In the Shadow of the Ancients - An Assyrian AAR

[Tommy4ever]

Introduction: The Origins of the Assyrian Nation​

Prior to the ascent of the first medieval Assyrian state, the Aramean-speaking Syriac Christians of the Middle East had little sense of collective national identity. This population, having been the largest group across Mesopotamia and Syria at the time of the Arab Conquest, had dwindled by the end of the first millennium AD to the status of a scattered minority everywhere in their traditional homelands except for a small territory north of Baghdad, centred around the city of Samarra. They appeared to be a disjointed people drifting into the abyss of history. Yet, from these beginnings there would arise a new Assyrian nation. Its developed was genuinely remarkable, marking the novel forging of a coherent and powerful national identity among the Syriac Christians of the Near East alongside the revival of the unimaginably ancient idea of Assyria. The ethnogenesis of this nation rooted itself in three key pillars: ancestral and ethnic connection to the ancient civilisations of the Near East – most prominently Assyria itself, the Aramaic language and the Christian teachings of the Church of the East.

The Medieval architects of Assyrian nationhood consciously identified themselves as the indigenous population of the Near East who had been uprooted by interloping Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Turks and Persians. They claimed to be the direct, undiluted, ancestors of the glories of the Cradle of Civilisation, to the Babylonians, Akkadians and above all the ancient Assyrians. This claim was granted credence by their use of the Aramean language, known as Syriac by the Greeks. Having originated in Syria, the Aramean tongue had developed into the dominant language of the Levant and Mesopotamia during the first millennium BC and remained so until the Arab conquest. It was the native language of Jesus Christ, was one of the main languages of the Talmud, was used in Babylon and Nineveh and at the courts of Persian Shahanshahs.

Just as important to the Assyrian idea as history and language was faith. Christianity arrived in Mesopotamia within the lifetime of the Apostles – soon establishing itself as one of the major religions of the area. While the Western Church solidified its structures and theology as the state religion of the late Roman Empire, the Christians beyond Rome’s eastern frontier in the Persian empire sought a different path. Receiving official sanction from the Sassanian Shah, the Church of the East was consecrated as an independent Church in 410, with its own Patriarch. The Church’s rise helped to further embed the linguistic foundations of the later Assyrian people, as literary Syriac – based on the Aramaic dialect spoken in the religious centre of Edessa – emerged as the liturgical language of the eastern Church.

The Persian Church had a number of theological differences with its Roman counterpart, chief among these was Nestorianism. Nestorius had been the Patriarch of Constantinople, one of the most influential positions in the Roman Church, and posited the idea that the human and divine nature of Jesus were distinct and separate. After Nestorius and his teachings were deemed heretical by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, many of his followers fled eastward into the Persian empire where they imprinted their ideas onto the emerging Church of the East.

From this time, the Church flourished – becoming the largest religion in its core Mesopotamian territories and achieving influence not only within the Sassanian empire but far beyond. There were sizeable Nestorian dioceses in Indian, where the St Thomas Christians of the Malabar Coast were in communion, and notable communities throughout the tribes of Central Asia and even in distant China.

The cataclysmic upheavals of the seventh century, with the rise of Islam and conquest of the entire Middle East by the Rashidun Caliphate set in motion the decline of the Aramean-speaking peoples and their Church. Many Syriac Christians had welcomed the Muslim takeover, that relieved them from the oppression of Zoroastrian Persians, shielded them from the interference of Roman clerics and granted them protection as People of the Book. Indeed, Aramean speaking Christian scholars played a vital role in the Islamic Golden Age with their translation of ancient texts, and their culture flourished in tandem with that of the Caliphate. Nonetheless, over the generations Islam and Arabic gradually replaced Christianity and Aramean across the Near East. As the centuries passed, the Syriac Christians retreated back ever further – increasingly concentrating in the plains of northern Mesopotamia, in the lands of ancient Assyria. It would be here, in the early twelfth century, that this age of retreat was ended and the Assyrian nation was born.

 

[Tommy4ever]

A People Are Born 1129-1138

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The Assyrian nation was forged during a period of tremendous flux in the Middle East caused by the dramatic waxing and waning of Turkish power. The Seljuk Turks had descended from their Steppe Homeland during the first half of the eleventh century to conquer a mighty empire stretching across Persia, Central Asia and Mesopotamia – making the Abbasid Caliph their vassal and establishing themselves as the greatest power in Sunni Islam. In the latter part of the century they attempted to push their power yet further – invading both the Shia Fatimid-ruled Levant and Byzantine controlled Anatolia. In both cases, they met with initially success – taking lands in Syria and Armenia – yet were ultimately forced to relinquish their gains before the end of the century. This stunting of the Turks’ expansionist ambitions robbed the Seljuks of their reputation for invincibility and promoted internal disquiet that would come to the fore under the strains of the century to come.

The Turkish empire was tipped from stagnation to crisis by the mass migration of another Turkic Steppe nation into their empire – the Jewish Khazars. Having once been the leading power on the western Eurasian Steppe, the Khazars had been forced from their traditional homelands by more aggressive Cuman tribes. In the late 1110s and the 1120s they made the journey around the eastern coastline of the Caspian Sea to invade the northern provinces of the Seljuk Empire. The Turks had little response to the arrival of the Jewish tribes in their tens of thousands, facing a string of military defeats that forced them to surrender the souther shore of the Caspian to a new Khazar Khaganate and allow for the migration of the entire Khazar nation from the north. The arrival of the Khazars gravely sapped the strength of the Turks, destabilising the entire Middle East.

The threat of foreign invasion was compounded upon by internal discord and religious schism. The movement of the messianic self-declared Islamic Mahdi, Hussein Zikrid – known as the Zikri – had risen rapidly across Iran, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf from last years of the eleventh century. Promising a reordering of society, a return to true religion and the imminent coming of the end of days, by the time of the Khazar invasion, the Zikri were increasingly challenging the dominance of the Sunni traditionalists – winning particularly widespread support in eastern Persia, southern Iraq and among the Kurds. The Zikri turned to revolutionary violence in the 1120s, embarking on major rebellions against their Sunni Turkish overlords that rocked the Seljuk state. At the same time, the Abbasids in Baghdad, fearing that the Seljuks were no longer capable of carrying the sword for the Caliph rose up in pursuit of their own independence.

Among the many warlords vying for a share of the spoils as the Seljuk Empire teetered on the brink of collapse was a Syriac Christian tribal leader hailing from the countryside near the city of Samarra. This was the man who would become known as Saint Ta’mhas the Great. Among his many epitaphs, Ta’mhas the Scholar, the Lion of Assyria, the Father of the Nation. The man who would do more than any other to forge the idea of an Assyrian people, and rise to a status of religious veneration within the Church of the East, his Qatwa bloodline taking on almost sacred significance among the adherents of the Nestorian Church.

Ta’mhas made his entrance into history in 1129 when he led a small band of Aramaic tribal warriors into the Christian-majority city of Samarra – taking advantage of the withdrawal of most its previous Turkish garrison. Over the next two years he would fight bitterly to secure his rule over his small territory – pushing east to take Kurdish Kirkuk and west to capture further Assyrian populated territory at Deir. Nonetheless, his position as Malik of Samarra remained contested with the Seljuks still desperately hanging on to their power while larger Kurdish and Arab Muslim armies swirled across the region. Ta’mhas took a major step towards security in 1131 when he joined with the Abbasids to fend off a Turkish siege of Baghdad, in doing so gaining the Caliph’s recognition of his claims. The first Assyrian Christian realm was born.

The Malik knew well that his position, surrounded by more powerful Muslim states, remained extremely tenuous. He therefore set out to strike against the last major outpost of Seljuk power in northern Mesopotamia at Mosul in 1132, the largest city in a region home to a large Christian population. Even in their wildest fantasies, few Assyrians would have predicted the scale of their success in this initiative as Ta’mhas and his ragtag army faced down a Seljuk force four times their number at the Battle of Nimrud and completely destroyed it – effectively ending serious Turkish influence north of Baghdad. As the Christians entered Mosul, their domination over the fertile Plains of Nineveh and all the lands from Samarra to the Anatolian mountains seemed certain.

However, as the Turkish power evaporated, the Kurdish majority of the region rose up to seize power for themselves in opposition to both their foreign masters and the Assyrians. With Ta’mhas’ men being routed from their attempts to move into Sinjar and Nisibin, the Kurds sought to track the Christian army in recently captured Mosul. There Ta’mhas waited for two long years in the face of an overwhelmingly large Kurdish host. All seemed lost after a group of Muslims inside the city opened the gates – allowing the Kurds to begin to pour inside. There, in what appeared a final stand Ta’mhas led out his men and not only halted the Kurds but sent them into a chaotic retreat that allowed him to sally forth and scatter them. Despite this great victory, the fighting was far from over. Still benefiting from much greater numbers, the Kurds continued to menace the Assyrian presence around Mosul for several more years before finally agreeing to a truce in 1136 that allowed Ta’mhas to retain control over the city but left the rest of northern Mesopotamia in their hands.

Shortly after the truce with the Kurds, Ta’mhas led his armies into a war against the isolated Turkish Beylik of Rahbah, who controlled a small Syriac-majority territory along the Euphrates. The victorious conclusion of this smaller conflict in 1138 marked the end of almost a decade of constant warfare for the nascent Assyrian state. Further to the east, the end of the 1130s also marked the conclusion of the Seljuk’s great crisis. After fending the Abbasids from Basra and holding the line against the Khazars along the new frontier in the Alborz Mountains, the Turks, admittedly diminished, had stopped the rot of their empire and clung onto their imperial power in Persia. Through these years of fighting, Malik Ta’mhas had established control over a rich Mesopotamian territory featuring a number of the area’s most important cities in Mosul, Samarra and Kirkuk. Furthermore, although within this territory Assyrian Christians formed a plurality of the population, only outnumbered by the combined numbers of Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis, Shia and Zikris. Now entering a period of peace, this new realm had the opportunity to take its first steps towards defining itself as a nation.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Kingdom Come 1138-1163

Having been formed through a decade of fighting in the midst of the collapse of Seljuk power west and north of Persia, the 1140s provided Ta’mhas Qatwa’s nascent state with a period of peace and nation building. The Malik moved his capital from his native tribal territory around Samarra to the larger city of Mosul in the north. In a move etched with the symbolic rejection of the legacy of the Islamisation and Arabisation of the Middle East and anchoring of his own Syriac people in the traditions of the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, Ta’mhas renamed the city Nineveh, adopting the title the name of ancient Assyrian metropolis whose ruins were not far from its successor.

During this time Mosul, Samarra and Kirkuk became magnets for two key groups of refugees – Syriac Christians and Jews. The instability of the first half of the twelfth century in the Middle East, the shock of the Khazar invasion, the rise of a Christian realm in Mesopotamia and, later in the century, the beginning of the Crusader era in earnest, turned Islamic opinion against religious minorities. For Christians, particularly Syriacs but also Armenians, the attraction of Ta’mhas’ statelet were obvious and they were welcomed keenly to settle. Asylum for Jews, who suffered ever harsher repression than their Christian counterparts as Turkic, Arab and Kurdish leaders accused them of collaborating with the Khazars, was a less obvious outcome of the emergence of a new Assyrian regime on the Tigris, but they were nonetheless welcomed in large numbers – swelling their numbers in the major cities and setting a historic precedent.

Together, these groups of refugees would help to stimulate a cultural and commercial flourishing, while Ta’mhas maintained a cosmopolitan court in Nineveh featuring Christian Assyrians and Armenians, Jews, and Muslim Arabs and Kurds. The emerging Mosul intelligentsia, following the interests of their patron, paid close attention to the question of Assyrian nationality, with Ta’mhas sponsoring the composition of an epic poem in the Aramean language that told the story of ancient Assyria and traced an unbroken historic lineage to his own state – the Melekh Katwa.

For all the cosmopolitanism in the cities, the Samarran state was tightly aligned with the Church of the East. Breaking a generations’ old taboo that had long forbidden any attempt to concert Muslims was from their faith, Syriac clerics embarked on proselyting campaigns among the realm’s large Islamic populations. As might have been expected, these efforts outraged communities and regional actors alike – leading to at an at times violent backlash, including the murder of Bishop Aggai of Deir near Kirkuk by a group of Kurdish tribesmen.

Undoubtedly the upturning of social hierarchies that had seen Muslims robbed of their historically privileged position was a source of torment and anger. It not only fuelled outbursts of popular violence, but also sinister scheming at court in Nineveh. There, Ta’mhas was the victim of an assassination attempt in 1147 as a palace slave brandished a knife and set upon the sovereign while he held court. The assailant was unable to badly injure his ruler, and was sent to the city’s dungeons for interrogation. To the horror of the Malik, the would-be killer was sprung from his captivity that very night by a Muslim cabal who subsequently fled to the Kurdish city of Irbil across the frontier. After the Zikri Kurdish Gholamid Emir refused his demands to return the conspirators to him, Ta’mhas readied his armies for war.

The Gholamids were an imposing foe with a larger and more religiously and ethnically unified realm than their Assyrian counterparts, while their territories surrounded Nineveh on three sides. Malik Ta’mhas therefore adopted a highly aggressive strategy. In his opening gambit, he marched east quickly from Nineveh, taking Irbil’s defenders by surprise, storming the city and brutally sacking it to neutralise it as a potential threat. He then swung westward to meet the largest part of the Kurdish army by the foot of Mount Sinjar where, in a tightly fought encounter, the Christians won the day. Although Samarra had gained a clear advantage, this was far from the end of the conflict as the Gholamid Emir rallied his pious tribesmen for holy war and sent a plea to his fellow Zikri Muslims in the Zagros mountains to send aid. These new sources of manpower could not wholly turn the tide against the Assyrians, but they nonetheless forced Ta’mhas to row back from ambitions to annex the entire Emirate. After four years of fighting, the two sides reached a peace in 1151 that saw Ta’mhas gain control of Sinjar, Irbil and Nisibis – a place of great spiritual importance to Nestorians as site of what was once one of the greatest centres of Syriac theology and scholarship.

