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

[Tommy4ever]

1716-1732 That Troublesome Priest

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The death of Sar Sarrani Levon in 1716 marked the opportunity for the Lebarian faction to finally contest the legitimacy of the Amarah-Laboue dynasty on the field as they had failed to in 1699. Capitalising on the assumed weakness of the new teenage Emperor Niv, and the unpopularity of his mother Sivert, the purported Lebario II raised the banner of rebellion in the Persian Gulf. Rallying the Bedouin Nestorian tribes of the region, he rode north into conservative Babylonia, where he found deep wells of support among the nobility, clergy and commonfolk alike. The pretender had high hopes of success as his numbers swelled, yet his lack of adequate artillery and stiff resistance from the city garrison prevented him from capturing Basra and sealing a solid base for his rebellion. In early 1717, he found himself isolated by a large loyalist army at the Battle of Najaf and badly defeated. As his supporters scattered, the would-be Emperor fled into exile in Persia.

The victors would not soon forget this revolt. Niv and his mother were already hostile to conservative elements at court and were suspicious at the enthusiasm much of the Church of the East in Babylonia and the Gulf had shown towards Lebario's claim. Fearing that the Nestorian hierarchy had conspired against them, they would push forward with reforms, that followed on from those of Levon, that would deepen the sidelining of the Church and seek a more secular state. This extended to inviting Jews and Muslims to take up roles in the Imperial administration.

Indeed, Niv and his mother were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and ran something akin to a Bohemian court – patronising philosophers, artists and scientists and inviting them to advise on the business of state at the expense of traditional sources of authority. They would push forward with a number of reforms aimed at rationalising the realm, including an unpopular redrawing of administrative boundaries – which had hitherto been based on centuries old political units.

The most significant economic malady that the reformist court attempted to address was the debased Assyrian coinage. The primary coinage in the Assyrian Empire were the gold Dinara and silver Shekel, both minted by the crown in Nineveh. By the turn of the century both had been heavily debased by years of monetary mismanagement. However, these were not the only major coins circulating within the Empire. Owing to its historic privileges and status as an independent Kingdom prior to the Armenian-Assyrian union of the fifteenth century, Armenia had long held the right to mint its own coins – the Drum – a status it had retained even during the height of absolutism. Unlike the Imperial coins, the Drum had retained its metal content and by extension its value and become used widely through the Empire in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

The reformers hoped to both rationalise the coinage and restore its value and confidence. Seeing the Drum as undermining the authority of the central state and the Emperor's coin, they moved to close the Armenian mint – much to the anger of the northern elites – and ban the use of the Drum entirely. A new, high quality, Dinara and Shekel then began to be minted, which over several years would replace the existing debased coinage. This process, while successful in restoring price stability, was extremely expensive. The crown would take control over the production of the gold mines of Sumatra and the Cape and introduce a reformed code of taxation that would significantly increase state revenues by both eliminating a number of traditional exemptions and privileges possessed by the nobility and Churches and yet further increasing the burden on the rest of society.

While price stability was welcome, albeit implemented in an authoritarian way with many slow to trust the new coinage, and a particular boon to the rising urban economies of the Empire's great cities, the Assyrian peasantry, and particularly those of Mesopotamia, remained in a state of crisis and rising agitation. As the region continued to suffer under a prolonged dry spell that had greatly reduced yields, the nobility had moved to partially compensate themselves for the new tax demands of the state by asking for greater exactions on the peasants. In what had once been a comparatively affluent society, certainly in comparison to its counterparts in Europe, poverty was widespread and growing while thousands were forced to flee to escape hunger – whether to the cities or the colonies. Anger and social tensions were becoming acute.

While the ideas of the Enlightenment made their way through Assyrian society, they stimulated the birth of modern archaeology. Sitting atop the Cradle of Civilisation, enquiry into Assyria's ancient past had been somewhat limited up to the eighteenth century. Unlike Egypt, with its awe inspiring heritage visible for all the world to see, many of the wonders of Mesopotamia and the Levant were less well known and had left a comparatively weak cultural imprint. Indeed, many pious Christians were uncomfortable associating themselves with the Biblical villainy of the ancient pagan empires. However, the magnificence and grandeur of what some of the early archaeological pioneers found below the lands of Mesopotamia in particular would leave an indelible impression, sparking off a fashion among the free thinking middle classes for all things associated with the Ancients.

Out of this milieu enamoured with the discoveries of long lost civilisations in Babylon, Sumer, Assyria and Akkad, was an Armenian philosopher named Yanai Babai from the border city of Mus. Studying at the universities of Aleppo and later Nineveh, Babai put forward a set of genuinely revolutionary ideas. Criticising the inequities and illogicality of the existing order, Babai rejected not only the monarchy but aristocracy as well and even the role of religion in national life. He supported a democratic republican order, elected by those who contributed towards the national wealth, the elimination of archaic institutions, laws, obligations, privileges and superstitions in favour of an order based on reason, simplicity, equal treatment and justice. In his writings, with appealed to an imagined image of the glorious Ancients, who were ironically largely ruled by despotic empires, Babai spoke of the need for contemporary Assyria to “Pass through the Ishtar Gate”, a metaphor for a total transformation of society. It was with this passage in mind, that followers of his beliefs would form the Ishtar Club in 1725 as a forum in which to gather and expound their revolutionary ideas.

The most politically explosive element of the unconventional courtly life in Nineveh was its infiltration by a number of Sassinites. The idiosyncratic heretical movement had laid deep roots in Assyrian high society with a number of skilled social climbing adherents, while the mysteries of its idiosyncratic practises and freethinking challenge to traditional morality made it an attractive prospect to many – particularly in the atmosphere of Niv's court. Their presence, more than anything else, was completely intolerable to the Church of the East who could stomach neither their origins as a despised offshoot of their communion nor their debauched religious beliefs. Worse, the Dowager-Empress Sivert was known to be in an open affair with a Sassinites noblemen – earning her the popular epithet “The Whore of Babylon” among her critics. Patriarch Shimun pleaded with Niv to expel the Sassinites from his court and allow for a return of Christian values, but, given the frosty relationship between Church and crown, this was ignored.

This sore only deepened as rumours began to emerge in the 1720s that the Emperor, now growing into adulthood, had started to personally take part in some of the ceremonies of the Sassinites, including their mysterious sexual rites. In 1728 the teenage son of the Malik of Ilam came forward with a lurid tale of his own participation in one of these orgiastic rituals, during which the Sar Sarrani can committed homosexual acts with him. This was the final straw.

On Easter Sunday 1738, Patriarch Shimun took to his pulpit in Saint Addai's Chathedral in Nineveh to issue an extraordinary call to arms. He claimed that the Devil himself now ruled in Assyria, that the Emperor was a heretic, a sodomite and illegitimate rule; that his immorality and misrule was to blame for the woes befalling his people and named Lebario II as the true Sar Sarrani, pleading with him to return to Assyria to restore Christian rule. Not since the Marian Revolution had the Church taken such a stance of open rebellion. Few could have realised how ready the country was to erupt. Violence quickly engulfed the land. In the cities of Mesopotamia, Nestorian mobs waged pitched battles against minority communities – set large swathes of the region's great cities ablaze and massacring thousands while also attacking tax offices and administrative buildings and parading enormous crosses through the streets. More dangerously, agents of the pretender stirred massive peasant unrest into coherent rebel armies from the Armenian highlands in the north to the Gulf in the south as Lebario himself returned from Persia to take command of this second rising.

This revolt dwarfed the first Lebarian War a decade and a half previously. In its opening stages Niv was forced to flee his capital for Syria, while his allies were run out of Mesopotamia – with only a view brave urban holdouts in Nineveh, Baghdad and Samarra standing against the rebels. Regrouping in Aleppo, and having lost control of the Nestorian heartland which had served as a the bedrock of the Imperial regime, Niv was forced to turn towards the western periphery of his Empire to save him. The nobles of Syria, Armenia and Philistia realised their position of strength and would extract a heavy price for rally the energies of their peoples behind the Emperor in his hour of need. Niv would make grandiose promises of further autonomy, special rights for the minority Christian Churches, new tax exemptions and above all the reconvening of the Majlis just over a century after its bloody closure.

Niv's desperate offer to turn the clock back to something akin to the old Federal Kingdom had the desired effect. The Syrians, Armenians and Philistians swelled his weakened ranks in their tens of thousands, while the flower of the western realms' young nobility joined the war effort. With the Lebarians still struggling to subdue the three resistant cities in northern Mesopotamia, the loyalist army marched east with great confidence. Between 1729 and 1732, Niv's armies would reconquer Mesopotamia piece by piece, cutting through the sprawling peasant armies of the enemy with spite and precision in a long campaign culminating once more in Babylonia and a siege of Basra between 1731 and 1732. The bloody campaign would do significant damage to the already fragile and weakened agricultural system of the region and claim the lives of tens of thousands before Lebario would flee to Persia for the second time. After great sacrifice, the Emperor had defended his crown once more.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1732-1737 The Emperor, the Majlis, the People and the Salt

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In the aftermath of his victory over the pretender Lebario, Emperor Niv's regime was completely beholden to the peripheral elites he had looked to in his time on need. With the rebels beaten, he would make good on his promises – devolving significant authority to the historic Kingdoms, even restoring the Armenian mint and removing restrictions on the use of the Drum and more importantly of all reconvening the Majlis. Over a hundred years since King Gurgen had crushed the assembly in bloody fashion, the great men from across the realm would gather once more in Nineveh to oversee the administration of the land. Despite calls for the increasingly vocal urban elites to have a place within the new assembly, an idea that had grown in prominence since the Sumatran Revolt of the late seventeenth century, the new Majlis would maintain its historic composition – with a membership mostly made up of the upper nobility and representation from across the Christian denominations.

The new Majlis was instantly confronted by the crown's ever worsening financial crisis. Its debts were immense and the recent civil war had pushed them to the extent that they were no longer easily serviceable. Yet the Majlis pushed through the elimination of a raft of taxes on the aristocracy and clergy that had been levied over the past three decades – restoring the privileges these classes had held at the time of the death of Yeshua II. Their solution was to shift the tax burden onto the common folk – the peasantry, traders and above all the urban middle classes who were increasingly important drivers of the imperial economy with unwelcome levies on all manner of goods, imported and domestic.

Faced with a decrepit and failing state that had turned its back on reform, was struggling under the weight of economic circumstances and social tensions and had empowered a rapacious aristocratic elite, the ideas of the Ishtar Club and of a radically different Assyrian state surged through the 1730s among the literate middle classes of the great cities of the Middle East through the medium of mass produced political pamphlets. Increasingly, these radicals were converging towards a central demand for a Majlis appointed by popular election that would represent the entire population of Assyria and not merely a narrow caste who refused to pay for the upkeep of the state.

In the countryside, years of rural unrest remained unresolved and continued to worsen, with anxieties spilling over into protest, localised unrest and general anger. Interestingly, different regions within the Empire were evolving divergent peasant ideologies. In many of the conservative Nestorian heartlands, Lebarian themes blaming hardship on a rapacious Federalist elite and ungodly government remained strong, while in other parts, most notably Armenia and parts of Syria, radical ideas of land reform and anti-landlordism were becoming ever more prominent.

In this post-Lebarian War Assyria, the central state was viewed as weak, venal and corrupt while regional centres re-exerted their influence. This was not an even process of the aristocracies of the historic Kingdom's greedily returning authority to their traditional assemblies, but also saw the urban elites attempt to secure some authority of their own. Having been denied representation in the Majlis, the Emperor agreed to grant special statuses to the greatest cities of the Empire that would allow them substantial governance over local affairs. This was a major innovation, and in the atmosphere of Enlightenment ideas and radical political philosophy brewing in the cities, there was ample room for experimentation. Most notably, the cities of Nineveh, Baghdad and Samarra – the three that held out resistant against the Lebarians during their occupation of Assyria-Superior – city councils were appointed through popular election by all property-owning men. The councils these elections produced were in turn hotbeds of militant opinion.

The antagonisms developing in Assyrian society would reach a crescendo in 1737 in the unlikely form of the salt crisis. Salt was a highly valued commodity, necessary above all for its preservative qualities. Without adequate salt, there were significant risks of serious food shortages throughout the land. The salt crisis of 1737 was not born of an actual shortage of production, but the temporary breakdown of logistics around its transportation that led to its scarcity in the cities of northern Mesopotamia for a period of several weeks early in the year. In a charged atmosphere, rumours of an absolute shortage spread rapidly through the region and led to widespread rioting in the capital and a number of nearby cities. In the face of agitation by Ishtarians and other radicals, the rioting mobs' demands intermingled the material and the political – with slogans calling for the state to ensure salt for the people, an end to unfair taxation and an elected Majlis.

On March 3rd, a large crowd formed outside the Qatwa Barracks of Nineveh's city garrison, believing the soldiers to be guarding a large stockpile inside. After hours of angry barrages and skirmishes, the numbers of the mob began to grow too great for the soldiers to control. Face with a choice of either firing upon the rioters or allowing them through, the garrison commander relented and abandoned the barracks – retreating to the main citadel in the city. The rioters descended on their conquest, ransacking its stores and thrilling in their sense of power. A radical section of the mob then moved on to march on the Majlis, located in the centre of the city. Besieging the building and issuing blood curdling slogans demanding “justice for the thieves” and “liberty for the people”. The military within the city had regrouped since its earlier defeat at the Qatwa Barracks, and was able to hold back the mob. Yet by now much of the city had descended into utter anarchy.

With his city in chaos, the Sar Sarrani sense the opportunity to restore his personal prestige and escaped from the straight-jacket his erstwhile allies in the Majlis had put him under since 1732, by taking control of events. On March 5th, after a further day of violence and bloodshed in the city – Niv left his palace in the countryside outside the capital to travel to Nineveh and meet with representatives of its radical city council, who were believed to have great influence with the mob. The Emperor agreed to a number of concessions – firstly promising to make military stores of salt available to the common people, calming fears of a shortage, and secondly reforming the Majlis to provide the cities with their own phalanx of representatives within the chamber. In the short term, this had the desired effect. With radicals and city burghers celebrating a major victory, and the shortage fears that had fuelled the riots dissipating, rioting soon petered out and the military was able to enforce order by the middle of the month. These humble events are often marked as the beginning of an incredible, world-historic, period in history – the Assyrian Revolution.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1737-1738 Can You Hear the People Sing?​

Few realised the significance of Niv IV's concessions to the salt rioters in early 1737. The power of the plebeian mob had been introduced a change-making political force in Assyria and had granted centre state to the liberal ideologies of the rising middle classes. Niv had granted the cities around a tenth of the seats within the Majlis, and the freedom to choose how to select their own representatives. Following the traditions that had emerged over the past decade in a number of urban centres that had been granted self-governance after the Lebarian War, several cities chose to select their Majlis representatives through raucous elections rather than appointment. Many of these new representatives were themselves radicals under the influence of the Ishtar Club and other organisations like the Society for the Abolition of Human Bondage, and would soon organise themselves into a single caucus within the Majlis.

