of victories in Armenia and Syria – pushing the Federalists to the brink of oblivion.

With defeat appearing inevitable, Davit Shoana sent a plea for assistance to the Roman Emperor, his co-religionist in Constantinople. Seeing the opportunity to reshape Assyria and place it under his own influence, the Byzantine Emperor eagerly accepted the request. Before the end of the year tens of thousands of Byzantine troops were streaming into Assyrian lands, joining with the remnants of the Federalist army to turn back to the tide of Royalist advance. Already exhausted from years of civil war, Gurgen had little hope of holding back the Byzantines on his own and in early 1631 appealed to his own ally – the Great Timurid Khan in Isfahan, reminding him of the wars his uncle Yeshua had fought alongside the Persians and Khazars.

The war was now a civil war overlayered by a grand international conflict. The cataclysmic battle of this phase of the conflict took place at Bitlis, near Lake Van in eastern Armenia, in 1632 as an army of Byzantines and Federalists faced Timurids and Royalists led by King Gurgen himself. It was a great triumph for the Timurid-Royalist army – which crushed their enemies in the field and paved the way for a hectic retreat towards Anatolia. But King Gurgen himself, over whose succession so much blood had been spilt over the past five years, was cut down in battle.

Fearing the splintering of their faction, the allies of the slain King quickly proclaimed his ten year old son as Yeshua II, forming a regency council led by the dowager Queen-Mother Berjouhi. With the backing of the Nestorian Patriarch, the military leadership and their Timurid allies, Berjouhi would maintain a smooth transition from her husband to her son while the fighting continued unabated in the west.

In truth, victory at Nitlis had given the Royalist-Timurid faction a decisive advantage. With the manpower of Persia, the Indus and Central Asia, the Timurids were able to recover from defeats from which the Byzantines could not, and the Romans found themselves incapable of holding back the tide after the battle. Over the course of the next two years the Timurids and their Assyrian allies swept the last remains of Federalist strongholds from Armenia and Syria and pushed deep into Byzantine Anatolia.

In the spectacular conclusion to the war in 1634, the mutiny of Greek sailors tasked with defending the Dardanelles Strait allowed a contingent of Assyrian and Timurid soldiers to cross over from Asia Minor into Thrace and attack a barely defended Constantinople from the west. Having failed to prepare the city for attack, the Byzantines were taken by surprise. Coming under intense artillery bombardment from both east and west, the city’s defences buckled and for the first time in its thirteen centuries of history Constantinople fell under the occupation of a foreign army. This catastrophe was a grave humiliation, yet the Greeks were fortunate that their enemies were eager for a quick peace. Rebellions among the Turkic tribes of Central Asia had distracted Timurid attention, while the Assyrian Royalists were long since exhausted. Neither were truly capable of maintaining control of Constantinople should the Romans attempt to recapture it. The peace with the Greeks was therefore unexpectedly light. The Timurids annexed some further territories in Georgia – including an outlet to the Black Sea, Davit Shoana and the remaining Assyrian Federalists who had joined the Byzantines in their retreat across Anatolia were surrendered to the regime in Nineveh, and a hefty tribute in gold was paid to the Great Khan.

Queen-Regent Berjouhis was among the most significant women in Assyrian history, tasked as she was with shaping the Four Kingdom’s future beyond the civil war. To the consternation of many hardliners in the Royalist camp who craved vengeance and a Nestorian ascendancy, Berjouhis cut a conciliatory figure. She offered amnesty to former Federalists who accepted her son as King, and rejected calls for the seizure of rebel land and properties. However, the new political settlement was unmistakably Royalist and absolutist. The Majlis, closed in gruesome fashion by her husband in 1627, was not to be reconvened, the principle of hereditary succession was secure, the assemblies of the constituent Kingdoms were left as little more than ceremonial gatherings while real power shifted to centrally appointed governors. The Queen-Regent also set out to implement an ambitious reform of the law across Assyria – seeking to simplify a system that was esoteric, patch-work and inconsistent – varying not only from Kingdom to Kingdom but from city to city and fief to fief. The new Assyrian code reaffirmed traditional rights of religious liberty, including for non-Christian groups – frustrating some Nestorian radicals – and created a much less arbitrary system than had previously existed.
In the royal court in Nineveh, the Regent attempted to balance the different factions of the victorious Royalist cause against one another. There were moderates like herself, Nestorian ecclesiastical extremists, proponents of untrammelled absolute monarchy, critics and defenders of the alliance with the Timurids. One of the key areas these groups competed was for influence over the education of the King - with a mixture of tutors given access to the royal person during these formative years of his adolescence.

