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1589-1605 – I Will Have My Vengeance
1589-1605 – I Will Have My Vengeance
Assyria interest in southern Africa was fuelled by a confluence of three factors – slaves, ships and gold. Ever since the Oceanic War of 1557-1562 between Assyria and a Sunni coalition led by the Caliph and including Muslim allies in East Africa and the East Indies, there had been an interest among Assyrian colonialists to find more reliable slave markets that were not dependent on the goodwill of tempestuous Swahili Sultanates. This led to expeditions further south, beyond the Muslims’ reach.
At the same time, the sixteenth century was an era of rapidly expanding global trade. Although Asian-European trade still predominantly moved along the ancient routes overland or through the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, intrepid merchants were seeking new avenues. This had led to some European traders, admittedly still modest in number and mostly travelling from the Scottish colonies in Brazil, sailing around the southern Cape of Africa to reach the Indian Ocean. From there, the Scots had gained access to slaves, spices and silks directly. With this emerging trade route, the Cape of Good Hope was becoming an obviously strategic choke point. It was primarily for this reason that the Assyrian state sponsored the established of a trading post on the South African Cape in 1586 – marking the birth of Assyrian colonial ventures on the African mainland.
The final factor that turned a modest trading post into a magnet settler colony was the discovery of gold a decade later. The promise of gold, bountiful land, commerce and good climate, would attract many thousands of Assyrians, Arabs and others from the Four Kingdoms to migrate to South Africa in the decades to come.
During the years around the turn of the century Assyria would strike out in a series of wars to seek revenge against its many enemies, hoping to restore its standing among the top table of world powers.
Catholic power in the Eastern Mediterranean was in clear decline by the latter years of the sixteength century. In the 1580s the Sunni Caliphate pushed the shrivelling Kingdom of Egypt completely out of Upper Egypt. With Damietta already in the hands of an Assyrian-controlled vassal, the Kingdom’s grip in Egypt-proper was limited to the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. Meanwhile, Latin Christendom was submerged in religious power struggles between Protestantism and the Roman Church. This not only reduced European interest in the eastern appendages of Latin Christendom, but loosened the unity of the once tightly bonded Eastern Catholic communities.
In 1595, spying weakness, Assyria moved quickly to occupy the Holy Roman territories around the Red Sea – the last legacy of Germany’s Crusader era. In the face of this threat, the Catholic powers put forward a rare display of unity. With Protestant Italy blocking passage across the sea, the French agreed to ferry a German army to Tunis in the Kingdom of Egypt. From there, the Imperials marched overland to attack the Assyrians and seek the liberation of their territories. This brave expedition ultimately resulted in painful failure as the Assyrians emerged victorious on the field of battle and forced the Empire to surrender in 1598.
While King Yeshua celebrated his gains along the Red Sea, a far larger and more consequential conflict had broken out in the Caucuses in 1597 between the two greatest empires of the age – Byzantium and the Timurids. The first year of fighting had been extremely costly for both sides, with scores being claimed by the inhospitable conditions in the mountains alone, yet the Timurids had gained a modest advantage – pushing into Byzantine Georgia and occupying Tblisis. Nonetheless, their armies had been badly sapped and would struggle to progress much further. The Great Khan therefore decided to call upon his alliance with Nineveh for the first time – asking Assyria to ride to his aid. Electrified by the chance to avenge the Byzantine invasion of his homeland two decades before, Yeshua eagerly agreed to join the war effort.
Assyria’s entrance into the war turned the tide of battle from a close contest into a rout. With a wide front opened up across Anatolia and King Yeshua taking personal command of a grand Syriac army, the Byzantines had no hope of holding the line. Quickly they fell into a fighting withdrawal across Asia Minor towards Constantinople. As they went, the Assyria’s spearheaded the charge and were noted for their brutal treatment of the Greek inhabitants of the western portion of Anatolia, the King delighting in showing his old enemies the horrors of occupation. In 1601 Yeshua joined with the Timurid generals on the banks of the Bosporus – in sight of the Queen of Cities herself, but unable to reach her owing to the continued resilience of the Roman fleet. After some months of stalemate, the Great Khan sent out emissaries to the Byzantines to begin negotiations for peace.
