1703-1716 The Copper King
Sar Sarrani Levon had an iron fixation on foreign affairs, on war and international diplomacy, throughout his reign. This perspective would lead towards a certain neglect for the internal affairs of his sprawling realm as he pursued his grand ambitions of furthering Assyrian greateness in the aftermath of his victory in the 1699-1703 Assyrian-Byzantine War. The next field for his ambitions would be in the Indies.
Assyria had already moved to expand its territory on Sumatra in the last years of Yeshua II's life with a short war to annex the Emirate of Siak on the eastern shore of the island in 1795. Levon, hoped to tighten his Empire's grip on the island further by moving against the power colonial empire of Korea. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Korea was a major colonial player across the Pacific world with territories stretching from Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo in the Indies, to the great southern continent of Hoju, the western seaboard of North America, Taiwan and the islands of the Pacific.
Allying with the Thais, the Assyrian colonial authorities invaded Korean territories in 1704 and achieved significant early success. However, the Koreans were unwilling to surrender their westernmost colonies without a fight and pursued a long contest throughout the waters of South East Asia. Both sides would sustain heavy naval losses, but the tide turned after the Assyrian fleet captured Taiwan in 1707, allowing for its ships to ravage the coastlines of the Korean homeland. Although an attempt to invade the home peninsula itself proved a failure – the Assyrian expedition withdrawing after only a few months – the Koreans nonetheless agreed to a truce in 1708 that saw them surrender all their possessions on Sumatra and Borneo to Assyria.
While the Assyrians pursued their interests in East Asia, a significant shift in the balance of power was taking place in the Middle East and Africa. At its peak in the High Middle Ages, the Shia Fatimid Caliphate was the greatest power in the Muslim world – ruling Egypt, the Maghreb, Levant and Hedjaz. Declining in the face of the rise of Christian Assyria and the European Crusades, and pursued out of Arabia by Sunni rivals, at the dynasty's nadir in the fifteenth century it was one of a number of powers competing for power in Ethiopia. Over the following centuries, the Shia grew to become a major player – unifying Ethiopia under their control, conquering the Yemen, pushing north into the Sudan and west across the Sahel as far as Lake Chad and the Sanga River flowing into the Bight of Benin.
Concerned by its continued rise, the Timurids had offered their protection to their fellow Sunnis in Somalia and the Swahili Coast against Fatimid encroachment. In 1705 the Fatimids had tested this resolve by invading their Somalian neighbours, bringing them into direct conflict with the Great Khan. Despite being considered an African backwater, the Fatimids achieved impressive successes – defeating the Somalis in East Africa and maintaining sufficient naval control over the Horn of Africa to prevent the Khan from sailing to his allies aid. In 1712, the Fatimids celebrated a peace that cemented them as a major player in their own right, the Timurids agreeing to small territorial concessions in East Africa, paying a tribute and importantly terminating their protection of the vulnerable Sulaymans.
Impressed by the new found stature of the East African power, and seeking to building a new diplomatic network to replace Assyria's historic dependency on the Timurids, Emperor Levon sealed an alliance with the Fatimids shortly after their victory in Somalia. Capitalising on the Shia's diplomatic isolation of their fellow Caliphate, the two powers then joined together to invade the Sulayamans in a short and bloody conflict between 1713 and 1715. Faced by two far strong foes, the Sunnis could only mount a fighting retreat before succumbing to the inevitable – seeing their richest lands in Upper Egypt annexed by the Assyrian Empire.
Levon secured a second diplomatic coup in the midst of his invasion of the Sulaymans, with an alliance with Chernigov in 1714. With these treaties, Levon had successfully constructed a multi-confessional axis of status that shared a hostility towards haughty Timurid domination and the penetrating influence of the European powers with Assyria at the centre as its clear leader.
In contrast to the lands of Lower Egypt that Assyria already controlled indirectly through Damietta, Upper Egypt had been defined for centuries by its Islamic and Arabic culture and, despite Assyria's traditions of tolerance towards its Muslim subjects, was unwilling to countenance annexation into Christian Assyria. Within a year of its incorporation, the flag of revolt was already flying in Upper Egypt, with pious Egyptian Muslims proclaiming the Emirate of Aswan and overwhelming the sizeable Assyrian military garrison in the newly conquered province. With much of the land falling over the course of the next several months, the Assyrian state was forced to call in troops from the Levant, Arabia and Damietta in order to restore order – with battles raging on to the end of the decade at great cost in man and treasure alike.