The Malik’s triumph in his war against the Kurds greatly enhanced the stature of his realm across the region – leaving Ta’mhas in control of all northern Mesopotamia. Following this victory, he beseeched the Patriarch of the East, Hnanisho, the spiritual leader of the Church of the East, to establish a permanent residency at Nineveh. The Church’s Patriarchate had been based in Baghdad for centuries from the Arab conquest, but during the instability of the 1120s and 1130s had relocated to the Persian city of Isfahan. Promised lands, the resources to construct a new residency, security, proximity to the largest part of his flock, and a place at the seat of power of the world’s only Nestorian Christian state, Hnanisho accepted this offer and arrived in Nineveh in 1155. Not long after his arrival, Hnanisho would proclaim Ta’mhas as the King of Assyria.

Born in the last years of the eleventh century, the great Assyrian King continued to lead military campaigns from the front well into his sixties. In the years following his war against the Kurds, the broken Gholamid Emirated splintered into a series of petty tribal states that Assyria routinely waged war against throughout the late 1150s – absorbing them into their growing realm one by one. Then, in 1160, a dispute broke out with the Armenians. A fellow non-Chalcedonian Christian nation, the Armenians might have appeared to be natural allies of Assyria. Nonetheless, the two Kingdoms came to blows over Edessa – strategic, prosperous and ethnically Armenian, but for the Assyrians it was of profound spiritual significance. Edessa had been home to Saint Ephrem, the father of the Syriac Christian tradition and the founder of the theological schools of Edessa and Nisibis that had incubated the Church of the East. Guided by force of destiny, Ta’mhas went to war in 1160. Edessa itself was extremely well defended and, while the conflict dragged on for three years and featured a number of battles across the frontier, the war was dominated by the long running Assyrian siege of the city. The attacking army was ravaged by raids, disease and occasional hunger, yet never relented in their attacks. Finally, in 1163 the walls were breached and the elderly King entered the sacred city in jubilation. Having achieved yet another great victory on the field of battle, Ta’mhas, now sixty five years old, was already gravely ill and barely had the strength to mount his horse. He would never set eyes upon the banks of the Tigris again, remaining in Edessa for several more months in a steadily worsening condition before passing away, bequeathing an incredible legacy to his two sons Niv and Nahir.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Cross in the East – 1163-1190

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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.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Rivers of Babylon – 1190-1215

Having fought back the Islamic invasions of the 1180s, the Christian Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Assyria banded together to capitalise on the weakness of their enemies – entering into a new, dramatically expansionist, phase of their struggle against the Muslim world. In this they met with quick and glorious success. Between 1190 and 1194, King Yeke seized Damascus, Prince Nahir sent the Abbasid Caliph into flight in the Zagros Mountains as he marched his army almost without resistance into Baghdad itself, while the Assyrians also took control of Palmyra in the west.

These impressive gains had been won in the face of limited resistance, as the great Islamic empires of the region reeled from the losses sustained in their earlier invasions. However, the fragility of these gains were brought to light by a major uprising in Syria. Emerging from the deserts of the interior, pious tribesmen swept the Latins out of Damascus, beat back an Assyrian army sent to aid them and attempted to push further northwards in an ultimately fruitless attempt to retake Palmyra as well.

The Syrian revolt that had driven the Latins back to Palestine provided the final motivation for King Niv to establish the Order of Saint Addai. Taking inspiration from the military-religious orders that had sprung up across the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Order would form an institution of pious warriors dedicated to buttressing the Assyrian state and her Church. Provided with a substantial territorial base in the newly conquered lands around Palmyra, the Order was assured of significant resources. This decision was the source of great tension between the brother Niv and Nahir. Not only had Nahir been thwarted in his attempts to expand his own personal holdings along the Euphrates into Palmyra, he saw the Order as a dangerous threat to the future stability of the realm and his own power. The younger brother saw the creation of the military Order as an affront to his own personal authority as the head of the Assyrian military – creating a rival centre of martial power. Further to this, Niv, for all his hedonism and open homosexuality, was a close friend of the church hierarchy, while Nahir was a Cosmasian heretic and by extension inevitably at odds from the devoted adherents of Nestorian orthodoxy attracted to the Order.

The creation of the Order of Saint Addai was but one symptom of the growing power of the Church of the East over all affairs of state as King Niv grew ever closer to Patriarchal authorities in his later years. The Assyrian state had assembled great wealth from its conquest of Baghdad, and continued to flourish in a period of amble harvests and successful commerce. Niv chose to invest a large part of this wealth into the construction of a monument to the glory of God, Assyria and his blessed father with the creation of the Cathedral of Saint Ta’mhas in Nineveh. Although it would be many generations until it was finally completed, Nineveh’s stunning cathedral would become one of the largest and most beautiful religious structures in the world, and the beating heart of the Nestorian faith.

In 1200, Niv died just shy of his fiftieth birthday of complications relating to gout, leaving Nahir, seven years his junior, as his clear successor. Yet the issue of the mighty Prince’s religious convictions hung over the succession. Despite his great prestige won on the field of battle, the religious establishment could not countenance an open heretic assuming royal power. As Niv lay on his deathbed, his brother had been warned by a coalition headed by the Patriarch and backed by the muscle of the Order of Saint Addai and a sizeable faction of the nobility that unless Nahir return to the Church of the East’s fold, he would face a powerful revolt. Reluctant to send his realm into civil war, Nahir renounced the Cosmasians and returned to the formal services of the Church for the first time in decades – securing his peaceful ascension.

This willingness to kneel to the Church was in part based upon the need to maintain internal unity in order to continue the campaigns of conquest of the last years of his brother’s reign. In 1201, just months after taking the throne, Nahir march south on a mission to conquer the last parts of Mesopotamia outside his grasp – Seljuk ruled Basra, as well as a number of smaller Sheikdoms, most importantly the Shia state centred on the holy city of Karbala. This southern campaign was marked by rapid movement and tactical brilliance. Nahir took the Turks by surprise by launching into an aggressive riverine campaign – sending a fleet of ships down the Euphrates and Tigris and into the marshes of the Shatt al-Arab. This aggressive move disrupted Turkish communications and allowed the Assyrians to launch attacks from multiple directions, seeing the Assyrians overwhelm their defences and reach the gates of Basra in a matter of weeks. The city itself was assaulted by both land and sea – falling after a short battle. Startled by how quickly their authority in the area had crumbled, the Seljuks struggled to find an effective riposte – taking more than a year to deploy a sizeable force to attempt to retake Basra, that was in turn lured into swampy terrain and utterly destroyed. In little time, and with even less blood spilt – all of Mesopotamia had been secured for Assyria.

Although beaten, the Seljuks had not completely surrendered hopes of regaining control over Basra, a city of great strategic and economic importance. Five years after Nahir’s initial invasion, in 1206, much of Mesopotamia was afflicted by a serious of Muslim revolts against Christian Assyrian rule and the Turks, in alliance with a number of Arab states, chose this opportune moment to invade. The Turks successfully recaptured Basra in 1207 and advanced as far north as Baghdad, which they besieged from 1208 to 1210 when the Assyrians were able to relieve the city. From this moment, the momentum of the conflict shifted firmly in Assyria’s favour and Nahir pursued the Turks and their allies all the way to the Gulf Coast – reclaiming complete control over Mesopotamia.

After a long life of warfare and conquest, King Nahir had firmly secured Assyrian power in his people’s spiritual homeland of Beth Nahrain. As the realm appeared to be approaching its first period of peace in a generation, an emissary from the distant St Thomas Christians southern India’s Malabar Coast arrived in Nineveh, fellow Nestorians, with a plea for help.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The St Thomas Crusade – 1215-1220

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The Christians of southern India were among the most ancient Christian communities in the world. Tracing their origins to the evangelism of the Apostle Thomas, from as early as the third century they had come under the guidance and authority of the Church of the East. Always a minority among a Hindu people, they had nonetheless prospered in their homeland along the Malabar Coast – growing rich from their trading connections to the Middle East.

Despite a long history of tolerance, the situation of the St Thomas Christians worsened during the High Middle Ages. The Tamil Chola empire that had dominated the region for centuries grew ever more suspicious of foreign religions and under the reign of Vikram I in the twelfth began a series of persecutions aimed against Christians, Jews and Muslims within his realm. These attacks badly damaged community and continued under his successors. Yet this tightening of the screw in India coincided with the remarkable flourishing of the community’s co-religionists across the Sea in Mesopotamia – with word of Nahir’s conquests thrilling the Indian Christians. The Metropolitan of India, the most senior Nestorian cleric in the country, hoped to leverage the newfound power of the Assyrians to gain concessions from his temporal master and dispatched an emissary to the west who arrived in Nineveh in 1215 with a request for aid.

The great King Nahir the Bear was electrified by words of the Indian ambassador – seeing an opportunity to win eternal glory. To the horror of his court and nobility, relieved by a half decade of peace after endless wars with their Muslim neighbours, Nahir called for the formation of a mighty army with which he would surpass Alexander and conquer distant India, to take up the cross in a Crusade of his own that would emulate his Latin allies in Palestine. A conspiracy opposed to the conflict quickly formed – headed by Grandmaster Bobowai of the Order of Saint Addai. Undeterred, the King had his Grandmaster imprisoned and forced the Order’s warriors to join his army, wilfully if they might and forcibly if they must.

With Assyria possessing only one major outlet to the sea in Basra, it lacked the naval power to transport an army of the scale being assembled for Nahir’s Crusade. He therefore found an unlikely ally in the form of the Omanis – who offered to sail the Assyrians to India in exchange for vast payment and assurances of plunder in the east.

Taking to the Omani vessels, the Assyrians arrived in the lightly defended Maldives in 1236 and established a secure base of operations. From there, they began to probe the Indian shoreline, raiding coastal areas and seeking to make contact with the St Thomas Christians whom they had come to defend. The new threat from the sea was bewildering for the Chola authorities – who struggled to mount an effective coastal defence or rally the local population of the Malabar Coast to resist. Instead, the Assyrians were able to exploit factionalism amongst the Tamils, and unite with militant local Christians to land a large army on Indian soil.

The failings of the Tamils allowed Nahir to consolidate a strong grip around Cochin and Calicut – the two most important cities of the region – and establish a strong defensive position. The meeting of Assyrians and Cholans on the field of battle was akin to the clash of alien civilisations – with the Indians’ war elephants filling much of the Assyrian soldiery with awe, wonder and fear. Fortunately for the Crusade, their leader Nahir had carefully studied reports of previous armies that had fought against the Indians and deployed expert tactics to neutralise this threat. The Indians meanwhile, had no counter the ferocious charge of the Christian heavy cavalry nor the manoeuvres of Nahir’s veteran infantry formations – seasoned from the long wars in the Middle East. At the decisive battle of the war at Isdhoo, the superiority of Assyrian arms was made clear for all to see as, despite a significant numerical advantage, the Cholans were heavily beaten by Nahir and send into a disorderly retreat.

Isdhoo marked the culmination of a long, methodical, campaign that had seen Tamil power swept back across the entire Malabar Coast, Nahir capturing towns, fortresses and cities one by one and defeating in detail every army the Cholan Maharaja could send to resist. With the Cholan armies broken and the region clearly out of graps, they surrendered to the great conqueror in 1220. The St Thomas Crusade was victorious. After years away from their homeland, the Assyrians were eager to return to Mesopotamia and, true to their promises, elevated the native Nestorian population to power – creating the Raj of Malabar, a Christian state on the subcontinent’s southwestern shore and the Maldives that swore allegiance to Nineveh but enjoyed a high degree of functional autonomy.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth, To Have a Thankless Child – 1220-1246

While Assyria’s eyes were fixed on the adventuring of King Nahir in the St Thomas Crusade, tremendous instability was afflicting one of its most powerful neighbours. For a century and half many had held out hope that the schism of 1054, that had broken apart the unity of the Roman Church – leaving behind distinct Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, could be mended. In 1211 the Byzantine Emperor Konstantinos XI achieved just this – restoring full communion with the West. Yet unity came at a price, accepting the highest authority of the Pope in Rome, surrendering on key dogmatic principles and even recognising the Holy Roman Emperor as the successor to the Western Roman Emperors of old – equal and legitimate heirs to Rome’s legacy. This union proved itself hugely controversial among the Greeks themselves and in 1214, Konstantinos was overthrown by Theophlaktos – who promptly restored the independence of the Greek church. The religious ructions were not ended there, as the Pope called for a Crusade to restore Konstantinos to the imperial throne while the Byzantine Empire as whole descended into conflict centred around pro and anti union factions.

Although the anti-Catholic philhellene faction were ultimately victorious in the ensuing struggle, the chaos in Byzantium bled into the affairs of the wider Near East. The war worsened an existing tense relationship between the Byzantines and the Crusaders of the Levant, while also cooling the close relationship between Nineveh and Jerusalem as the experience of the Greeks filled many Nestorians with the fear that the Catholics might attempt to undermine the religious independence of their own church as well.

Upon returning to Assyria the old bear Nahir showed little inclination to retire in peace, continuing to wage military campaigns abroad through his sixties and into his seventies, displaying remarkable longevity. Through these years he fought the Armenians for territory around Edessa and the Arabs to push Assyrian power as far south as Amman. Yet the largest foreign conflict of these later years was not in the pursuit of new conquests, but to support the adoption of Nestorianism in the Persian Gulf. Emir Shaiban II, who ruled most of the southern shore of the Gulf, abandoned his Muslim in favour of the Church of the East in 1231, bringing many of his tribal brethren alongside him in this transition. Almost immediately he was beset by internal rebellion and invasion from his Muslim Arab neighbours – who all sought to topple him and restore Islamic control to the region. Spying an opportunity to extend Assyrian and Nestorian influence, Nahir led his armies in a series of campaigns to prop up the Emir and consolidate the Church of the East’s expansion into the Gulf – a key way station to Malabar in India.