To their frustration, the Assyrians were relegated to a supporting role in these discussions – the Timurid Khan being eager to impose his senior status within their alliance. The Treaty of Nicomedia, settled in 1602, saw the Byzantines grant independence to the small Albanian Principality of Arbanon – that had rebelled during the war and received support from Isfahan and Nineveh, in Georgia the Timurids annexed a portion of territory including key fortification and the city of Tblisi. This frustrated the Assyrians, in particular the Armenian lobby within the realm who had held such a strong interest in Georgia, but the Kingdom was compensated with lands in Cilicia and a Georgian exclave at Kartil that allowed Yeshua to present the war as an important victory.
Not content with his recent gains from the Greeks and Germans, just months after the end of the war with Byzantium Yeshua ordered the invasion of Egypt. The much diminished Kingdom, that one century before had ruled over Assyria itself, now stretched from Alexandria and Cairo in the east to Tunis in the west along a thin strip of North African coastline. With no European power willing to defend it, the emboldened Assyrian army pushed what little resistance Egypt could offer with ease. In the diktat imposed upon the defeated Kingdom in 1605, all of its territories from Benghazi eastward were surrendered to the Assyrian-controlled Duchy of Damietta. With these annexations, Assyria had in effect destroyed the last remnant of the Crusades in the Middle East.
During this period of pointed warfare with the powers of the West, the tensions within Assyria’s religious landscape had worsened as the wars breed suspicion that Assyria’s own Latin and Greek Christians might harbour sympathies with the enemy. Yeshua himself particularly distrusted the Greeks – believing they had facilitated rather than resisted Byzantine occupation during the Byzantine-Assyrian War of 1578-1583. Fearing that they might use the decentralised institutions of the realm as a fifth column, the King used the war years as an opportunity to remove or dampen the influence of Greek Christians. In Syria, where the Paulician and Old Orthodox establishment of Antioch and Aleppo had been the leading force in the Kingdom for two centuries, the King sought to build alliances between the large Nestorian minority within Syria and the smaller denominations in order to install Syriacs in positions of influence. Similarly in Armenia, largely divided between an Old Orthodox west and Oriental Orthodox east, Yeshua sponsored anti-Greek alliances.
In Philistia, the situation was much more complex. There, the Protestant Reformation had arrived on Assyrian shores some decades before through connections between the minority Latin elite and Europe through Italy. While imported Protestant theology fizzled among the Latins, it was on contact with the indigenous Arab Catholics that it made a greater impact. Middle Eastern Protestant took on a distinctive character – playing upon social tensions between Latin elites and Arab masses, it preached solely in the local Arabic vernacular, filled its leadership ranks with Arabs (a contrast to the Latin-controlled Philistian Catholic Church), and prayed to traditional sensibilities, some of which had contained echoes of Islam – with the forbidding of alcohol, scornful rejection of graven imagery and art and dourly pious tone. These same influences were mirrored across the border in Egypt, including the Assyria’s subject state of Damietta, where Copts, rather than Arabs, were set against their Latin overlords.
With the Protestant community unrecognised as a distinct Christian grouping in Assyria’s complex religious settlement they received little in the way of protection. The Catholic authorities who controlled Philistia’s autonomous institutions therefore characterised the schism as a problem within their community and their Kingdom, resolving to quash the Protestants through weight of persecution. Seeing an opportunity to weaken Catholicism, and with it the influence of foreign powers, within his realm, and challenge the power of local elites, King Yeshua intervened in Philistian affairs to side with the Protestants. Turning to Assyria’s laws of religious toleration, he forbade the persecution of the Protestants and offered them his protection – pushing them to formalise their status. With the King’s aid, the Protestants of the Middle East soon coalesced into the Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church of Jerusalem and Coptic-speaking Evangelical Church of Egypt, the latter based in Damietta. Both Churches would grow to represent important minorities within their respective communities in Philistia and Egypt.
In religious affairs, the Assyrian state had moved towards a clearly more interventionist approach than had been attempted for generations. The King sought to weaken the largest denominations, with their links to foreign powers, that had formed tight, non-Syriac, establishments in many parts of the realm. By breaking these up, the centralists hoped to allow for the Church of the East to assume a more dominant position as Assyria’s true church of state.
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The Maldives are far from nothing even if they are well short of our initial goals. A historic part of the old Malabar Raj, a close point of connection to the St Thomas Christians in India and a new station in our Indian Ocean empire - and what an ideal stopping point on the route between Sumatra and Oman!
And now we've taken a more serious step forward with a series of military successes. Perhaps these gains haven't allowed us to completely forget the losses of Georgia and Cyprus, but they are a real boon and we look to be in a very secure position so long as the Timurid elephant stays on side.