Far away from the Assyrian metropole, the Cape colony faced a time of unprecedented difficulty. Having grown rapidly in the decades around the turn of the century, late 1620s brought this progress to an abrupt halt. Civil war in Assyria cut short the flow of new settlers to the colony, while the disruption it caused to trade ravaged the colony’s economy. Worst was yet to come. Between 1631 and 1634, Southern Africa was hit by an epidemic of deadly Roman Fever. The disease, brought to the region by European traders, claimed the lives of up to a quarter of the Middle Eastern population of the Cape Colony, leading to the abandonment of towns, farms, and mines. To add insult to injury, the retraction of Assyrian military power from the region while war raged in the Middle East had allowed the Kingdom of Egypt – now a Latin state based around Tunis and Tripoli – established a colonial foothold of its own in the region around Natal. The Latins would seek to use this new outpost to offer an alternative waystation for Europeans to enter markets of the Indian Ocean, undermining the Assyrian monopoly of the trading lanes through the Cape of Good Hope.

In the Indies, the Assyrian colonial empire had been largely territorially stable for some decades, with societies based upon trade, plantation agriculture and economic extraction developing on Western Sumatra, Sulawesi and Eastern Borneo. On the southern corner of Sumatra, the Assyrians scored a diplomatic coup in the 1630s through their engagement with the Hindu kingdom of Palembang. Assyrian influence had been strong in the area for some time, with the Hindu state a safe harbour for merchants moving between the Moluccan territories to the east and the both Sumatra and the wider Indian Ocean world to the west. In 1637, civil war broke out on the island between the two sons of the deceased king – Trau-Lha and Trenggana. Fearing for his inheritance, Trau-Lha called upon the Assyrians to aid him, and an army was dispatched to the Kingdom in 1638, aiding Trau-Lha in securing his throne. However, there would be a price to this victory and the new King was forced to agree to a raft of economic and political concessions. The Assyrian troops would never leave. Palembang was in effect, a vassal state.

In 1642, Yeshua II, now aged 22, finally assumed his full royal duties from his mother and regent. The inheritor of the legacy of the civil war, he would wield more unrestrained power than any of his predecessors going back centuries.

 

[Tommy4ever]

A good old fashioned bloody civil war to decide the fate of the realm. The in game explanation for this is that we were still an elective monarchy up to the death of Yeshua I, Davit Shoana was very briefly elected as his replacement before I took a government reform that turned us into a hereditary monarchy once again - which led to a succession war. The Byzantine conflict happened around the same time, we bring the stories together in the AAR.

Oh my, he had a good reign, but 34 years just was too short. The Federalist cause leads to disaster, but the king got too soft at the end. Now to see if his nephew is up to the task.

34 years is a good length reign, but its quite remarkable that that is the longest we have managed since the very early stages of the AAR. Being King of Assyria leaves you with a short lifespan it seems!

Well the Federalist cause has been brought to disaster itself! The Royalists had crushed the movement and now have free reign to lead Assyria forward themselves.

What a reign. Despite that bloody war, Assyria is much better off. Here's hoping this trend continues.

Yeshua's successors had to fight to the bitter end to maintain his legacy, but they had done so and then some - leading us in an even more centralist and absolutist direction. We shall see where the young new King takes Assyria now he has come of age.

This civil war could prove disastrous, especially if other powers (like the Timurids or Byzantium) interfere...

Turning on the merchants - the people who manage money - is an amazing idea. It's not like it could lead to a huge decline in trade or anything.