The leader of this new Ishtarian caucus within the Majlis was the charismatic representative of Samarra – Lazarus Dunanu. A man of letters and flying rhetoric, the like of which the sleepy Majlis had rarely seen since its re-convention just a few years previously, he put forward four core demands: an entirely elected Majlis, guaranteed liberty of conscious and speech for all, an end to economic and political privileges based on aristocracy and inheritance and, explosively, restrictions on the slave trade and even outright abolition. Through his platform in the capital he possessed an ability to communicate with allies and sympathises across the entire Empire – with the emerging press picking up and disseminating his every word to all the realm's great cities. Importantly, within Nineveh itself his demagogic oratory allowed him to manipulate the mob at will and continue to bind it to Ishtarian ideals.

Events in the Assyrian metropole were being watched closely in the colonies, attracting both disdain and excitement. In Sumatra, the overarching sentiment was the latter. There, memories of the failed Sumatran Revolution of the 1680s had never truly faded, and ambitions for reform, local rule and liberal freedoms were a potent force. In September 1737, liberal creoles inspired by events in Nineveh, stormed the Governors offices and seized power in a coup backed by the local military garrison. There, they established an elected assembly to administer Sumatra and reform the colony, all the while professing their loyalty to the Sar Sarrani and Nineveh. The issue would soon paralyse the imperial administration. Any conflict with Sumatra would cut the crown off from its cold mines and the riches of trade with the Indies upon which its fragile finances depended. Equally, the Ishtarians in the Majlis were staunch supporters of the creoles' exercise of popular sovereignty, forming a pro-Sumatran lobby in the capital. With both political and economic factors holding it back, Niv's regime found itself incapable of responding – neither denouncing Sumatran coup nor accepting its legitimacy.

It was this Sumatran Crisis, and the inability of either the Majlis or Emperor to act decisively to crush the upstarts and restore order in this most vital of colonies that led the traditionalist general Karnu Kapriel to act. In October he send his troops into the capital to arrest Dunanu, quash the radicals, and close the Majlis – restoring the absolutist constitutional order that had preceded the past turbulent decade. This moment would change the course of Assyrian history. While Kapriel's troops successfully stormed the Majlis and detained Dunanu, they were caught off guard by the mobilisation of the urban poor by Ishtarian militants across the capital – with barricades forming to trap the soldiers occupying the Majlis and block any reinforcements from reaching them. The situation worsened when, with the Emperor remaining conspicuously silent and refusing to offer his backing to Kapriel, elements of the conspiracy began to lose confidence – with some parts of Kapriel's putschist officer core defecting to align with the defenders of the Majlis. After a two day siege, fearing for their lives and running low of supplies, the troops occupying the Majlis turned over Dunanu to the mob and withdrew from the Majlis in exchange for safe passage. The coup was collapsing and Kapriel himself was murdered by his own allies, most of whom fled the city.

In this moment of chaos, with the capital an armed battleground and no clear source of governing authority anywhere – the Ishtarians did not miss a beat in pressing home their momentum. Despite days under captivity and torture, Dunanu seized his moment in history and directed his allies to push on to consolidate their grip over the capital – occupying key points and seizing weapons abandoned by Kapriel's disintegrating army. He then led two thousand men on a march outside of the city walls to the Imperial Palace, where they presented the Emperor Niv IV with a petition demanded the concession of an elected Majlis. Disorientated by the speed at which events had moved, intimidated by the Ishtarians' show of force and fearful of all manner of threats to his life and position, Niv followed the pattern he had repeated throughout his reign and conceded to every demand.

In a strange atmosphere in which the authority of different institutions were in flux, fierce negotiations ensued between the existing Majlis, the Imperial household and the radicals on the nature and implementation of this promise. The franchise agreed between the parties was somewhat more restrictive than the Ishtarians might have hoped, with barely one in twenty adult men given the right to vote, with the franchise based on a property qualification, possession of recognised aristocratic heritage or a position of a certain rank in the clergy.

The above results are estimates based on records of the candidates taking part in the 1738 elections.​

The promised election would take place over December and January, with voting and counting taking several weeks. This election was the first of its kind anywhere in the world on this scale, with around a quarter of a million electors meeting the requirements to be able to cast a ballot. In an era long before the very idea of political parties, elections were largely local affairs and candidates did not necessarily run on defined political programmes or ideologies. However, after the dust settled four loosely defined factions would emerge within the Majlis – the Ishtar Club influenced allies of Dunanu who formed just a sixth of the chamber; a much larger group holding true to traditionally Federalist ideals of parliamentary power and decentralisation; a distinct Muslim block – enjoying a greater share of political power than their co-religionists had ever had in Assyrian history; and finally a sizeable but divided selection of conservative monarchists who opposed the idea of an elected Majlis entirely but were split between Lebarians and supporters of the Amarah-Laboue line.

Among the intriguing innovations in the new Majlis was the very concept of the political right and left. While the Majlis had always historically had factions and groupings, members had tended to group themselves within its chamber by region and historic kingdom and had not say in any discernible pattern. In the new assembly, sharp divides would be drawn with each of the three main factions assembling in clear groupings – Dunanu and his radical allies on the left, his conservative monarchist enemies on the right and the Federalists between them in the centre.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1740-1742 Revolution and Reaction

Assyrian decentralisation allowed for the emergence of important differences between the Empire's different regions. Among the most pronounced of these was the capture of Armenia's regional assembly by radical Ishtarians. There they acted as outriders was the wider liberal movement. They adopted a mass franchise for their assembly, opening to all literate adult men without debts; banned slavery within Armenia – something of a symbolic gesture, with the area having an almost non-existent slave population by the eighteenth century; altered the symbols of the state – adopting the first ever tricolour flag to replace more traditional heraldry; and pursued an outspokenly secular agenda. For several centuries the Armenian nation had been divided by religion between a historically dominant Oriental Orthodox community in the east, with the Old Orthodox communities in the west being more marginalised and a Nestorian minority scattered throughout the region being closer to Nineveh that local elites. The Armenian Ishtarians hoped to overcome these divisions by turning away from the traditionally tight relationship between local institutions and the Oriental Orthodox Apostolic Armenian Church, pursuing a separation between Church and government.

In the more southerly and conservative provinces of the Empire, the direction of travel was very different with frustration and violence building towards open revolt. Philistia was a particularly strong centre of angst. Supplied by arms smuggled into the country by agents of Catholic France, the Latin landed elite, despising the liberal revolution ongoing in Nineveh, had begun to organise through the still existent but now largely ceremonial Crusader Orders. By 1400, Knights of the Holy Orders, for centuries little more than prestigious relics of a bygone age, were beginning to take to the countryside as guerilla leaders against the Imperial authorities. By 1741 both their confidence and numbers were growing rapidly and in April that year they launched a daring expeditions – pursuing the main Imperial garrison in the south west to the Red Sea port of Aqabah and utterly destroying it in one of the gravest Assyrian military disasters for generations. All of Philistia and much of western Arabia lay virtually undefended.

Despite the descent into violent in Philistia, politics in the Imperial heartland were growing more radical. Indeed, the Knights' Revolt had heightened anti-conservative sentiment in the cities and the liberal mob increasingly harassed and attacked right wing representatives who dared show their faces in Nineveh – leading many to abscond from the Majlis entirely. Under pressure from the radicals among the Ishtarians within the Majlis, Dunanu had pushed his Federalist allies to adopt further reforms – ending all remaining Church exemptions from taxation, establishing a system of poor relief designed to ease urban poverty and calm the cities and creating new, more localised, elected assemblies at the level of small towns. Through this period, the still young Assyrian Constitution visibly buckled under the strains of the continued impetus towards reform, with the aristocratic upper house's attempts to obstruction and block new legislation being met with mob intimidation, and fury on the parliamentary floor. It was this question of the division of power that ended the fruitful alliance between the Federalist Vizier Nader and his Ishtarian keeper Dunanu. When the noble chamber blocked attempts to further loosen restrictions on the franchise, Nader stood firm against demands that he ignore its objections and proceed heedlessly ahead. The result would be a new set of elections in 1741.

The 1741 election, held in testing circumstances given the situation in Philistia, saw the crushing of the political centre at the expense of the extremes. As the old Federalist block in the Majlis, once so powerful, was reduced to a mere rump, Dunanu saw his allies soar to a clear majority in their own right for the first time. In reality, a portion of the Ishtarian majority in 1741 consisted of former Federalists who had drifted closer to Dunanu's leadership, but it was also true that many new and more left wing representatives were elected as well. Meanwhile, anti-parliamentary Conservatives also experienced a surge – sweeping the southern provinces and making gains in the more rural and religious parts of Assyria-Superior. Despite the misgivings of the Emperor, Lazarus Dunanu – the doyen of Assyrian radicalism for a decade – was made Vizier. Dunanu was under heavy pressure on his left flank to wield this new power to transform Assyrian society, emulating the Armenian example and even surpassing it by taking on the bulwarks of reaction – slave power, the residual authority of the aristocracy and even the Church of the East itself.

The disturbing results of the 1741 election proved the final straw for Conservative conspirators who been contemplating their next steps for some time. As Dunanu and the Ishtarians assembled their new government in the capital, the Imperial army on the eastern frontier with Persia rose the flag of revolt under the command of the arch-reactionary Yohannan Satenik, the Malik of Amida. Finding unsurprisingly strong support in Babylonia, Satenik moved to occupy Basra unopposed before marching northwards towards the capital. The first major obstacle he faced was Baghdad – second only to Nineveh itself as a beating heart of Ishtarian radicalism. Despite the efforts of a hastily formed city militia, Baghdad fell after three weeks fighting to the superior arms of the rebellion. After this victory, Satenik conducted a symbolic public purge of the radicals. Trying hundred of those involved in radical politics in the city in martial courts and subjecting them to public executions. This terror had a clear air of the pogrom, with Baghdad being the greatest centre of Judaism in the world, Jews making up around a tenth of its population and supporting the Ishtarian cause in large numbers. Satenik deliberately targeted the city's sprawling Jewish Quarter for reprisals and arrests, and stoked ethnic tensions as he depicted the liberals as an alliance of heretics, heathens and Jews. By early 1742, this white army was on the move again, with the 50,000 rebels surrounding Nineveh. The fate of the revolution hung in the balance.

The months following the 1741 election saw the Assyrian Empire fragment into a series of warring factions. It was during this period that the Philistian revolt escalated from insurgency to take control of the province, firing barely a shot as garrisons in Jerusalem, Jaffa and many other cities surrendered in despair. In the east, Satenik's rebels stretched out their arms to attract the support of the Christian tribes of the Gulf penetrate deep into Arabia.

The vultures of Assyria's powerful neighbours were finally preparing to take advantage of the Empire's troubles – with the Greeks probing on the western frontier, and the Timurids taking advantage of the chaotic situation in the south eastern portion of the Empire to occupy Oman, and sponsor the establishment of a friendly Omani Emirate. The Ishtarian government controlling the Majlis could only claim real authority in Armenia, Syria and parts of Assyria-Superior.

Across the Sinai, the Assyrian vassal of Damietta had chafed for several years in the face of the radical changes taking place across the border – with its Latin ruling elite mirroring their Philistian cousins in their conservatism and fear of having changes imposed upon them. As Nineveh's authority began to wilt, the French took their chance to push the Damiettans into open revolt – landing an army of mercenaries in Alexandria to join the service of the Duke as he chased Assyrian forces from his lands and invaded Upper Egypt. By the end of the year, the Damiettan Duke had won over the loyalty of the Philistian rebels and claimed the Crusader title King of Egypt and Jerusalem.

In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad to Satenik's white army, the rebels had received an invaluable boost to their prestige as the Nestorian Patriarch had fled Nineveh in his carriage and come to Baghdad where he offered his open endorsement to the rebellion's aim to restore Christian rule. The Church of the East had thrown in its lot with reaction.

Events in the Middle East were deeply traumatic in Assyria's colonial societies on either end of the Indian Ocean. Sumatra had emerged as a beacon of liberalism over the past several decades, responsible for an escalation of Assyria's own political development after a creole uprising unilaterally established its own autonomous governing structures during the 1738 Sumatran Crisis. Since then, its administration had been a staunch ally of the Nineveh governments of Michel Nader and Lazarus Dunanu, and it remained firmly opposed to the Conservative revolt engulfing so much of the motherland.

On the other end of the Ocean, Alopheeria, the South African Cape, was a very different place. Here, in a society defined by the rugged individualism of the Middle Eastern creole settlers and farmers; their domination and enslavement of the native Blacks and suspicion of metropolitan ideas and interference; liberalism was chronically weak. While Alopheeria had been granted its own elected assembly in 1739 by the reformers in Nineveh, granting it equal status with Sumatra, this chamber was dominated by staunch Conservatives who were aghast at the discussions of Abolitionism in Assyria. In contrast to their cousins across the Sea, the Alopheerians would throw their lot in with Satenik's revolt following the fall of Baghdad, with the local Imperial garrison backing the colonial assembly in rebellion. This would pave the way for a division of the Assyrian colonial Empire between east and west, with the slave-holding islands of the western Indian Ocean supporting the rebellion, while the Indies held loyal to the Majlis, turning the Ocean itself into a battleground between the competing factions.

The Siege of Nineveh was a period of incredibly tense political drama. Immediately before the siege, Sar Sarrani Niv IV had sent emissaries to the south to the white army to feel out the willingness of the rebels to back his restoration to true political power. Finding a cold reception among a rebel command that had obvious sympathies for the more traditionalist Lebarian claimant, Niv would withdraw from their negotiations – yet disastrously his communications were uncovered. This forced the Emperor to flee Nineveh for the west, just as the white army approached the city.

Once the siege was joined, the city found itself only lightly defended – with its formal garrison hopelessly outnumbered by the 50,000 professional soldiers enveloping it. In response, the radicals in the city organised the mob into citizens' militias numbering in the many thousands. Filled with fear of the sort of slaughter meted out in Baghdad, these ragtag revolutionary bands proved surprisingly effective – holding back the probing assaults of Satenik's army for several months. Within the city itself, politics did not cease. Instead, the most radical elements of the Ishtarian movement came to the fore – making ever more elaborate promises to the revolutionary mob in order to energise them towards victory. In early 1742, less than a year after his crowning achievement of bringing his liberal faction to a Majlis majority, Lazarus Dunanu was forced from power by Ephrem Karim – the new Vizier notably taking the title by the majority support of the Majlis alone with the Emperor absent. Karim promised equality, unrestricted democracy and a genuine overturning of the social order. In the immediate, he launched attacks on the Nestorian Churches of the capital – seizing their wealth to support the treasury and casting out their priests as spies and traitors. Absentee aristocrats, many of whom had fled the capital in the preceding months, saw their riches and properties similarly seized and numerous bold proclamations for the future were made.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1742-1744 Death to Kings!

While the world held its breath with Nineveh under siege and the fate of the Assyrian Revolution in the balance, to the north an Armenian general of minor noble birth named Nehor Vassak had been assembling an army from the liberal heartlands of his homeland to throw back the reactionaries. In April he descended from the highlands to the Plain of Nineveh and, joining with the citizens' militia from the capital, crushed Satenik and his white army – sending them fleeing back to Babylonia. The revolution was saved, Assyria-Superior was secure. The political ramifications of this victory would change the world.