A century on from the birth of Saint Ta’mhas’ Assyrian statelet in Samarra, his son’s realm was entering a period of cultural and economic change. Throughout its early decades, the Kingdom of Assyria had been a predominantly Muslim state with a sizeable Christian minority in which Kurds and Arabs both outnumbered the ruling Assyrians. Although this remained very much the case at the end of Nahir’s reign, there were some signs of change. Notably, a slow process of culture change was underway on the Plains of Nineveh, and in the cities of northern Mesopotamia – Islam, Arabic and Kurdish were slowly receding while the Syriac language and Nestorian faith were on the rise. Indeed, it was during this period that Aramean became the predominant language in Nineveh itself.

At the same time, the realm was growing increasingly prosperous. The lands of Mesopotamia were themselves agriculturally rich and enjoyed a sustained period of bountiful harvests and advantageous weather, but Assyria’s greatest improvements came in the field of commerce. Benefiting from an advantageous geographical position, Mesopotamia’s existing trading advantages were stretched further. For one, the area’s already large Jewish population grew significantly in light of the tolerant attitude of Saint Ta’mhas and his successors to their settlement – seeing Baghdad, Nineveh and Basra emerge as the centre of world Jewry and the heart of a nexus of international connections spread across the known world. Further to this, Assyria’s new links to southern India gave Mesopotamian merchants easy access to the bountiful riches of the Indian spice trade and key naval choke-point on the maritime route to the markets of the Far East.

For all his military glories and undoubted ability, King Nahir was always surrounded by many enemies throughout his life. There were those who doubted his religious convictions and suspected he still harboured heretical beliefs, those who feared his tendency towards cruel and arbitrary treatment of his inferiors and many who simply tired of the unending call to war. As had been the case for much of his reign, the Order of Saint Addai remained a hotbed of discontent in the King’s later years. Nahir had sought to exert greater control over the Order when he pushed for his second son Ta’mhas to be appointed as Grandmaster in 1223, following his return from India. Unfortunately for the King, it did not take long for Ta’mhas to be sucked into the dissenting culture of the Order and in 1230 he spearheaded a rebellion against his father. This revolt was swiftly and brutally dealt with by the elderly monarch. As his son pleaded for clemency, the betrayed father commanded that Ta’mhas be put to death. Taking on a practice he had witnessed in India, the Prince was to be executed by elephant – crushed to death under the feet of a mammoth beast taken back to Assyria from the St Thomas Crusade.

By 1230, already seventy three years old, King Nahir was ancient by medieval standards and the question of his inevitable impending demise ensured that the defeat and execution of Ta’mhas was merely the opening chapter in a period of instability. Unlike many western Kingdoms of the era, Assyria lacked a codified law of succession. The transitions that had followed the deaths of her first two monarchs had been smoothed by the informal direction of the departing King and the approval of both the Qatwa dynasty and the realm’s important magnates. Nahir lacked the same certainty his father and brother. The King’s favoured successor – his eldest son Avina – was seen as weak and overly close to his father and was unpopular with much of the Assyrian elite who favoured the grandson of King Niv by his eldest son Shovai – Nahir Bar Shovai.

Conflict was sparked in 1235 after King Nshir fell became bedridden with an illness. Expecting his impending death, both Avina and the younger Nahir assembled their forces to prepare for war. Although the elder Nahir recovered from this illness, the wheels of conflict were already well in motion, a civil war had begun. The old bear summoned his strength for one final conflict and in a blistering campaign destroyed the best part of the rebel army – advancing from Nineveh to Basra in the space of a few months and winning several major battles. Yet this would be the last act for the great King, who died in Basra in 1236, with the civil war still raging. At his death he was seventy eight years old, having reigned for thirty six years despite assuming the throne in middle age. Incredibly, a full one hundred and thirty eight years separated the birth of his father, Saint Ta’mhas, in 1098 and his own death in 1236

Although King Nahir had bequeathed a powerful position to his son, Avina lacked the martial talents of his father and his position soon worsened following his ascension to power. The rival faction regained their footing and pushed Avina towards a costly stalemate and a negotiated truce in 1238. The rebels accepted Avina’s Kingship, but in return the new sovereign named Nahir Bar Shovai as his successor. Assyria’s spate of infighting had allowed her rivals to prey upon her most vulnerable interests. In India, the Tamils had reclaimed the northern parts of Malabar, while in the Gulf the Shaiban Emirate that Nahir the Bear had fought so hard to support was destroyed by the invading Seljuk Turks.

Avina’s reign proved to be short and unfortunate. Lacking the strength of his father, Avina struggled to maintain control over his vassals. In 1242 the ever troublesome Order of Saint Addai provoked a war against the Byzantines over the city of Damascus, drawing the King into a war which he had not sought. Still suffering from prolonged internal turmoil, the Romans were not the power they once were but were nonetheless able to deploy a large force to Syria, confronting the Assyrian King at the Battle of Baalbek in 1243. There, King Avina was cut down by the Greeks, although his generals were ultimately able to force the Byzantines back. With the King’s death, his erstwhile rival ascended the throne as King Nahir II. Through this exchange of power the war in Syria continued, with Damascus falling after a long siege and the Byzantines struggling to mount an effective campaign to reclaim it. A peace was agreed in 1246 that transferred the important city over to Assyrian control.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Thunder on the Steppe – 1246-1270

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Throughout the history of civilisation the shifting patterns of power on the Eurasian Steppe had possessed the propensity to greatly reshape the world around them. In the thirteenth century one such moment of change was brought about by the emergence of the Mongol Empire. The tribes of the Far Eastern Steppe were united under a Great Khan at the very beginning of the century and proceeded to rapidly expand their domain – invading China and then surging westward all the way to the waters of the mighty Volga River.

Prior to this conquest, the Steppe had been a land of great religious diversity. Adherents to traditional pagan Tengri beliefs lived side by side with Nestorian, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Buddhists, Manicheans, Hindus, and Zoroastrians. The Great Khan sought to sweep all of this away, seeking to impose a single uniform faith based upon a reformed, more hierarchical, form of Tengrism across the diversity of his sprawling dominion. These religious policies had significant consequences. Notably, the new faith proved attractive to a large part of the indigenous Slavic population to the west of the Mongol realm, who had only embraced Christianity relatively recently, and where pagan customs remained widespread. Yet the largest impact was upon the Cumans. The most powerful force on the western Steppe prior to the Mongol conquest, the Turkic Cuman Confederation was predominantly made up of Christianised Turkic peoples who inhabited most of the lands between the Carpathians and the Aral Sea. As these tribes fell to the Mongols, their new masters offered a cold choice between conversion to Tengrism or death – setting off a mass migration of Cumans fleeing Mongol tyranny into the settled lands that surrounded them.

The largest part of the fleeing Cuman horde passed into fractured lands of the Byzantines, where they struck against both the Balkans and Anatolia. In the Balkans, the Cumans conquered much of the territory around the Danube River – establishing a string of principalities from Wallachia in the east to Serbia in the west in which the Turkic invaders massacred and enslaved the indigenous Slavic and Vlach populations. In Anatolia, they Cumans were more united, creating the powerful Kingdom of Charsianon in the centre of the peninsula, and beginning the process of Turkifying the region.

The last part of the Cuman migration affected Assyria. Cuman raiding and small scale attacks had begun in the early 1240s and increased in size, frequency and strength through the decade as the invaders noticed the distraction of Assyrian forces in the Damascene War against the Byzantines. Shortly after the conclusion of the conflict in Syria, Borc Khan, a leader of a large Catholic Cuman alliance, began a large scale invasion of Mesopotamia, taking with him not only many thousands of warriors but entire tribes with him as he sought land for settlement as his compatriots had done in the Byzantine Empire. The Cumans sowed frightening devastation across much of the region – sacking cities, torching villages and slaughtering civilians. Nonetheless, the remained in a stalemate, incapable of taking and holding territory within Assyria for prolonged periods, yet powerful enough to resist outright expulsion. As their campaign in Assyria ground on for years, King Nehor II made the fateful decision to come to terms with Khan Borc in 1257. The Cumans were to be granted land for settlement – predominantly in the foothills around the Kingdom’s northern and eastern frontiers – and in return their would swear allegiance to the Assyrian King and enter into his military service.

The settlement of Borc Khan’s Cumans on Assyrian soil was tremendously unpopular among high and low society alike. Not only did it invite a barbarous and heretical people, who had committed many atrocities during their invasions and remained prone to raiding neighbouring communities even after entering the King’s service, it forced thousands from their traditional homes, involved seizures of lands from factions of the nobility and a reorganisation of the realm’s military around the new Turkic component.

For the better part of the next decade Assyria was wracked by internal instability. In 1258 and then again in 1262, the Kingdom was hit by large peasant rebellions. More concerning for the integrity of royal power, a large anti-monarchical alliance emerged at court in Nineveh – yet again powered by the ever troublesome Order of Saint Addai, but featuring several key members of the upper nobility including the Maliks of Edessa and Samarra. These groups launched a major rebellion in 1264 – threatening to topple Nehor II by bringing Nineveh under siege. Fortunately for the King, his support held better in the south, and an army from Babylonia arrived to relieve him and assist him in driving the rebels back, restoring peace by 1267.

As order returned to the realm in the late 1260s, King Nehor’s attention turned towards dynastic politics. His wife, Maria ve Samosata, was the sister of the childless King Vakhtank of Armenia. As Vakhtank grew older and his health started to worsen, the question of the Armenian succession grew in prominence and controversy. Nehor and Maria’s son, Saad, was the King’s closest living male relative and as such had a clear claim to the crown. However, with many Armenia’s eager to avoid a union with their larger neighbour to the south, Vakhtank took to decision to revise his Kingdom’s laws of succession to exclude the female line – this removing Saad from the inheritance and naming his cousin Leo as his successor. Disputing the disinheritance of his son, Nehor invaded Armenia at the head of a larger army in 1270.

While Assyria was focussed on its efforts to bring the weaker state to heel, news was already beginning to reach the Middle East of a new force that would scatter all plans of Kings, Queens, clergy and commoners alike asunder.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Catastrophe – 1270-1279

In 1270 the first recorded instances of the Black Death were observed in Kirkuk, on the eastern fringe of the Assyrian realm. Within months it was rife throughout the Kingdom – turning Middle Eastern society on its headed. Far more deadly than any epidemic seen in the known world for centuries, the plague would wipe away at least a third of the region’s population in the course of just a few years, inflicting an unimaginable degree of suffering and social dislocations. Cities were emptied, fields abandoned, infrastructure sent into disrepair, families wiped out and communities destroyed. To the shaken people of the Middle East, a punishment had arrived from God the like of which they had never before been able to contemplate.

The royal household was not spared from the horrors of the plague. Nehor II’s military expedition in Armenia was decimated as the army was riven by disease and forced to fall back. Worse, at home in Nineveh Prince Saad, for whose claim the Armenian campaign had been fought, was was claimed by disease alongside his mother, Queen Maria, and much of the royal family. After returning to his capital, broken by the loss of his family and failure of his political ambitions, the King himself perished from the same sickness in early 1271.

Assyria was not alone in facing dynastic difficulty as a result of the plague. To the west, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem had fallen on hard times from the middle of the century, gradually disintegrating as the French King, Holy Roman Emperor and local Latin magnates established control over large parts of Palestine at the realm’s expense. By the onset of the plague, Jerusalem had been reduced to an enclave around Acre. After a number of deaths in the royal household, the crown fell into the hands of Queen Cecilia. The daughter of the Crusader King, she had married one of the sons of King Avina of Assyria – Nerseh – and spent much of her life as a courtier in Nineveh, where she had openly practised Nestorianism. Even after returning to Acre and openly declaring her loyalty to His Holiness, her commitment to Catholicism remained somewhere ambiguous, much to the anger of her nobility. Most worryingly, her son, Prince Niv, was both her own successor and stood high in the ranks of Assyria’s succession too – promoting the possibility of a union with the heretical Kingdom to the east.

Back in Assyria, the deaths of Nehor II, his primary heir and much of the Qatwa dynasty in the face of the plague’s onslaught pushed the fallen King’s cousin Moqli to unexpectedly assume power. Only slightly younger than his cousin, who died at the age of sixty five, the new King swore to lead Assyria through these trying times. Having spent most of his adult life in Baghdad, where he had ruled as one of Assyria’s most powerful Maliks, Moqli isolated himself in a fortress near the city for the first two years of his reign as he saw out the worst of the epidemic, communicating with his court through written messages and couriers.

When the new King emerged from this isolation he was faced with a changed, fearful and unhappy world. In the context of social breakdown, untold personal tragedy and hardship, economic disaster and rampant banditry and criminality, the populace were violent, angry and prone to millenarian fervour that would effect Muslim and Christian alike. For the state, the most immediate concern was a movement of his fellow Nestorian Christians in the Assyrian heartland – the Messalians.

As Nestorian Christianity had expanded its reach to become the primary religion in northern Mesopotamia, the central control of the Church of the East over dogma and practice had been somewhat weakened as holymen working outside the direct authority of the church, and often preaching at odds to its official teachings, spread far and wide. The Messalians had their origins among these lay preachers, as well as longstanding mystery cults within eastern Christianity that taught of intense and individualistic spirituality and suspicion of authority.

The Messalians promoted an egalitarian ethos, questioning the power and wealth of the elite and the necessity of the Church and priests to intercede the individual and God. Prior to the plague they had been growing in strength in northern Mesopotamia, developing deep roots among the Christian peasantry along the fertile banks of the Euphrates and Tigris. The experience of the Black Death radicalised the Messalians and pushed them towards an extreme anti-Semitism – blaming the Jews for hoarding riches, practising Satanic rituals and human sacrifice and bringing God’s wrath upon the people of Beth Nahrain. In order to achieve salvation, the Messalians taught that the Jews would have to be cast out of Assyria.

Although they were rooted among the poor, the growing Messalian movement had many powerful allies among the elite – at court, in the nobility and even the Church. As these groups pushed for an expulsion of the Jews in 1273, some fearing that it was the only alternative to uncontrolled violence, pressured built upon King Moqli to act. Yet, at the time still cocooned in his isolation, the King remained silent on the issue. This changed when Patriarch of the East Yahballaha boldly defended the Jews – claimaing they had played not part in the epidemic and had a rightful place within Assyrian society, rights that had been given to them by the Kingdom’s sacred founder Saint Ta’mhas the Great. Going further, he denounced the Messalians as dangerous heretics and called for the excommunication of any clergy that followed their doctrines. With his spiritual leader having made the first move, Moqli broke his silence – finally returning to court in Nineveh and announcing his support for the Patriarch’s position. The Messalians were denounced, the state would take no actions against the Jews.

