1675-1687 – King of Kings
The Malabar Crusade against the Tamil states of southern India would be a long and gruelling conflict. The Assyrians began their expedition, just as Yeshua I had, not by striking directly at Malabar but by invading the island of Ceylon first as a staging point. There, the Assyrians, under the command of the King's brother Prince Nahir, won a major victory at Ruhunu and successfully established control over the entire island by 1677. In that year, Nahir made the momentous voyage across the Comorin Cape to land in Malabar itself – where he was greeted by larger numbers of friendly Christians, who eagerly hoped to align with the invaders to establish their dominance over their Hindu neighbours. However, Tamil power in the region was guarded by the impenetrable fortress of Venad, to the south of Cochin. Such were its formidable defences, that no direct assault could hope to succeed. Nahir therefore settled in for a long siege.
For the next five years, the Crusade was centred around the Siege of Venad. The Tamils would send many armies to Malabar to drive the Assyrians back from its walls, only to fail on each occasion. Efforts were made to distract Prince Nahir's army – launching attacks against the Christians of the region, attempting to isolate the besiegers and deprive them of supplies, and engaging in pitched battles against the invaders. In 1681, Prince Nahir himself was cut down on the field of battle while successfully fending off yet another assault. This death had significant political consequences. With King Yeshua childless, Nahir had long been his chosen heir, compromising the security of the succession. More immediately, this was another painful personal blow for the sovereign and a setback to the campaign in India. Nonetheless, the Crusader army held together after the Prince's death and finally captured Venad in 1682, with food shortages hitting the garrison hard. While this victory placed the Assyrians in a position of great advantage, events elsewhere in the Indian Ocean were already forcing them to look elsewhere.
The Assyrian fleet had a much clear advantage over the Tamils in the 1670s and 1680s than it had a century before during Yeshua I's campaign in southern India. Assyrian forces had consistent military control over the straits between Ceylon, the Maldives and Malabar. However, they were unable to ensure the complete safety of merchant ships either in this narrow area or more broadly in the seas around India, as the Tamils focussed their energies on attacking Assyrian trade when they were unable to challenge their navy directly. This dealt a catastrophic blow to the economies of the Assyrian East Indies, which were entirely dependent on the expert of those very sealanes. To make matters worse, the estate levied additional taxes on the colonies to help finance its expensive and lengthy campaign in India and tapped into the manpower of the colonies, in particular nearby Sumatra, to maintain its strength in the field.
In the complex society of colonial Sumatra, where the Alsharqian Middle Eastern creoles made up around a tenth of the population, dissatisfaction with the administration of the Malaccan Company and their treatment by the Assyrian crown had been growing for decades and become increasingly acute since an increasingly greedy financial vice had been placed on the colony after the calamitous Assyrian Byzantine War of 1659-1665. The exactions of the Malabar Crusade brought these grievances to boiling point.
During the conflict, rising militancy among the Alsharqian populace was causing significant instability on Sumatra and leading to concrete political demands for local autonomy, with Sumatrans borrowing from the tenets of Federalist philosophy for their own purposes. It was this context that faced Ciaphas Iskand, the Malaccan Trading Company appointed governor of the island. Iskand had been involved in the Company all his life, and spent much of that time among the Sumatran creoles, developing a deep sympathy for them. As the island appeared to be veering towards civil war, he put forward a radical solution – establish Sumatra as a constituent Kingdom of the Assyrian realm, with its own autonomous assembly under the crown. Given the nature of Sumatran society, this political project would go beyond a transplanting of Federalist Assyrian traditions to the Indies. With no historic nobility, Iskand formed an assembly led by all the propertied classes of the island, or at least those of the creole elite, from traders to plantation owners, including Christians, Muslims and Jews on equal terms. Gathering in the city of Banda Aceh in 1681, the Sumantran Assembly proclaimed the dissolution of Company rule, establishing of the Kingdom of Sumatra under their administration and offered the crown to King Yeshua II.
This revolution split Asharqian society in two. Immediately after this declaration, troops in northern Sumatra loyal to the existing regime attacked the city and forced Iskand to flee to the south while the Trading Company declared him to be an illegitimate traitor. As Sumatra fell into civil war, news of events on the island would reach Nineveh not long after the death of Prince Nahir in India and drive the appalled King to rage. Disgusted by the ideals of popular sovereignty that the Sumatran Revolution drew inspiration from, he demanded that his armies crush it immediately and without remorse. With troops redeployed from the Malabar Crusade, loyalist forces were able to established a decided advantage and systematically reconquer the entire island and crush the revolt by 1684.
The outbreak of fighting on Sumatra, and resulting diversion of resources from India, cut short the Malabar Crusade. While final victory in the Siege of Venad in 1682 had ensured Assyrian victory in the war, they would have to limit their ambitions of sweeping annexations throughout the region. In the Treaty of Madurai agreed in 1683, Assyrian annexed the southern portion of Malabar, including its leading city in Cochin and the areas with the most densely concentrated Christian populations. In exchange, they returned Ceylon – occupied for more than half a decade – to its Tamil rulers and renounced their claims to the northern part of Malabar, which included the city of Calicut. Although not as spectacular as some had hoped for, this was a victory of historic spiritual significance to the Nestorian faith. For the firth time in four centuries, Christian rule had returned to India.
