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Caesar returns home, bloody but victorious. In the penumbra of his glory, shadows gather. There is no power from without that can challenge Assyria. Time will tell what becomes of us.
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A costly war to be sure, but all those sacrifices are worth it as long as the republic stands. Let’s hope Abaya doesn’t squander it by becoming a dictator.
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3 Rs. Regroup, Rebuild, Restore. Great victory. You mentioned one of my pet peeves. Upgrading navy is very expensive, while army upgrade is free. I wish for more balance. Thank you for new adventure.
What a heart wrenching war! 5-10 million dead, generations sent to die for khan and Republic in cataclysmic battles (123k infantry on each side at Battle of Qazaniya!)... The world might not see another massacre like this until trench warfare!
Let's hope the Republic makes it worth it, but I fear further instability is on it's way...
Let's hope the Republic makes it worth it, but I fear further instability is on it's way...
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On ‘Unity or Death’
Will he or won’t he? I shall read on and find out.
All straight from the Emperor Palpatine playbook: “It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy. I love the Republic. Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me!”
Will he or won’t he? I shall read on and find out.
World-shaking event. One wonders where it will end.
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Not the greatest gains, but I guess the BB was too huge for you to take more?
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Abaya has achieved a great victory.
Niv has finally been executed. Let's hope that his family doesn't become a problem.
I don't expect that the Timurids will stay down for long.
Niv has finally been executed. Let's hope that his family doesn't become a problem.
I don't expect that the Timurids will stay down for long.
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1762-1775 The Great Helmsman
1762-1775 The Great Helmsman
At the end of the Great Persian War, Assyria was in a sorry state. The country had been depopulated, trade routes had been heavily disrupted, agricultural infrastructure was in disrepair, inflation was rampant and the state deep in debt. The nation had suffered an unspeakable loss of life and treasure to achieve its Republic. At the same time, many liberals were calling for rewards for the common man for his part in defending the Republic during the war through political and economic reforms.
A decade since the last elections to the Majlis, Assyria renewed its parliament in new elections at the end of the year. The shattered country strengthened the unassailable Moderate dominance of the Majlis yet further – reducing oppositional groups on the left and right to less than 100 of 601 seats. There were some accusations that opposition candidates, particularly any who dared criticise the conquering Vizier, faced hostility and threats of violence by pro-government thugs; yet their marginality to the Republic's political life was clear.
At the end of the Persian War, Malik Abaya was undoubtedly master of all he surveyed. The man who had brought peace to Assyria, defeated the Greeks and crushed the Persia, in complete control over the Majlis and military alike. By 1762 he had governed Assyria for 14 years and, now aged 50, showed no inclination towards stepping away from the leadership of the Republic. Indeed, while some were concerned at the concentration of power and prestige in a single individual, others could hardly imagine an Assyrian future without its helmsman.
As the new Majlis was sworn in following the 1762 election, the ceremonies of the body's opening were disrupted by a group of Moderate representatives. With much of the faction drawing its political inheritance from Federalism, rather than Liberalism, many of Abaya's supporters were attracted to the ideal of a return of elected monarchy and could think of no better man to lead. These representatives brandished a crown before the Vizier and pleaded for him to accept their election as King. As the stunned Majlis watched on, Abaya made an elaborate display of rejecting the offer and assuring his fealty to the Republic and its constitution. Further to this, he swore to serve and guide the Republic for the rest of his life. The intention was clear. While Abaya would not wear a crown, he intended to hold onto power so long as he was alive.
These events left Assyrian liberals, both parliamentarian and radical, aghast, filled with fear and uncertainty that the Republic they had fought and died for was slipping away. Frustration only grew as the Moderate administration showed no interest in further political and economic reform, and indeed enter a period of relative state austerity aimed at rebalancing budgets and stabilising the economy with minimal support offered to demobilised war veterans, widows and orphans. Under the veneer of Moderate dominance of the body politic, unrest was growing.
This was most pointed among the Dawronoye, the spearpoint of the most radical of Ishtarians. With significant influence in the capital in particular after their role during the Persian Siege of Nineveh, they were a serious threat. Certain that the Republic was sliding towards autocracy and inequity that would see all the gains of the Revolution rendered moot, on Easter Sunday 1765 the heads of the Dawronoye under their leader, the Armenian craftsman Armin Zarobyan, they swore a blood oath to overthrow the government and restore the Republican constitution of 1742.