Despite the proclamations of King and Patriarch, ethnic tensions descended into intense violence over 1273 and 1274. While containing a significant anti-Semitic basis, with Jewish quarters and villages destroyed throughout northern Mesopotamia and thousands forced to flee to the relative safety of the largest cities, the Messalian-led insurrections had a strong social component. Indeed, the rebels sought to seize control over empty lands, attack landlords and their property and redistribute wealth to the needy. As the Kingdom’s heartland fell into anarchy, and with his regular forces far too weakened by the plague to restore order, Moqli turned to the Cumans to brutally put down the rebels and garrison the major cities, further strengthening the Cumans’ growing influence over the Assyrian state.

Having relied upon the Cuman Khan to subdue the rebellions in the Assyrian heartland, and inviting their warriors into Nineveh and the other great cities of the region, King Moqli found himself under the hock of his Turkic soldiery. As the epidemic receded across the region, the Cumans used their newfound influence to spearhead a series of campaigns into the region around Lake Urmia between 1275 and 1277 which culminated in the capture of the rich city of Tabriz. The spoils of these victories further enriched the Cumans within Assyria, while attracting further migrants to join them in settling the newly acquired territories in the Zagros.

The suppression in 1273 and 1274 did not destroy the Messalian movement nor weaken its appeal. Indeed, anger among the lower orders continued to mount through the rest of the decade as class conflict simmered over a variety of issues stemming from the newfound labour shortages across all areas of the economy that the plague had produced. Efforts to enforce old noble rights, suppress wages, maintain high prices all strengthened the claims of the Messalians that the elite, in hock to the Jews, were their enemies. This erupted into a second peasants rebellion in 1278, this time under the centralised leadership of the radical preacher Yeshua Dinkha. This time, the rebels met with immediate and spectacular military success. Moqli’s army was badly beaten not far from the capital a few months into the conflict. As the King withdrew his forces back to the city, the Cumans abandoned its defence – seeing no need to die for the Assyrian King, and withdrawing towards their new stronghold at Tabriz.

As the rebels approached, the capital was hopelessly poorly defended and the Messalians were able to breach its defences after a defector within the walls opened one of the city’s gates. As the poured into Nineveh, they would unleash a torrent of bloodshed and destruction. Almost the entire Jewish population of the city, numbering close to ten thousand, while many Kurds, Arabs and the city’s elites suffered gruesome treatment. For the despised King Moqli, Dinkha reserved an especially tortious punishment as the King, deemed a tyranical allies of Assyria’s enemies, was crowned with an iron crown that had been fired to be iron hot – burning through his skin and killing him in agony. The Assyrians had taken the shocking step of killing their own King. As the Messalians began to redistribute the spoils of their conquests, they seized custody of Moqli’s daughter and only surviving child, Tabitha, and named her as Queen of Assyria, while Dinkha maintained tight control over the direction of his burgeoning state on the Plains of Nineveh.

With the horrors in Nineveh, the Kingdom was falling into complete chaos. In the east, the Cumans were consolidating themselves around Tabriz having absconded from the defence of the capital and to the south a large scale Islamic revolt had broken out in Babylonia. At this moment, the fourteen year old Prince Niv, son of Cecilia of Jerusalem, crossed over from Acre with a band of retainers to push for his claim to the Assyrian crown. Quickly winning support in the western provinces, he was crowned King in Damascus before the year was out as he set out into the ensuing battle for Assyria.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Hammer 1279-1291​

The fall of Nineveh and execution of King Moqli left Assyria without a single respected source of central authority – leaving the country to fall into anarchy and warlordism as local elites organised themselves against a constellation of rival factions. In the north, the Messalians sought to consolidate upon their great victory. With their recently crowned Queen Tabitha locked away in her palaces, the populist religious leader Dinkha rallied his followers to expand across the Kingdom. They achieved significant victories throughout the Nestorian north – pushing west to capture Edessa, east to Irbil and south to Samarra, although they were notably frustrated in their efforts to push on to Kirkuk by Cuman resistance. Across the lands under their control they repeated a pattern of massacring Jews, expropriating land and property and preaching an increasingly millenarian religious philosophy to the masses.

To the south, Assyria was faced with a threat at least as great as the Messalians in the form of an Islamic revolt in Babylonia. Central and southern Mesopotamia had changed a great deal in a century of Assyrian rule. The southernmost part of the region, around Basra and the marshes of the Shatt al-Arab, the Church of the East had supplanted Islam as the largest religion. Meanwhile, Christianity and Aramean culture had been on the rise in and around cosmopolitan Baghdad. Yet much of the land – particularly outside of the vicinity of Baghdad and Basra – the Arab Muslim character of the region had been unchanged and remained deeply hostile to the impositions of Assyrian rule.

Nineveh’s weakness was their opportunity to strike back and under the leadership of the tribal leader Mubarak Al-Tamur the Muslims overwhelmed almost all of central Mesopotamia and brought the great city of Baghdad – by far the largest in the Middle East, its population further swollen by refugees fleeing the Messalians – under siege. With the local Christian-Assyrian nobility of the region having largely retreated south to Basra, Baghdad had no large army to defend it beyond a ragtag band of Assyrians, Christian Arabs and a hastily created Jewish Legion – the Jews being intensely loyal to the Assyrian state as their key protectors from Islamic and Messalian fanaticism alike. Instead, the beleaguered defenders sent an envoy west to plea for aid from to the pretender Niv of Jerusalem, who was seen by many as the champion of a return to the old order.

Niv, King Niv II of Assyria and Crown Prince of Jerusalem by his own pretensions, entered into the ensuing civil war at the tender age of fourteen. However, from the first set out to lead his men into battle from the front. In the early stages of the war, while he gathered his forces and built confidence, Niv’s troops consolidated the lands west of the Euphrates – capturing Palmyra from a local lord and engaging in inconclusive raids and skirmishes across the river against the Messalians. Indeed, he was forced to turn back from Assyria for a time to aid his mother in putting down a rebellion in Jerusalem by nobles who feared that Niv’s campaigns might ultimately lead to the subsuming of their realm into Assyria. Arriving in 1281, the message from the Baghdadis was well received as an opportunity to expand his influence and break the deadlock in the conflict. Bypassing the Messalians in the north, Niv therefore marched south into Babylonia.

Niv’s march into Babylonia secured quick success. The Muslims fell back from their siege of Baghdad and faced a significant military defeat at Ilam, while the lords of Babylonia and her Jewish and Christian peoples rallied behind Niv as their liberator. Yet this moment of triumph was not to last. The fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates still deemed with pious Muslim Arabs, while in the foothills of the Zagros thousands of Kurdish tribesmen were similarly unwilling to surrender the religious power they had recently regained so easily. Licking his wounds from Ilam, Al-Tamur re-grouped with a horde numbering in excess of fifty thousand men and sent Niv into a ragged retreat.

At the disaster at Dehloran Niv himself was badly injured while his army had been savagely beaten. In a state of near delirium, the pretender’s advisors had called for him to withdraw south to the relative safety of Basra in order to regroup. Instead, Niv called for the remains of his army to go north – into the treacherous Zagros mountains, with its networks of passes that his followers know little of and teeming with hostile Muslim Kurds. It was remarkable that such a journey was made successfully, yet it came at great cost – by the time Niv reached the banks of Lake Urmia, near Tabriz, several months later his exhausted army had been reduced to just a few thousand men. There, he held an audience with the Cuman Khan – demanding that the Khan repent for the oath he and his kin had broken at Nineveh in 1279 by rejoining the service of the true King of Assyria. Naturally, there was more than honour at play in Niv’s offer. The Cumans were under significant pressure from the Messalians, who had not only finally taken Kirkuk but were advancing towards Lake Urmia and Tabriz – seeking to displace Cuman settlers as they went. Niv’s forces, reduced as they were, could tip the balance back against the Messalians, while also presenting them access to legal guarantees and power into the future.

Their oath kept, the Cumans and Niv joined together to scatter the Messalians and retake Kirkuk. From there they pushed on southwards, winning another important victory at Samarra – claiming control over the vital city and allowing them to receive reinforcements from the western provinces and Jerusalem. Rather than carry this momentum forward against the northern heretics, Niv pushed south to renew his struggle against Al-Tamur. Once again Baghdad was relieved from a Muslim siege, its strong defences holding out just long enough to keep them at bay. Through the next two years, from 1284 to 1286, Niv and the Cuman Khan waged a long, bloody and exacting campaign criss crossing Babylonia – wearing down Al-Tamur’s armies and the great rebel leader himself as well as the communities that supported them. A key facet this approach, chiefly carried out by the Cumans, to putting down the unrest in Babylonia was through forced conversions, the destruction of villages and fields. By 1286 the region was sufficiently calmed to allow the battle hardened Niv to march north once more.

This push to retake the capital was halted by the outbreak of conflict within the ranks of Niv’s own coalition. Ever since his first campaign in Babylonia five years before, the Mesopotamian Maliks had been one of the cornerstones of his support. Yet the extreme brutality used to by the Cumans over the past two years, that had badly damaged their lands and severed the region’s fragile social relations, had simply been too much. The most powerful of this group, Malik Caiaphas of Basra, sent Niv an ultimatum – turn on the Cumans, or lose their support. Unwilling to abandon his most effective military weapon, Niv rejected these demands and was forced to turn his army around to face down this noble revolt. The magnates rebellion was little more than a cruel echo of previous stages in Assyria’s long civil war, with Caiaphas and his allies defeated in the course of just a few months. Yet this did delay the arrival of Niv’s army on the frontier of the Messalian domain until 1287.

The Messalians were not the force they had once been. While Niv and Cumans had campaigned in the south, war had broken out between the Byzantine governor of Syria and the Messalians, seeing Edessa fall under Greek occupation. Worse, the Messalians revolution had started to eat her own children as, with external enemies closing in, Dinkha had begun to regularly purge their political, military and religious leaderships while on the ground, many of their former peasant allies had grown increasingly disinterested since land had been redistributed. With relative ease, Niv defeated the Messalians in battle and then marched on the capital – seizing it without a fight as its garrison defected to the King, now recognised across the realm. Niv the Hammer offered little mercy to the defeated. Messalians were to be either executed, expelled or forced into repentance by an inquisition led by the Church of the East, their puppet Queen, Tabitha, was imprisoned in a tower within the royal palaces of Nineveh – forbidden from ever leaving – while Dinkha himself, deemed a false prophet, was crucified – left to hang outside the gates of the city. It is notable that while Messalianism was wiped out in Assyria in the ensuing years, a community from the group made an arduous journey through the Syrian desert to settle in the mountains and deserts to the west of Damascus.

Unfortunately for the tired people of Assyria, even with all internal foes vanquished, there remained another battle to fight. Niv, now without dispute King Niv II, had hoped to be able to negotiate the peaceful return of Edessa from the Byzantines. Yet the Romans had no intention of parting with their new prize, expecting the exhausted and weakened Assyrians to offer little resistance. To their surprise, the Assyrian King skilfully outmanoeuvred them diplomatically by making contact with Great Khan Pachu – the Cuman ruler of central Anatolia, the Danube and Bulgaria. Pachu agreed to attack the Romans from the north and east simultaneously alongside the Assyrians. These attacks allowed Niv not only to reclaim Edessa after a short siege but push on into Byzantine Syria as well. There, the Assyrians met with successes they could only dream of, with Constantinople incapable of sending effective reinforcements while the Cumans threatened them in the Balkans and Anatolia. Niv successfully captured the rich cities of Aleppo and Alexandretta to the west of Edessa, although he was ultimately frustrated after a long siege of Antioch as the city’s ancient walls proved too much for his army to overcome. Nonetheless, peace was agreed in 1291 that ended hostilities and brought an end to twelve years of continuous warfare in Assyria. Niv II had earned his reputation as the Hammer in blood, subduing a Kingdom on the brink of collapse and even securing an outlet to the blue waters of the Mediterranean and a new destiny in the Levant.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Spice Coast 1291-1301

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The creation of the Raj of Malabar by the St Thomas Crusade in the 1210s was among the most incredible feats of the Assyrians Kings. Over the course of the thirteenth century this realm emerged as a semi-independent Christian state, nominally loyal to Nineveh but always mostly autonomous, amid a sea of Hindu powers. Despite constant pressure from its neighbours, it held firm to defend its territories for decades, offering a safe haven to India’s Christian minority and growing fabulously wealthy at the heart of Indian Ocean trade.

The plague arrived somewhat earlier in Malabar than it did in the Middle East, hitting the area at the very end of the 1260s. As India emerged of the pandemic, it found itself effectively severed from the mother country as Assyria descended into two decades of anarchy, cutting the territory off from what little support it had received in the past. Unfortunately for Malabar, its Hindu neighbours had not been similarly weakened, and in 1273 the resurgent Chola Empire invaded alongside her allies.

In the ensuing Malabar War, the Christians were led by a tragic hero in the form of Raj Joseph Vatterassil. Seeing the vast numerical superiority of his enemies, the Raja sought to fight the war on sea – where Malabar’s strong fleet would be of great use. Fortifying his key cities, Joseph terrorised the shores of southern India, effectively halted the maritime trade route between the Far East and western Asia – exacerbating the weak economic recovery of the post-plague era – and even for a time occupied much of the island of Sri Lanka. However, the Malabaris were forced to fall back to their home territories as it appeared that Calicut, their greatest city, would soon fall. Raj Joseph met the Tamils in battle near his capital in 1279 and, in a bloody stalemate, forced them to withdraw from their siege of the city.