You rightly predicted that others would interfere. Thankfully for us, we became a proxy in the Byzantine-Timurid rivalry rather than seeing our lands partitioned. But we are now starting to appear an even more junior partner to the Timurids than we did under Yeshua I. Let us see just how acceptable that is in the long run.

honestly it'd be pretty funny if assyria colonized some of the americas via south africa

Well I do know at this point there are still a good few parts of South America that aren't yet colonised. Our colonial expansion has taken a little backseat with all the drama on the home front, we shall see what the rest of this century brings.

A swing in the federalist direction, perhaps while retaining some of the more advantageous elements of the current government (such as a more centralized army), seems to me ideal at this stage. Still, it looks like a civil war is on the horizon, and I imagine this will not be the first fought over this issue. I would not be surprised if the political alignments we see developing now lay the foundations for partisanship much further down the line.

Well we ended up going very much the other way. The Majlis is closed, the regions brought to heal, the Federalist dream put in its box. Only time will tell if this new Royalist vision can hold.

And here I thought that was Byzantium's gig. Geez another civil war on the horizon huh?

And a very gruesome one indeed! We shall see what course young Yeshua II take us forward from here.

 

[Nikolai]

Hopefully Yeshua II will not turn out to be mental unstable or something. Although with the Assyrian luck…

 

[HistoryDude]

Assyrian federalism is crushed... for now, and yet... there was a reliance on the Timurids to do that. What happens if the Timurids backstab Assyria? Can they deal with that? Can they even survive unscathed if the Timurids break the alliance?

Perhaps (more) colonies could help Assyria survive...

 

[Ix:Risor]

Oh well. It's not what I would have preferred, but Assyria certainly offers no shortage of crises to give room for a revived federalist movement. I'll simply have to bide my time and hope for wiser heads in a generation (or several). It's interesting to see Assyria being brought increasingly under the wing of one of its greatest rivals in years past. We'll see if they go the way of the Egyptians come the end.

 

[Von Acturus]

Had the King survived and reigned, Assyria could very well have dived deep into the abyss of royal tyranny and religious fanaticism.

The Queen Regent stroke a more conciliatory note, which should help Assyria keep together for the time being. let's hope her soon is more like her than like his late father.

 

[Midnite Duke]

Thank you for the updates. Are the Timurids beyond scripted instability? I am hoping for a soaring mountain but with Assyria deep valleys always need to be crossed.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1642-1659 The Young King

​

Has Yeshua II assumed his full royal powers at the age of 22 in 1642, his was shaped by four key influences: intense personal religious piety, loyalty to the Church of the East, his own sense of destiny and admiration for his mother, the outgoing regent Bejouhi. For the first part of his reign, factions of moderates around the Dowager Queen and hardliners supported by the Nestorian Patriarch competed for supremacy at court – with Yeshua maintaining a balance between the two.

While Bejouhi ensured that her son did not disturb the laws of religious liberty she had established during her regency within Assyria, one area in which the Church pushed the King in favour of its interests was in Egypt. The Duchy of Damietta had been under Assyrian suzerainty since the Marion Revolution at the beginning of the sixteenth century, at first limited to the Nile Delta before later expanding to the great cities of Cairo and Alexandria. For the most part, the Duchy had been free to manage its own internal religious and political affairs under a Latin Catholic elite, so long as its loyalty to Nineveh remained unquestioned.

Ever since the days of the Egyto-Assyrian Union, small Syriac communities had been developing in Egypt, firstly growing around trading centres before later growing into the thousands. By the mid-seventeenth century, these Egyptian Syriacs formed the largest Assyrian population outside of the Four Kingdoms and its colonial empire itself. The status of these Nestorian Christians was a source of discomfort for the Church of the East, who resented their subservience to Catholic law and authority within a state over which Nineveh held great power. Under the urgings of Patriarchal authority, Yeshua pressurised the Duchy into implementing a new special legal status for Nestorians in Egypt in 1645 that would separate them from Damietta's legal system, allowing the Nestorian community to operate under its own distinctive law codes.