The Dawronoye plot was unleashed in the week before Christmas 1765. Pouncing with highly coordinated and heavily armed militants, many of them veterans of the Great Persian War, the revolutionaries overwhelmed government authorities throughout Nineveh and took control of the city. Rallying the masses, they led them on a gruesome rampage against their enemies – plundering Churches, assaulting the rich and those of aristocratic lineage who had returned to Nineveh since the Civil War, and most of all concentrating their fury on Moderates and all those associated with the Caesarian Abaya faction. As they stormed the Majlis, dozens of representatives were killed within the chamber itself – while those that could scattered. Abaya himself only narrowly escaped the capital, receiving a gunshot wound in his arm as he fled. Notably, a small handful of Ishtarian deputies chose to stay in the capital, and provided the Dawronoye with a veil of legitimacy, electing Zarobyan as Vizier and handing over government to his clique. With control over the capital, the Nineveh Commune was born – with a city government experimenting in radical egalitarianism, redistributing property, offering pensions to widows and veterans, food and shelter to the needy, holding citywide elections under universal suffrage and promising to end slavery in every corner of the empire.
Crucially, while the Dawronoye had seized the capital and were supported by a degree of unrest through the rest of the country, Assyria as a whole remained loyal to the government of Malik Abaya. In February, the Vizier returned to Nineveh at the head of an army and would spend the next several weeks crushing the rebellion and reoccupying the city – wreaking more destruction than either the reactionaries or Persians had in their previous sieges. By the spring, Zarobyan was dead, the Dawronoye crushed and the rebellion comprehensively defeated. The last flicker of the Assyrian Revolution was over.
In the aftermath of the December Massacres, the Republic would take an authoritarian turn with the introduction of new censorship laws banning seditious press, limits on the freedom of assembly and organisation of unauthorised political groups. The Dawronoye were made outlaws and over the next years the remnants of their organisation would be systematically destroyed and their ideas discredited.
As the dust settled on the Dawronoye's attempted revolution, Abaya sought to further reaffirm his legitimacy and replace many of the murdered representatives by calling for new elections to the Majlis – effectively calling a referendum on the rebellion. With the Ishtarians in disarray and dispirited, their support collapsed and the Vizier's allies won nearly three quarters of the vote and in excess of 90 per cent of the chamber as turnout plunged. Assyrian liberalism, it its Ishtarian form, was clinging faintly to life. Abaya's power had reached new heights.
Fortunately for the regime and Assyria, the period after the December Massacres coincided with a significant upturn in the Republic's economic fortunes. 1766 would see the most bountiful harvest the Middle East had enjoyed in for a century, and mark a stand out year in a general shift as the dry conditions of that had blighted the region in the first half of the century – driving desertification, falling yields and rural desperation – eased. In what remained an overwhelmingly agricultural society, the results of this trend were tremendous – resulting in greater abundance for the peasantry, lower food prices for the cities and greater income for the state.
At the same time, crucial monetary reforms sought to stabilise the currency. Assyria had been blighted by rampant debasement and inflation before – resulting in the government of Niv IV issuing a purified coinage in the distant pre-revolutionary era of the 1720s. Yet in the ensuing decades of turmoil, Assyrian governments had allowed the coinage to once again plummet in value as they struggled to manage spiralling debts. One of Abaya's most capable Ministers, a Baghdadi Armenian financier named Toba Achina, devised the creation of a new institution that would seek to resolve this perennial difficult once and for all. The Federal Bank would be modelled on similar institutions seen in the most advanced European states – Germany and Scotland – operating as a central bank with responsibility for minting an improved coinage and maintaining its value as well as operating as the primary lender to the state. By the 1770s, the impact of these reforms were already being felt in the stabilisation of prices and the wider Assyrian economy.
In a more benign economic environment in which material conditions were improving and war was no longer a present danger, a becalmed situation set in across the Republic. Politically, these years were defined by the near total absence of serious political conflict or debate – with the Majlis acting as little more than a confirmatory assembly for the Vizier's policies. With Ishtarianism close to extinction and conservatism largely disorganised, there was simply no alternative to Abaya and his Moderates.