While Levon secured a string of international successes with his skilled diplomacy and important military victories over the Greeks, Koreans and Sulaymans, internally his position was far weaker. The legitimacy of his imperial kingship had been disputed since the time of his succession by an alternate branch of the Amarah dynasty. Having failed to attract significant support at the time of Levon's ascension in the mist of the war against the Byzantines, Lebario Amarah continued to cultivate a growing clerical conservative faction around his claim. Even after the elder pretender's death, his nephew, the titular Lebario II, continued to plot, scheme and feed into broiling unrest in Mesopotamian.
Just as the Lebarians presented a threat in the Mesopotamian heartlands, traditional decentralist sentiment in the old Federalist mould remained as strong as ever among the nobles of the north and west of the Empire. With the risk of rebellion growing in Syria and Armenia in particular, Levon attempted to head off this threat by offering concessions – restoring some of the old autonomies and institutions of the historic Kingdoms of Assyria that had been abolished by his predecessor.
In the first decades of the new century the winds of a new intellectual age were sweeping through Assyria with the dawning of the Enlightenment. This was a set of ideals and ways of thinking rooted in reason and empiricism rather than faith and tradition that had first emerged in the Universities of Italy, Germany and Byzantium and soon took root in Assyria's own centres of learning. Undoubtedly influenced by the idea of the enlighten autocrat being promoted in Europe, Emperor Levon consciously attempted to open up his court and realm to new thinking – releasing political prisoners, removing censorship on publications and supporting a more vibrant intellectual life while shunning the clerical support base and ecclesiastical elites upon which Yeshua II had based his regime.
One of the consequences of this opening, was that the arch heretic Avira Sassine was released from his imprisonment in 1704 – after more than a decade an a half. Confinement had done little to limit either the growth of his movement or his own convictions, and Sassine found himself feted upon his return – where he found himself well connected at the very highest tiers of Assyrian society. Now operating openly and with confidence, Sassinites continued to proselytise while also engaging in secular causes. This included the establishment of the Society for the Abolition of Human Bondage, a political club dedicated to the abolition of slavery that would become a hotbed for liberal thought far beyond its heretical founders.
The most intractable problems facing Assyria in the new century were economic as unfavourable climatic conditions and pressure on the coinage squeezed the state and common people alike. Despite serving as the cradle of human civilisation and producing prosperity for thousands of years, the rivers systems of the Fertile Crescent upon which the Assyrian Empire was founded were highly sensitive to shifts in climate. A period of hotter and drier weather beginning in the 1710s and continuing for the next three decades upset this fragile system – straining irrigation networks, forcing fields to be abandoned to the desert and decreasing crop yields.
Just as this natural phenomenon pushed millions towards precariousness, the man made economic system was starting to break down. The issue was inflation, derived from a rapid debasement of the coinage. The Assyrian crown had been struggling under the weight of ever growing debts for decades, and during the reign of Yeshua II it had started to slowly reduce the gold and silver content within the coinage in order to sustain itself.
With the size of armies spiralling, the cost of warfare had grown significantly and Levon engaged in a series of costly campaigns against the French and Byzantines in 1699-1703, the Koreans in 1704-1708, the Sulaymans in 1713-1715 and the Aswan Revolt from 1716. All told, Levon spent just six years of his reign at peace and financed his militarism through a more rapid debasement. By the time of his death, the Assyrian Dinara was worth a fraction of its historic value. This caused serious imbalances in a highly commercialised economy – causing serious harm to the urban middle classes and pushing much of the countryside towards barter at the expense of cash.
Levon's administration had made some efforts to ease the situation by raising greater tax revenues, to mixed success. By far his most politically consequential decision made in this area was to reverse a number of tax exemptions for the Church of the East that they had been granted under Yeshua II – badly souring relations between the Imperial household and the Church.
The Sar Sarrani died in 1716, just shy of his 40th birthday, with a realm that had continued to expand through his reign but was riven by economic, social and political problems. His son and successor, Niv IV, was only 15 and would rise to power under the close supervision of his mother Sivert.
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