Inter communal relations within Egypt were already tense prior to the Nestorian Decree of 1645. The perception that the Syriacs were being granted an exceptional privileged status sparked widespread unrest. Catholic mobs swept across the major cities of Damietta – slaughtering Nestorians alongside other minorities including Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Old Copts. Seeing an opportunity to capitalise on the violence, the Count of Gharbia, Hugues Arnaud, raised the flag of rebellion against the Duke, calling for Damietta to break free form Assyrian rule and return to the fold of Catholic Christendom. Riding the popular mood, Arnaud destroyed the Ducal army and took control of most of the Duchy by 1646. Unwilling to countenance the loss of his Egyptian vassal, Yeshua deployed a large force of some 40,000 men to crush the rebellion. The Assyrians would spend the next two years stamping out the rebellion and inflicting terrible punishment on the Catholic Egyptian populace who had threatened their power.

In the Assyrian colonies of the East Indies, there had long been a significant divergence between the fates of the rich and complex colonial societies of Sumatra and the less developed territories on Borneo and Sulawesi. While Sumatra had a large Middle Eastern settler elite and a thriving extractive economy, the more easterly colonies had attracted virtually no permanent settlers, despite fertile soils and suitable climates produced much less in the way of profits for the crown and colonial company and were under much looser Assyrian control.

In 1634, a Qatari Arab Christian named Mansoor Al-Haydos assumed the directorship of the Malaccan Company that administered these islands. Eager to compete with the more successful Moluccan Company on Sumatra and win fame, fortune and political influence, Al-Haydos developed a plan to transform Sulawesi into a thriving colonial initiative. Al-Haydos feared that overpopulation meant that too much of the island's richest lands were turned over to subsistence agriculture rather than the plantations that would produce greater wealth. He hoped to change this, and attract a settler population that would mirror the development of Sumatra. Through the second half of the 1630s, the Company led a programme of terror against the indigenous Sulawesians, forcing thousands to flee into the forests of the interior as the colonials successfully cleared many of the lands they hoped to turn over to plantations.

This violent approach soon fell into problems. Firstly, having forced the Sulawesians from these fields, the Malaccan Company struggled to find sufficient labour to work them. Migration to the colonies had been somewhat suppressed since the only recently ended succession war in Assyria, and those who did set out to find new homes had more enticing options in Sumatra and the African Cape. Those Arabs and Syriacs who did come to Sulawesi, did not have the numbers to cultivate the amount of land cleared. The most readily available source of labour – the native Sulawesians – had naturally grown deeply hostile, with armed bands striking out against the settlers from the forests, leading to deep suspicions between the two groups. As such, the settlers preferred to import African slaves to work their fields.

Banditry was an endemic problem for these fledgling settlements, with Sulawesian raiding parties striking against them with regularity and great ferocity. Colonial forces embarked on regular punitive campaigns against the rebel forces, but were never able to fully bring them to heel. Part of the difficulty lay in simple geography. Assyria controlled the largest part of Sulawesi, but there were enclaves all over the island that were under the authority of the Sultan of Malacca – who happily allowed rebel bands to cross into his territories in order to evade Assyrian troops. While a source of frustration, this situation became truly intolerable in 1648 after a band of Sulawesians overran the province of Mamuju – home to the largest settler population – and massacred every Middle Easterner and African they could find. Enraged, the Assyrian crown demanded that the Sultan of Malacca cede all its territories on the island immediately. These demands were refused and war declared.

The conflict against Malacca, a wealthy but painfully weak power, was brief and decided by the overwhelming might of Assyrian arms. Its enclaves on Sulawesi were quickly overrun while an army crossed over from Sumatra to capture the eponymous city itself. The fighting was extended by the Sultanate's unexpected alliance with the Japanese Shogunate. The Japanese had significant political and economic interests in the East Indies – controlling the island of Timor as a colony and maintaining ties throughout the region. They were determined to resist Assyrian expansionism, having confidence in their naval strength. While the Japanese fleet was powerful, it was no match from Assyria's wooden wall. A series of crushing defeats in the Banda and South China Seas ended Japan's ability to project power into the south. Yet still the Shogun refused to make peace, leading Assyrian admirals on a bold voyage to the Japanese Home Islands, where they blockaded the Shogun's ports and raided his coastlines – forcing him to accept surrender in 1651. Not only did Assyria annex the Malaccan territories on Sulawesi, they seized Timor from the Japanese and were granted special trading privileges in Japan itself – opening new avenues for their commercial interests in the Far East.