Among the most telling sores for the Republic remained religion. The conservative Nestorian Patriarchate that had been based first in Basra during the Civil War and later in Isfahan had refused the urgings of the Great Khan to support the Timurid cause during the Great Persian War, and been exiled for a third time to Ahmedabad in the Solankis empire of north western India. From its new home, the Old Patriarchate continued to reject the pro-Republican New Patriarchate in Nineveh and the institutions of the Republic themselves as illegitimate. Likewise, its following within Assyrian Nestorians – in particular the clergy and peasantry of provincial Mesopotamia, classes for the most part safely distant from the Majlis' electorate – remained immense and problematic for the state.
Efforts to heal the divide within Nestorian, pursued ardently by elements within the Moderate coalition, could achieve little traction. The Patriarchate was unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a secular state governed by a heathen Druze nor any continuation of the Republican Church. The turmoil within Assyria's leading faith remained unresolved.
As the Vizier grew older, thoughts began to turn to possible successors. His son, Humza Abaya, had entered politics in the 1760s as the governor of the family's home state of Syria before entering the Majlis in 1766. A sharp orator and naturally possessing unparalleled connections, it appeared to many that he was to be groomed to takeover from his father in the years ahead. These plans were derailed by the outbreak of a hugely damaging political scandal in 1771.
The Abaya family, coming from humble origins in the poor Jabal Al-Druze, had little in the way of inherited wealth. Yet over the course of his governorship of Syria, he amassed tremendous personal riches – building a palatial estate on the outskirts of Damascus. Angered to see his country being pilfered and distrustful of Humza personally, a Moderate Majlis representative from Hama brought extensive evidence of corruption before the Majlis – horrifying the chamber and dividing the Moderates between pro and anti Humza factions. Fearing the a split in his parliamentary majority and the undermining of faith in the Republic, the Vizier would turn his back on his own son – allowing the courts to try him for corruption and effectively ending his political career. Any thought of an emerging Abaya dynasty was over.
The first elections after the downfall of Abaya's son were held in 1773. Despite a very slight slippage from their peak seven years previously, the Moderates retained their utter domination of the Majlis with in excess of 70 per cent of the vote and well over 500 seats. Notably, while the tiny Ishtarian group made a handful of gains, right wing critics of the Vizier fared far better – gaining more than a dozen gains to return to a similar position as they had held in 1762.
Two years later, in 1775, at the age of 63 and after governing Assyria for 27 years as its all-powerful Vizier, Malik Abaya died following a short but painful intestinal infection. His works had been immense – overthrowing Nuri Ardalan and the terror, establish a new and more restrained constitution, ending the Assyrian Civil War, and reunifying the empire defeating the Byzantines and establishing a Roman Republic, crushing the Timurid Empire in the Great Persian War and defeating the Dawronoye's attempt at a second revolution. What would succeed his rule, at times little more than a personal dictatorship, was far from clear.
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Abaya is truly the Caesar of this age, the greater warrior hero come leader of the masses and dictator for life. He took over Assyria still a fractured nation in the midst of civil war and leaves it behind the greatest power of the Near and Middle East.
Well, he did continue to hold elections and refused a crown, but Abaya functioned very much like a personal dictator in all but name with essentially unlimited power concentrated in his hands. With the prospect of power falling from father to son ruled out, we will have to see which way the Republic turns next. A continued slide away from liberty, or towards a more democratic government?
That element of upgrading is probably an even bigger difficulty in Victoria 2, where we will be heading to next, where each generation of naval research basically leaves everything else in the water obsolete. I suppose that is by design though!
Indeed, I had a look back at my Polish AAR and even the very biggest battles I had there, definitely making them the biggest I've ever had in EU4 didn't come close to matching the sheer scale of Qazaniya, which is up there with the biggest RL Napoleonic battles. Let us hope that many generations pass before we see slaughter like this again!
On ‘Unity or Death’
All straight from the Emperor Palpatine playbook: “It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy. I love the Republic. Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me!”
Will he or won’t he? I shall read on and find out.
World-shaking event. One wonders where it will end.
And he gets more than a little Palpatinee in this latest chapter with his promise to serve the Republic for the rest of his life!
I remember when negotiating the peace that what I actually wanted to do was to release a bunch of state from Timurid territory to shave them down to size a bit, but there weren't any good options for doing so. Annexations were a lot more limited as a result and my CB had some limits on me.
We shall hear a little more from surviving claimants to the imperial legacy in the next chapters
. And time will tell when and if the Timurids recover to anything comparable to their 17th century high tide when they were essentially hegemons of Eurasia.
Strong indeed! Really this is probably the most powerful we have ever been throughout the course of the AAR. We have never been the top dog in the world or even the region. Perhaps that is changing.