In the midst of the siege of Nineveh the Majlis had deposed the Emperor's appointed Vizier, Lazarus Dunanu, and appointed the radical representative Ephrem Karim in his place without the Emperor's consent or approval, a flagrant violation of the 1738 Constitution that gave the Sar Sarrani sole right to make this appointment. With the Emperor absent during the siege, having fled to Antioch, this contradiction could be ignored, yet Karim's illegitimacy and revolutionary fervour meant that his position was unacceptable after the capital was secure. Within weeks of the Battle of Nineveh, Niv IV had sent a letter to Karim demanding his resign and a new Vizier be appointed based on the constitution. The Emperor's feint attempt to re-exert his authority forced a confrontation that was by now inevitable. The Ishtarians had long held a Republic as the ideal, accepting constitutional monarchy as a necessary compromise, yet Niv's known flirtation with the white army, his flight from Nineveh at its time of need and his attempt to unseat the Majlis's chosen leader pushed the liberals to take the remarkable step of proclaiming the end of half a millennium of Assyrian monarchy. Speaking before a raucous and crowd on the steps of the Majlis in Nineveh in April, Ephrem Karim announced the formation of the Federal Republic of Assyria, and was greeted by deafening cheers of “Death to Kings!” A new phase of the revolution had begun.

The Emperor had expected the revolutionaries to oppose him, and has spent the past month gathering allies in the west and reaching out to Assyria's neighbours. Having gathered a rump of aristocrats and anti-republican Majlis representatives in Antioch, the Sar Sarrani appointed a Greek Federalist, John Theophoros, as his Vizier and appealed to the Byzantines for aid – offering to return the Armenian borderland provinces that his father had taken from them forty years before. By the end of the spring, tens of thousands of Roman troops were marching across the border to join Niv's Imperialist army – opening up a another, potentially fatal, front in Assyria's ongoing civil war.

One might have assumed that, faced with impossible odds and existential threats on three sides, the Assyrian Republic might be chiefly concerned with military defence. Yet the revolutionary Ishtarians around Karim believed that the fate of Nineveh had proven that the masses would mobilise themselves to defend the revolution if it could animate them, and therefore flung themselves into symbolism and the drafting of a new constitution. The hastily formulated 1742 Constitution aimed to bring all the greatest ideas of the Ishtarian cause to life. Slavery was declared illegal – giving freedom to tens of thousands of Black slaves living within Syria and Assyria-Superior, small numbers compared to the slave populations outwith republican control but far more than had been effected by the previous Armenian emancipation – all remaining feudal obligations and titles were abolished, the complete separation of Church and State was passed into law, universal adult male suffrage was proclaimed, and with a view to creating a centralised state capable of defending itself and enforcing the new rights of the constitution, the authority of the regional assemblies were significantly curtailed in favour of the central government in Nineveh. With the abolition of the Empire, the traditional royal and imperial symbols of Assyria were rendered obsolete and had to be replaced. Following the prior example of Assyria, tricolour flags would grow to become extensively used by both the army and civilian government – with a variety of designs spreading including sky blue-blue-grey and red-white-red patterns.

To the south, Satenik's failure to capture Nineveh would have great consequences for the domain that remained under the control of his counter revolutionary white army. Licking their wounds after their costly failure, the whites remained in control over Babylonia and the Gulf and had the loyalty of the African colonies, yet they were forced to draw closer to the Timurids. The Lebarian claimant, the titular Lebario III, would end his exile in Persia, where he had been groomed by the Timurids throughout his life, to cross over to Basra and assume the status as the movement's sovereign. Meanwhile, Oman, nominally an independent Emirate since coming under Timurid occupation, was placed under Lebario's formal vassalage, while remaining tightly under Isfahan's thumb – effectively accepting the loss of the province in all but name.

In the angry aftermath of their failure, the mood in conservative Babylonia turned bitter and bloody and inward. Jews, Shia and Zikri Muslims and Mandaeans – non-Christian minorities making up close to a fifth of Babylonia's population between them – were labelled as fifth columnists and subject to a wave of gruesome pogroms. During this bloodshed, the Zikri Muslim Kurds of Ilam rebelled and appealed to the Great Khan for protection. Seeing an opportunity to extend their control over the crucial mountain fortresses guarding the border with Assyria, and seeking to bring the whites to heel, the Timurids recognised the independence of a Kurdish Illamite Sheik and occupied the border province, much to the annoyance of their clients in Basra.

On the field of battle, the most direct threat to the Republic was the Byzantine-led invasion of Syria hurtling towards Aleppo. From June, the city would hold out against enormous odds, despite its defenders being outnumbered more than ten to one by the Greek and Imperialist attackers. Despite tremendous firepower and numerical strength, wave after wave of attacks were repulsed by a revolutionary army under the command of a young commander named Malik Abaya. By the end of the year, the Greeks were exhausted, and the young Abaya, with incredible bravery and ambition, launched a counter attack that saw tens of thousands of Byzantine troops surrender to his force and their entire invasion force retreat back into Anatolia. While the more senior Nehor Vassak would take command of the larger Anatolian front, a new star was born.

Abaya was a figure who was quintessential to the revolutionary era. He belonged to the tiny esoteric ethno-religious Druze community of southern Syria. For centuries the Druze had been marginalised – seen as Muslims by the Christian elites and shunned as infidel by the Muslims, barred from significant office and subject to occasional open persecution and efforts at conversion. Like many of his kin, Abaya had entered into the Assyrian army as a young man in the 1730s. The defections of so many aristocratic officers to the various counter-revolutionary movements, and the desire of Ishtarian liberals to push for more meritocratic appointments had paved the way to a rapid rise to the status as the head of Aleppo's military garrison by the age of 30 in 1742. His heroics in holding back and repulsing the Greek invasion won him the admiration of the government in Nineveh, and prominence as one of the Republic's foremost military leaders.

While Vassak led the larger campaign against the Romans in Anatolia, Abaya was redeployed to Mesopotamia, where he was expected to solidify Assyria-Superior's defences from a possible regrouping of the white army to the south. Not only would the young leader drill a modestly sized force in a flurry of fort building to protect the approaches to the capital – he would strike against the weakened enemy to liberate Baghdad in 1743. One of the great centres of liberal Ishtarianism before the civil war, the city had been badly damaged by Satenik's conquest in 1741. Pointedly, upon his capture of the city, Abaya would personally visit the city's sprawling Jewish Quarter, which had been subject to vicious pogroms in 1741 and 1742. In an elaborate display of remorse that would be circulated in pamphlets and cartoons throughout the region, the Druze general fell to the ground and wept upon sight of the destruction of the city's great synagogue – once the largest and most beautiful in the world.

Politically, the radicalism of Karim and the revolutionary Ishtarians remained unquenched. The Vizier had risen to prominence as the left opposition to Lazarus Dunanu within Assyrian liberalism in earlier years by pushing forward the idea of land reform, now he saw his opportunity to achieve it. As Assyria had descended into civil war, great swathes of its landowning nobility had fled – whether to join opposing factions in the conflict or merely escape the violence. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful property-owning institutions of all – none other than the Church of the East itself – had openly thrown in its lot with the Republic's enemies. Karim would establish an extraordinary legal body with far reaching powers – operating over and above the Majlis and even the constitution – that was responsible for passing judgement in absentia on the owners of Assyria's land, and seizing control of their property for the state. These lands were then to be transferred to the peasant masses – laying the foundation of the smallholding peasant society Karim idealised.

Believing Karim to be falling into political excess and twisting the fundamental tenets of the Ishtar Club, the former doyen of Assyrian liberalism Lazarus Dunanu split with his former Ishtarian allies entirely to form a distinct political grouping – known as the Marduk Club, after the high god of the Babylonians. The Mardukites took with them a sizeable portion of the liberals within the Majlis, and offered a critique of the radicals for their drift towards authoritarianism and insistence of widening the breach within Assyrian society to such an extent that they threatened the survival of the Republic. Despite coming from the same liberal tradition, the followers of the two Clubs would grow bitterly opposed and deeply suspicious of one another.

On the battlefield, Nehor Vassak had followed on from the victory at the Battlle of Aleppo to drive deep into Anatolia, reaching as far west as Caesarea. However, the situation turned from the end of 1743. Suffering from the defection of a number of his close lieutenants to the Imperialist cause, Vassak was forced into retreat back to the pre-war border – only barely repulsing an attack on Adana in Cilicia. To the south, the outbreak of war between the Byzantines and Assyria had given the French the confidence to increase their support for the titular Catholic Kingdom of Egypt and Jerusalem, sending its own troops to the Middle East to aid in the quashing of Muslim resistance in Upper Egypt and the Hedjaz and fighting against the Republicans in the Levant. With French support, the Catholics would capture both Beirut and, painfully for the Vizier, Karim's own home city in Damascus by early 1744. The Republic's military position was coming under intense strain.

With troubling news reaching the capital from Anatolia, Nineveh was shaken by the assassination of its revolutionary Vizier, Ephrem Karim, by one of his handmaidens. The woman, a young Cuman girl named Mehisti Nahim, would commit suicide before she could be questioned, leaving her motivations and the details of her plot a mystery. Fears of foreign conspiracies, of enemies in the midst and the threat of counter-revolution not through defeat of the Republic's armies but subterfuge and treason would soon grip Assyria's revolutionary elites.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1744-1747 Justice and Terror

Following the murder of Vizier Ephrem Karim a small cabal of his most devoted followers took power. They were led by Nuri Ardalan, the Kurdish son of a shop-keeper from the city of Amin on the upper Tigris. Neither Ardalan nor his allies were great orators, theorists or visionaries, but they shared a relentless capacity for organisation and political fervour. Upon taking power, they swore before the Majlis to find justice for their fallen idol and to protect the revolution at any cost.

The mechanism with which the Ardalanites would carry out their cause had already been created during the premiership of Ephrem Karim – in the system of special courts he has established with the purpose of confiscating property from exiles and rebels. The new Vizier would transform this system of tribunals into a powerful weapon for the disciplining of Assyrian society and weeding out of reaction within the Republic. Between May 1744 and March 1745, a wave of purges, accusations and cold blooded political terror swept the lands under the authority of the Republic. The tribunals sought out any and all individuals believed to be in sympathy with the counter-revolutionary movements, bringing thousands of aristocrats, right-leaning politicians, actors in the state machinery and common people before their courts. Sentencing was carried out by Ishtarian militants and often resulted in death sentences for the accused. With accusation often enough to draw a conviction in itself, there was a flurry of score settling and paranoid confusion as individuals sought to send rivals before the tribunals before they themselves were taken.

The most prominent victims of this wave of terror was none other than the great general Nehor Vassak, who had saved the capital from the white army during the siege of Nineveh just two years before. Hailing from noble birth, having suffered recent military defeats at the front, having had a cold relationship with Karim prior to his death and being seen as a possible danger to the Republican regime itself; Vassak had a target on his shoulders from the first. Fortunately, the general was spared the indignity of execution – being sent to rot in prison near Lake Urmia. By the end of this wave of trials, several thousand death sentences had been carried out and fear had been imbued throughout the land.

It is notable that during this period, despite the viciousness of the purges, the regime was not completely closed to criticism. Notably, the Mardukites succeeded in tempering aspects of the Ardalanite terror – averting what might have amounted to an all out war against the Nestorian faithful. The Federal Republic and the Church of the East had been set against one another as enemies since the Patriarch had decanted to Baghdad and later Basra to align himself with the white army and the Lebarian cause in 1741. Since then, the Church had lost a number of its lands and properties, been stripped of any political influence or privilege, but importantly it had continued to serve its millions of parishioners within the territory of the Republic. The most extreme of Ishtarian radicals had sought to end this state of affairs, and strike against the Church and clergy with their whole might during the period of terror – seeing it as the ultimate enemy within, irrevocably lost to reaction. The Mardukite leader Lazarus Dunanu feared that this might spark open revolt in the countryside and the downfall of the Republic and therefore begged the governing faction to consider compromise.

In the years since the Patriarch's defection to the rebels, elements had emerged within the Nestorian clergy that were more accepting of the Republic. Dunanu therefore proposed cultivating these allies and pursuing a split between the Church within Republican territory and the exiled Patriarchate – providing a patriotic and republican leadership to the Church. With the backing of the regime, liberal clergy would hold a council in Nineveh in late 1744 – formally deposing the exiled Patriarch, deemed to have abandoned his seat, and appointing a replacement from among their faction. Nestorian had undergone the largest schism in its history. Yet these actions would spare it the wrath of the revolutionary tribunals.

Out in the Indian Ocean, the two poles of the Assyrian colonial empire remained bitterly opposed. In Sumatra and the Moluccas, Nineveh's offer of emancipation to slaves in 1742 had been contentious. Although slavery was not the basis of the economies of the East Indies, which relied predominantly on indigenous labour, there were still nearly 100,000 slaves in the colonies – a far larger number than had been emancipated within the Republican territories in the Middle East. While the issue divided the Sumatran assembly, that administered the wider region, the decision was taken to accept the demands of the 1742 constitution on the proviso that the freed slaves would repay their former creole masters for their lost property with an inheritable debt bond.

In the war, the Sumatrans had struggled to compete with the Lebarian Conservatives. The two most important centres of the Assyrian navy in Basra and Muscat were firmly in the hands of the whites, and this gave them the lion's share of the old Imperial fleet. With this strength, the Lebarians had been able to largely control Indian Ocean trade, while also pestering the the Indies with piratical raids. This naval strength had a disruptive impact on international trade – forcing both the Indies and Far Eastern economies to pursue longer and more perilous trade routes across the Pacific Ocean in order to reach European and American markets.

Despite their strong position in the Indian Ocean, the Lebarians would be menaced by the rising power of the Scots. Scotland had been the greatest winner of the colonisation of the Americas. By the early eighteenth century it had established three rich, populous and profitable centres of its empire in the Americas – New Scotland on the eastern seaboard of North America, the Caribbean and Brazil in South America, with less important holdings in Central and northern South America. The supreme power in the Atlantic World, in the early decades of the century that had grown ever more interested in Africa, the source of the slaves who were the basis of all three of their principle colonies' economies. This had resulted in the conquest of the Kongo Kingdom and establishment of territorial control into the Congo Basin. Ever eager for more sources of slaves, the Scots had enjoyed a profitable relationship with Assyrian intermediaries in the Cape to gain access to the East African trade as well. With Assyria in civil war, the Scots would turn more predatory – probing Assyrian defences in the Cape with raids and small scale attacks through the 1740s, forcing the Lebarians to maintain a sizeable garrison in the African colony and leading to the further militarisation of Alopheerian creole society.

The distraction of the Lebarians would prevent them from either seeking a direct assault on the Indies or concerning themselves with Malabar, Assyria's Christian Indian enclave that had been largely forgotten in the strains of the Revolution. The ruling St Thomas Christian community of Malabar had held little interest in the secular and democratic ideals of the Revolution, fearing the large Hindu minority they lived amongst, yet the failed to attract the support of the white army in Basra – who could not spare a garrison. Spying an opportunity to cast the Christians out, Malabar had faced a Tamil invasion in 1744 – with the Christians fleeing to their near impregnable coastal fortresses at Cochin and Vandad. Through the following years of siege, Malabar would sustain itself with little more than a trickle of supplies from Muscat.