In the Indies, not to be outdone by the expansion in the eastern islands, the Sumatrans extended their power in 1657 by formally annexing the kingdom of Palembang on the southern part of the island, that had been under informal Assyrian control for for the past two decades. Assyrian colonial power in the region had advanced significantly in a short period of time after several decades of stagnation from the turn of the century.

From a young age, Yeshua II was raised on memories of his father's death at Grecian hands at the Battle of Bitlis in 1632. As a result, he was cultivated to feel an undying hatred of the Romans, and a desire for revenge. Equally, Yeshua tended towards the nationalistic view that over the past several decades Assyria had grown overly dependent on the Timurid Khan, with the realm clearly positioned as much the junior partner. He was therefore interested in expanding Assyria's diplomatic horizons. Yeshua achieved this with a spectacular marriage to Princess Vittoria of Italy, in a move brokered by his mother in 1646. Although the Protestant Princess embraced the Nestorian faith of her new husband, the move was not welcomed within the religious establishment – however their influence at court had been somewhat weakened by the chaos then developing in Egypt.

Geopolitically, the alliance the marriage secured placed Assyrian interests in the heart of Europe for the first time. The Kingdom of Italy was highly strategic. Over the past two centuries, and with greater pace since the Reformation had isolated Protestant Italy from the European mainstream, the Byzantines had been consolidating their power on the Italian peninsula. By mid century, the Greeks ruled over Rome, Ravenna and the entire southern half of the peninsula. Yeshua sought to bar any future Italian expansion and provide himself a key ally on his enemy's western frontier.

Diplomatic manoeuvres were only one part of Assyria's posturing towards Constantinople through the 1640s and 1650s. Yeshua sponsored heavy spending on preparing his military for conflict. The long neglected Mediterranean fleet more than doubled in size over these years, larger a more elaborate fortifications were erected in the borderlands of Armenia and Syria, tens of thousands were recruited and drilled into the royal army and the latest armaments were imported from Europe, Iran and India. These decades saw a period of frosty peace between the two empires, punctuated by border skirmishes, sabre rattling and efforts to economically isolated one another. This finally came to a head in 1659 as Yeshua's beloved younger brother, Prince Nahir, led an Assyrian invasion of Byzantine Cilicia.

 

[Tommy4ever]

A bit of a delay since the last update. And we had some peril for the continuation of the AAR in the background. Just over a week ago my laptop died, and almost took all my files with it. Thankfully I was able to recover the screenshots for this AAR and other related files and they are all undamaged - so we're all good to power on ahead! So long as my 12 year old back up laptop stays strong until I get a replacement .

Very pleased to be able to continue after technical issues claimed my last AAR earlier this year. And we are just starting to get within striking distance of sections I have been looking forward to writing about since I first played them. But no spoilers!

Hopefully Yeshua II will not turn out to be mental unstable or something. Although with the Assyrian luck…

We have avoided a mad King so far. He's got competing voices whispering in his ears, and the sort of authority that few of his predecessors have wielded to actually carry out his own ambitions. We shall see how this adventure in Cilicia goes.

Assyrian federalism is crushed... for now, and yet... there was a reliance on the Timurids to do that. What happens if the Timurids backstab Assyria? Can they deal with that? Can they even survive unscathed if the Timurids break the alliance?

Perhaps (more) colonies could help Assyria survive...

We've gone and gotten a few extra colonies to help pad that aspect of our power. But the question of the Timurids looms very large. If we can beat Byzantium on our own, Assyria's star will surely rise back to the ranks of first rate powers. Let us pray we don't have to turn to Isfahan yet again for relief.

Oh well. It's not what I would have preferred, but Assyria certainly offers no shortage of crises to give room for a revived federalist movement. I'll simply have to bide my time and hope for wiser heads in a generation (or several). It's interesting to see Assyria being brought increasingly under the wing of one of its greatest rivals in years past. We'll see if they go the way of the Egyptians come the end.

We would be nothing without a few good crises! You can rest assured that there remain many adherents of the old Federalist ideas throughout Assyria who would very much like to take us back to the old ways of the 16th century elective monarchy.