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A time of uncertainty awaits. Hopefully the succession will be resolved before the vultures gather.
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The toughest job is an orderly succession. A well-deserved rest for the great Abaya. Thank you
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A fragile time for our nascent Republic. Let us hope that the many great triumphs of the late Abaya will give us time enough to sort out the issue of succession- hopefully allowing the fracturing of the 'Moderates' and opening a path to return to our democratic roots.
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And so ends Abaya's reign, he definitely felt like a mix of Napoleon and Julius Ceasar. We'll see if the republic lasts and manages to become a true democracy, or slides into either anarchy or authoritarianism.
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Abaya was a good leader, but it is good that he didn't end up creating a new monarchy.
Let's hope that some more democracy returns to Assyria after his death! Of course, let's also hope that this democracy doesn't also weaken the regime enough that the monarchists reclaim power...
Let's hope that some more democracy returns to Assyria after his death! Of course, let's also hope that this democracy doesn't also weaken the regime enough that the monarchists reclaim power...
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Can we get a state of the wider world at some point soon? I'm especially interested in seeing what Europe as a whole looks like and the amount of land controlled by the German Republic. If Germany has remained democratic, I'd be curious as to how they're receiving Assyria's authoritarian turn
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The Spectre of dictatorship and now Assyria's favourite pastime, succession wars, returns. Let's hope the Republic can weather the storm and that democracy can return to the Majlis.
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1775-1781 After Abaya
1775-1781 After Abaya
With the death of Vizier Malik Abaya, Assyria was shorn of the man who had dominated every part of its body politic for nigh on three decades. With no clear successor or even especially influential deputies, there was an immediate scramble for power and position. The biggest question was whether a military figure would follow in Abaya's footsteps and use brute force to establish control over the state. As such, the deputies in the Majlis attempted to move with speed and unanimity to exert their own authority before any putschist threat could materialise. The unlikely figure of the secretarial Baghdadi Jew Samuel Bellilios, who had served Abaya for many years as a key fixer within the Majlis, who was able to rally the Moderate coalition around himself within a matter of a few days. Alongside the usual offers of bribes, influence and position, Bellilios importantly swore to serve only in a temporary capacity, and seek to transition away from a period of personal rule towards a parliamentary regime in which the Majlis would be dominant. This gambit was a success. As Bellilios was elevated to become Vizier, the fear military coup did not materialise and a smooth, bloodless, transition of power was won.
With a generation having passed since the Revolution, traditions of veneration had started to develop. One expression of this was popular celebrations around anniversaries of important events – the largest of which developed on 'Republic Day', April 2, celebrating the date at which the Federal Republic was proclaimed. Reminiscent of Saints' cults, key individuals achieved elevated status – notably Lazarus Dunanu, the martyred leader of Assyrian liberalism in the 1730s and a break on Ishtarian radicalism in the 1740s who was eventually claimed by the Terror. A large statue of Dunanu was constructed on the site of his execution during the 1760s, and would become a focal point for Republic Day celebrations.
Most impressive of all was a grand Mausoleum of the Republic constructed in the centre of Nineveh, which featured thousands of individual graves from martyrs of the Civil War and Great Persian War. Still under construction at the time of Abaya's death, it would later be amended to include a large complex at its centre in which the remains of the fallen Vizier Malik Abaya were entombed in ornate and imposing opulence. This tomb would be a site of veneration and pilgrimage for generations to come.
Despite the veneration of the great man, Bellilios had captured a prevailing mood among national elites in his turn away from personal rule. This ideal was best captured in the monumental work of political philosophy 'The Spirit of the Laws', which was published two years after Abaya's death. Its author, Addai Abdima, had been born in the Syriac community of the Jordan Valley at the beginning of the century and had served as a Federalist and later Moderate representative in the Majlis at various points during the 1740s and 1750s and later as a governor in his native Philistia before retiring to a life as a philosopher of government. Waiting until after the death of the great man to publish his magnum opus, he had nonetheless spent years advocating for strict constitutionalism and the division of power. The publication of his greatest work had been deliberately delayed in an effort to avoid it appearing as an attack on Abaya, yet it was clearly written with the desire to prevent any future leader from centralising so much power in their hands. The text called for the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and legal branches of government, and their binding together by harsh adherence to a clear and detailed constitution. His work would strike a cord with among the Assyrian political elite, and Bellilios, who had known him personally for many years, would call upon him to help to draft a new constitution.