We are seeing that religious screw tightening with the cover of the wars with the Latins and Greeks allowing the state to grow more hostile to these two large alternative sources of religious power. It is an interesting dynamic that the Nestorians are seeking to effectively rally a core Nestorian block alongside the smaller denominations to undermine the more middling sized ones as they angle greater influence.
The alliance with the Timurids has proven its worth already. The Byzantines might have been able to swipe us away alone, but they stood little change against the two powers together.
A tremendous damp squib! The victories against the Nicene Christians were surely more satisfying - even if I don't quite understand why the Timurids decided I needed an exclave in northern Georgia
. They were surely let down not only by Assyria's failure to liberate them - but to even land an army on the Indian mainland. We will have to see how that relationship evolves in the future.
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Kinda surprised South Africa is uncolonized by 1600. In my AAR I've had to colonize it some 50 years early to prevent Spain from colonizing it. Anyways it's nice to see the trade motivations on the part of Assyria line up with the Europeans, except it's the maintenance of a monopoly instead of breaking the Ottoman one down. The only point I'd contend on is that South Africa wasn't a place that exported slaves, it imported them (the connections with the Arabic Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean introduced the word "kaffer" from "kaffir" to both South Africa and the Netherlands with two different meanings). It would however be a nice stop to West Africa, which did export them and may prove to be more reliable partners to Assyria considering they don't have the geopolitical rivalries that their East African muslim compatriots have with Assyria.
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Assyria claims the Holy land from the catholics and wins the war of vengeance with the Byzantiums. But I can't see the new policies of ostracizing and curtailing the power of the greek subjects of Assyria as beneficial in the long term. Unrest must be brewing...
And this expansion in africa and the caucasus will inevitably lure Assyria into conflict with the Great Khan and the Sulaymans. Here's hoping Assyria's colonial empire will be able to bankroll and provide the manpower for such a costly war.
And this expansion in africa and the caucasus will inevitably lure Assyria into conflict with the Great Khan and the Sulaymans. Here's hoping Assyria's colonial empire will be able to bankroll and provide the manpower for such a costly war.
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Well, that is some definite turning of fortunes. Now surely Yeshua will die early and his heir be a baboon.
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oh god, we're about to see arab christian boers doing apartheid- assyria really is rushing to do as much cursed colonialism as possible
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And the Timurids will assuredly remember that they’re supposed to hate Assyria, break the alliance, burn Niveneh to the ground and take Baghdad in the peace deal.
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Certainly, in the long term Arabia and Egypt have to be secured, and best to do it when the relationship with the Timurids is strong and the chance at their intervention is the lowest
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I'm not overly enamored with these turns of event, but we'll see if the Assyrians can turn strength into stability. I would advise moderation, but that does not seem to be their strongest suit...
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Back up to date again after having to deal with some RL matters in recent weeks. It was interesting to read that last batch of chapters as a group. Great writing as usual and some good twists and turns in the game.
So far, the Timurid Alliance has worked very well indeed.
Well that must be embarrassing for the Pope! Has he been evicted from Rome?
So far, the Timurid Alliance has worked very well indeed.
It would be interesting to get an idea of how Europe is looking these days, including the divisions into Catholic and Protestant. Any Thirty or Hundred Years’ War equivalents emerging yet?
Well that must be embarrassing for the Pope! Has he been evicted from Rome?- 1
Well, Assyria has achieved victories, but I fear that they're getting arrogant in their victory.
Yeshua himself is an example of what a people who has been occupied wants - revenge. He's asking for a Byzantine army led by Anatolian Greeks to launch an invasion of Assyria and besiege Nineveh.
Alienating key players in the realm is also unwise and likely to lead to more revolts.
The end of the European Wars of Religion will likely be a tumultuous time for Assyria - as the Catholics attempt to gain their revenge. Just because they're preoccupied now... doesn't mean that they'll be preoccupied in the future.
Yeshua himself is an example of what a people who has been occupied wants - revenge. He's asking for a Byzantine army led by Anatolian Greeks to launch an invasion of Assyria and besiege Nineveh.
Alienating key players in the realm is also unwise and likely to lead to more revolts.
The end of the European Wars of Religion will likely be a tumultuous time for Assyria - as the Catholics attempt to gain their revenge. Just because they're preoccupied now... doesn't mean that they'll be preoccupied in the future.