That relationship with the Timurids is really a dominant theme this century. The alliance has protected Assyria from predation by the Greeks, but put a very obvious limit on us as Isfahan's second fiddle. Yeshua II wants to break out of that through war with the Romans. Let us see if he succeeds.

Had the King survived and reigned, Assyria could very well have dived deep into the abyss of royal tyranny and religious fanaticism.

The Queen Regent stroke a more conciliatory note, which should help Assyria keep together for the time being. let's hope her soon is more like her than like his late father.

Over this question of whether Yeshua II will be more like his father than his mother, I think we remain at a delicate position. He has kept something of a balance in his first couple of decades in power. The test of a great military conflict will surely force him to make harder decisions and choose sides however.

Thank you for the updates. Are the Timurids beyond scripted instability? I am hoping for a soaring mountain but with Assyria deep valleys always need to be crossed.

Yes, the Timurid aren't under threat from scripted civil wars and divisions by this point. That is one big weakness of EU4 as a game. There is much less propensity for big states to fail and split up in this game than in CK2, and even than Victoria 2.

 

[HistoryDude]

The colonies expand...

Religious conflict in Assyria rises again. That could prove problematic if they go to war against the Byzantines...

 

[Steckie]

Are the Sulaymans still allied to the Timurids?
Because when Assyria's alliance with them eventually comes to an end, that exposed southern border in Egypt and Arabia can be a real pain.
With Italy as a deterrent against the Byzantines, it might have been better to secure the Arabian coastline and access to the colonies than to start another costly war against the Byzantines.

But then again, when have Assyrian Kings ever chosen the logical path over the "screw you, Greeks!"path

 

[Nikolai]

Time to incorporate Damietta fully?

 

[Ix:Risor]

What I would really like to see is a remedy to the absurd bordergore of the South Caucasus and a comfortable northern border anchored by the mountains, but I suppose a war against the Byzantines could be a start to that. A consolidation of our position, including the full integration of Damietta, would seem to be in accordance with our centralizers' ambitions in any case. We'll see if that gives us the leverage we need to maneuver out of the Timurid camp and stand on our own two feet

 

[Bullfilter]

This finally came to a head in 1659 as Yeshua's beloved younger brother, Prince Nahir, led an Assyrian invasion of Byzantine Cilicia.

The Romans have lasted for longer (and more strongly) in this ATL than in ours. Maybe it’s time to really start breaking them down if Assy is going to fulfil its destiny. That is, developing the strength to stand alone from - even up to - the Timurids.

Thankfully I was able to recover the screenshots for this AAR and other related files and they are all undamaged - so we're all good to power on ahead

Good news!

So long as my 12 year old back up laptop stays strong until I get a replacement

Ooh, make sure you have some image and game files backed up somewhere else too. Here’s hoping the sailing is smooth from here.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1659-1675 Folly and Grandeur

For all King Yeshua II's dreams of glorious conquests in Anatolia, his invasion of the Byzantine Empire met with disaster from a very early stage. The Assyrians had neither bargained on the decision of the Catholic French to join the Byzantines in their war effort – a move undoubtedly partly motivated by concern over Assyrian diplomatic entanglements with European Protestants – and the continued strength of the Roman army. Within months of the outbreak of war, the Byzantines had gathered a huge army numbering around 140,000 men to Cilicia, greatly outnumbering the Assyrians, and decisively defeated the King's brother Prince Nahir at the Battle of Ayntab. The defeat ended Yeshua's expansionist ambitions before they had ever begun, and was soon followed by a Byzantine invasion of Syria. But far worse was yet to come.

To the west, Yeshua had called upon his Italian allies to join him in his fight – providing a distraction that would divide the Romans between two fronts. Yet Italy, already vulnerable, had no intention of putting itself into a potentially existential conflict with France to the west and the Byzantines to the south and east for the benefit of Nineveh, and reneged on their treaties. Meanwhile, in Syria, the hotbed of Greek Christianity and Federalist opposition, the Romans expertly pulled upon the deep well of resentment towards Nineveh to rally much of the local nobility in support of their invasion. By the end of 1659, Antioch and Aleppo had already fallen while the Greeks pushed deeper into Assyrian lands.