True to his word, just three years after taking office Bellilios retired as Vizier and turned over to the Majlis to consider his successor ahead of the first set of elections of the post-Abaya age. That man who would step up to become Vizier and take leadership of the Moderate faction was, it an incredible statement of the Republican era, a Sunni Muslim raised as a pauper. Abgar Israel hailed from Muslim Upper Egypt, a land that had only recently been annexed by Assyria prior to the Revolution. Israel was an orphan, who grew up as a street child in Assyut on the banks of the Nile. As a young man in the 1740s, he saw his homeland occupied by the reactionary Catholic 'King of Egypt and Jerusalem' during the Assyrian Civil War, with the Christian occupiers inflicting horrors on the Muslims of Upper Egypt. During this time he joined a gang of bandits that would harass the occupiers and live on plunder.
As the Civil War drew towards an end, and Malik Abaya led his armies into Egypt – Israel's gang declared themselves Republicans and supported the invasion. In post-Civil War Upper Egypt, his loyalist status allowed him to enter the local administration. Completely illiterate as a youth, he not only taught himself to read and write as an adult, but learned numerous languages – Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Greek – and developed a diversity of intellectual interests. Better yet, he was an exceptional political organiser – turning Upper Egypt into an effective Moderate-controlled one party state – and competent administrato
Coming to Nineveh as a Majlis representative in 1766, he was a part of numerous governments and build up a wide network of allies throughout the assembly. At Bellilios' resignation, pulling in every favour, he secured the Majlis' support to become Vizier. For a nation in many ways founded in opposition to a then Islamic dominated Middle East in the Medieval period, and often defined in its struggles against the Muslims, to see a Sunni orphan take up the Republic's highest office was extraordinary.
The new elections, seeking to confirm the post-Abaya administration, produced results that shook Nineveh. The near monopolistic Moderate control over the Majlis was ended, as the Moderates secured their worst result since the formation of the faction after the 1748 coup d’etat. While the Moderates still held on to a large majority in the Majlis and the popular vote, they shed more than a hundred seat in a contest that saw dozens of long serving representatives unseated. The beneficiaries of this decline were a scattered array of conservative and localist candidates sitting to the right of the government. The success of such candidates, who won more than a quarter of votes nationwide, was a great shock to the Republican elites in Nineveh. But it was a turn that had been building for years.
Even before the death of Abaya, the rumblings of a revival in traditionalist sentiment could already be heard around Assyria. In 1774, a small group of Old Nestorian lay people from poor communities in the swamps of the Shatt-al-Arab in southern Babylonia conducted a march from Basra to Nineveh, carrying on their backs large wooden crosses. During their long and tortuous journey, during which they faced harassment from government authorities and bandits alike, they cried out lamentations for the exile of their Patriarch in India and the eclipse of God in His homeland. Each year, the march was repeated, grew larger and more organised. By the end of the 1770s many thousands were taking part, in 1780 presenting a petition to the Majlis listing 500,000 names calling for the exiled Patriarch to be allowed to return to his seat in Nineveh. This was the first display on mass religiosity on such a scale for decades and spoke to rising spiritual unease.
In India, the Patriarch made a deliberate attempt to cultivate strong ties with the St Thomas Christians, or Nasranis, of Malabar. While the majority of Nasranis lived under Assyria rule, a substantial minority resided around Calicut, just to the north of Assyrian Malabar, and there the Patriarch made numerous visits – preaching to huge crowds and attracting many Christians from across the border in Assyrian territory. The Indian Christians, always comparatively conservative, rejected the New Nestorian Church in Nineveh outright and would provide significant financial and material backing to sustain the exiled Patriarchate, and aiding its connections throughout the Assyrian world.
Alongside this religious backlash, there were important dynastic changed among the exiled monarchist claimants to the vacant Assyrian throne. Nahir III, the last standing Lebarian claimant of the Civil War who had fled to the Cape after the fall of Basra before in turn being overthrown in 1753, had spent decades in exile in Europe fruitlessly seeking military support to bring down the Republic before dying in 1773. He was survived only by one daughter, Fariah. After living for some years in Sweden, she travelled to France in 1777, where she came into contact with the grandson of Niv IV, one Yeshua III. The two distant cousins agreed to wed, thereby mending a near-century old divide within the Assyrian imperial dynasty.