Unfortunately, this victory merely delayed the inevitable. Cities across the Malabar coast had already begun to fall, and soon the Tamils had regrouped and returned to Calicut. Unable to defend the city in the long term, Joseph attempted to withdraw to the safety of the Maldives. However, in the intervening years his enemies had embarked on their own campaign of naval expansion and met his ships in the Laccadive Sea to the south of the Indian mainland and delivered a blow from which there would be no recovery. In 1283, the defeated Raja fled his homeland – never to return. After more than six decades, Christian Malabar was no more. Joseph himself made his way to Basra, arriving in Assyria in the midst of its brutal civil war – and aligned himself with King Niv, offering his services and those of his few remaining retainers in defeating his internal enemies and restoring order to Assyria.

The decades after the plague were ones of destabilisation, change and collapse throughout much of Eurasia. In the Byzantine Empire, they preceding the formation of the Paulician reform movement – that sought to overthrow the old Eastern Orthodox hierarchy and pursue a return a purer religion modelled on the Church of Paul the Apostle. More immediately, they sent the mighty Seljuk Empire spiralling catastrophic internal conflict. In this, the Turks’ experience shared many parallels with Assyria – with new religious movements, minority currents, steppe elements and regional lords all playing a role in pulling the country apart. Yet, there was to be no Seljuk Niv, and their once powerful empire splintered into dozens of distinct polities over the course of the 1280s and 1290s.

The collapse of one of their greatest geopolitical rivals presented Assyria with the opportunity to establish itself as the leading power in the Middle East. Seeking to take advantage of this moment, the Assyrians launched an invasion of the Persian Gulf in 1294, a region that was still home to a number of Nestorian Christian tribes. Although Niv successfully occupied most of the region, the rise of a new self-declared Sunni Caliphate from the deserts of western Oman forced the Assyrians into retreat. By the time a truce had been agreed in 1297, Assyrian gains had been limited to Kuwait.

As the century drew towards its close, the question of dynastic succession in Acre became increasingly important, where King Niv was set to take over from his ageing mother once her health finally failed. Although the stature of the Crown of Jerusalem had declined a great deal from its height, the title was nonetheless of clear spiritual and symbolic importance. The Papacy was firmly of the view that the title should not fall into the hands of a heretical ruler. The Catholics hoped to use this crisis as an opportunity – bringing the Church of the East into full communion with Rome and taking forward an ongoing Catholic ambition to heal the old religious divisions within Christendom and forge a truly universal Church. Niv, having been raised in Catholic surroundings in Acre and influenced by his close relationship with his Catholic Cuman allies, was open to this idea and facilitated the opening of negotiations between Catholic legates and the Eastern Patriarchate.

These negotiations would come to naught. The prestige of the Patriarchate had grown during the decades of crisis that followed the plague for its harsh line against the Messalians and the part it had played in restore social peace after the civil wars. The Patriarch therefore felt bold enough to stand against the monarchy – refusing to countenance any dilution of Nestorian doctrine nor accept the superiority in rank of the Pope in Rome. There would be no ecclesiastical union.

Instead, when Cecilia passed away in 1301, Niv marched into Acre at the head of army in order to enforce his claim to Jerusalem’s crown, the ruler of a Nestorian realm. With the Pope denouncing Niv’s ascension, the Holy Roman Emperor Dietrich, who ruled the city of Jerusalem and much of the Palestinian coast, swore to take up the cross and lead a Crusade to expel the heretics from the Holy Land and restore a Catholic Kingdom of Jerusalem under his own leadership. He would be joined by a large alliance of small independent Latin lords in the region who feared for their independence and faith following the push of the Assyrians into the region. The Palestinian Wars had started.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Palestinian Wars 1301-1320

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The twenty year conflict in the Levant initiated by Niv II’s decision to forcefully press his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem progressed through a number of different stages as it escalated into a matter of Assyria’s very existence. In the first part of the conflict, the Assyrians faced down the Crusader lords of Outremer. Benefiting from much greater numbers and a unified leadership under the talented generalship of their King, the Assyrians made strong gains – capturing a number of fortresses east of the Jordan River and placing Jerusalem and Jaffa under siege.

The tide of the conflict started to change after German forces began to arrive in the Levant from around 1303, and especially after the Kaiser himself landed at Beirut in 1304. The Germans, greatly outnumbering the Assyrians, captured Acre, relieved Jerusalem and Jaffa and reclaimed most of the Jordan Valley, all the while sparing with the Assyrians leading to heavy losses on both sides.

While the Germans could field more men, and had a steady stream of reinforcements from Europe that the Assyrians could not match, the course of the conflict began to bend in Nineveh’s favour in the face of a number of key victories on the field of battle that Niv led his men to. Fighting was attritional and costly, but within a couple of years the momentum of the German advance had been halted and by 1307 the Assyrians were beginning to make gains – pushing back into the Jordan valley, recapturing Acre and most importantly of all bringing Jerusalem under siege once again. Assyrian prospects were further enhanced when the Emperor Dietrich passed away as a break out of cholera in Jaffa ripped through his army. His successor Friedrich, far away in Europe, was less focussed on the Palestinian conflict, and as such limited the resources being sent to the long campaign in Outremer.

It was during this siege of Jerusalem that relations between the crown and Cumans finally broke down. Having maintained a testing relationship with the monarchy ever since their first arrival in Assyria decades before, the Cumans had been particularly reluctant to become involved in a great conflict with their Catholic co-religionists in Palestine. Notably, they had been alienated by an increasingly anti-Catholic Assyrian attitude and the very heavy losses their forces had sustained. These concerns had been papered over with the reward of ample payment and loot, yet with the Assyrian state’s coffers completely emptied by the costly conflict, the Cuman’s were left unpaid, relying only on the promises of future rewards. As the Assyrian army was afflicted by food shortages and disease during its long siege of Jerusalem, the Cuman Khan Burak turned against his King and raised the flag of rebellion – threatening to take the Holy Land for himself.

With the Cumans making up around a third of the Assyrian army, this was a near mortal blow. While Niv fought the Cumans off, he lacked the numbers to maintain the siege without them and withdrew back east of the Jordan river. Meanwhile, the Cumans were able to withdraw north and capture Acre – attracting some support from the local Latins as they established a stronghold from which they launched debilitating raids throughout the Levant. During this lull in the fighting, the Assyrians were able to gather fresh troops from Mesopotamia for a renewed attack – returning to besiege Jerusalem once more and finally capturing the city in 1312. Shortly thereafter the Holy Roman Emperor agreed to a truce – dividing the Holy Land between German territories in the Lebanon and Palestinian coast and Assyrian lands in the interior, including Jerusalem itself. Notably, Niv agreed to renounce the title King of Jerusalem, in claim of the less ostentatious King of Philistia.

While Niv and the Assyrians appeared to be on the precipice of a lasting victory, word arrived that a new threat was tumbling down the Syrian coast from the north. Burak Khan, holed up in Acre, was well aware of the impending threat as the conflict between the Germans and Assyrians wound down and had sent a messenger to his ethnic kin in Anatolia seeking allies and aid. Cuman Anatolia had retained the febrile instability of the Steppe, with many factions squabbling for power among one another. One of the great tribal leaders of the region, Tunga Khan, saw in his compatriots’ plea an opportunity to escape a weak position in Anatolia and strike out to conquer new lands. He would therefore lead not only fifteen thousand riders, but wagons of women and children, herds of animals and thousands of horses, southwards towards the Holy Land. As Tunga and Burak united, they were instantly the greatest power in Palestine – forcing Niv into a retreat back to Damascus yet again and capturing Jerusalem in 1313. With near total control over the region, the two Khans would set out to build a Cuman Kingdom in Philistia, while regularly driving deep into Assyrian territory, harassing Niv’s armies and threatening to attack locations as far east as Mesopotamia.

Assyria’s struggles with the Cumans convinced others of its weakness in the Levant. While the Cumans consolidated their grip in Philistia, two new threats arose. In the south, Shia Arab tribes from the deserts south of Palestine invaded Assyrian territory – capturing the fortresses of Kerak and Monreal to the east of the Dead Sea and raiding far to the north. As King Niv sought to address this threat, he was lured into the greatest military disaster of his long and bloody reign. The Assyrians were expertly outmanoeuvred by the Muslims, who isolated the Christian army from all key sources of water before pouncing upon their foe – almost completely destroying the Assyrian army. The Shia captured the Crown Prince, Isho, on the field while Niv himself barely escaped to the north with his life. Over the following years, although their gains were undermined by tribal infighting, the Shia pushed on to capture Amman and enter into a struggle for the Holy City itself against the Cumans.

A further threat came from the Druze. This small, somewhat esoteric, ethno-religious group had its origins in an offshoot in the eleventh century Shia Fatimid Caliphate. After its followers were forced to flee Egypt, they settled in the region to the east of Damascus, the Jabal al-Druze. Since then they had lived mostly in peace under Muslim and Christian masters alike, yet now they had sensed an opportunity to strike out for independence and in 1314 rose up to occupy their homeland and move against the great city of Damascus.

By now, King Niv cut an isolated figure. His wars had heavily indebted his realm, limiting its opportunities to further finance the war, it had suffered horrendous manpower losses that could not be easily recouped, its most effective military force of the past several decades – the Cumans – were in arms against it, and its exhausted nobility and martial elite were losing patience and faith in their King’s ambitions. A reprieve, of a sort, arrived in 1316 with another crucial battlefield triumph. At Qasr Amra, not far from Damascus, the royal army, outnumbered two to one, crushed the Druze on the open field, scattering their force and defeating their rebellion once and for all. Crucially, this ensured that the link between the Assyrian Levant and Mesopotamia remained open and revived Niv’s wavering military reputation.

Following the victory over the Druze, Niv left his army in Damascus and returned to Nineveh. There he sought to calm the faltering support of his nobility – many of whom were demanding that the King abandon his conquests in Palestine in order to avert graver disaster. However, his real target was the Church and Patriarch Tavish III. The Nestorian religious hierarchy had maintained an ambiguous relationship to the Palestinian Wars, the lengthy conflict, predominantly with Catholic powers, over the Holy Land. Importantly, they had maintain the bar against members of Nestorian holy orders from taking up arms against fellow Christians. Lacking the manpower to reclaim suzerainty over Palestine on his own, Niv hoped to tap into the last major unscathed source of soldiery open to him – the Order of Saint Addai. The Patriarch’s demands were significant – grants of land in Mesopotamia, greater legal and tax privileges for the Church in Assyria, support for religious missions to maintain links to the St Thomas Christians in India and ecclesiastical control of the most important holy sites in Jerusalem and its surrounds. Niv agreed to everything and in return, was given the men he asked for to march west one last time.

Replenished with the men of the Order, Niv set out from Damascus in 1317 for a final do or die campaign against the Cumans. Despite incurring very heavy losses, his men scored key victories that put the Cumans into retreat and allowed the Assyrians to bring Jerusalem itself under siege. With the Turkic armies just as weary as the Assyrians, after the Holy City fell in 1320, the Khans Tunga and Burak, although still controlling the better part of Philistia, was finally ready to negotiate. Accepting the end of his dream of a Cuman Kingdom in the Holy Land, Tunga secured new rights for settlement across the Assyrian domain. While the existing Cuman population of Assyria was allowed to return to their settlements around Lake Urmia, the newly arrived wave of Anatolian Cumans were granted land rights in Palestine and northern Mesopotamia – further swelling the growing Turkic component of Assyrian society. Moreover, they would resume their previous status under the military service of the Assyrian crown. In exchange, they swore allegiance to Nineveh as their overlord.

With peace now secured with their main foe, the Assyrians and Cumans joined together to sweep the Shia back into their home territories before the end of the year. Two decades after first inheriting the crown of Jerusalem, Niv’s division of Palestine was now complete.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Isho the Unlucky – 1320-1342

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The son of Niv II, Isho, although fairly talented, was blighted by frequent misfortune. Coming of age in the midst of the Palestinian Wars, he spent more than a decade serving as a lieutenant in his fathers armies. In 1314, at the disastrous battle of Krak de Moab, he was captured by the Shia, aged thirty six. For the next six years the Arabs held him in captivity at a fortress of Tabuk. There he suffered all manner of humiliations, torture and confinement, until his release was finally negotiated as a part of the truce that brought the long running Levantine conflict to and end. Gaunt and weakened, he would rejoin his ageing father in Nineveh in 1320. There would be little time for happy reunions, as conflict began to brew once more within a year of the Crown Prince’s return.

Through the King’s two decades of gruelling campaigning in the west, many of the Assyrian nobility in Mesopotamia had taken the opportunity to pursue their own interests. For some, this had meant small incursions eastward into the power vacuum in Persia. But the largest expansion came in the south east, where Malik Ahai of Basra spearheaded half a dozen campaigns into the Persian Gulf and eastern Arabia. Capitalising on alliances with local Nestorian tribes, Ahai conquered a swathe of land stretching all the way to Qatar, with influence deep into the Arabian Desert. Although angered by the growing Christian presence, local Muslim powers remained too weak and divided to retaliate. This was until the conclusion of the Palestinian Wars in the west. During the conflict the Shia tribes of western Arabia had mobilised thousands of fighters and revived a spirit of holy war. Many of these same ghazi would flock to the east the join the banner of the exiled Caliph Lot, who promised to expel the Assyrians from the Gulf as he embarked on a new Jihad in 1321.

As the Muslims swarmed into the region in their tens of thousands, Malik Ahai’s defences were utterly overwhelmed and he was forced to flee back to Basra while Caliph Lot established a court on the island of Bahrain. As Ahai plead to Nineveh for assistance, Niv donned his battle armour one last time – leading a some twenty thousand men south to face down this new threat. Unfortunately for the battle hardened sovereign, he had woefully underestimated the scale of the threat facing him. After several months of sparring between Muslim and Assyrian forces, the full weight of the Caliph’s power was brought down upon the Hammer at the battle of Avan in 1323. King Niv II, after four and a half decades on the throne – the large majority of which was spent at war, was slain in the field – dying every inch the warrior king. Isho meanwhile failed to prevent the collapse of the Assyrian resistance in the chaotic aftermath of his father’s demise – leading a disorderly retreat back to Basra with the remnants of his army. Now King in his own right, Isho agreed to surrender Assyrian Arabia to the Caliph, sparing Basra but enduring his realm’s largest territorial contraction since the loss of Malabar.