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Good to see Assyria bouncing back, after those unfortunate but thankfully not hugely hurtful losses. The Timurdis are a very powerful ally although the Caucasus ownership may become a sticking point with them and the internal elites.
And I'm sure encouraging religious fragmentation and conflict within your own borders will not backfire at all...
And I'm sure encouraging religious fragmentation and conflict within your own borders will not backfire at all...
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A tremendous damp squib! The victories against the Nicene Christians were surely more satisfying - even if I don't quite understand why the Timurids decided I needed an exclave in northern Georgia
Perhaps, but the hostily towards our brothers-in-Christ troubles me deeply. Assyria should look eastwards!
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Assyrians: Europe will go through us to get to those Eastern riches or they won't get them at all!
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Not an update today - but tell me there is a way we can use this image later in the AAR! Assyrians have made it to the World Cup!
See you all soon for the next proper update.
See you all soon for the next proper update.
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1605-1627 State and Crown
1605-1627 State and Crown
Assyria’s period of persistent warfare was far from over after its victories in Egypt in 1605, as Four Kingdom’s Timurid ally would soon draw them into a conflict on a continental scale. For centuries the Timurid Khans had feuded with the mighty empires of India – consolidating their grip on the Indus Valley but failing to push any deeper into the subcontinent. The alliance with Nineveh, and crushing victory over the Byzantines had shifted the balance of power – securing the Persianate empire’s western flank – and open the possibility of focussing its full might on the east. In 1607 the Timurids invaded the Bengali Mallabhum empire, seizing Delhi and advancing along the Ganges. These successes soon drew in the subcontinent’s other Hindi-speaking power in the Rajput Solankis. With the war escalating out of hand, the Khan called upon his allies in the west – the Sunni Caliph and, far more importantly, the Christian King of Assyria to come to his aid. The entire Indian Ocean world was locked in conflict. Fighting would rage on for the best part of a decade, claiming the lives of close to 700,000 souls on the battlefield alone in one of history’s bloodiest conflicts.
For the most part, Assyria’s role would be on the high seas. The Kingdom had the single largest navy in the Indian ocean and, alongside the Persian and Arab fleets of its allies, possessed the potential to dominate the ocean’s waters. In the first years of the conflict the Assyrians pursued a strategy aimed at blockading the Indian’s key ports and ravaging trade in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. These grand ambitions were dealt a debilitating blow by a crucial Bengali victory near the Andaman Islands in 1610. Thereafter, the Indian Ocean became a contested battleground with neither side of the conflict able to exert their dominance on the other.
In the Indies, the Bengalis possessed a small, heavily fortified, enclave on the island of Sumatra. As the core of Assyrian colonial empire, and with a number of smaller states allied to the Timurid Khan present on the island, it was expected that a quick victory could be achieved. Instead, the Bengalis would hold out year after year undefeated, inflicted significant casualties on the attackers as the tried and failed to dislodge them.
On the Indian subcontinent, the fighting was apocalyptic in scale. The conflict took on the tone of a civilisational Holy War, as Hindu and Muslim of dozens of ethnicities met on the battlefields from the Hindu Kush in the north to Gujarat and the Ganges Delta in the south. Resisting the requests of the Great Khan, the Assyrians avoiding directly involving their own armies in this bloodiest theatre of conflict – maintaining their armies, depleted by years of warfare, at home while keeping their focus on the seas.
The past decades of conflict had weakened Assyria’s economic foundations, seeing creeping inflationary pressure from modest debasements of the coinage, disruptions to harvests and heavy investment by the state in all the paraphernalia of war. This had proven sustainable as the Indian Ocean trade that formed the foundation of Assyria’s Early Modern riches was undisturbed. The Great Indian War ended this situation. With heavy fighting on Sumatra, Assyria’s imperial jewel suffered significant economic damage while many other colonies were disrupted by Indian raids. Worse, the Indian Ocean’s precious sea lanes, the richest trade routes in the world, were all but ground to a halt by the heavy naval warfare. Already rising inflation began to spiral as the merchant classes sought to scramble to compensate for the disruption they faced, while at the same time the colonial companies took on heavy debts and taxes on the commonfolk rose significantly to fund the conflict.
These economic shocks hit a realm in which a raft of political, religious and social tensions were already beginning to rise to the surface. From 1609 until 1611, Assyria was rocked by a wave of serious peasant unrest that affected many parts of the Four Kingdoms but was most clearly concentrated in Syria and Armenia, where economic and religious dissent met in a powerful combination that saw peasant armies stalk the land. Attracting significant sympathy from Greek Christian elites and leading to open attacks on the King on the floor of the Majlis, at the height of the rebellions there appeared to be a threat of the realm slipping towards civil war.