As calm returned to the Republic within the end of the purges in early 1745, Ardalan's ministry looked to work towards the grandest exercise in democracy in world history. By 1745, the Majlis was an effective rump – its former royalist members had fled or been tried, many of those who remained in Nineveh represented areas that were not even under the control of the Republic. Unshakable in their faith in the masses, the Ishtarians were eager to implement the promise of universal manhood suffrage included in the 1742 Constitution and called for new elections to solidify their endorsement by the people. Coming out of the stifling atmosphere of the year of terror, open debate would ring out through the land once more as millions were given a say in their own governance for the first time.

With traditional conservatism unacceptable, the election saw a resurgence in previously moribund Federalist thought – with critics of the Republican regime framing their concerns in Federalist terms, seeking protection for the Churches, regions and individuals from the state and expressing preferences for elements of the 1738 Constitution over the Republican 1742 Constitution. Neo-Federalists would capture more than a third of the the vote and the second largest block in the Majlis. Lazarus Dunanu's moderate liberal faction would also fare well in the areas in which it stood candidates. The Ishtar Club was deeply disappointed, having expected to be greeted by the newly enfranchised masses with overwhelming support, they failed to secure an absolute majority in the chamber, reduced in size to account for the occupied territories. This poor showing would feed into a sense of unease and fragility at the centre.

The arrest of Nehor Vassak in 1744 had allowed for the young figure of Malik Abaya, hero of Aleppo and Baghdad, to be given command of the largest Republican army on the Anatolian front. There, he would meet with outstanding military success. Over the course of an incredible campaign between 1744 and 1746, Abaya would utterly destroy the Byzantine army and their Assyrian Imperialist allies, occupying the entirety of Asia Minor and even shelling Constantinople itself from across the Golden Horn. These victories effectively ended the immediate threat to the survival of the Republic and earned him widespread popular support in Assyria itself, where the cold leadership of Ardalan and his clique had been struggling to reignite mass support. Crowing fearful of Abaya's influence, and motivated by the same suspicions and jealousies that had led to the arrest of Vassak in 1744, Abaya was recalled from his command in 1746 and assigned to a much smaller military force responsible for eliminating the raids of Bedouin tribes striking through the Syrian Desert who had been wreaking havoc with agriculture in Syria and Mesopotamia.

During this period, other fronts in the civil war remained more static. In Babylonia, Republican forces launched a number of raids aiming to stimulate slave unrest with the offer of emancipation, but achieved only limited success with the whites mostly able to keep them at bay. The one major success for the Republic in this theatre was the capture of Muslim-majority Najaf in 1745 – taking advantage of the weaker presence of a hostile, pious and militant Christian majority. Elsewhere, there were gains in the Levant, where long and grinding sieges at Beirut and Damascus saw souther Syrian regained by the Republicans and revolutionary forces begin to push on towards the medieval fortresses of Philistia itself.

The Assyrian Revolution marked a world historic moment, from the early stages of its development the revolutionary ideals that powered it – liberalism, constitutional government and equality – spread out across the civilised world. By the 1740s, they were beginning to make their mark in Europe and Asia. In the Byzantine Empire, the conduit through which many European Enlightenment ideas had first reached Assyria, many of the urban middle classes were attracted to liberal ideas, but it was the military successes of the Assyrian revolutionaries in the mid-1740s that pushed them to the forefront. In Anatolia, the victorious Assyrian armies had established elected local councils and encourages revolutionary reforms in the areas they occupied. Across the Aegean and Black Seas, thousands liberal factions were forming in Greek cities opposed to the policy of the Emperor while ethnic minorities rallied before revolutionary banners to seek their freedom. The destruction of much of the Byzantine army by Malik Abaya's campaigns left the Empire vulnerable and in 1745 the Albanians, who had been in revolt for years, would successfully establish a revolutionary Republic centred on Vlore. Two years later the Russians living on the Byzantine enclave east of the Kerch Strait established their own Republic, while in Wallachia Romanian rebels dominated the Danube.

To the east, liberalism was rising throughout the cities of Persia, causing significant concern for the Timurid Great Khan whose initial delight in the downfall of the Assyrian Empire was increasingly turning to fear and dread. To the west, in the Kingdom of Italy fear of revolt and extensive agitation led to the end of feudalism and absolutism with the adoption of a democratic constitution in 1743 and the establishment of friendly relations with the Assyrian Republic – doing much to relieve its chronic geopolitical isolation. Across Europe movements for change were growing in strength and adventure, most importantly beyond the Alps in Germany.

The greatest legacy of the Assyrian Revolution beyond its own borders, certainly in the short term, was the German Revolution. As one of the most economically and culturally advanced areas of Europe, liberal ideas were already present in Germany long before the advent of the Assyrian Revolution. Yet it would be the inspiration of the Near East that would drive the German masses and their leaders to turn to action. The victory of the revolutionaries at the Siege of Nineveh in 1742 was celebrated by liberals around the world. In the Kingdom of Thuringia, which ruled over the largest part of Germany, it drove key liberal leaders to form their own Teutonic Ishtar Club – which adopted the 1742 Assyrian Constitution as its manifesto. In 1746 the group orchestrated a large uprising in the Kingdom's key cities and, benefiting from widespread sympathies within the army, overthrew the monarchy and seized control of the Kingdom. A key demand of the Teutons was the unification of the German lands – which were divided between Thuringia, the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, the Baltic Duchy of Rana and several smaller states, mostly under French influence. Having been a committed member of the coalition fighting the Assyrian Revolution, the French were terrified of the rise of an aggressive Republic on their frontier and in the heart of Europe and would soon invade to support the forces of German counterrevolution, drawing in their allies in the neighbouring Kingdom of Croatia – whose boundaries snaked from the Adriatic to the Baltic.

The German Revolution would have important strategic consequences in the Middle East, with the French forced to effectively abandon their Catholic clients in the Kingdom of Egypt and Jerusalem as they desperately hurried troops back across the Mediterranean, leaving the Levantine front exposed and vulnerable. More importantly, it made clear that the ideals of the Assyrian Revolution were universal and exportable. There was not a single crowned head in the advanced world who could rest easy upon on the authority of tradition alone.

Although by the end of 1746 the Republic was more secure than it had been since its proclamation, the governing clique felt more threatened and insecure than at any time since the end of the terror. By then a new wave of panicked accusations and trials were beginning to pick up steam, with a fear of spies and traitors gripping Nineveh. One arrest would be more explosive than any other. On 6 February 1747, within the chamber of the Majlis itself, one of the Vizier's close allies delivered a speech in which he provided lurid details of a plot between none other than the Mardukite leader and former titan of the Ishtar Club Lazarus Dunanu was in league with the Timurids to spring general Nehor Vassak from his imprisonment near the Persian border and lead a military coup to overthrow the regime. Before he could speak in his defence, soldiers entered the chamber and dragged Dunanu away in chains. In a hasty trial lasting just a couple of days, Dunanu was brougth before the tribunal, found guilty and sentenced to death. The revolutionary crowds of Nineveh who once followed his every word came out in their tens of thousands to delight in his public execution, while in distant Urmia his alleged co-conspirator Vassak met a similar fate at the hangman's noose.

The turn against two of the greatest heroes of the revolution was shocking and drove the very sort of conspiracy that Ardalan and his allies feared. Believing that they would be the next targets for the revolutionary tribunals, a secret coterie of Mardukite, Federalist and even more moderate Ishtarians would send an appeal to Malik Abaya, asking that he lead his troops to the overthrow of the sitting Vizier and act as a popular figure head for a government of unity. A personal admirer of Dunanu, Abaya agreed and led the small army of a few thousand soldiers he had under his command to the capital at the end of February. Despite the efforts of Ishtarian radicals to organise popular resistance to this coup, attempts to barricade the city devolved into brawling between rival Republican factions and allowed Abaya's troops to move swiftly on the Majlis – occupying the legislature and arresting Ardalan and his closest allies. The most radical phase of the revolution was over.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1747-1750 Unity or Death

The culmination of Malik Abaya's coup of 1747 was a strange spectacle. As the troops made their way through Nineveh, the Vizier Ardalan and his allies had taken to the Majlis were they spoke manically to a packed chamber demanding their support to defend the Republic. With many member of the assembly having been involved in the conspiracy, he was met be division and angry debate that continued until Abaya's soldiers reached the building. Upon entering the Majlis they seized the Vizier and a small handful of his closest allies and dragged them from the chamber to face arrest. This was met by cheers and violence on the floor as representatives for and against the takeover descended into brawling, the full significance of what had occurred not yet taking hold. In the hours that followed, the arrested politicians were offered a brief military trial and were executed – found responsible for the complicity in the terror and the improper execution revolutionary heroes like Dunanu and Vassak.

Despite this violent takeover, Abaya was clear that he had come not to destroy the Republic but to save it. The most hated elements of the last years, above all the revolutionary tribunals, were hastily dismantled and Abaya promised a return to order on the streets of the capital, which had been plagued by mob rule for years. Within days of the coup the Majlis met again, where a majority of representatives voted to provide Malik Abaya with supreme command of the Republican army while naming one of his allies, the Mardukite Magna Sava, as the new Vizier to head the political leadership in the capital. Abaya was a popular figure throughout the country, and it was hoped he would act as a figure head for an emerging coalition of politicians within the Majlis – that united Mardukites, Federalists, elements of the Ishtarians and even the handful of Muslim representatives elected in 1745 – that supported his takeover and wanted to see a stabilisation of the Republic.

Within months of his coup, Abaya left Nineveh to go on campaign once more, leaving his allies to govern in the capital. Fixing his aim first of the Levant, he recaptured Philistia with relative ease and sent the Catholic rebels into retreat back to Egypt. With the withdrawal of these troops, the Muslim tribes of Medina rose up in favour of Abaya's forces – allowing the Republic to secure western Arabia and reopen access to the Red Sea. Encouraged by these successes, the great general refocussed his efforts towards Babylonia, hoping to retake Basra, the gateway to the Indian Ocean and the overseas empire beyond. In contrast to his easy victory in the west, the Babylonian campaign was a disaster. The local populace remained feverishly hostile to the banner of the Republic while the white army appeared certain to fight to the last. This failure would convince Abaya that the only way to end the civil war and reunite Assyria was to find a political settlement that would be acceptable in the rebel provinces.

In the year after the coup of 1747, the victorious factions within the Majlis had squabbled among one another as they failed to forge an effective path forward, with Sava struggling to reach out beyond his small Mardukite caucus to govern effectively. Both within the Majlis and on the streets of Nineveh, the Ishtarians were resurgent once more – pressuring for new elections and return to power; meanwhile with the end of the terror, anti-Republican sentiment was being spoken openly for the first time in years and channelled frustration at years of instability and revolutionary chaos.

In 1748, following the failure of his latest Babylonian campaign, Abaya returned to the capital where he sought to take control of events. Leaning on his failing friend Sava to resign, he put himself before the Majlis and was duly elected as Vizier – reuniting the coalition that had supported the overthrow of the Ardalanites the previous year. The new Vizier would stake all his political capital on a revision of the constitution that he claimed was necessary to end the civil war and bring stability to Assyria. It was a shocking document for many liberals: proposing a radical reduction of the franchise to a more limited property owning middle class set, and end to the constitutional ban on slavery – allowing those freed in 1742 to remain so but offering the continuation of the institution in rebel areas upon their reintegration, including guarantees to property ownership that would preclude any further efforts and land reform and redistribution and limits on mass gatherings aimed at calming the turbulent city streets.

This new constitution would crystallise the core division within the Majlis as those for and against Abaya, with previous political categories growing increasingly redundant. Abaya's supporters did not have a formal club as the Ishtarians or Mardukites around which to organise, but grouped around the new political leader's agenda and the label of Moderates. After fiery debate, angry protest and great eulogies, the 1748 constitution would pass into law with a clear majority in May.

With its rejection of popular democracy, redistribution and abandonment of abolitionism, the 1748 constitution represented the horrific spectre of reaction to many Ishtarians. Protest accelerated to angry rioting in the lead up the Majlis' vote on it, and outright insurrection thereafter. As the Ishtarian-led mob descended on the Majlis, echoing so many previous stages of the Revolution, Republican troops opened fire to defend the building – resulting in scores of dead. With troops flooding the city over the following weeks, order was firmly restored.

The new constitution represented a new chapter for Ishtarianism. Much of Assyrian liberalism, whether it be the Mardukites or Right-Ishtarians, had compromised on some of its ideals and merge into the Moderate coalition while others had been liquidated in the coup of 1747 and the May Killings of 1748. An oppositional rump remained within the Majlis, shut out completely from power for the first time in a decade, while the movement was bruised but still very much alive throughout the country. Henceforth a tension would begin to emerge within Ishtarianism between constitutionalists who sought to oppose the Moderates through legal and peaceful means with the aim of restoring the 1742 constitution, and recalcitrant elements that pushed for more extreme change and continued to believe in the power of the mob.

The consolidation of Abaya's power in Assyria occurred at a time when the wider geopolitical situation was continuing to turn in the Republic's favour. In 1748, Italy, already on amiable terms with Nineveh, invaded Byzantine Italy, hoping to push its authority beyond the far north of the peninsula. In eastern Europe, the German revolutionaries had yet with great successes, overthrowing the Kingdom of Croatia and establishing a Republic. This Croatian Republic then proceeded to invade the northern parts of the tottering Byzantine Empire, seeking to take control over the Danubian territories that were already in revolt. Having already been crippled by its war with Assyria, the Romans were on the cusp of utter defeat.

Even more momentous news came from further west. The German revolutionaries had succeeded in consolidating their control over the German lands of Central Europe and then pushed on to invade France. Incapable of holding their enemies back, Paris would fall before the end of 1750 and a humiliating peace that established the German Republic of Thuringia as the dominant power in the heart of Europe.

After several months in the capital, Abaya would return to the saddle with the aim of finally bringing an end to the long civil war. His first target would be Egypt, shorn of its foreign backing, already struggling in the face of Muslim rebellion in the south and filled with ethno-religious minorities – chiefly Protestants, Jews and Assyrians – in its northern cities were sympathetic to the Republic. The Republicans could not have known just how fragile the Neo-Crusader Kingdom was. Crossing over the Sinai unhindered, Abaya crushed a Catholic army near the city of Damietta before liberal forces within the city seized control and threw open its gates. Soon rebellion spread to Cairo and Alexandria, and lacking the will to fight on the would be King fled for Europe. Within the space of a couple of months the largest and most populous rebel land had been reconquered. The Vizier would leave his agents to establish Republican institutions in Egypt – restoring a semi-independent Damietta in the north as a sister republic, dominated by the friendly urban middle classes at the expense of the old Latin aristocracy and Coptic peasantry, while in the south rebuilding Upper Egypt as a province of the Republic in its own right, as it had been during the days of the Empire.

The following year, attention turned to the east and perennially resistant Lebarian heartland in Babylonia. The region was in a desperate state after incessant fighting tracing back to the Second Lebarian War two decades before. With the Republicans reaching out to wavering elements of the white forces, offer amnesty and emphasising that the region's social order was no longer under question, the whites were unable to hold back the tide as Abaya struck down on them with all his might. In 1750, the Republicans brought Basra itself under siege as the endgame of the white cause approached. Seeing defeat as inevitable, the titular Emperor Lebario III committed suicide rather than surrender himself to the Republic, while his supreme military commander General Satenik died during the fighting. As the dust settled and the city fell, all of metropolitan Assyria outside of the Timurid-supported enclaves of Ilam and Oman were under Nineveh's control once more. The Assyrian Civil War was, in the main, at an end.