Defeat in war and the death of the respected King Niv II was a mortal blow to the standing of the Assyrian monarchy. Furthermore, the abandonment of the Gulf left the Basrans fearful of their insecurity and abandonment. The realm soon feel into civil war. The rebels were led by a young woman of great power and ambition – Samiyah Karamalish, the Malikah of Edessa. The niece of Ahai of Basra, Samiyah ruled a sprawling domain that snaked from its heartland around her seat of power in Edessa, along the Euphrates and into central Babylonia and the Zagros Mountains. With royal Qatwa blood flowing through her veins from the maternal line, through which she had inherited her southern lands, she claimed the Assyrian crown for himself – promising to restore the primacy of the Mesopotamian heartland, Beth Nahrain, and the Assyrian people.

With the royal army battered from its defeats to the Muslims, Isho was ill equipped to face down Samiyah’s threat. Although success in capturing Basra from Ahai, who had sided with his niece, Isho abandoned attempts to defend Baghdad, allowing it to fall to the rebels, in order to secure Nineveh itself. With the Cumans of Tabriz having remained loyal to the crown, fearing the patriotic rhetoric of the pretender and her followers, Isho pushed back against Samiyah in the east, capturing her territories in the Zagros and fighting a bloody stalemate in central Babylonia. At the same time however, the King lost ground in the west, with the rebels pushing towards Palmyra and Damascus, the Levantine provinces still being too devastated from the Palestinian Wars to adequately defend themselves.

Unable to resolve the conflict on the field of battle, Isho sought a diplomatic solution. In 1326, Isho was forty four. His first wife had borne him three children, including a son – Nechunya, yet she had died of smallpox during his captivity in Tabuk the previous decade and he had never remarried. Meanwhile. Samiyah was twenty five, still in her prime childbearing years, and had not yet found a worthy suitor. Isho’s solution to the intractable civil war was therefore a union between its two protagonists. The King and the Malikah would wed and, most importantly, primacy in the line of succession would be given to any product of their marriage, effectively disinheriting Isho’s eldest son.

Dreams of harmony and internal peace were short lived. Less than two years after their marriage, the Malikah had risen in revolt once again in 1328 – claiming that Isho had failed to consummate their marriage, reneging on their political and matrimonial vows. Although personally humiliating, the King’s military position had strengthened during the interlude of peace and he was able to strike quickly and unwaveringly against his wife – scattering her armies and capturing the Malikah herself in 1329 as she attempted to withdraw behind the high walls of Edessa. With Samiyah captive in a well-guarded turret in Nineveh, away from his allies and influence through the rest of the realm, the civil war was now truly over.

The wave of social and political instability that the Black Death had unleashed across Eurasia had echoes enduring for decades. Perhaps the last great wave of unrest that the plague stimulated came in the Byzantine Empire, which in the first decades of the fourteenth century underwent a painful religious revolution. Greek Orthodoxy had been deeply shaken by the trauma of the attempted union with Rome and the following Byzantine Crusade a century before. For much of the thirteenth century, the Church was wracked by philosophical and theological debates and the rise and ebb of reform movements. The great plague only stimulated this inward looking energy more, providing the backdrop for the emergence of Paulicanism. The Paulicans took inspiration from the earlier Iconoclasts by seeking to strip back Orthodoxy and return to a purer, simpler and less stratified Church. In the early fourteenth century they made their bid for power – seizing control over the Patriarchate in Constantinople against the will of the Emperor in 1304 and setting off decades of religious warfare.

Assyria made an unexpectedly significant intervention into this power struggle in 1332 through a minor border dispute in Syria. Hoping to capitalise on the Greeks’ perceived weakness, the Assyrians occupied the town of Asas – the only Byzantine foothold along the Euphrates. Unwilling to surrender this land without a fight, the Emperor Methodios, a follower of Old Orthodoxy, sailed to Syria to eject the Assyrians. Unfortunately for the Romans, the resulting battle the two sides fought near Hama would be of far greater consequence than the small scrap of land they were fighting to defend. Although the fighting itself was somewhat inconclusive, both sides suffering heavy losses but neither able to decisively claim the field, Edgar, the head of the Varangian Guard and one of the Emperor’s most able allies, was slain on the field while Methodios himself was captured. Although the Basileus was quickly released in exchange for his surrender of Asas and a substantial tribute, his humiliation at Hama would badly shake his prestige and facilitate a Paulician resurgence that would bring down Old Orthodoxy for good.

Isho had not escaped from Hama unscathed either. A wound he sustained to his leg during the fighting duly grew gangrenous, leading to a crude amputation from the court physicians in Nineveh. Badly weakened, Isho would turn to his son, Nechunya, to take on a greater role in governing the realm. Having never forgiven his father for the betrayal of proposed disinheritance through his union with Samiyah the previous decade, Nechunya assumed significant control over his father’s care and would take the opportunity to flowing poison him with mercury and sideline him from the affairs of state – allowing the Prince to assume ever greater control over the realm. By the time Isho finally passed away in 1342 he was almost completely unable to function. So ended a most turbulent of royal lives.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Distant Thunder – 1342-1369

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Nechunya’s ascension to power in Assyria was both smooth and unsteady. For the best part of a decade he had been the leading force in the realm’s governance, with his father incapacitated. Yet, he was unpopular with much of the nobility, clergy and common folk alike. Many disapproved of his treatment of his father, others loudly whispered that he had a hand in hid death and physical deterioration while Nechunya was personally viewed as aloof and wedded to an opulent lifestyle in the comforts of Nineveh that contrasted with the spartan militarism of many of his predecessors. With a weak base of support, Nechunya sought to win favour by decentralising power in a manner not pursued by past Assyrian monarchs. Obligations of tax and feudal dues to the crown were reduced, authority was devolved to the provinces and a crude noble assembly was established in Nineveh called the Majlis that allowed the upper aristocracy an opportunity to review the administration of the realm.

Through the 1340s and 1350s the Assyrian crown remained largely passive in foreign affairs, for the most part seeking to avoid major conflicts that would strain the stability of the Kingdom. This did not stop local lords from make their own bids at expansion. In the south, the Basrans successfully reconquered the Persian Gulf coast from the Shia by the end of 1340s – regaining the lands that had been lost two decades before. These gains formed the basis of naval expeditions to the island of Socotra, home to one of the oldest Nestorian communities in the world, that was wrestled from the control of the Yemeni Arabs. Meanwhile in the east, border lords further consolidated Assyrian control over much of the Zagros Mountain range, a valuable buffer between Persia and the Kingdom’s Mesopotamian heartland.

The most significant external conflict during this period was a brief war against the troubled Byzantines in 1352 that saw the ancient and holy city of Antioch, one of the seats of the ancient Roman Patriarchal Pentarchy, fall into Assyrian hands. Upon its captured Nechunya moved to claim the title King of Syria. While this had obvious geopolitical meaning – effectively laying claim to the remnants of Byzantine Syria – its primary immediate effect was a further legal division of the Assyrian realm. Since the Palestinian wars, Assyria’s formally Latin-ruled south western provinces had been legally distinct from the rest of the realm as the Kingdom of Philistia. Now, Nechunya had cleaved off the north western territories – including Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo and Antioch – into the Kingdom of Syria. Much like Philistia, this region was culturally and religiously distinct from Assyria’s Mesopotamian core. Heavily Arabic, and by the fourteenth century home to a majority Christian population that mostly followed denomination of Greek Rite Churches.

Internationally, the geopolitical status quo in the Near East was in flux. Most importantly, a new wave of Crusades had significantly empowered the Latin presence in the eastern Mediterranean that had previously been badly weakened by the Palestinian Wars. Cyprus was cleaved from the Byzantines to form a small Catholic state, while more importantly to the Crusaders established the Kingdom of Egypt – a new centre for Latin power in the region. Meanwhile, to the north, a resurgent Mongol Empire conquered most of the Caucuses, pushing all the way to the Assyrian frontier, overwhelming Armenia. Crucially, the Mongols came into conflict with the Khazars in Azerbaijan, competing with them over grazing land and leading many to migrate southwards towards the relative safety of Persia.

Assyrian expansionism into the fringes of the Iranian world in the staunchly Muslim lands of the Zagros Mountains had long grated agaisnt the Kurdish tribes that inhabited the region. Tensions would build further as the Church of the East began to take a close interest in the region – seeking to expand the frontiers of the faith with extensive missionary work throughout the high mountains. In 1358 one such missionary, Bishop Shlemon of Kirkuk, was captured by a group of tribesmen who crucified him, leaving his body displayed openly in a mountain pass as a warning against Christian encroachment. Pressured by the Church to respond with punitive action, Nechunya assembled a large army to pacify the Zagros region and bring its wild people to heel. To the bewilderment of the Assyrians, rather than force the local into submission, their aggression led to the tribes of the region unifying under the banner of Nadhim Farhadid. With a strong army behind him, Farhadid would lead a long campaign of resistance against the Assyrians that culminated in a climatic battle near the rich city of Isfahan in which the Assyrians suffered a catastrophic defeat, losing two thirds of their force while the Kurds emerged largely unscathed. By 1362, Farhadid was recognised as Sultan of a realm stretching across the mountain chain, and leaving behind a Cuman-dominated Assyrian exclave around Tabriz separated from the rest of the realm.

Although defeat to the Kurds for a painful blow for Assyria, a much greater threat was emerging further to the east that would soon make its power felt. Yet, while dark headwinds broiled beyond the frontier, Assyria and her increasingly frail King Nechunya continued to focus inwardly, seeking to manage their relationship with the neighbours without recourse to warfare. By Nechunya’s death in 1369, and the succession of his twenty three year old son Niv III, this peace was ready to break.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Iron Khan – 1369-1388

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The Khazars were among the most consequential people of the Medieval Middle East. In the early twelfth century the Turkic Jewish nation had migrated from their homeland north of the Caspian, outcompeted by fiercer Cuman rivals, to the Sea’s southern shore – settling in a crescent of territory from Tabriz and Baku in the west to Tabaristan in the east. Their invasion brought the Seljuk empire to the verge of collapse – seeing it withdraw from Syria and Mesopotamia and in doing so facilitate the rebirth of Assyria. Ultimately, however, the Turks recovered and eventually reconquered the short-lived Khazar Khanate. Nonetheless, while their polity did not survive, their demographic reconfiguration of northern Persia changed the region permanently.

Under Seljuk rule, the Turks looked to the northern Khazar lands as their most reliable military mustering grounds – allowing a Khazar warrior caste influence right across the Iranian world. It is notable that during this period Khazar society divided, with the western lands around Baku and Tabriz remaining bastions of Judaism, while the tribes in Tabaristan and especially Gilan drifted towards the Sunni Islam of their Turkish masters. After the collapse of the Seljuk empire in the aftermath of the Black Plague, Khazars eagerly joined the squabbling factions fighting for supremacy across Iran – serving every manner of warlord, Emir and Satarap yet failing to join together to create an independent homeland of their own.

The Khazar role in post-Seljuk Persia was disrupted by the Mongols’ brutal conquest of the Caucuses in the mid-fourteenth century. Following the sacred will of their high god Tengri, the Mongols inflicted a systematic slaughter in their conquest of Azerbaijan – massacring the population of Baku and ejecting Khazars from many of the prime grazing sites in the area. The Mongols’ actions drove tens of thousands of Jewish Khazars to flee eastward into Tabaristan, where they fought with and put to the sword many of their ethnic kin who had converted to Islam, and in doing so abandoned the way of the Torah. These Jewish Zealots would continue their conquests far beyond Tabaristan, invading Khorosan and expanding their reach as far north as the rich trading city of Khiva. This was the Zandid empire, the greatest Jewish Kingdom since the fall of the Temple.

While the Zandids were an imposing power in their own right, history would remember them more for the enemies they made than their own feats. One of these was a young Sunni Muslim Khazar named Timur. Hailing from Tabaristan, he had seen his family slaughtered as a teenage boy and fled south, into Persia to escape the Jewish horde. There, he fought as a bandit and mercenary at the services of the feuding fiefs of the region. In 1362 he seized control of the city of Rayy for himself and soon became a beacon for the Sunni faithful throughout Iran. By the fourteenth century Sunni Islam was in a sorry state. Most of the Middle East had fallen to the Christians – from Egypt to the Levant and Mesopotamia. In Persia, the Jewish Zandids ran rampant while Zoroastrianism was still widespread and a powerful political force. More concerning, a heretical Islamic movement known as Zikrism had swept through the country – upturning the authority of the Sunni elite and capturing the hearts of millions. Timur presented himself as the restorer of Islam and Iranian civilisation and the liberator of the Muslim Khazars.

In 1362 he invaded the Zandid empire, triggering a mass revolt of the Muslims of Tabaristan against Jewish rule. The next six years were consumed by an existential struggle. At his lowest point, Timur fled into the desert with a few dozen retainers – surviving for days in the scorching sun, with little water and being forced to drink the blood of their horses to survive before being rescued by a friendly caravan of Turks. Yet, once he had gained the upper hand, Timur showed no mercy – massacring entire Jewish tribes, and targetting cities for complete destruction if they refused to turn themselves over to him. By 1368, the Zandids were no more and Persia had a new power.

The Jewish Khanate was only the beginning. From the dawn of the 1370s, Timur embarked on a blistering set of expeditions across Persia – south towards the Isfahan, Shiraz and the Gulf, west to liberate Mongol-ruled Baku and north into central Asia. During this orgy of expansion, the Iron Khan marched against the Assyrian exclave in Tabriz in 1376. The region, although largely populated by Khazars, Persians and Kurds, was dominated by a Cuman warrior class and been the centre of their powerbase in Assyria for decades. As the Timurids entered the territory, the Cuman Khan sent a plea for aid to Nineveh. However, at the time King Niv III was focussed on affairs in the Levant. Indeed, with much of his court was inherently suspicious of the Cumans, and there were those in the capital who believed the loss of Tabriz would strengthen rather than weaken the realm by reducing their influence. With no aid forthcoming, the Cumans of Tabriz duly abandoned their loyalties to Assyria, and accepted Timur as their master.