In the Indies, another key legacy of this period of conflict was in the decision of the crown to completely reorganise the administration of the colonies. The Malaccan and Moluccan Trading Companies were abolished, with the crown taking direct control over the governances of the East Indian colonies. On the ground, much of the infrastructure of Company administration remained in place, with the central state merely taking a more active role in the appointment of key positions.
Away from Asia, Assyrian expansion in southern Africa continued with the Cape colony driving its frontiers ever deeper into the African interior, driven the the migration of Al-Opheerian settlers northwards from the increasingly crowded Cape itself in pursuit of gold, minerals and farmland. These northern treks lured the Al-Opheerians into intermingled conflicts with the Bantu-speaking tribes of the southern African interior, the Muslim Swahilis and the Catholic Egyptians. In the area around the Cape that the Assyrians had first begun to colonise a century before, the settlers had found the indigenous tribes weak and easily dominated. The further north the settlers reached, the more warlike and resistant to intrusion the native tribes were. Further to this, these areas had much deeper connections to the East African Swahilis and the colonial enclave of the Egyptians, both of whom were hostile to the Assyrian presence in the region. For decades, Al-Opheerian settlers were in a state of constant low level struggle to control the regions they occupied and extend their grip. This situation took a turn in the 1680s.
From the 1670s the warchief Ngwane, King of the Swazi, had been building a confederation of Bantu tribes both within and beyond the areas claimed by Assyria by a mixture of diplomacy and bloody warfare. Seeing the Swazi as a potential threat to the Assyrians, both the Egyptians and Swahilis provided him with arms and gold to strengthen his forces. In 1681, the Swazi Confederation entered into direct conflict with Assyria after his forces raided the town of Jazina – one of the largest Assyrian settlements of the interior – and slaughtered its entire population of 3,000 souls. This was the beginning of an existential conflict that defined the distinct identity of the Al-Opheerian settlers. With the Malabar Crusade ongoing, the Assyrian Crown could offer little additional assistance beyond the existing garrison, which could do little beyond protecting the most populated areas around the Cape. Instead, creole militias were forced to take forward the fight.
The Al-Opheerians possessed clear technological advantages over the Swazi, with the tribesmen having limited knowledge of the firearms they did possess, little access to steel weapons and no cavalry tradition. As such, although outnumbered, the Al-Opheerians could move with speed from place to place and carry a much stronger punch. The fighting would go on for years, with the settlers predominantly on the defensive but wearing the Swazi Confederation thin with numerous bloody victories over the Africans.
The end of Assyria's wars in India and Sumatra allowed the state to play a larger role in the conflict from the middle of the decade – targeting Ngwane's outside allies. Employing diplomatic and economic pressure on the Kilwa Sultanate, they pushed the Swahilis to step away from the Swazis. The Egyptians were dealt with far more harshly, with a swift campaign in 1686 that saw their small African territories, and the Antarctic island of Sud Giorgio in the South Atlantic, occupied and annexed. Shorn of their backers, and with thousands of Assyrian soldiers arriving from other fronts, the campaign was taken to the Swazi and their Confederation utterly crushed by the end of 1687. The victorious Al-Opheerians delighted in placing the entire Swazi nation, and many of the allied Bantu tribes of the Confederation, into slavery – moving entire populations across southern African to where the demand for enslaved labour was greatest, with many thousands also sent away from the continent entirely sold into the wider Indian Ocean slave trade. This barbaric victors peace, the like of which had never been seen before in Assyrian history, had a significant impact at home, where it shocked quiet elements of society that were beginning to ask questions of the institution of slavery itself.
In the Nestorian heartlands of Assyria, victory in the Malabar Crusade was a source of ecstatic jubilation. Across the land, clergy celebrated the ancestral struggle to liberate the St Thomas Christians as the end of a holy mission to save Christendom. The Assyrian armies brought with them a variety of prized relics back from India – chief among them, the skull of the Apostle Thomas and a robe that Nahir the Bear had worn during the first St Thomas Crusade in the thirteenth century and had remained perfectly preserved. After these relics were brought to land in Basra they began a slow procession through Mesopotamia towards their new home in the magnificent Renaissance domed Cathedral of Saint Addai's in Nineveh. As they proceeded through the land, crowds of pilgrims travelled to see them in their tens of thousands – emptying entire villages as the common people sough communion with the holy glory of the Crusade. It was a moment with few precedents in Assyrian history of the scale of the public religious devotion on show, cementing a glorious standing for King Yeshua among the faithful.
Wielding this great prestige, Yeshua sought to make the greatest change to Assyria's constitutional arrangements in decades. In Sumatra, Yeshua and the absolutists at court had seen a warning of the persistent strength of decentralist ideas and their continued, alarming, mutations. They believed that Assyria's greatest weakness was its lack of uniformity and the still surviving recognition of divergence and differences within the Four Kingdoms. Yeshua's solution was a thunderbolt. In 1685 Yeshua, by then sixty five years old and having reigned as King for half a century and in his own right for four decades, abolished all his historic titles, adopting a new imperial status as Sar Sarrani – an ancient Mesopotamian variant of the Iranian King of Kings. Under this new regime, the Medieval Kingdoms of Assyria, Armenia, Syria and Philistia were all abolished, to be replaced by a single Assyrian Empire. In a grandiose ceremony at Saint Addai's cathedral, in the presence of the holy relics from Malabar, the Patriarch invested Yeshua with this new power and status – glorifying him in the presence of the whole world.
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