While the Middle East had been reunited, the South African Cape and much of the colonial world remained committed to the anti-Republican cause. During the chaos surrounding the fall of Basra, the son of Lebario III, taking the title Nahir III, had managed to escape with some remnants of the white leadership for the Cap, where he was accepted as Emperor. Meanwhile, the Basra Patriarch evaded captured and made his way across the border into Persia, where the Great Khan greeted him as a persecuted friend and provided him with asylum in Isfahan – where he would remain the spiritual leader of the millions of Nestorians that rejected the schismatic Republican church hierarchy that had been established in Nineveh. At sea, some elements of the Assyrian fleet that had sided with the monarchist cause did reconcile themselves to the Republic in the aftermath of the fall of Basra, reducing residual white influence to the Cape and the east African littoral islands.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1750-1755 Return of the King of Kings

The ailing Byzantine Empire had been effectively crippled as a fighting force in the mid-1740s in Malik Abaya's Anatolian campaign, which had destroyed the greatest part of its military strength and shorn it of Asia Minor. However, utter defeat had been averted through the strength of its navy – which could easily hold the Assyrian Republicans at bay and prevent a crossing across the Aegean or Marmara into the Balkans. However, events at the end of the decade had begun to change the balance of power in the Mediterranean. Italy's entry into the war in 1748 brought another credible maritime threat, while the reconquest of Egypt in 1749 placed Alexandria's warships into Assyrian hands. Weakened and overstretched, the Romans could no longer fill the seas with their fleets and control them at will. This shift provided the Assyrians with an opening to evade the Roman blockade and land an expeditionary force on the Peloponnese in 1750.

On European soil, the Assyrians found an Empire ready to collapse. Having already ceded Danubian territories to the Croatians in an effort to win time, their Italian possessions had been occupied, the remnants of their army were growing mutinous and liberal revolutionary ideas had spread throughout the cities. The arrival on an Assyrian expedition was the final straw that would break the will off eighteen centuries of Roman monarchy to fight on. Following the capture of Corinth and Athens by the Assyrians, liberal revolutionaries seized power in Thessalonica – forcing the Byzantines to fall back entirely from the Greek peninsula, having barely lifted a finger in resistance. As the troops fell back towards Thrace, embittered liberal junior offices mutinied, taking command of the army and marching on Constantinople. As the Byzantine Emperor fled for his life, the city was left unguarded, allowing the liberal soldiers to enter the Queen of Cities and declare the Second Roman Republic in 1751, that would borrow from both classical history and the example of Assyria.

The Byzantine Revolution, reshaping the global balance of power, would also spare the Romans from a more debilitating surrender. Now entering into a treaty of friendship with the old enemy in Nineveh, the two parties agreed to resolve all territorial disputes in Anatolia – the Greeks ceding some territories in Cilicia and renouncing any claim to Armenia. Elsewhere, they recognised the independence of the Albanians and Bacau Russia, under Assyrian protection. In Italy, they would separately turn over Rome to the Italians, while maintaining the majority of their lands. Perhaps the greatest prize of all was the return of exiled Assyrian Imperialists who had allied with the Byzantines, including none other than the Sar Sarrani Niv IV, who was captured by Roman revolutionaries in his rooms within the Byzantine Imperial Palace. For the first time in a decade, Assyria was largely at peace.

The return of the Emperor to Nineveh as a conquered enemy was an incredible, intoxicating and dangerous occasion. Nine years after he went to war with the liberal government and joined together with a Greek invasion, he had become a figure of hate for the revolutionary masses. The Ishtarian opposition, and many among Abaya's own Moderate supporters, within the Majlis channelled the mob's anger in demanding that he answer for his treachery with his life. At the same time, Abaya feared reigniting the violent revolutionary fervour of the 1740s or potentially inflaming conservative opinion and driving it towards rebellion once more. The Vizier sought to pursue a middle course. The deposed Emperor would stand trial as a common citizen of the Republic.

The ensuing trial would focus on profound legal arguments, offering a chance for Assyrian litigators to argue for the legality and legitimacy of the institutions they had created. Overseeing the stretch of Assyrian history, they grounded the Revolution in the traditional sovereignty of the Majlis as the voice of the people – the institution having claimed the right to choose the state's leaders, and even overthrow Kings, since the Marian Revolution. The evolution of the Majlis into a more representative elected body, and its deposition of the Sar Sarrani and creation of a Republic in 1742 was merely an extension of this right. Niv, on the other hand, had betrayed his own people and the Assyrian state by inviting foreign invasion.

In response, Niv offered a belated but stout defence of the rights of Kings. He highlighted that the powerful Majlis of the Federal Kingdom had been abolished for a century when he restored it in 1732. It had only been re-established by his hand and by his right alone. In the Assyrian Empire created by his predecessors, all authority was derived ultimately from the Emperor. No institution that had not been created by his sovereignty therefore had any legal or moral right beyond the sheer brute strength of military force. The court trying him therefore had no right to do so, and he refused to recognise their sovereignty over himself.

With Niv largely refusing to engage with the court beyond this unmoving stance, his guilt was a forgone conclusion. The nature of his punishment was a far less certain decision. With the Vizier leaning on the court, execution was ruled out and instead the Emperor was sent into internal exile. He would be housed in the Saint Jacob Monastery, secluded in the Syrian Desert south of Raqqa. The former Nestorian Monastery, like many others, had been abandoned during the Revolutionary War and its properties seized by the state. Far from civilisation and easily defended, it made an ideal captivity. This represented a cathartic moment for the Assyrian Revolution. For some, it marked a final closing chapter, while others saw the exile as a failure that left the Emperor's treachery unpunished.

Despite the Republic's outward strength in the early 1750s, Assyria had been gravely weakened during the Civil War years. In economic crisis even before the Revolution, living standards had significantly decreased despite some redistribution – in particular among the peasantry of Syria, Assyria-Superior and Armenia. State finances were likewise in a terrible state, with seizures of property in the mid-1740s serving as only a temporary boon before the government had turned to the old tactic of the ancien regime of debasing the coinage and taking on spiralling debts to sustain itself – causing chronic inflation. Worse, while the size of the state had expanded its administrative capacity had lagged behind, leaving much of the Republic poorly governed.

In an effort to smooth the reunification of the Republic and ease these burden, the Abaya government would turn to the old elites it had only recently defeated in war. Many exiled nobles and aristocrats who had been tried in absentia by the Revolutionary Tribunals were invited to return to Assyria and even re-assume their historic titles, although not their properties, in exchange for a special tax to ease the state's coffers. Meanwhile, in the southern provinces, old conservative elites – Latin Catholics in Philistia and Damietta, tribal chiefs in Arabia and Nestorian hardliners in Babylonia – were turned to fulfil much of the governing function within these lands, both to ensure their loyalty and attempt to co-opt them into the Republican political project and to avoid an additional burden on overstretched state.

With peace in the Middle East, the Republican government was determined to restore the entirety of the Assyrian overseas empire. In late 1752, it outfitted an expedition to Malabar. With minimal aid from elsewhere, the defiant St Thomas Christians had held the Hindu Tamils at bay for years under siege conditions in their coastal fortresses, saved only by the weakness of the Tamils' naval forces preventing a full blockade. Malabar had nominally sided with the Lebarian cause during the Civil War, but nonetheless rapturously welcomed the arrival of these reinforcements. By this stage, the Tamils themselves had grown exhausted from their fruitless campaign and would withdraw after only a few months of fighting in 1753, recognising the Republic's claim to the province. Although ravaged by the occupation of its inland areas, Malabar was freed once more.

Elsewhere in the colonies, there was a slow trickle of defections from the rump-Lebarian faction in the years after the fall of Basra, and a slow advance of Republican forces with the captures of Socotra, the Seychelles and Mauritius. By 1753, the rebels were confined to the South African mainland, and growing more weary and divided by the day.

In 1752, seven years after the last election, Assyria would move to re-elect the Majlis in circumstances of peace. The franchise was much reduced since 1745, the only election contested on near universal male suffrage, although modestly broader than that employed under the 1738 constitution. The voting was extremely uncompetitive, with allies of Malik Abaya dominating throughout the Republic and winning nearly 500 of the Majlis's 601 seats. Not only did they win heavily in the Republican northern provinces of Armenia, Syria and Assyria-Superior, but also performed strongly in the southern territories, with outstanding success in appealing the Muslims as the guarantors of their protection from the traditionalist Christian elites that had held these lands during the Civil War. Pro-government candidates benefited greatly from their ability to provide and promise patronage to voters, bringing a level of material self interest to Assyrian elections that had been far rarer in the previous decade. The opposition, was evenly split between liberal Ishtarians, still refusing to reconcile themselves to the Moderate majority, who were only capable of winning seats in some parts of Armenia and in the hotbeds of Revolution in the northern cities. Meanwhile, a variety religious conservative and localist candidates were elected, mostly in the main centres of Civil War-era rebellion in Philistia and Babylonia. The Majlis was now little more than a rubberstamp for the Vizier's agenda, with the most meaningful debates occurring within the ranks of his own supporters.

Humiliation in the 1752 elections drove Ishtarianism to the brink of irrelevance. The few dozen representatives that survived the contest, many of them veterans of the movement, were strongly committed to constitutionalism and a legalist approach to opposing the Moderate majority. Yet with the movement lacking any obvious path back to power by democratic means, radical Ishtarians were no longer content to grumble from the sidelines. In a cellar below a watering hole in a plebeian neighbourhood of Baghdad, a group of radicals would come together to form the Dawronoye, a name derived from Syriac meaning Revolutionary, under the symbol of the red star of Ishtar. The group rejected mainstream Ishtarianism outright as corrupt and incapable of taking the revolution forward, espousing an extreme political programme based on absolute equality between classes, races and even genders – becoming the first group in Assyrian history to call for female suffrage. Unlike previous strains of radical Ishtarianism, it would shun the mob in favour of cultivating a following of committed revolutionaries capable of acting as a vanguard elite to reclaim power.

By 1753, the Cape was the last Assyrian territory aside from those areas under Timurid control, that remained in open rebellion. Increasingly troubled and isolated, the colony was riven by divisions. Within its assembly in the city of Al-Opheeria on the southern tip of the Cape, from whom the ruling Middle Eastern creole derived their ethnonym, previous monolithic unity had broken down and a large re-unionist faction emerged. At the centre of this shift was the Cape's tempestuous relationship with the Scots. The Europeans openly coveted the colony for themselves, hoping to add it to their sprawling Atlantic empire, yet given the Al-Opheerians' ever narrowing access to the Indian Ocean they had grown more and more dependent on trade with the Scots for their economic survival. This had allowed a Scottish quarter to emerge in Al-Opheeria amid growing demands for more concessions and control. To many there appeared to be only two possible futures for South Africa – rule by the Scots or their Assyrian kinsmen.

After a dispute over tariffs saw Scottish warships shell Al-Opheeria in 1753 before being granted further economic rights, pro-Assyrian elements launched a coup to overthrow the Lebarian government – bringing down the pitiful figure of Nahir III who was allowed to go into exile. The new administration sent out a plea to Nineveh, offering to re-join the Republic so long as their existing autonomy and the cherished institution of slavery were not disturbed and Republican forces offered them protection from the Scots. More than willing to welcome back their prodigal son, the Republic would dispatch forces to South Africa before the end of the year.

Geopolitically, the first half of the decade was overlooked by rising tensions with the Timurid behemoth in the east. With the Timurids still occupying Assyrian soil in Ilam and Oman, and Nineveh and Isfahan representing incompatible and opposing ideological worldviews, a normalisation of relations between the two great powers of western Asia was impossible. Instead, the two would spend years trading threats, insults and outrages as they prepared themselves for the event of conflict.

The Timurids had granted sanctuary for the Nestorian Patriarch as he fled the fall of Basra in 1750 and would make use of the arch-conservative cleric to undermine the Republican regime in Assyria. Since the mid-1740s, the Church of the East had been divided by a schism between supporters and enemies of the Revolution. Despite efforts of liberals to strengthen their splinter Patriarchate, colloquially known as the New Church of the East while both splinters claimed to be the legitimate authority, the traditionalists still held great sway among Nestorian clergy within Assyria and indeed with large parts of the laity. The exiled Patriarch in Isfahan called upon true Christians to rejected the Republic and refuse to participate in any interaction with it, undermining its legitimacy through much of the country.

While the Great Khan offered protection to reaction, he could only thinly conceal his terror of the seemingly unstoppable march of liberalism. Since the beginning of the Assyrian Revolution in the late 1730s, its ideals had spread far and wide – overthrowing Kings and Emperors from the Indian Ocean to the North Sea, with Republics now reigning in Byzantium, Croatia and Germany. The Timurids were fearful of liberal agitation in the cities of Persia – harshly suppressing any hint of Republicanism or even reformist voices. As such, many dissidents had fled across the border, where they had been granted shelter in Assyria, safe to plot their return and the downfall of three centuries of Timurid despotism.

Persian paranoia of Assyrian pretensions were only worsened by the spectacular state visit of the German President in 1754 to Assyria. The Germans brought a large delegation running into the hundreds, keen to observe the revolutionary motherland. The Assyrians were keen to impress, decking Nineveh in German flags and putting on a large military parade headed by the Vizier Malik Abaya himself riding on a white horse. The two leaders would agree the Brothers Pact, promising the eternal unity and friendship of the German and Assyrian people, proclaiming the universality of the Republican form of government and, most disconcertingly for the Timurids, affirming their commitment to support its spread to all free peoples.

These tensions would boil over into inevitable, total war in 1755. As sabre rattling over the occupied Assyrian provinces mounted, in the summer the Assyrians moved troops to occupy Ilam and its strategic fortresses overlooking the mountains passes of the Zagros. Unwilling to back down in the face of this affront, the Great Khan declared war, bringing their Arab, Somali and Bruneian allies into the conflict alongside themselves, while the Thais joined the Assyrians and the Germans offered their support. The Federal Republic was now at war with the most powerful empire in the world.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1755-1762 The Great Persian War

One of the first and most strategically significant engagements of the Great Persian War would be for control over the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait was fundamentally important for both parties. It represented the only viable gateway between Assyria and her colonial empire in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, it offered a route directly into the Persian heartland of the Timurid empire and conversely a direct connection between Persia and Arabia. Unfortunately for Nineveh, they were utterly savaged off the coast of Hormuz. Given the ructions of civil war and revolution, very few new vessel had been built in Assyria for decades, while many had been lost in internal fighting while central control of the navy had been somewhat undermined by the insistence of Sumatra in particular in maintaining authority over the fleet that had been based in the Indies during the civil war. As such, the Assyrian navy was far weaker than it had been at the beginning of the century and proved no match for a smaller and more advanced Persian fleet. Timurid control over both the Straits and the wider Gulf was assured.

Despite their decisive victory on the Straits, the Timurids and their allies were at a clear disadvantage in the Arabian campaign. Focussed on the threat on their western frontier, the Timurids only sent limited numbers to defend their puppet-Emirs in Oman, while their Arab Sulaymans allies could do little more than rally Bedouin tribes to strike behind Assyrian lines. Indeed, within just a few months the Assyrians had Muscat under siege and were proceeding to bound the city into submission with their heavy artillery.