While the mid-fourteenth century saw the reunification of Persia under Timurid leadership, the Byzantines similarly moved beyond a long period of internal division and conflict. The unending religious struggle between the Paulician reformers and the traditionalists of Old Orthodoxy was finally ended by emperor Leo IX. A Paulician, he not only crushed his internal enemies but for the first time in generations extended Byzantium’s borders outwards. In the north he destroyed the Bulgarian Khanate, that had united Cuman dominions on the Danube and in Anatolia, extending the northern frontier beyond even the great river itself, while also waging successful campaigns in southern Italy – a region that had been slowly slipping out of the Greek world.

Not all were satisfied with this restoration. In Byzantine Syria, ironically one of the greatest hotbeds of popular Paulicianism but one in which the nobility were implacably hostile to the new religious regime, the general Michael Kantakouzenos rebelled and took most of the province with him in 1375. It was this crisis that absorbed Assyrian attention while Timur’s armies swept through Persia and seized Tabriz. In the following years, the Assyrians, eager to further cement their domination of the Levant, acted as fierce guardians of Kantakouzenos against Constantinople’s desires to restore its control – ultimately absorbing his domains into the Kingdom of Syria in 1380 in exchange for wealth, religious guarantees and influence in the north western portion of the Assyrian realm.

By the late fourteenth century, the culture of the heartland of the Assyrian realm in Mesopotamia was in the midst of drastic transformation around three key features: the expansion of the use of the Syriac language, an even broader growth in the Church of the East and finally, and most interestingly, the emergence of a shared cultural identity across the diverse peoples of the region that appealed beyond language, ethnicity and sect.

First among these factions, onward march of the ethno-linguistic core of the empire – the Assyrians. When Saint Ta’mhas established the embers of an Assyrian state, his people were a small minority in Mesopotamia, and an even more marginal force across the wider Middle East. Yet in the following centuries, the revival of their culture and status of Syriac as the prestige language of a mighty Kingdom led to a complete reversal of hundreds of years of Arabisation. By the late fourteenth century, Assyrian was the majority language and ethnic identity of the peoples of northern Mesopotamia from Palmyra and Edessa in the west to Irbil in the east. Its influence had extended southwards as well. Indeed, Syriac had overtaken Arabic as the most spoken language in Baghdad – albeit with the city remaining polyglot den of a dozen major languages at least. Further south, Arabic had remained dominant, although the minority Syraic speaking-community had grown. In the more recently acquired, and legally distinct, Levantine Kingdoms of Syria and Philistia, Syriac was a notably weaker force – with scarcely any cultural imprint in the Holy Land, but a rather strong influence in Syria, particularly in the major cities.

The second string to the land’s cultural transformation was religion. In the western territories, the Church of the East had made a weaker imprint. In Syria, the areas east of the Euphrates had been heavily Assyrianised, bringing with it a strong Nestorian character while the Church had also had some success in the area around Damascus. Yet it remained a more marginal force – far outweighed by the power of Catholicism in Philistia and the strength of a scattering of other, mostly Greek-rite, Christian denominations in Syria. The situation was very different in Mesopotamia. There, the Church was assuming an increasingly dominant, and unifying, position. The growing Assyrian-speaking communities were naturally solidly Nestorian, yet the Church had achieved great success in expanding its appeal beyond its ethnic core. From the thirteenth century Basra had emerged as the heart of an Arabic Nestorian tradition, distinct from the Syriac-speaking core to the north that helped to drive the Church’s missionary efforts yet further. Similarly, the Kurds had been drawn towards the Church in very large numbers – with only those tribes who lived closer to the Zagros Mountain range maintaining their Islamic roots. By the 1380s, Islam – divided between sizeable Shia, Sunni and Zikri communities within Mesopotamia – was a fading force, attracting a majority of the population only in a band of territory between Baghdad and Basra.

Building upon the foundations of the growing prestige and weight of Syriac culture and Nestorian religion, a blended culture was emerging in Mesopotamia that unified Assyrians, Arabs and Jews into the core of a Mesopotamian identity.

Away from the sphere of culture, to the relief of the Middle Eastern world, the rapacious conqueror Timur turned his gaze away from the Near East following the consolidation of his power in Persia in the 1360s and 1370s. Instead, he moved east – extending his power over Afghanistan and then into the teeming lands of northern India. His victories had done much to reinvigorate the Sunni world, and solidify the authority of the Sulayman Sunni Caliph in Mecca – whose empire was spread across Arabia, Oman and Upper Egypt. As the 1380s worse on, the Caliph became consumed with the dream of using the Khazar warlord’s military power to smash down the Christian empires of the Middle East and restore Islam’s supremacy over the old lands of the Rashidun Caliphs. Coaxing Timur to move away from his warring in the rich lands of India, the Caliph formed a pact with him to join together in a holy Jihad to destroy the Assyrian empire. In 1388, Assyria found itself caught in a Jihadi pincer between Timur in the east and the Muslim Arabs in the south that threatened its very existence.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Khan, the Caliph and the Bishop – 1388-1395

In the opening stages of the war the Arabs of the Sulaymans Caliphate quickly overran the Persian Gulf region, while a large Timurid army brought Basra under siege – seeking to cut Assyria off entirely from the eastern seas. King Niv III spent some time gathering a large force from every corner of his empire, more than thirty thousand strong, to confront the looming threat. In 1389, the Assyrians faced down the Timurid threat around the walls of the southern city and completely overwhelmed them. In this moment of glory, everything seemed possible and Niv deployed probing attacks into the Gulf to regain the territories lost from the Arabs, suffering heavy casualties but regaining Bahrain and Qatar.

Despite the failures of his vanguard in the opening stages of the war, Timur possessed nearly endless resources to continue the fight. In 1390 he crossed over into Mesopotamia personally and moved against the Assyrian capital itself. After storming Irbil, he lured Niv III into bringing the largest part of his army north to protect Nineveh – forcing him into an open engagement. The two armies clashed at the Battle of Bartella just outside the city. As the Assyrians launched into a headstrong frontal assault against his army, Timur skilfully manoeuvred his cavalry to outflank his opponent. With the Assyrian Cumans unable to counter Timur’s Khazar riders, Niv’s army found itself surrounded and quickly fell into disorder. The King himself was cut down in the fighting, adding to the confusion – with the fallen sovereign's generals saving the realm from utter disaster by organising a flight from the field. While Assyria’s armies holed themselves into their walled cities and citadels, Timur unleashed his armies on the riches of Mesopotamia – ravaging the countryside from north to south and plundering whatever lightly defended towns and cities he could. Meanwhile, in Nineveh, Niv III’s sixteen year old son Eliya was crowned King of a nation in the depths of crisis.

With focus fixed on the battlefronts in the Mesopotamia, there were worrying developments in the west. The Messalians had first come to prominence in the anarchic period that follow the Black Plague in the late thirteenth century. In the social tumult of the era the populist religious movement rebelled against Nestorian orthodoxy with a creed that rejected clerical hierarchy, advocated redistribution and social revolutionary change and was intensely anti-Semitic. At its peak, it rocked Assyria to its core – its militants capturing Nineveh and infamously executing King Moqli in 1279, holding onto a burgeoning realm in the Assyrian heartland for the next decade before being defeated by King Niv the Hammer. In the aftermath of their defeat, Niv persecuted the movement to near extinction – wiping it out in Mesopotamia, with only a small band of Messalians escaping along a treacherous journey through the Syrian Desert. This exodus led them to the area north of the Sea of Galilee and west of Damascus, where they built a new home. From this seedling community, through the following century the Messalians actively spread their faith through the region, winning over scores of converts from other Christian denominations and Muslims alike among the local Arab population, despite a perennially testy relationship with the state and reigning elites. By the late fourteenth century, they formed a plurality of the population in Damascus and a majority in around their core bases to the west

While Timur ravaged Mesopotamia, the Messalians seized their opportunity to rise up in rebellion shortly after Eliya’s ascension in 1390, under the leadership of their spiritual master – Bishop Nuraddin. Although Messalian doctrine had evolved over the past century, with anti-Semitism in particularly fading in significance after the movement’s transplantation away from the Mesopotamia and its multitudinous Jewish communities, it remained a radical proposition. With no local force able to contain them, the zealots stormed Damascus and began seizing wealth and property, slaughtering merchants, nobles and minorities and in the countryside seeking to redistribute land to the faithful. Unable to dislodge Timur from Mesopotamia, the teenage King chose to divert his army to Syria to deal with the Messalian challenge and secure his position in the Levant. This campaign met with some early successes, with the powerful royal army retaking Damascus and driving forcing the largest part of their army into the Lebanese Mountains.

It was in a naive pursuit of the Messalians around Mount Hermon in 1392 that Eliya’s entire life came crashing down. Trapped in the high passes, his army was ambushed by the heretics and King himself captured. Subjected to horrific torture for months, Bishop Nuraddin agreed to his release on a number of conditions: the surrender of Damascus and recognition of a Messalian state under his leadership, the payment of a large sum of gold, Eliya’s promise that all persecutions of Messalianism in Assyria would cease and, as a final act of humiliation, Nuraddin would take the King’s eyes – acting upon a mystical belief among the Messalians that an individual’s eyes were a window into their soul, whether they remained in their skull or not. Still just eighteen years old, the tormented King Eliya had his eyes crudely gouged out in a dusty rebel stronghold, before being released to make his return to Nineveh.

Eliya did not reach as far as his capital. Instead he was intercepted near Palmyra by one of his generals, the Latin nobleman Manfred di Lorenzo. Under Manfred’s custody the King, deemed utterly unsuitable to rule in his pitiful state was killed by a hammer blow to the head and his fifteen year old younger brother named King Nechunya II under a military junta headed by Manfred. The wider strategic situation was dire but not insurmountable for the Assyrians. In the west, the Messalians were causing chaos through the Levant, yet lacked the means to hold territory beyond their fledging state. In the east, although Timur had reaped incalculable destruction throughout Mesopotamia he had failed to capture Baghdad, Nineveh or Samarra – his greatest prize being the port city of Basra, with the Arabs having occupied the Persian Gulf. Most crucially of all, in 1391 war had broken out in the Indus Valley between the Timurids and their Indian foes, leading to Timur taking taking a large part of his army with him away from the Middle East to confront this threat.

Regrouping Assyria’s armies after the disastrous Messalian campaign, Manfred led his forced into Mesopotamia – seeking to regain control of the countryside from marauding Khazar raiders who had despoiled the land for years. With the Muslims weaker than they had been for years, the Assyrian counterattack found quick success, pushing the invaders out of north and central Mesopotamia following a number of small battlefield victories.

At this stage the unity of the Assyrian camp began to waver. Manfred, closely aligned with the Cumans – his Catholic co-religionists, wanted to lead the army west to crush the Messalians, while Nestorian cabal included the Mesopotamian nobility and the military-religious Order of Saint Addai wished to continue the campaign in the east. In the end, Manfred was forced out – the Latin leaving the royal army behind to take a band of Levantine troops with him into the west – and Malik Amin of Samarra, a close ally of the Patriarch who had served in the Holy Order in his youth, took control of the army.

The tired Assyrian army marched into the south and won a crucial victory north of Basra against a mixed Arab-Timurid army in 1394. With the Khan’s attentions now absorbed far to the east, there was little prospect for another major force to be deployed against Mesopotamia. The Sunni Caliph was on his own. Fighting continued for another year as the Assyrians probed the Gulf, attempting to re-establish control over the coastal regions and rouse the Christian tribes of the region to their banner once more. Finally, the two exhausted parties reached a truce in 1395. The Jihad had failed. Mesopotamia was unconquered. Yet Assyria’s western provinces remained in turmoil.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Land of Spite – 1395-1413

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Throughout the medieval era Assyria, and Mesopotamia in particular, had been one of the richest places in the world. Not only did it sit at the intersection of crucial trade routes, it possessed bountiful agricultural lands that produced large surpluses upon which the Assyrian nation had grown rich. Yet the ecosystem upon which this agrarian foundation was built was very fragile, dependent on complex systems of irrigation and a favourable climatic conditions. The end of the fourteenth century had seen both of these factors undermined, with dire consequences for the realm. The Timurid invasion of the 1390s had badly damaged the region’s crucial agriculture, disrupting several harvests and drastically reducing both the amount of land available for farming and the productivity of that which remained under plough. Worse still, the period around the turn of the century was punctuated by a sustained dry spell – weakening the flow of the two mighty rivers that gave life to the land and allowing for the creeping advance of the desert. Going into the new century, Mesopotamia would be a poorer, hungrier and more unhappy land.

Despite the grandiosity of their incredible feat of turning away Timur and the Jihad, there was little unity or triumphalism in the Assyrian elite. Instead, they were absorbed in regional, personal, ethnic and religious rivalries and power struggles. Having sidelined Manfred di Lorenzo and his Cuman allies in the closing stages of the Jihad, Nestorian Mesopotamian elites – both Assyrian and Arabic – sought to re-establish their dominance over the realm. They pushed out the Catholics who had increasingly intruded into courtly life in Nineveh, importantly reducing the seniority of Cuman chiefs within the military, and placed limits upon the autonomy of the Kingdoms of Philistia and Syria. King Nechunya II, still very young, played little role in these developments – largely allowing policy to be guided by the Church and nobility. Many of the Mesopotamians were eager to continue the fight against the Arabs, aligning with the Nestorian Bedouin tribes of the Gulf to invade Oman and conquer the strategic port city of Muscat in 1399.

The King took a much more active interest in enacting bloody revenge against the Messalians, whose evil had led his elder brother to his terrible fate and still dominated Damascus and Galilee. Indeed, while the Assyrian military fought for the survival of Christendom in the Near East during the latter stages of the war with Timur, the Messalians had launched ambitious raids throughout the Levant – even going to far as to besiege Acre and force its Count to pay a large ransom for them to retreat back to their home territory. Between 1396 and 1400 Nechunya personally oversaw a campaign of repression against the Messalians, recapturing Damascus and their many fortresses and massacring the heretics in their thousands.