With his own armies badly depleted and in retreat, Yeshua sought to turn the tide by looking to the rugged peoples of the Eurasian Steppe beyond the Caucasian Mountains. For centuries the Steppe had been contested by many different people groups, but through the Early Modern era the Perun-worshipping pagan Russians of Chernigov had been gaining ground over the Turkic tribes with their militant warrior traditions. The Russians were sworn foes of the Greeks – who had interests on the Steppe of their own and frequently supported their enemies – and the Chernigovians were only too willing to allow thousands of riders to go south to the Middle East to enter the employment of the Assyrian King. With his ranks replenished by Russian mercenaries, Yeshua attempted to turn back the tide at the Battle of Hama in late 1660, but was badly defeated again. The Russians proved to be unreliable allies, with their warbands at times raiding Assyrian territories and at others avoiding the hardest battles. The Greeks continued to make progress, capturing Damascus, Edessa, Beirut and Jerusalem as much of western Assyria fell to them.

While the Russian mercenaries had had a limited impact on the battlefield, they tangled the conflict into a web of wider strategic concerns. The Assyrians had promised great wealth and glory to the Russian mercenaries when recruiting them, and many noble warriors had ridden south. Among them was Oleg, the younger son of the Chernigovian Grand Prince Sviatopolk. In early 1662, Oleg was captured by Roman troops in Armenia. The pious Greeks despised the pagan Russians and took the prince to Constantinople where he was humiliated, castrated and blinded in a display of Christian Imperial power. The Grand Prince was enraged and swore his own bloody vengeance – declaring war against the Byzantines. Like Assyria, the Chernigovians were aligned to the Timurids and pressured the Great Khan Babur to join to conflict. Seeing the opportunity to re-establish Isfahan's authority over Assyria, the Timurids accepted the call and sent their armies into the west once more.

With Chernigov and the Timurids joining the fight, the course of battle turned decisively against the Byzantines. Over the next three years, Timurid troops joined with the Assyrians to force the Byzantines out of the western Assyrian lands, crush their internal Federalist sympathisers and pursue the Greeks across Anatolia. More impressively, the Russians spearheaded a daring march across the Ukrainian Steppe and Black Sea coast, supported by the Timurids, to march on Constantinople itself, taking the city by storm and ravaging it in a brutal sack to avenge the horrors inflicted on prince Oleg.

Yet the involvement of these foreign powers, and the Timurids in particular, had great political consequences in Assyria. For one, being forced to turn to the Persians yet against was a humiliation for King Yeshua. Shortly after their entrance into the war, Yeshua had seen his beloved mother Bejouhi pass away. The failures of his ambitions and this personal loss, sent the King into a spiral of despair and seclusion at court. Worse, Khan Babur spent much of the war based in Assyria itself while he directed his armies, where he behaved as a liege lord and demanded the Assyrian crown support the maintenance of his armies on the field. When peace was agreed in 1665, Assyria was cut out completely. The Timurids secured new annexations in the Caucuses and Caspian region – most importantly the port city of Trebizond – while the Chernigovians also made some territorial gains. Both received hefty tributes while Nineveh was granted a paltry sum.

In the aftermath of the war, the Assyrian crown was approaching financial ruin. Yeshua II had spent heavily long before the conflict, and tightened his fiscal headroom yet further by extending existing tax privileges for the Church yet further. However, six years of war had allowed his debts to spiral out of control, with no reward from military victory to compensate. With the King taking a listless approach to administering his realm, factions at court moved to impose their will. The moderates that had previously benefited from the sponsorship of the Dowager Queen had been clearly weakened by her passing, allowing clerical and absolutist ministers to take significant control. These groups ensured that the privileges of the Church were not questioned, while seeking to find new sources of income from elsewhere with a raft of new taxes and levies. These included heavy levies on goods imported to and exported from the colonies – causing great anger among the settler classes who had previously enjoyed a looser relationship with the metropole. However, increased taxes alone were far from enough to relieve the realm's woes.