King Yeshua’s solution to the crisis was to turn against the merchant classes. A statute of prices was introduced that forced products to be sold at fixed prices set to their pre-war levels – this did much to calm the unrest of the peasantry. At the same time a series of restrictions on merchants and traders were introduced aimed at stabilising economic relationships and further isolating Assyria from the Kingdom’s enemies in India. Finally, the crown stepped in to support the struggling Malaccan and Moluccan Trading Companies, but at the cost of taking a controlling interest in both organisations and effectively ending the era of unrestricted Company domination of the Indies.
All these reforms and restrictions were heavily opposed by the merchant classes who feared the interference of the state would lead both themselves and Assyria to ruin. Their frustrations would lead many into the dissident circles of the Federalists, gradually introducing the merchants affection for freer markets into their broader ideology of decentralisation, parliamentary power and confessionalism.
The Great Indian War ended in 1615 after eight years of fighting in a miserable white peace. Not one scrap of land nor gold coin nor even treaty revision changed hands as the Khan met with his Indian counterparts in the city of Lahore to sign a treaty of peace and friendship. The limits to the power of the Nineveh-Isfahan axis had been found at tremendous cost.
The Federal Kingdom that Yeshua seized power over in 1583 possessed an almost totally unique constitutional arrangement that guaranteed a level of freedom and dispersed power seen in few other states in the world. Yet one by one the King and his allies had undermined its basis. By the late 1610s, with the monarchists increasingly adopted emerging ideas of absolutism that called for the rejection of any and all constraints of the power of the crown, the Assyrian state had clearly evolved into a new, imperial, form. The Church of the East was now ascendant over the other Christian Churches, who remained tolerated and continued to exercise a degree of authority but much diminished from their previous status. The assemblies of the constituent Kingdoms were de fanged and much of their power transferred to Nineveh. The Trading Companies, who once administered an empire on behalf of their committees and investors, were now largely under state control. Meanwhile the Majlis itself was little more than an advisory body with the King content to govern with little reference to its will. For all this centralisation of authority, opposition to the King’s project was broad and steadily growing, grouped around the Federalist faction and focussed around the ambition to restore the old constitution established by the Marian Revolution. It was a mark of what remained of the old freedom that in Yeshua’s Assyria, dissent was accepted even if it was largely ignored.
The pace of Assyrian colonial expansionism had undoubtedly slowed during Yeshua’s reign in comparison to its ecstatic growth earlier in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, in the first three decades of the new century steady progress continued. In the Indies, a short and relatively bloodless invasion of the Emirate of Kutai saw Assyrian power on Borneo expand further north along the island’s eastern seaboard. In Africa, change was greater and more impressive as Assyrian adventurers, prospectors and settlers spread out from the Cape colony to push deeper into the African interior. There the found surprisingly little resistance from a quiescent local population and a rich and fertile land in which to call themselves masters. The state had relatively little interest in the colony beyond gold mines and the Cape’s trading port. For those settlers with the ruggedness and ruthlessness to take it, Africa offered an escape from law, taxes, lenders, landlords and colonial company contracts. As the first generation of settlers passed, these Middle Easterners would begin to form their own creole culture, speaking a stilted Arabised dialect known as Al-Opheerian.
By the 1620s, King Yeshua was an ageing figure who had ruled for decades and reshaped the Assyrian state in his own image. Yet the future of his political project was far from secure, with his succession not yet settled. Despite the rising power of King and crown, the principle of elective monarchy had not yet been challenged. With opposition to Yeshua’s strong armed approached having grown ever broader and more entrenched over time, it seemed liked the Majlis would oppose any effort to see another Amarah succeed the King. Realising that this was an issue that might push his enemies into open revolt, and having seen his will to fight sapped by age, Yeshua attempted to avoid confronting the issue head on and instead sought to cajole and bully the Majlis behind his chosen successor, his nephew Gurgen.
However, this was an issue on which the nobility would not budge. By 1627, with the King’s health deteriorating, the problem had not been resolved. Desperate to preserve the legacy of his long reign – at 34 years, the longest since Nahir the Bear in the thirteenth century – Yeshua announced a shocking decree that unilaterally adopted a law of hereditary succession in line with Assyrian traditions prior to the Marian Revolution. Within months, the old despot was dead. He rose to power in a country in the ruins of military catastrophe, and left it tremendously changed but hurtling towards civil war.