In response, the Timurids sent their fleet to the Horn of Africa, transporting some 40,000 Somali warriors over the sea to Arabia. The Somalis completely changed the balance of power on this southern front – sending the Assyrians into retreat up the Gulf coast. With the Somalis preying on the Nestorian Arab tribes of the Gulf, they found themselves bogged down in vicious sectarian tribal warfare. This delay provided for time for Nineveh to redeploy troops to the south and force the Somalis to a set piece engagement at Qawasin in 1757 where their army was utterly destroyed. The way to Muscat was wide open once more.

While the war in the deserts of Arabia had raged, the greatest focus of all sides remained in the north and west – in the Caucasian and Zagros mountain ranges that buttressed the borders of the two great powers. Abaya had caught Timurid defences off guard in his re-occupation of Ilam, and even more so with his risky and aggressive tactics as he took personal command of the largest part of the Assyrian army to plunge into the passes of the Zagros Mountains. After capturing Hamadan and threatening the heartland of Persia to the east, he swung northwards to take Tabriz and Baku – cutting off the large Timurid army in the Caucuses from the Persia. Meanwhile, along the border Assyrian forces secured hard fought and costly victories at Kars and Tblisis to take control of key strong points in Georgia. The opening moves of the war had been momentous for Assyria. By late 1757, after two years of fighting, Republican forces had great momentum, and real hopes of victory over their mighty foe.

These gains were illusory. The Timurid empire was far from the paper tiger it had first appeared. In such a vast realm, stretching from the Arctic to the Arabian Sea, the full weight of Timurid military might took some time to come to bear as men were drawn from the distant Punjab, Central Asia, the Pashtun lands and rallied in the Persian heartland. In late 1757, the Great Khan unleashed his counter attack. At the Battle of Tehran, Abaya led his armies to a shattering defeat, losing 40,000 men in a single day and seeing many thousands more fall as he retreated in disorganised fashion back towards Mesopotamia. As the Assyrians abandoned all they had gained, the mighty Timurid army crossed over into the Republic in early 1758, sacking Kirkuk and bringing Nineveh and Baghdad under siege while hundreds of thousands swarmed the lands east of the Tigris. Abaya and his battered troops fell back to the Euphrates, praying for a miracle. With Assyria in existential peril, the Great Khan swore to destroy the Republic and its liberal poison once and for all and restore the Emperor to his throne. In the areas they occupied east of the Tigris, Timurid forces sought dismantle revolutionary institutions and capture and execute known liberal leaders as they made clear their intention to purge the Revolution from the land.

The sieges of Nineveh and Baghdad were quite different. The eastern approaches to Baghdad were guarded by the fortress of Qazaniya, allowing the city, although imperilled, to continue must as it had before and for the Republican government to exercise full control. At Nineveh, the Timurids enveloped the city from all sides, cutting it off from all supply lines and conducting numerous probing attacks into its outlying areas while subjecting its defences to months of bombardment. In the capital, a motley military garrison was augmented by citizen militias – many of them led and organised by the liberal-ultras in the Dowronoye – who bolstered their ranks and barricades every corner of the city. While stoutly repulsing all Timurid attacks, these militias would take it upon themselves to act as an internal policy force – lynching suspected Timurid spies and traitors as an air of the mid-1740s returned to the capital.

Across the Republic more widely, Abaya called for a mobolisation on a greater scale than had ever been seen before. Assyria had instituted conscription during the Civil War, but now the state sought to requisition food, property and supplies to feed the war effort while its agents went from village to village to demand a soldiers to replenish the army. The country was filled with a powerful patriotic fervour, most powerfully in Mesopotamia, where nationalism, Republicanism and hatred of foreign invasion combined into a potent brew. There were notable efforts to broaden the scope of this nationalist ideology, including through the first usage of the 'two rivers' Assyrian flag – that encapsulated the new blood and soil stress on unity of the peoples of the Middle East and Mesopotamia in particular and their ancestral connection to the land.

In the Syrian Desert, the former Sar Sarrani Niv IV had grown to become a serious security concern. With the Timurid appealing for his restoration, the Vizier and his allies feared that conservative elements might attempt to free him from his monastic captivity and use him as a rallying point for a new rebellion. Given the precariousness of the Republic's position, this could not be allowed to happen. Equally, an open execution might stimulate the same sort of revulsion that could turn to revolt. Abaya therefore ordered for the quiet garrotting of Niv in his chambers, a death that would not be admitted publicly for many months and would officially be blamed on natural causes.

For eight long months between March and October 1758, the sieges of Nineveh and Baghdad would continue while Abaya regrouped to the west. Finally, as autumn approached he made his move – bringing all the troops he could muster to face down the Timurid at the Battle of Qazaniya, east of Baghdad. This would be warfare on a scale unseen. Each army fielded in excess of 200,000 men, with fighting taking place over a miles long frontline covered in a thick smog of gunpowder smoke and death. Fighting would take place over the course of several days, as probing attacks and skirmishes eventually escalated into a full frontal assault on the Timurid positions led by the Assyrians' Bedouin cavalry. With their line buckling, the Timurids would withdraw from the field, abandoning their attempts to take Baghdad. The death toll for a single battle was staggering, with around a quarter of the combatants killed during the Battle, the majority of them Assyrian.

Despite still possessing significant strength further north in Assyria-Superior, the Timurids deemed their positions to be overexposed after the costly defeat at Qazaniya and broke off their siege of Nineveh – withdrawing back to the defensible positions in the Zagros Mountains. As victory bells rang out in triumph throughout the land, a potent peace faction emerged among the Vizier's advisor and within the Majlis – now restored to Nineveh after a temporary exile. It was known that many in the Timurid court were losing heart following Qazaniya and were open to a negotiated truce while Assyria was on its knees, having sustain horrendous casualties, maintaining spiralling debts and with much of the country ravaged by warfare yet again. Abaya rejected these calls outright, demanding that the Republic see the fight to the very end. No one had the power to stand in the way of his ambition.

In 1759, Abaya marched north to Georgia and the Caucuses. Even at the height of the Timurid counter invasion, the Assyrian army had clung to a toehold of Timurid land at Kars. The Timurids maintained a very strong army in the Caucuses, and were determined to dislodge the Assyrian occupiers of the city. Abaya chose this terrain as the ideal location to pin his enemy to a pitched battle once more. In another large and gruesome battle, the great Vizier dealt his enemies a second debilitating defeat. However it would be the aftermath of the Battle of Kars that would prove to be far more decisive in deciding the outcome of the war. As the Timurids fell back deeper into the Caucuses, Georgian tribes aligned to Assyria blocked off their path to retreat through the mountain passes. Pinned down, the Assyrians pursued them and secured the surrender of the entire Timurid northern army. The entire region was effectively undefended. By the end of the year, Assyrian forces had once more captured Baku and Tabriz, while gains were also made further south along the border regions in the Zagros. It was only as Abaya began to push towards the Persian imperial heartland once again that stiff resistance re-emerged. Losses remained heavy, but Assyria's gains were intoxicating.

The Assyrian cause was greatly aided by a brief but bitter succession crisis that followed the death of the Great Khan in 1760 that drew much needed troops away from the frontline and held back any coordinated resistance to Malik Abaya's advance. In the traditional Turkic fashion, the Khan had not appointed a clear heir, and his sons and nephews moved to tear one another to shreds over the course of several months. The victor of this struggle was Mirza II, an unusual figure within the Timurid Empire, a reformist with some liberal inclinations and a member of a peace faction that wanted to reach a conclusion to the devastating war in the west.

Despite the new Khan's hopes of peace, fighting continued unrelentingly. Having seen their westernmost provinces fall rapidly to the advancing revolutionary army, the Timurids succeeded in, at the very least, slowing the Assyrian advance as they reached into the Persian heartlands. However, after the fall of the capital, Isfahan, in 1762 opinion at the Timurid court finally turned in favour of capitulation and peace with Nineveh. The Great Persian War was over, Assyria had achieved one of the greatest military triumphs in her history.

Yet the cost of victory was staggering. The Great Persian War was the goriest chapter in two decades of incessant blood-letting in the Assyrian Revolutionary Wars of 1741-1762. All told, somewhere in the region of 5 to 10 million people, soldiers and civilians alike, are believed to have died during these wars, representing one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. The population of the Middle East had notably dropped since the beginning of the century, and entire generations of young men had been wiped out.

Abaya would impose a heavy price on his vanquished foe in the Treaty of Tabriz that brought a close to the war. Territorially, Assyria would annex Georgia – which it had long claimed as a part of the historic Five Kingdoms – and Pontus, while the Byzantine Republic regained the lands around Sinope on the Black Sea. The Timurids would agree to pay an hefty annual tribute in perpetuity as a guarantor of the peace, while also giving Assyrian merchants unlimited economic access to their Empire. Finally, Mirza agreed to adopt a limited constitution under the guidance of Assyrian advisers – the Assyrians believing that constitutional governments were inherently friendlier to their Republican state.

The Federal Republic of Assyria had defeated all its enemies, foreign and domestic. Its mighty neighbours that for centuries loomed over it – Byzantium and the Timurids – had both fallen to the unstoppable might of its Republican armies and adopted more amenable forms of government at the tip of a bayonet. The Republic was secure. Yet after such horrors, many of the weary soldiery looked expectantly towards the state and their heroic leader Malik Abaya to reward them for their sacrifices.

 

[Tommy4ever]

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.

 

[Tommy4ever]

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.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1781-1790 The Return of Reaction​

The 1781 election had changed the shape of Assyrian politics. The Moderates had lost their Majlis majority for the first time since Abaya's 1748 coup and were now outnumbered by the right wing opposition. Fortunately for the ruling group, the conservative block was far from unified, even by the standards of the day, with the Moderates and especially the Ishtarians having far greater unity around shared principles and organisations.

Within Assyrian conservatism, there were two main poles. Firstly, the clerical-monarchical Old Nestorians, dominant in Babylonia and the Gulf and a major force in rural Assyria-Superior and Nestorian communities throughout the Republic. They were motivated by pain in the exile of the traditionalist Patriarchate and monarchism above all else. Secondly, there were the Egyptians, the Copts and Latins of Lower Egypt who clung tightly to their Catholic faith and were focussed on the goal of restoring the Duchy of Damietta. In between, there were many others, Catholic conservatives in Philistia who were often both monarchist and close to the Egyptians, and the likes of the Georgian caucus who had little interest in an Imperial restoration in Nineveh or the Church politics to the south but rankled under their country's annexation into Assyria at the end of the Great Persian War. Others were even more local – representing traditionalists rejecting the power of central government and interference in social structures, a strong current among tribal communities in the mountains and deserts where the state's imprint was weaker.

Yet with the right so close to power, in the aftermath of the election there was a concerted effort to bring greater cohesion to the movement. The man who would undertake this task was Addai Seraphin, a blue blood aristocrat from Babylonia and the Malik of Wasit near Baghdad. His father had been a passionate Lebarian, fighting in the Civil War in the 1740s. Benefiting from the amnesties of Vizier Abaya, the Seraphins had retained their land, titles and slaves in Babylonia, yet remained unreconciled to the Republican status quo – with Addai himself entering the Majlis in the 1760s on an unabashedly monarchist platform. As one of the most senior of the Mesopotamian monarchist representatives, he appeared a natural leader among the Nestorian wing of the conservative movement with the Majlis as it grew rapidly in the 1770s. But the annexation of Damietta had provided opportunity to go further. Seraphin would devise a shared political platform for the Assyrian Right: the restoration of the Assyrian monarchy, the creation of a Kingdom of Egypt under the control of the local Catholic elite and in personal union with Assyria, the unification of the Church of the East under the Old Nestorian Patriarchate and its elevation to the status of state religion – while maintaining the traditions of Assyrian religious tolerance, the protection of land and property rights including slavery, the pursuit of compensation for lost titles and properties during the expropriations of the Revolution, greater decentralisation to the states and the weakening of the central government. This was a set of principles that were broadly acceptable to all the main conservative factions in Assyria. Indeed, Seraphin would even move to forge the basis for a true political organisation with the creation of the Saint George Society effectively a political club that drew influential figures from the various strands of the conservatism within the Majlis for the purpose of decision making. This marked the birth of a true conservative faction, seeking to challenge for power in its own right.

Conservative unity presented a major threat as the Majlis moved to elect a new Vizier. Desperate the maintain Republican power, Agbar Israel dismissed his many internal critics – calling for them to rally around him in the name of keeping the Right at bay. While the Moderates would seek to pick of elements of the Conservative coalition with offers of concessions and bribes, their main backing outside of their own ranks would come by looking to the small Ishtarian block in the Majlis, who held the balance of power. Cooperation with the Ishtarians had been a major taboo since the Decemeber Massacres in 1765-66. The willingness of the Moderates to deal with the liberals did much to dispel their extremist image, legitimising them before the Assyrian mainstream.

While the Israel ministry struggled on, paralysed by the gridlocked Majlis and building frustrations among his own supporters who had been used to perpetual untrammelled power, the Vizier would find solace in a quick and victorious war in the east. The borders of the Assyrian East Indies had been largely static through the eighteenth century, given the instability of the Revolutionary era, but soft power, in particular emanating from Sumatra – the jewel of Assyria's Empire – had seen Assyrian tentacles tighten around many of the small indigenous states of maritime South East Asia. Angered by this growing influence, in 1782 the Sultan of Brunei expelled Assyrian merchants from his realm and invaded the lightly defended colony of East Borneo, occupying the territory and threatening to invade Sumatra through the allied Emirate of Malacca on the Malaya archipelago. These grand ambitions were cut short by the arrival of the Republican Navy – which crushed the Sultan's fleet off the coast of Sarawak and placed all of Borneo under a naval blockade. With troops later arriving from the Middle East to defeat Sultan on land, a peace was agreed by the end of the year with Brunei ceding a hefty tribute, agreeing to reopen his country to Assyrian commerce and seeing his allies in Malacca annexed. Victory reaffirmed the importance of Nineveh to the East Indian colonies, a reminder to Sumatra in particular of the importance of the motherland, and boosted the Republic's prestige at home.

The 1770s had seen the Second Roman Republic effectively destroyed by its Turkic problems, and Assyria was not immune. On face value, the Cumans were not unlike other semi-nomadic pastoralist populations within Assyria, including Kurds and Bedouin Arabs. Yet they were set aside by an extreme martial culture that had led some in times gone past to label them the Spartans of the Near East. The Cumans had migrated to the Middle East and, in larger numbers, Anatolia during the Middle Ages. In Assyria, they could be found in three disparate parts of the Republic – in Pontus, in truth the eastern finger of Anatolian Cumania, they dominated the highlands and played a large role in the main city of Trabzon, while the Greeks lived on the coastal lowlands. In Philistia, they were as much as a tenth of the population – living mostly among their fellow Catholics west of the Jordan River. Finally, in Assyria-Superior, Cumans were around 5-10% of the population, with tribes scattered throughout the state, with greater concentrations in the mountains and especially on the shores of Lake Urmia near the Persian frontier. Over time in both the Byzantine and Assyrian Empires that had developed traditions of military service for the state and raiding. In Assyria, it was tradition for all Cuman males to spend a decade or more of their youth as a warrior before retiring to marry and take up the life of a herdsman, ready should a time of need come.

