The Cross in the East – 1163-1190
The Cross in the East – 1163-1190
Although both of them were only children at the time of their father’s death, Niv being thirteen and Nahir just six years old, the two brothers would grow up to be the defining figures of the latter decades of the twelfth century in Assyria. They could hardly have been more different. Niv was a somewhat hedonistic figure, a known homosexual who could not bare the company of women – not least his wife, who drank and feasted regularly, gaining weight steadily as he grew older, and showed little of his father’s interests in scholarship and generalship but was nonetheless an expert in managing courtly relationships and delegating responsibilities.
Nahir on the other hand, was a tortured titan. As a child, rumours had swirled around court that he was in fact the Spawn of Satan as a result of is strange and cruel behaviour, with only the intercession of the Patriarch preventing a proposed exorcism. As he grew older his streak for sadistic cruelty never left him, but he emerged as a man of outstanding physical attributes – standing at least a foot taller than even the greatest of champions and possessing incredible strength – and an unparalleled intellect. He was also the follower of a strange esoteric religious sect known as the Cosmasians who believed that through secret rituals involving ecstatic forms of worship and speaking in tongues, they could communicate directly with Christ himself – practices that Nahir credited with guiding his military decisions. This outward heresy naturally set the Prince against Church authorities, although his brother’s use for his talents shielded him from any reproach. Through the coming decades, while Niv ruled Nahir would act as the sword of state – leading Assyria’s armies into many battles.
In the first years after the death of Ta’mhas the Great, Assyria was governed by a regency council headed by the new King’s mother Sarica. During this time, the Assyrians faced a major rebellion in Edessa as the local Greek and Armenian population slaughtered much of the city’s Syriac populace and sought to expel Assyrian power – reacting with fury towards outrageous caused by Nestorian Church authorities attempts to interfere with Orthodox and Armenian religious affairs. During this revolt, the rebels took possession of King Ta’mhas’ body, who had recently died in the city, and threatened to destroy the remains before instead agreeing to ransom them over to the Assyrian crown for a substantial payment and agreements to respect the independence of other church denominations. The decade after the Edessan rebellion was relatively peaceful, as both Niv and Nahir matured into adulthood, with the Assyrians only engaging in small border conflicts with neighbouring Kurdish tribes.
The international order in the Middle East would be further shaken in the latter decades of the twelfth century by the advent of the Crusader era. The first experiments Crusades – international campaigns uniting the Catholic world against external threats – had their origins earlier in the century in Italy and Spain. There, the Pope had first called for a holy army to destroy the powerful Sicilian Sultanate that had expanding across southern Italy to threaten Rome itself – meeting with spectacular success. Later, a Crusader expedition helped to force the Muslims back from the efforts to wholly eliminate the Christian states of northern Spain.
With these victories in the West, the Catholic world’s eyes turned towards the Holy Land itself. The Latins arrived on the shores of Palestine in 1174 with a huge army, shattering the strength of the mighty Fatimid Caliphate, that had already lost Syria to the Byzantines and Egypt to rebellion, and conquering all the lands from the Jordan River to the Sea by 1177.
The Crusade significantly altered the geopolitics of the region. Despite their success on the battlefield, the Crusaders soon squabbled among themselves over the spoils of war. The chief dispute was between the Holy Roman Emperor – whose mighty state had supplied the largest part of the Crusader army and expected to be rewarded with overlordship of the Holy Land, as befitted his standing – and Yeke the Sword of Jesus, the unlikely leader of army on the ground. Yeke was a Pecheneg and, like many of the Turkic peoples of the Black Sea region, his tribe had embraced Catholicism as a means to reject the influence of the Byzantines. Through most of his adult life he had campaign across Europe as a mercenary, before travelling to the Levant with the Crusaders and establishing himself as the leader of the expedition through his tactical skill, personal wealth and ability to unite the multinational Christian army into a coherent force. As such, while a number of the emerging Crusader lords in southern Palestine swore loyalty to the German Emperor, Yeke ruled the north as King of Jerusalem.
The sudden emergence of a powerful new Latin presence in the region was a shock for the indigenous powers of the Near East, both Christian and Muslim. While the Byzantines were extremely sceptical of the Latins, in particularly King Yeke with his anti-Orthodox background, the Assyrians were quick to embrace the newcomers. Barely a year after his coronation in the holy city, Yeke took the hand of King Niv’s sister Khannah, forging an iron alliance between Nineveh and Jerusalem.
The creation of this new Crusader-Assyrian axis could not have come sooner for both parties as the Islamic world, shaking from the losses of southern Italy, northern Spain, the Holy Land, Syria and Assyria in the space of a single lifetime found new unity. In 1181 the Sunni Abbasid and Shia Fatimid Caliphs launch coordinated attacks on Assyria and Palestine respectively, both calling upon the faithful to join in a sacred Jihad to drive the infidel conquerors back. Assyria and Jerusalem would seal their marriage alliance in blood, as both pledged to join together in the face of the Muslim onslaught.
Through the red heat of the ensuing decade-long battle for survival, Prince Nahir emerged as a heroic figure among his people. In the opening phase of the conflict the Abbasids sent a large army upriver into Assyrian territory, capturing Samarra – birthplace of the Qatwa dynasty – and terrorising the region’s Christian population as they attempted to coax Assyria’s Muslims into revolt. Nahir met the Caliph’s men at the Battle of Bichri, grinding the slightly larger Muslim army into a stalemate as both sides suffered heavy losses but the Muslims were forced to withdraw to regroup.
By this stage of the war, Assyria’s Latin allies in Palestine were in a desperate state. The Fatimids had overrun the Holy Land, capturing many cities and besieging both Jerusalem itself and the crucial port of Acre – where King Yeke held his court. In order to support the Crusaders, Prince Nahir led around five thousand riders on camels through the impassible terrain of the Syrian Desert to arrive unexpectedly near Damascus. Ravaging the Syrian countryside and threatening the great city, the Assyrians lured the Fatimids into breaking off their sieges of Acre and Jerusalem – before joining with Latin forces to drive them out of Palestine.
Despite the Christian successes in the west, by this stage Assyria itself was once again being menaced by Abbasid advances and Niv called upon his brother to return east to protect the homeland. Bringing back what remained of his initial expeditionary force, and some limited Latin reinforcements, Nahir tipped the numerical balance in the east back in Assyria’s favour and heavily defeated the Arab army.
At this stage the victory appeared clearly within the grasp of the Christians, until word reached the courts of Nineveh and Acre that the mighty Seljuk Sultan had pledged his great armies to the faltering Jihad. Joining with the remnants of the Sunni Caliph’s armies in souther Iraq, the Turks advanced directly on Nineveh. In this final cataclysmic battle, King Yeke travelled to the east to personally lead a Crusader contingent alongside Nahir in defence of Assyria. History records that as the badly outnumbered Christian army began to buckle, two great streaks of flames lit up the sky in a brilliant light that forced the sign of the cross – inspiring the Assyrians and Latins to join together in a great charge against the Muslim ranks that broke them and sent them into a rout. Nineveh was saved.
The conflict still had years left to run from the glorious Battle of Nineveh, but nonetheless the momentum between the Assyrians and Jerusalemites was unstoppable. By 1190 the Muslim invasions had been decisively beaten back. The Jihad was at an end.
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