In the Federal Republic, this marriage was important as it allowed monarchists to rally around a single claimant that all could agree on. Furthermore, the Lebarian cause, always popular in the conservative Nestorian heartlands of Babylonia and the Gulf, had long carried baggage that limited its appeal outside of this core territory while also lacking the same international legitimacy that the heirs of Niv IV, the recognised legal sovereign, held. Although forbidden by law to forge formal organisations, secret monarchist clubs, often little more than drinking and social societies to begin with, had been proliferating widely through the 1770s – gaining traction not only in the south east, but through Old Nestorian communities in Assyria-Superior, one of the heartlands of the Revolution, and in Philistia among both the Nestorians of the Jordan Valley and Catholics of the coastal plain.
The new constitution, the work of the ageing philosopher Abdima, would be enacted in 1780. The Vizier's role would be made quite distinctive, to be elected by a majority vote of the Majlis but thereafter be independent of it as the executive arm of government, while the Majlis itself would operate at the legislative branch. Elections to the Majlis would be held every three years under the existing franchise, at the beginning of each new session of the Majlis the assembly would be tasked with either electing or re-electing the Vizier. The courts were to be completely independent and powerful, with the authority to enforce the constitution. The provinces of the Republic, now styled as states, were given clear authority over local affairs, but placed within limits relative to the Federal government in Nineveh. In an anti-militarist diktat, serving members of the army and navy were forbidden from serving in any other capacity in the state without special dispensation from the Vizier.
The most important change of all was a geopolitical decision – the integration of the Republic of Damietta into the Assyrian Federal Republic, thereby ending centuries of autonomy for Lower Egypt's Copts. Many in Assyria had held ambitions of bringing Damietta into the Republic for years, but had relented from doing. Culturally distinct from the Arabic Muslim south, northern Egypt was home to millions of Coptic-speaking Catholics with a Latin-speaking elite and a speckling of religious and ethnic minorities. For centuries they had tended to look westward to Europe rather than eastward to the Middle East, and many were very hostile to greater Assyrian control. The region's demographic heft relative to the rest of Assyria had only grown during the harsh years of War and Revolution in Mesopotamia and the Levant. At unification, Lower Egypt contained around a quarter of Federal Republic's metropolitan population. For the Vizier, himself an Egyptian from the Muslim south, its integration was a statement of personal ambition and a belief in the universal values of the Republic.
For a time in the middle of the eighteenth century, it appeared that the revolutionary force of republican liberalism unleashed in Assyria was going to take over the entire world. At their peak, an unbroken belt of Republics controlled all the lands between the Persian Gulf and the North and Baltic Seas while sympathetic constitutional monarchies held sway in Italy and the mighty Timurid Empire.
However, the conservative wave that was impacting Assyrian politics domestically was a part of an international phenomenon of reaction. To the east, the liberal Persians had been faced by incessant rebellion and civil war ever since the end of the Great Persian War, and the Khan had slowly backslid on the constitution he had granted his subjects at the end of the war. In the west, the Croatian Republic was blighted by persistent instability and rebellions, particularly in the Danubian territories it had acquired from the Byzantines during the Revolutionary Wars, with reactionary and regional nationalist sentiment leaving the state always on the brink of collapse. The German Republic was more sturdy, although numerous border conflicts with the French, supported by Scotland, meant that it was never able to settle into a prolonged period of peace.
In the Roman Republic, things were far worse. The Byzantium that emerged from the Revolutionary Wars was a humbled and divided one. Having lost significant territory, endured terrible loss of life and economic dislocation, international humiliation and the distress of the end of nearly two millennia of monarchy, the country was something of a basket case. While the revolutionaries who had seized power in 1751, with the Assyrian army baring down on Constantinople, had some popular support in the cities, they were largely despised in the hinterland provinces which remained steadfastly loyal to the monarchy. In the second half of the 1770s, this fragile Republic would collapse.
The trigger for the downfall of the Second Roman Republic came from the unlikely source – the ending of enmities between Byzantium and Assyria. Central Anatolia was a sparse territory mostly populated by the Turkic Cumans. Much like their cousins in the Middle East, the Anatolian Cumans were a warlike people, for centuries they had upheld traditions of raiding across the border into Assyrian Armenia, usually with the active encouragement of Greek authorities that were happy to direct their energies eastward. With the establishment of peace between Constantinople and Nineveh, the Assyrians put pressure on their new friends to end these raids permanently. The Byzantines attempted to achieve this through a complex system of bribes and offers of state positions to 'police' the other tribes of the region. This delicate balance was both a heavy drain on Constantinople's stretched treasury and highly unstable.