During the Revolution, the Cumans – so long associated with the monarchy – were looked upon suspiciously, with many of their warriors fighting for a variety of anti-Republican factions during the Civil War. With the end of the Great Persian War, the Federal Republic began to demobilise its sprawling armed forces and sought to reduce the outsized role of Cumans within it – leading to a steady drop in the demand for Turkic soldiery and military expertise. During this prolonged period of peace with no war, and far fewer opportunities for military service, an entire generation of Cuman youth passed by without being blooded as warriors, a fundamental right of passage before manhood among their culture. Repulsed by the fading of their traditions, and in part inspired by the explosion of violence in Byzantine Anatolia in the 1770s, tribes in Assyria began to form warbands and conduct blood feuds among one another and raid other semi-nomadic and settled populations. This problem was particularly significant in Assyria-Superior, where Cuman activity sparked a domino effect with many Kurdish highland tribes militarising in response and both posing a serious threat to many rural communities in the Republic's heartland. The government responded with a heavily military presence, but faced by the mobility of the raiders and often unforgiving terrain they struggled to completely end the Turkic problem.

After the delicately poised 1781 vote, the 1784 elections were among the most bitterly contested in the post-Revolutionary history of the Republic with Addai Seraphin promoting a single Conservative platform from the Nile to the Persian Gulf. His dreams of sweeping to power with an anti-Republican majority would ultimately fall narrowly short, as the Right were just four seats shy of control of the Majlis. The real victors were the liberals, who saw a steady increase in their vote, share of the chamber and most importantly of all the importance of their parliamentary support in keeping the monarchist monster at bay. Assyrian liberalism had grown greatly in confidence over the past three years, enjoying a degree of respectability it had not held in a generation and drawing attraction as the militant defenders of the Republic. They would push a much harder bargain with the Moderates than in 1781, calling for a ban on monarchist and anti-Republican organisations, accusing the Saint George Society of flagrantly disregarded Abaya-era laws outlawing seditious bodies and more importantly, action on the issue of slavery. With the Moderates ditching Israel, refusing to endorse him for another term as Vizier and instead turning to the Antiochian Greek Michalis Sabetos to lead them, they could not accept the former without risking civil war but agreed to address the latter. Remarkably, after a Druze, a Jew and a Muslim, Sabetos was the first Christian Vizier since 1748.

The slave issue had been reignited by great changes abroad. While Assyria was the dominant player in the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Atlantic trade was dominated by Scotland, with its colonies in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America importing millions of Africans over the past two and a half centuries. While Scotland had been an opponent of the eighteenth century revolutions, it had undergone a peaceful and evolutionary path towards constitutional monarchy and possessed its own liberal traditions, distinct from the legacy of Assyrian Ishtarianism. A part of this was an abolitionist movement. In 1782, this movement achieved its greatest victory as Scotland banned the importation of new slaves into the Scottish Americas. While existing slave populations would remain under bondage, and the smuggling of slaves into Scottish territories through third parties,most significantly the Byzantine port of New Athens at the mouth of the Mississippi continued, the single largest source of demand for African slaves in the world had been severed. It was the largest move towards the end of the trade globally since the initial efforts at abolition in Assyria during the Revolution.

These changes had great consequences in Assyria. Firstly, they caused economic hardship and disruption among commercial elites and the Cape in particular. Much of East Africa's slaves did not remain within the Indian Ocean world, but were exported, via the Cape, to the Americas. Now this lucrative trade was gone and the value of slaves dropped significantly. Politically, Assyrian abolitionists were ashamed to see the Scots surpass their achievements in taking such significant action while the Indian Ocean trade remained alive and undisturbed. The Ishtarians in the Majlis, were therefore determined to end this trade once and for all, as a first step towards a future outright emancipation.

While the Vizier pursued an agenda against the slave trade, he found himself tearing the Moderate coalition apart. A clash emerged between the authority of the Vizier and his allies – who wished to pursue legislation that would limit or abolish the trade in line with his alliance with the Ishtarians – and a rebel faction of Moderates who ensured that an anti-reform majority in the Majlis could block him at every turn. This group was led by a young rising star among the Moderates, Chozai Petuel. The Moderate rightwiner was an ethnic Assyrian from Kirkuk, an unusual background for a defender of the peculiar institution. He rallied opposition to the Vizier around several axes: not only slavery, but a wider failure to secure the Republic by addressing the rise of the Conservative Right. A follower of the New Nestorian Church, he demanded that the state move towards reconciliation with the Old Church and pursue a religious settlement that would bring the Republic's largest faith into the fold. The Moderate caucus was increasingly raucous and divided in these years, with the Majlis barely able to function.

The 1787 election was one of relative stasis in voting preferences, but the small changes that did occur were of great significance. The Moderates regained their status as the leading block in the Majlis, narrowly short of a majority while the Conservatives shed thirty seats. The Ishtarians on the other hand, increased their incrementally yet again – exceeding their vote tally in the last pre-December Massacre election held a quarter of a century ago for the first time. Although less reliant on liberal votes than he had been in the past, Sabetos renewed his relationship with the Ishtarians to secure his re-election as Vizier, promising to continue to work to find a parliamentary majority for reform.

The liberal constitution of 1742 had emancipated several tens of thousands of black slaves in Syria and Assyria-Superior. Despite so much of that constitution being abandoned following Malik Abaya's seizure of power half a decade later, those blacks in the northern parts of the Federal Republic retained their freedom. The story of these black freemen in the decades after the emancipation was a sorry one. Pushed from the land by the growth of a smallholding peasant class during these same revolutionary upheavals, the blacks slowly flowed into the major cities of the region. There, they were shunned by state authorities and the local populace alike – denied access to the trades, still controlled by guild-like organisations, other gainful employment and all but the worst housing stock. They were pushed to the margins of urban life and developed into an underclass prone to begging, criminality and prostitution. Anxieties about the black freemen in the northern cities had been growing for some time, but spilt over into a full blown moral panic after two blacks were arrested for murder of a well-known merchant and his wife in Aleppo in a failed robbery in 1788.

With polite society in an uproar, the Conservatives seized the initiative to tap into sectors of the population that had hitherto shunned them in the cities. Their leader, Seraphin, argued that the blacks were in capable of of surviving in a civilised society under their own direction, arguing that the state must replicate the conditions of bondage they had previously lived under by taking the freemen into their control as a type of 'government serf', removing them from the cities and putting them to work on public projects. This proposition proved highly popular, and soon the Conservatives appeared to be gaining ground on territory they had previously feared to tread. With the Ishtarians stoutly defending the liberty of the freedmen, while they continued to work alongside the Vizier in pursuit of legislation on the slave trade, many Moderates were fearful for the very continuation of the Republic under its present course. In this mood, Chozai Petuel captured the mood of the faction to seize control of the leadership of the Moderates within the Majlis, ousting Sabetos' allies. Owing to the constitution, the Vizier would remain in office, but he was no longer in power.

Firmly under Petuel's leadership, the Moderates entered the 1790 election on a platform promising end the exile of the Old Nestorian Patriarch, bring the blacks in the northern cities to heel – although not going to the extremes of Conservative ideas, and swore to end all attempts to interfere with the institutions of slavery. The result was a stunning victory. The Moderates gained significance support at the expense of Right, seeing their close rivals of the past decade lose around a third of their seats and almost a quarter of their vote – neutralising them as an immediate threat to the existence of the Republic. While Petuel made major gains on his right flank, he lost out on his left. A number of Moderates who had been aligned to the outgoing Vizier had run in alliance with the liberals in 1790, combining with them to see the Left make a sizeable electoral breakthrough. Having won the Moderates' first parliamentary majority in a decade, Petuel was thunderously elected as Vizier, marking a shift in Assyria's political evolution.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1790-1802 The Man Who Would Be King​

Chozai Petuel, perhaps more than any man since Malik Abaya, had a grand sense of destiny for both himself and the Assyrian Republic, seeking to bring grandeur and elevation to both. His first aims were to resolve the immediate crisis arising from the racial panic in the cities of Syria and Assyria-Superior and, most significantly, bring an end to the exile of the Old Nestorian Patriarchate.

The first of these aims was the simplest and most brutal. Dismissing the Conservative proposal of a return to effective bondage under the control of the state for the blacks, Petuel borrowed from the history of the Jews, adopting a policy of ghettoisation. The blacks would remain free, but would be legally restricted from living or even exiting without permission defined neighbourhoods within the cities in which they resided. In effect, Petuel sought to place them out of sight and out of mind for the majority. These black ghettos, although small, would become dens of poverty with vanishingly few sources of outside income beyond charity from the churches that provided enough food to keep their inhabitants from famine.

The government's largest goal was religious reconciliation. However, this would be no easy task. Entreaties to India found that the Old Nestorian Patriarch, Rubil IV, refused to countenance a return to his ancestral see in Assyria, thereby legitimising the Republic, unless he was recognised as the sole head of the Church of the East and all the properties that had been lost during the Revolution were returned. These demands were nearly impossible for the state to meet. Therefore, negotiations stalled with little progress being made.

Pressure was building on the Moderates and Petuel in particular. They had attracted many religious voters in 1790 on the promise that the Patriarch would return, and the anti-Republican right appeared poised to capitalise on any disappointment. Salvation arrived for the Vizier in 1792 when the Patriarch of the New Nestorian Church based in Nineveh died at the unusually young age of 49 after contracting malaria. Pouncing on this opportunity, the state shed its commitments to secularism to intervene in the resulting assembling of bishops to appoint a replacement. Facing heavy handed pressure from the government, the bishops issued an encyclical calling the exiled Old Nestorian Patriarch to return to Nineveh and lead an ecumenical council leading towards the unification of the Church of the East.

Rubil delayed responding for some months to consider this proposal, with the Assyrian state publicly ending all legal impediments to his return. In late 1792, the Patriarch crossed into Assyrian Malabar, where he was greeted by massive crowds numbering in their 100,000s who chanted for a “one God, one Church, one Patriarch”. Seeing the enthusiasm of the St Thomas Christians, he set sail for Basra. Rubil's arrival on Assyrian soil was a moment of mass outpouring of religious ecstasy, as the ambition of millions of Nestorian traditionalists unfolded before their eyes. Rubil marched on foot from Basra to Nineveh, being following and visited by untold numbers of the faithful who wished to see the return of true religion to their land with their own eyes.

Despite the superficially strong hand of the New Nestorian bishops in the resulting council, the Republican Church possessing far fewer parishioners but most of the Nestorian Church's historic properties in the northern states of the Republic and a more established position within the Republic and its halls of power, massive popular pressure would force them to concede on almost every point of doctrinal and structural dispute with the traditionalists. Aside from a small number of New Nestorian dissidents who could not accept the member, the Unified Church of the East would bring the wider Nestorian religious community back together under a traditionalist leadership in 1793. As such, much of the anger would permanently ebb from Assyrian Conservatism.

Riding a tide of political euphoria among Nestorians, Petuel secured a thumping re-election in 1793. Taking two thirds of the Majlis, the Moderates' best performance since 1778, the party inflicted heavy losses on the Conservatives as traditionalist religious voters continued their drift towards the centre. Indeed, the entire character of the right wing contingent in the Majlis underwent a notable reorientation away from Mesopotamia and towards Egypt, where its Catholic voter base was unmoved by the Church of the East's reconciliation. For their part, although falling to modest parliamentary losses, the liberals saw their vote hold steady as they continued to consolidate their position as a significant critic of the Moderates' turn to the right.

Buoyed by electoral glory, Petuel's government would take an imperial turn in the middle of the decade. Its first target was the small, independent, Kingdom of Malta. In recent decades the central Mediterranean had grown into the site of regional power struggles. With their restored monarchy, the Byzantine sought to re-exert their much weakened influence, to the south the Italians had conquered the historically Egyptian lands of Tunis and Tripoli while Sicily itself was controlled by an independent Kingdom. All three coveted the rich, strategic island of Malta – that had preserved its independence for generations in the shadows of great powers. The Assyrian were eager to exert their own influence westward, taking the island as a base from which they could project power across the Mediterranean. In 1795, they deployed an armada to invade the island and overwhelm its well-manned fortifications – annexing Malta as a province of the Federal Republic.

The Maltese adventure was merely a preclude to a far larger expedition in the Far East. The expansion of the Assyrian Indies had largely ceased a hundred years before. Petuel had personal ambitions to end this stagnation and make rich new conquests in the region. His target was the Tagalog Archipelago stretching from Mindanao, north of Sulawesi, to Luzon in the north. These lands were divided between the Sultan of Manyila in the north, ruling from the island of Luzon, and the Raja of Sunda in the south, the master of western Java who also controlled much of Mindanao and the nearby islands, and some smaller local rulers. As Assyria lay claim to the entire archipelago, the two main indigenous rulers – traditionally rival Muslim and Hindu powers – united in alliance against the invasion. Despite this cooperation, the Assyrian far eastern fleet was able to crush their enemies at sea, ensuring complete control of the waves for the invaders and allowing for an invasion force to set out for Mindanao in early 1796.

Domestically, Petuel was a critic of the 1780 constitution, believing that it had left the government of Assyria too divided by overly weakening the Vizier at the expense of the Majlis. Petuel hoped to use the significant political capital he had amassed through his role in mending the Nestorian schism to remedy this fault. Keeping the bulk of the 1780 constitution in place, which was widely respected among his fellow Moderates, he secured important revisions that gave the Vizier effective free reign over foreign affairs and the ability to overrule the Majlis on domestic issues in limited circumstances. Crucially, the Viziership would be decoupled from the deliberations of the Majlis. No longer would the head of state be elected by the parliament, instead, the Vizier was to be chosen by direct election according to a plurality of enfranchised voters - proving a direct and personal endorsement by the citizens of the Republic – and would serve for two terms of the Majlis, six years in all, rather than requiring more regular re-election.

First Vizieral Election Result, 1796

Majlis Election Results, 1796​

The 1796 election would be the first to be contested under the new system. They would prove to be a great individual victory for the sitting Vizier. Running against two rival candidates from the left and right – an ageing Addai Seraphin standing for the Conservative right and a ally of the former Vizier Sabetos who had drifted over to the liberals, the Armenian deputy Stepan Kocharyian, being chosen as the Ishtarian contender. Petuel won a convincing majority of the popular vote, notably outshooting the Moderates' performance in the Majlis election held on the same day. The vote underlined Petuel's enduring allure on the right, with tens of thousands of voters who supported Conservative parliamentary candidates giving him their support. As such, while the Conservatives remained the second faction in the Majlis, the liberals secured a clear second place in the Vizieral election.

From the moment of domestic political triumph, Petuel and his government would be brought crashing to earth by a catastrophic turn in the Tagalog War. The early stages of the campaign began well, with the expedition to Mindanao successfully overcoming a number of local rulers and pushing the Sundanese to pull back from the island. In 1797, filled with heady expectations of imminent victory, the Assyrian expeditionary force, already tired after months of hard battles, pursued the Sundanese to the smaller island of Panay to the north of Mindanao. Little did they know that the Raja Sikander I had managed to reach the archipelago, nor the scale of the Sundanese force that had concealed itself on the island. The Assyrians had walked into a massacre. Their army was almost completely destroyed, with the weak remnants losing control of most of Mindanao once more, retreating to the island's western Zamboanga peninsula. The defeat was a humiliation that put the entire expedition at risk of failure. Rather than admit defeat, the government would seek to call up fresh troops from the citizenry of the Middle East. Over the next two years, the southern island would become a meatgrinder as the Sudanese were joined with Manilyan forces from the north in a desperate struggle to push the Assyrians back into the sea.