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Really prime real estate left untouched! The Europeans are already all over South America and parts of West Africa at this point, so quite the opportunity that SA was left open. And noted on SA's history. In game a lot of our SA provinces start producing slaves as their good (alongside other things like gold and so on) - so in game is becomes a slave exporting province. The Cape is both the gateway for Europeans who want to engage with the Indian Ocean trade and our own stepping point for contact with the Atlantic World. This is something we've barely engaged with at this point, but that will change as the Cape becomes established.
The one real surprise here has to be that civil war waiting until Yeshua's death to break out. He's trampled all over the old liberties and political settlement that had defined Assyria during the Federal Kingdom and even from the Armenian period in the 1400s. It's time for a showdown here.
We shall see how long that alliance with the Timurids will remain. We are traditional enemies, and they seem to view us as clearly the junior partner - twice now drawing us into wars in which their interests come first and they take the lead.
Well for one thing he didn't die early. 34 years isn't an absurdly long reign, so it's impressive that its the longest we've had in 400 years. He will certainly go down in the pantheon of one of the most important figures in Assyrian history - although likely a very controversial one!
We're certainly on the path to something of this sort in South Africa. Its emerging as a settler colony already in a society with a particular view of Africans.
That is always the danger! At what point to the two of us stop being useful to each other? The Timurids are already getting a little scary and maybe a touch meglomaniacal - do they see themselves as the masters of the world in attempting to conquer India?
In game, the alliance with the Timurids was obviously my response to the Byzantine disaster. I'd had fairly bleak relations with them throughout the game (fighting a war directly against them in the 1400s and annoying them by attacking the Sunni Caliph when they weren't looking in the 1500s). If I didn't ally with them I feared they would attack me next and crush me. With them on side, we can feel very secure. But whether we want to be the Khan's lackey forever is another question.
We've really drifted from one extreme to another. At this point, despite all the absolutist drift, Assyria's constitutional arrangement is still probably more balanced and free than most of its contemporaries. But we have a clear direction of travel away from the era of the Federal Kingdom. We shall see if the defenders of the old order can turn the tide against the would be absolutists.
Back up to date again after having to deal with some RL matters in recent weeks. It was interesting to read that last batch of chapters as a group. Great writing as usual and some good twists and turns in the game.
So far, the Timurid Alliance has worked very well indeed.
It would be interesting to get an idea of how Europe is looking these days, including the divisions into Catholic and Protestant. Any Thirty or Hundred Years’ War equivalents emerging yet?
Getting the chance to hit back against the Greeks was sweet, embroiling ourselves in a grand and destabilising war against the Indian empires was less than ideal. We shall have to see how this alliance with Isfahan continues in the future.
I will see if I have good screenshots for Europe in this period. In terms of the Reformation - Italy, parts of Germany and the Baltic region went Protestant, as did parts of Spain. Germany was the main hotbed for religious wars - with Protestant Thurungia facing down the Catholic HRE and Germany fairly evenly split between them (and the two almost constantly at war). As for the Pope - I imagine he's made his way to Avignon by now!
Yeshua was a figure who's entire reign was shaped by that defeat to the Greeks, memory of them marching into Nineveh and occupying the Assyrian heartland and his own fight to push them back. It was the driving force for his political project to dismantle the Federal Kingdom, his harsh line against internal minorities, his desire to inflict revenge during the war with the Greeks and the alliance with the Timurids for security.
That alienation of various stakeholders in the Kingdom has slowly led to the coalescing of a powerful alternate faction that has now risen up in arms. We shall see if it sweeps back his legacy and restores the old structures.
And we shall see what the future holds for our relationship with the Catholics in the West!
And backfire it surely has! Religious and ethnic dissent, at an elite level at least, has at this stage not drifted towards those wanting a dissolution of the Assyrian state but is focussed around a project to restore the previous political settlement. It is a question if, should this effort fail, future dissidents look towards a more separatist escape from a centralising Assyrian state.
To and extent we were looking eastward in this latest update, becoming embroiled in one of the biggest wars of the age against the Indian superpowers. Megacampaigns always seem to see this Indian super states emerge - something to do with Indian states being overly stable and internally peaceful in CK2 I think. But religious disquiet at home has hardly stopped, and we now look like we will be taking swords against one another once more.
A fair position I am sure you will agree!
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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.
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