Indeed, the question of the Assyrian state's financial wellbeing was intermingled with anger at the willingness of so many to throw their lot in with the Byzantine invaders during the war and the suspicion that treachery ran much deeper through parts of Assyrian society. The solution to these problems was devised by one of the fiercest absolutists at court, Maurikios Leon. Ironically, a Paulician and ethnic Greek himself from the city of Antioch with a deep hatred for the Romans – who had forced his family from their Anatolian home generations before, Leon unleashed a vicious purge of the Assyrian elite. Those who had sided with the Byzantines were met with arrests, executions and seizures of land and property. But Leon's purges pushed much further to target those suspected of potential treachery as well as those who had openly committed it. Naturally the hammer fell hardest on religious and ethnic minority populations, and particularly those in Syria – Leon's own homeland.

Yet the group that were hit the worst by these purges were the Jews. The relationship between the Assyrian state and the Jews had been a long and fruitful one. Saint Ta'mhas the Great had set the tone at the foundation of the Kingdom by offering sanctuary and tolerance to the Jews of the Middle East in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century, the Assyrian crown and Church of the East had stood against the anti-Semitic Messalian movement and the violence of Islamic rebellion in Mesopotamia. In return, the Jews of Mesopotamia and Syria had developed a sophisticated and rich commercial culture, and contributed disproportionately to Assyria's expansion into the Indian Ocean. Now, the weakened administration in Nineveh looked upon their wealth with greedy eyes, saw their difference as a potential source of dissent and their influence as a threat. Under Maurikios's auspices, with the King's support, royal agents struck against the great families of the Jewish elite in the realm's largest cities, filling the state's coffers with their riches.

These attacks of Jewish wealth led to a remarkable incident in Baghdad in 1670. The great city, the largest in the realm, was the heart of worldwide Jewry. Around a tenth of its population was Jewish, while the leading Jewish families had sprawling influence and economic interests throughout the city, operating as something akin to captains of industry, local elders and mafia dons all at once. News had reached the most powerful of these Baghdadi Jewish family patriarchs, Elias Kadoorie, that Maurikios's agents were coming to the city. Instead of passively accepting his fate, Kadoorie rallied thousands of his own followers and retainers to form militias and blockade large parts of the city. The soldiers sent by the crown were repulsed by these makeshift defences, effectively losing control over large parts of Baghdad for a period of several weeks. The deadlock was only broken when the royal generals deployed their artillery to breakdown Kadoorie's defences and storm his section of the city – inflicting widespread destruction and plunder.

Although particularly famed and memorable, Kadoorie's revolt was far from an isolated incident, with resistance and sporadic rebellion flaring up across the realm in the face of Leon's proscriptions. These in turn fuelled further cycles of violence. Despite its long history of rebellion, Syria was relatively calm during this period – its anti-monarchical factions having been broken during the preceding years of warfare. True order was only restored through sheer force of arms on the part of the royal army and the imprisonment of Maruikios himself in 1673, which brought an end to the programme of land seizures as King Yeshua II sought to re-exert his own personal authority and bring a degree of peace to his realm.

Political violence and turn towards intolerance in the Middle East stimulated a surge in migration to the colonies, particularly among Muslims, Jews and Christian minorities. By the end of the century the religious demographics of the settlers had diverged notably from the motherland. While in the early days of Assyrian colonialism, the Church of the East had hoped to monopolise the overseas empires for their own faith – they had long lost control of the larger scale migration of later years. Although the Indian Ocean islands were predominantly Nestorian, the Alsharqian creoles of Sumatra were almost one third Muslim, while the Al-Opheerians of the Cape contained a somewhat lower Muslim component but much larger population of non-Nestorian Christians. Jews were also numerous in the urban centres of Sumatra and the Cape.

At court in Nineveh, the Yeshua's terrible defeat to the Greeks and the internal conflict and ructions that followed had driven him closer into the arms of the Church. There, the pious clergy had lobbied the King to rebuild his glory by taking up the holy mission that his grandfather had pursued almost a century before – to liberate the Nestorian Christians of the Malabar Coast. By the middle of the 1670s, the now middle aged King had grown secure enough to once more look outwardly for the chance to rebuild his legacy. In 1675 a great Christian army left port in Basra, bound for a final Crusade against the Hindu Tamil Kingdoms of southern India.