In the face of a deteriorating military situation, unpopular conscription and angry criticism from right and left the Moderates walked into disaster in the 1799 Majlis election, representing the first 'mid term' vote in the new Assyrian election cycle between Vizieral votes. The Moderates plumeted to their lowest ever vote share and seat tally, with both the Conservatives and Ishtarians making sweeping gains. It was a harsh rebuke for the government, which was left unable to command majority support in the Majlis and as a result robbed of any ability to carry forward a legislative agenda.

In the aftermath of his 1799 humiliation, the Vizier took the risky and legally unconstitutional decision to travel out to the Indies to personally oversee a grand army that had been gathering to revive the Assyrian dream of conquest. Over the next two years a vicious campaign saw control over Mindanao fall firmly back into Assyrian hands, opening the way for a direct assault on Luzon and the Manilya Sultanate. During this period, Petuel pioneered a policy of offering military commissions to Cuman and Kurdish chiefs, seeking to redirect the militant energies of their warbands to fuel the colonial war effort – a policy with uncomfortable echoes of the Imperial era that angered many in Assyria. The war culminated Cagayan in 1801 at which a large Assyrian force heavily defeated the Manilyans and secured effective dominance over the Tagalog Archipelago. By the end of the year a peace treaty would bring an end to the bloody conflict. Assyria annexed the entire island of Mindanao directly as a colonial province, as well as the Rabaul islands off the coast of Papua – territories than had been outlying Sudanese possessions, while the Sultanate of Manyila was reduced to the status of an Assyrian vassal. From near disaster, the Vizier had snatched a great victory – expanding the Assyrian colonial empire more than any other ruler had managed to in a century and glorifying his own person.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, economic and technological changes had been brewing that would change the world more profoundly than any that had come before since the dawn of human civilisation. This was the beginning of the industrial revolution. This economic transformation had its origins in the political changes unleashed by the liberal political revolution in Germany. While Assyria, and indeed Byzantium, had seen relatively little change to their economic structures during their Republican Revolutions, in Germany, Revolution had allowed market forces to be unleashed wholesale onto a society that had the wealth, resources, individual genius and technical expertise to be the hearth of industrial change. The heart of the revolution lay in discoveries around steam power and locomotion, new mining technology and labour-saving improvements in agriculture. Combined, these allowed for the exploitation of Germany's massive coal reserves and their conversion into power, the like of which the world had never seen, and significant increases in agricultural output to facilitate population growth while pushing thousands towards the cities where they would be a cheap source of labour for emerging factories and sweat shops. By the end of the century, these changes had transformed Germany into a beacon of economic and technological progress, streaks ahead of anything seen around the world, and the advancements of the industrial revolution were already spreading to the British Isles, Scandinavia, Italy and France.

Despite possessing an advanced political system and close diplomatic links to the Germans, Assyria lagged woefully behind. Its economy remained based on agriculture and trade. Meanwhile, for centuries Assyria, much like other Asian economies including Persia, India and China, had enjoyed the fruits of an established artisanal manufacturing base that had dwarfed its European counterparts. These more primitive manufacturies, often run by insular minority groups including Jews, Armenians in Syria and Mesopotamia and Protestants in Egypt, saw little need to adopt the new technologies transforming Europe and continued to use ancient methods and approaches, at much smaller scale. Assyria was falling behind.

Second Vizieral Election Results, 1802

Majlis Election Results, 1802​

Final victory in the Tagalog War could not have been better timed for the Vizier, who returned to Assyria as a conquering hero in the mould of the venerated Malik Abaya just in time for a new election campaign. Petuel received the adulation of the masses, even as his militarism, disregard for the constitutional norms and self aggrandisement were a cause for concern among the political elite who instinctively feared a slip back towards personal rule. At the ballot box, Petuel won a heavy personal mandate as he was re-elected as Vizier for another six year term, having already served for more than a decade. He notably outperformed the Moderate parliamentary candidates, who, while regaining their Majlis majority on Petuel's coattails fell significantly short of the dominant display of their leader. The Ishtarians performed relatively strongly, retaining their popular vote in the Majlis vote despite a Moderate resurgence, while their Vizier candidate Stepan Kocharyian finished in second place once again. For the Conservatives, it was an especially painful election. Not only did they see the bulk of the Majlis gains they had made in 1799 wiped out, they saw their Vizieral candidate perform abysmally. With the old master of Assyrian Conservatism, Addai Seraphin, stepping towards retirement, the Egyptian wing of the movement had asserted their right to leadership. Yet the Latin-speaking Egyptian nobleman Cesare de la Bourg lost significant support among the Nestorians of Mesopotamia, who were reluctant to fall in line behind a Catholic. Going into a new century, Chozai Petuel was well on his way to second decade dominating Assyrian political life.

 

[Tommy4ever]

1802-1817 Modernity Calls

In the South African colony of Al-Opheeria, the turn of the century was a time of economic depression. The colony had been hit by compounding crises. For much of its history, the Cape had been one of the most important conduits of the international slave trade in the world – the entrepôt from where East African slaves entered the Atlantic trade and West Africans the Indian Ocean and a key market in its own right. The catastrophic decline of the Atlantic trade from the 1780s following Scotland's ban on the importation of new slaves to its American colonies significantly depressed demand for slaves around the world and rendered Al-Opheeria's role as the conduit to the Atlantic redundant. Just as its most important mercantile interests suffered, its key extractive industry suffered a serious blow as well. Much of Al-Opheeria's growth, in particular in its early days as a fledging settler society, had been founded on the promise of great wealth from gold and precious metals – resources that littered its lands, but were especially concentrated near the Cape itself. However, overexploitation of these resources had left many of the rich mines of the Cape completely exhausted by the turn of the century – leaving miners to drive deeper into the interior in search of riches while others fell into a life of poverty. Overall, Al-Opheeria had grown significantly poorer and saw inward migration from the Middle East slow down drastically in the face of its struggles while internal social relations only grew more strained.

Majlis Election Results, 1805​

In the midterm elections of 1805 the Moderates made significant gains at the expense of the Conservatives. Their successes were heavily concentrated in Egypt, where the Moderates had spent decades attempting to build a Republican coalition around the mostly urbanised non-Catholic minorities of country, but had now lured a section of the Coptic majority away from their longstanding loyalty to the Conservative Latin aristocracy. With Conservative support reaching its lowest level in three decades, the liberals overtook them to form the large opposition group in the Majlis since 1752 – a seminal moment.

Political change in Egypt was driving inter communal discontent in parts of the rich and populous country. Since the time of the annexation of Damietta, and indeed the Revolution, the main divide in Egypt had been between a reactionary Catholic majority and the many minorities – Muslims, Protestants, Jews, Nestorians and Old Copts – who rallied around the Moderates and the Republic. This state of affairs had allowed the Muslims control in Upper Egypt, and had allowed minority-led Moderate coalitions to dominate in certain urban areas of Lower Egypt, most importantly Alexandria. In the great Egyptian port city, the Moderates had run a somewhat corrupt administration for the benefit of the city's merchant classes that granted privileged status to their own ethno-religious communities. As a Republican island in a Conservative sea in Lower Egypt for most of the period since the annexation of Damietta, Alexandria had remained independent and aloof. However, with the rise in strength of the Moderates among Egyptian Catholics, the wider state of Lower Egypt fell under republican administration for the first time. With this glimpse of influence, there was a power struggle among the Alexandrian set and the rising Coptic Catholic Moderate leaders that would play out in the streets of major cities. These tensions escalated until a mob of Protestants and Jews armed themselves and ransacked a number of poorer, predominantly Catholic, districts in Alexandria – forcing the Republic to call in the army to restore order in the city. This alienation of their historic powerbase would allow for the pollination of the seeds of Ishtarianism in Egypt, with the liberals offering themselves as the true defenders of the republican tradition.

In the halls of power, the period after 1805 was dominated by the looming question of Chozai Petuel's future. Having already held the reins of power as Vizier for a decade and a half, Petuel was seen as a threat to the integrity of the Republic by political elements both within and without the government. Indeed, despite their large parliamentary majority and superficial unity against enemies on the left and right, the Moderates were riven by tensions and divisions. These divides were both personal and ideological, with elements within the Moderates believing that with the imminent threat of a Conservative takeover having receded, they should draw back from the right-wing course Petuel had set in favour of a closer relationship with the liberals. Meanwhile, for years worry about the Petuel's personal ambitions to become a new Abaya, a Vizier for life, had been held in check by assurances that he would stand down at the end of his term in 1808. However this balancing act would break down after Petuel reneged on his previous promises and announced his intention to run for Vizier once more.

While Petuel retained significant personal popularity among the masses, seen as a guarantor of stability, his seeking of another six year term as Vizier led to outrage across the political spectrum and brought together the most unlikely of political alliances. The Ishtarians would form a tight alliance with Moderate dissidents, supporting the candidacy of a rebel Moderate and critic of the Petuel administration from the left in the form of the Aleppo-Armenian Nourhan Mashalian. What was far more surprising was that the Saint George Society, the organising club of the Conservatives, elected not to stand a candidate of the Right, without openly endorsing Mashalian. Ironically for a group whose stated ambition was to end Assyrian democracy, the Conservatives had implicating lent their aid to a front aimed at preventing a slide towards personal rule.

Third Vizieral Election Result, 1808

Majlis Election Result, 1808​

The 1808 Vizieral election would be the most closely contested and bitter election Assyria had seen since the 1780s. Mashalian campaigned on a broad Republican front, defending the existing institutions of the Federal Republic, while Petuel claimed his defeat would let in the radical demons he had kept at bay – Abolitionism, expansion of the franchise and breakdown of the reconciliation with the Nestorian Church. In this angry battle, Petuel would emerge triumphant, ironically benefiting from the absence of a Conservative candidate by attracting the largest share of the Rightwing vote.

In the Majlis, the outcome was very different. There, with both pro and anti Petuel candidates running under the same banner, the Moderates rode to their greatest victory in decades, benefiting from a collapse in the Conservative vote, with thousands of Right wing voters disgusted at the perceived cooperation between their traditional political leaders and the liberal left. Indeed, the Conservative Majlis caucus was almost wiped out. At the same time, Ishtarians climbed to nearly a third of the popular vote, even as the Moderate landslide meant their Majlis contingent declined modestly.

In the aftermath of the election, re-elected and with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, Petuel began to move against his enemies - denouncing the Mashalianites and demanding the personal loyalty of all Moderates. At the same time he embarked on new legislative reforms aimed and bringing the legal system under the direct control of the Vizier, ending its constitutional independence.

At the height of his untrammelled authority, in March 1810 Chozai Petuel was assassinated in Antioch by a Greek craftsman who cried “death to the dictator” before firing a single bullet into the heart of the Vizier, killing him instantly, and thereafter being overwhelmed and slain by Petuel's armed entourage. Having been Vizier for twenty years, he was by far the longest serving Assyrian political leader since Malik Abaya, but now his rule was over. The first episode of political terrorism of such prominence in decades, the Assyrian political classes were shocked and bloody anger filled the chambers of the Majlis, with some Petuelist hardliners accusing the liberals of cultivating a new wave of Dawronoye violence and calling for retribution.

According to the Assyrian constitution, with the Vizier killed in office, a replacement had to be elected by the Majlis to serve out the remainder of his term. Since 1808, the Moderates in the Majlis, controlling the large majority of the chamber, had fractured between Petuelist loyalists who stayed close to the regime and Mashalianites who had drifted towards the Ishtarians and been largely pushed aside from immediate access to political power. Resisting the angry impulses of the hardliners, Moderate grandees saw this moment as an opportunity to restore unity and strengthen the institutions of the Republic. Labbaeus Shama – a Petuelist with connections on both wings of Moderatism – was elected as the new Vizier and would bring forward a number an amendment to the constitution that would limit any future Vizier from serving for more than two conservative six year terms, thereby drawing a line under past debates over when power should be relinquished.

Majlis Election Results, 1811​

In the midterm elections contested one year after Petuel's murder, the Moderates successfully defended their Majlis majority, albeit suffering losses to both the liberals and Conservatives. While the right enjoyed a modest recovery from the appalling lows reached at the last election, they remained far short of their historic levels of strength. Meanwhile, the Ishtarians held on to their impressive showing in the popular vote in 1808, while making significant seat gains to surpass their previous peak in 1799.

During the 1810s, the Assyrian Indies were afflicted by a prolonged period of unrest and rebellion. The Tagalog War of the 1790s had brutalised the region, with many natives from throughout the Assyrian colonies in the area being pressganged into fighting while the conflict disrupted the wider trade and economy of the area. Major revolts would break out in Borneo and Maynila against Assyrian rule, while Sulawesi and Mindanao were also hit by more minor disturbances. The unrest was so great that Assyria was forced to redeploy troops from the Middle East in order to restore order while the small creole populations of the East Indian colonies beyond Sumatra, which remained largely calm, faced harassment and attacks from indigenous forces.

Fourth Vizieral Election Results, 1814

Majlis Election Results, 1814​

After Labbaeus Shama's brief stint as a unifying placeholder Vizier between 1810 and 1814, the Federal Republic would elect its new leader. After fierce debates within its own caucus, the Moderates put forward a traditionalist in the right-wing Petuelist mould in the form of Idan Seta – a pious Nestorian, slave-holding, land magnate from deeply conservative Babylonia. The continuation of this rightist path alienated many Moderates who hoped for a change of course, yet they lacked a rallying point as they had had in 1808, with Nourhan Mashalian loyally backing Seta's candidature.

At the polls, the Moderate coalition would hold together strongly enough to return a majority in the Majlis once more and elect Seta Vizier, but this disguised serious losses – with dozens of seats falling to liberal challengers and Seta becoming the first Vizier to be elected on a minority of the vote. Indeed, the Ishtarians stormed to over 200 seats in the Majlis, an unprecedented success, while their Vizieral candidate, decorated admiral Bagour Al-Arbela, won nearly two fifths of the popular vote. The Conservatives, remained mere shadows of their former selves, having seen much of their historic support ebb away to the Moderates, returning just 51 seats and finishing as also-rans in the Vizieral election.

Europe's ascent that had begun in the eighteenth century continued to catch steam in the first two decades of the nineteenth, as the economic productivity and technological progress of the West surged far beyond the rest of the world. Largely insular during these years, worried predominantly by its internal political affairs and maintaining control over its colonial possessions, Assyria was left behind. However, the Federal Republic was far from unaffected by these changes. For centuries, Europe had been an importer of good from the rest of the world, and Assyria was among its chief suppliers – both producing good domestically and acting as a middle man for the transportation of Asian products. By the 1810s this relationship was already beginning to reverse, with the flow of good shifting from an East-West axis to a West-East one in which local Assyrian producers and merchants struggled to compete with Europe. At the same time, military technologies were evolving rapidly rendering the armies and fleets of the Asian powers obsolete. By the early 1810s the Timurids played host to a Scottish military mission, supporting the modernisation of their armies and European influence was spreading rapidly through the Indian Ocean and beyond. A new world was coming.