The system broke down in 1774 as Central Anatolia descended into a bloodbath of inter-tribal violence that the state could not control. In 1777, with this inter fighting having resulted in the pro-Republican tribes being heavily defeated, the Cumans turned westward and unleashed a year or horrific plunder across Greek-populated Western Anatolia. With Anatolia in ruins and popular anger at the regime boiling over, in 1779 a group of reactionary military leaders marched on Constantinople to overthrow the government and invite the exiled Emperor, Constantine XXII, to re-assume his throne to barely a single cry of unrest across the land. He would return as a true absolutist monarchy. With Byzantine Restoration stunned liberal sensibilities, with many having seen their cause as an unstoppable march of progress. Yet neither Germany, focussed on its western frontiers, nor Assyria, caught up by its internal politics, made any effort to resist the Restoration beyond mere protestations.
In Assyria, the first elections since the integration of Damietta were held in 1781. Lower Egypt's immense demographic shape necessitated the complete alteration of Assyria's political system, with constituencies greatly enlarged in size to accommodate the addition of the large new state. Politically, the Copts would reshape the Federal Republic as well. Lower Egypt was deeply conservative society, still slave-holding like Babylonia and Arabia, and their was particular revulsion at the Muslim Vizier leading the Republic. While the Moderates in particular made major inroads among the largely urbanised ethno-religious minorities of the state – Protestants, Old Copts, Jews and Nestorians – the great mass of Catholic Copts turned towards clerical, conservative and often anti-annexation candidates of the right. Elsewhere, in the historic territories of the Republic, the Moderates were also assailed by a pincer of advancing conservative and liberal opposition candidates. In the shocking final results, the Moderates lost their Majlis majority after three decades of unchallenged domination. The right, containing a ragtag and disunited band of Nestorian traditionalists, monarchists, regionalists in peripheral provinces like Pontus and Georgia, tribal leaders and a mass of Coptic conservatives, now outweighed the Moderates, although they lacked an anti-Republican majority in their own right.
The Republic had been betrayed by the ballot box, and its annexation of Damietta in particular appeared very fragile indeed. Despite this, the shattered Moderates under Agbar Israel were determined to maintain their grip on power.
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For once, the vultures were not given a good meal out of the death of a great Assyrian leader. The political vultures on the other hand, have taken the Republic on a new path, and perhaps into some real peril - bringing in a massive reactionary province just at a time with conservatism was reviving itself in the heartland.
His achievements were monumental indeed. And we even averted the long tradition of bloody succession war.
That Moderate coalition is holding together for now, but it is much weakened from its peak in Abaya's days. The era of goodfeelings seems to be coming to an end already.
A Napoleon or Caesar who did not bequeath a permanent dictatorship onto his people! A great man indeed, but in part because of how his successors rejected aspects of his legacy rather than embraced it whole heartedly. Let us see if Assyria's Republic can survive the current White Wave.
Prescient once again on this one! The Moderate elites were keen to avoid another one-man regime, and so have looked to disperse power, only to see the Reactionary Right they had thought banished to history make a sudden and very powerful resurgence. Let us see if the Republic withstands this wave better than the Greeks did.
We've had a peak at the rest of the Republican states the era of revolutions produced in Europe - and it was something of a sorry picture! A more detailed world update will be included at the beginning of Part 3 - where I will have better images to use.
A succession war was averted, let us hope the current way things are going don't lead to wards of restoration and separation of our own!
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Uh oh, looks like the monarchists are back at it again. Seems like we’re in a new wave a revolutionary wars with no Abaya to lead Assyria. Let’s hope the Assyrian Republic manages to fend off the reactionaries with less loses than the previous wars, or more republics don’t flip back to absolutism like the Romans and Timurids have.
On a brighter note, not only did Assyria democratize after Abaya’s death, but it even elected an Egyptian Muslim to be Vizier of a mostly Christian country, that is quite progressive compared to the previous monarchical regime or even most societies during this period in OTL, let’s hope this tolerance lasts and leads to further secularism.
On a brighter note, not only did Assyria democratize after Abaya’s death, but it even elected an Egyptian Muslim to be Vizier of a mostly Christian country, that is quite progressive compared to the previous monarchical regime or even most societies during this period in OTL, let’s hope this tolerance lasts and leads to further secularism.
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