What directed Nechunya away from his quest to annihilate his brother’s mutilators was the belief that they were being aid by a foreign power – the Romans. The Byzantines still had one last small fragment of their Syrian province in the exclave port of Tripoli, just to the north of the Messalians’ territory. From here, the Greeks had clandestinely supported the heretics with gold, supplies and sanctuary from where to evade Assyrian forces and plan raids through the rest of the Levant. Frustrated by this support, Nechunya placed the city under siege in 1400 and demanded the Byzantines evacuate the city – expecting the Greeks to withdraw rather that face down a foe that had bested them repeatedly over the last century. Yet rather than give in, the Byzantines, now more united than they had been in generations, declared war and promised to liberate the all Greek Christians of Syria.

Fielding an imposing force, the Assyrians stormed Tripoli and moved to face down the Grecian armies that were making their way through the Cilician Gates. Despite numerical superiority, the Assyrian armies performed unexpectedly poorly on the field – suffering heavy causalities even in victory before running into complete disaster at the Battle of Bile in which the King led his men to almost complete destruction, barely escaping with his own life. After Bile, the Byzantines proceeded to occupy Edessa and then march on Antioch and Aleppo while much of Syria stirred in sympathetic revolt with the invaders. What had begun as an effort to bully a regional rival into a minor territorial concession now posed a greater risk to the Assyrian order in the Syria as a whole.

With the course of the war running poorly, opposition to the King and his command of the military coalesced around Manfred di Lorenzo and the factions who had been pushed to the side over the past decade. Assembling an alliance of Philistians, Cumans and disgruntled Mesopotamian nobles, Manfred demanded that Nechunya surrender control of the prosecution of the war to himself and surrender power and position to his allies. As the King refused and rallied in his Mesopotamian heartlands, the Catholic-led coalition went to war in 1402.

The rebels and loyalists met in the centre of the empire, near the banks of the Euphrates at Tikrit. To the King’s horror he suffered another heavy defeat, the superior command of Manfred and agility of his Cuman cavalry overwhelming Nechunya’s forces. From that point on, the Assyrian realm was essentially divided. In the east, Nechunya continued to rule, while in the west Manfred assumed control and redirected his attentions to deal with the Byzantine threat. The situation grew even graver for Nineveh in 1404 as Timur launched an opportunistic invasion to seize control of Basra, and with it domination of trade through the Persian Gulf, with minimal resistance from the reeling Assyrian authorities.

The loss of Basra, and threat of further Timurid incursions, convinced Nechunya to come to terms with the rebels in 1405 – offering to accept Manfred’s demands, appointing him as his martial, abandoning direct command of the army, restoring the influence of the Cuman chiefs and autonomy of the western Kingdoms. Reunited, two wings of the Assyrian lion joined together against their common Greek enemy. In the years between his victory at Tikrit and end of hostilities with the crown, Manfred and his faction had already stemmed the tide of the Greek advance – quashing sympathetic Syrian rebellions, finally suppressing the Messalians and preventing the Greeks from taking either Aleppo or Antioch. With the support of the King’s men, the Latin lord was able to finally dislodge the Byzantines from Edessa in 1406 and then conduct raids into Cilicia – forcing the Emperor to come to terms, surrendering the largely indefensible port of Tripoli in exchange for peace.

Less than a year after the end of the war with the Byzantines, Nechunya was calling on Manfred to liberate Basra – control of which was crucial to Mesopotamian commerce and Assyrian ambitions in the Gulf and Arabian Seas. Despite uncertainty that the realm had had time to recover from many years of fighting, the Latin general proceeded to march on the city in 1407. Timur had expected an attack at some point, and took personal command of his armies – seeing a chance to avenge the failures of the Jihad in the 1390s – and pinned Manfred to a pitched battle at Al-Najaf where he inflicted a horrendous defeat on the Assyrians. As Manfred scurried north with his survivors, Timur in close pursuit, he chose abandon Baghdad with nothing more than a small garrison in order to regroup in northern Mesopotamia.

With the main Assyrian army withdrawing from the field, Timur hoped to take the shining city of Baghdad, that had eluded him the previous decade, by storm. Hopelessly outnumbered, a young Arab nobleman and Zikri Muslim named Nour Hussein led the defence of the city – holding out against all odds as the great conqueror unleashed a terrifying assault involving ceaseless attacks and, for the first time in Near Eastern history, a new weapon from the east – gunpowder. After several months of fighting an outbreak of cholera forced Timur to break off his siege and withdraw back south to Basra. Baghdad has been saved, and Nour Hussein was elevated to heroic status. With much of the Mesopotamian nobility eager to eject the Catholics from influence, a number of the most powerful Maliks in the realm turned to Nour to lead them forward – providing them with a banner to unite around as they coaxed him to march north from Baghdad. With his army melting away, Manfred attempted to hold back the tide by meeting Nour in battle at Mount Sinjar, but was slain on the field, his army defeated. The humble Babylonian warrior now had the entire empire at his feat.

Even greater fortune awaited the Assyrians. To the south, the outbreak of disease that had forced Timur to withdraw from Baghdad claimed the life of the conqueror himself in 1408. His sprawling empire – stretched from Basra and Baku to Multan and Lahore and from Khiva to the waters of the Indian Ocean – soon began to slide into a succession crisis as his sons squabbled over their father’s inheritance and other local forces sought their chance to restore their freedom. With a grander drama to concern them, the majority of the Timurid army in southern Babylonia withdrew – leaving only a hardy garrison in Basra. Fresh from his victory over Manfred to the north, Nour Hussein marched on the port city and brought it under a long siege – finally reclaiming it in 1410, restoring Assyria’s eastern boundaries.

United and at peace, Assyria desperately needed a period of calm, stability and normality in which it could restore its prosperity of old. Unfortunately for the realm, its King, Nuchunya II, died in 1413 following a bout of flu at the age of thirty three. This left Kingdom in the hands of his only teenage son, Sabrisho’, and a regency headed by his wife, the wily Nazaneed Red-Cheeks who possessed close sympathies with the Muslim tribes of central Babylonia whom she grew up with, and the recently emerged generalissimo Nour Hussein.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Salam Brother – 1413-1426

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In the Late Middle Ages, the Zikri represented the youngest and third largest denomination of Islam. Born in Persia in the centuries that followed the collapse of Muslim power in its Middle Eastern heartland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Zikri rejected the dogmatism of the dominant Sunni school of thought – opening themselves up to mysticism, intense displays of personal piety, the wisdom of other faiths and a loosening of the binds of traditional Islamic jurisprudence. At its peak prior to the rise of Timur, the Zikri formed the largest religious community in Persia – greater in number than the Sunni, Shia, Zoroastrians or Jews. The movement’s reach through the Islamic world was fairly limited outside of its home region, with the exception of Mesopotamia – where the Zikri supplanted the Sunni as the majority faith of the shrinking Mesopotamian Muslim community, concentrated in numbers in the Babylonian Muslim Belt between Baghdad and Basra. The rise of the group had been quietly welcomed by Christian elites in Babylonia, who saw the Zikri as less troublesome and rebellious than either of the two older Muslim denominations.

For most of their history, the Zikri sect – although regionally influential – had played no significant role in the power politics of Assyria. This changed suddenly and decidedly in the space of a few years at the beginning of the 1410s. Firstly, the heroism and generalship of Nour Hussein saw the warrior’s influence rise dramatically, allowing him to assume a powerful position at court as a key figure in the Assyrian military. Perhaps more important was the death of King Nechunya II, and the rise to prominence of his widow – Nazaneen Red Cheeks. Famed for her beauty and intelligence, Nazaneen had left her origins among the Zikri tribes of Babylonia behind to travel to Nineveh in her youth where she married Nechunya, embracing the Nestorian faith and Syriac styles of court. Yet in her heart, she never left behind her Arab roots and continued to secretly study the Quran conduct prayer in private. Very close to her son, Sabrisho’, she would push away the attentions of tutors to provide him an education herself that emphasised the history of the Arabs and Muslims. Growing more confident after the death of her husband in 1413, at which point Sabrisho’ was thirteen years old, mother and son soon began to join together in private devotion to Zikri Islam while outwardly nodding to the Christian conventions of the Kingdom.

As Sabrisho’ reached his late teens and began to take control of the reigns of administration, his personal convictions led him to push towards a new era of religious pluralism. The King put forth the view, much to the anger of the clerical hierarchy, that the woes that had befallen Assyria in recent decades had been rooted in a lack of tolerance as the growing size of the realm had led to it becoming increasingly diverse. As a result, Sabrisho’ passed a decree of religious toleration in 1417 that promised his subjects in all three of his Kingdoms the right to practise any faith unmolested. In Nineveh, the King cultivated a cosmopolitan, multi-religious, court – with Jews taking control of many senior offices alongside Nestorian, Catholic, Greek and Armenian Christians and, naturally, an oversized clique of Arab Muslims headed by his trusted lieutenant Nour Hussein.

This was only the beginning. In 1419, Sabrisho’ stunned Assyria and the world by announcing his embrace of Zikri Islam. The realm was stunned. There was little precedent for a move of this nature in the history of the world, the abandonment of the established Church, let alone the Christian faith, had been simply unthinkable. However, divided by their own factions, the King was not confronted by the initial apocalyptically violent response he had predicted – with Nour Hussein moving at pace to face down a spate of uncoordinated rebellions and civil dissidence focussed in the Nestorian heartland of the empire. At the same time, Sabrisho’ promised to respect the Christian structures of the realm and the faith of his subjects.

By the following year, Sabrisho’ felt secure enough to embark on a lifelong ambition to complete the Hajj to Mecca. The Islamic world was, understandably, electrified by the young Assyrian King, and Sabrisho’ held audiences during his journey with Sulayman Sunni Caliph and emissaries from the Timurid court – agreeing treaties of eternal friendship with both powers, taking a step towards securing the enduring safety of his realm’s southern and eastern boundaries.

Slavery had been a core facet of the economy of southern Mesopotamia for hundreds of years – the area notably being the site of one of the largest slave rebellions in world history during the ninth century Zanj Revolt. By the Late Middle Ages the institution was somewhat weaker than it had been at the height of the Islamic Golden Age and certainly than it would become in the impending Early Modern Era. Even so, many thousands of slaves continued to work the plantations of southern Babylonia through into the late fourteenth century. The destruction of the Timurid invasions – that had ravaged this region more thoroughly than any other – and a drying climate shook the plantation economy. Areas previously suitable for agriculture turned to desert, vital irrigation systems were left in disrepair, and food surpluses faded away.

These changes had turned the slave economy into a more marginal existence and drove two key changes. Firstly, the conditions of the enslaved suddenly and drastically worsened, with more exacting demands on their labour and smaller food rations. Secondly, the Basran Christian elite that owned the majority of the region’s slave population entered into a competition for scarce arable land with their Muslim Arab tribal neighbours. On the ground, this involved low level warfare and raiding largely fought between Muslim tribesmen and black slaves under the direction of their Basran masters – fuelling a hatred of Muslims among the slave population.

In this context, the conversion of the King to Islam, and his closeness to the Zikri tribes of Babylonia, acted to ignite a situation that was already primed for violence. From 1419, an Ethiopian-born slave leader named Sanda Ajawa led his people in a great uprising, the largest slave revolt the Middle East had seen since the Zanj. Sanda’s followers slaughtered their Arab overseas and seized control of their plantations. They showed immense brutality in utterly destroying neighbouring Muslim villages before turning their attention southwards towards Basra – the home of their masters – cutting a path of destruction as they went before bringing the rich port under siege. Troops were rushed south to counter the unrest and, while breaking the siege of Basra, found Sanda’s forces very challenging to suppress as they skilfully travelled through the marshes and rivers of the region to evade their opponent and attack unexpectedly. The fighting would rage on for years before Sanda’s eventual capture and execution.

The violence in the south proved to be the last straw for the Christian elites who had watched on in horror at the past several years. In 1422 Sabirsho’s uncle Todos, the third and last remaining son of Niv III, was confronted by a noble delegation that demanded that he take action to end the madness. Early in the morning on a balmy summer’s day, Todos led a guard of elite Cuman soldiers into the royal palaces of Nineveh and sent them to kill all they could find. The great general Nour Hussein, who had saved the empire from Timur, was drawn and quartered – his head placed on a pike at the city gates, the queen mother Nazaneen Red Cheeks – despite her advancing years – was forced to endure terrible torments at the hands of the Cumans for hours before she too was executed, the King’s young son and only child Nerseh was strangled while Sabrisho’ himself was stabbed more than forty times by a gang of noblemen who had accompanied Todos in his attack – his body thrown into the Tigris without ritual. The massacres were not limited to the murdered King and his immediate entourage, with Muslims and even Arabs more generally throughout Nineveh being pulled into the streets, beaten and killed as those loyal to Todos cleared Sabrisho’s influence from the city. Many others deemed overly close to the old regime, notably a number of influential Jewish families were similarly struck in the ensuing purge.

Having gruesomely expunged the memory of his only living male relative, Todos was filled with dread for the future of his family. Although still only thirty six, Todos was childless and had a wife several years his senior and therefore well beyond her childbearing years. With Sabrisho’ gone, he represented the last surviving flicker of the might Qatwa dynasty through the male line, tracing his descent back directly to Saint Ta’mhas, the founder of the Assyrian nation, and his heroic successors like Nahir the Bear and Niv the Hammer who had forged the mighty Kingdom. This royal lineage possessed almost divine significance among the Assyrian nation and the Church of the East, with legitimacy that could not be replaced by any alternative. Indeed, for most of its history Assyria’s succession laws did not identify a clear path of succession, merely demanded that the King trade his ancestry back through the sacred bloodline. In the name of avoiding the extinction of the Qatwa line, the Patriarch of the East provided Todos with special dispensation to divorce his wife on the grounds that she was barren and seek out a suitably youthful alternative.

Fate was not on the side of Todos and the House of Qatwa. Not long after his remarriage, the King discovered a cancerous growth on his groin. Seeking to save his liege’s life, the court physician castrated the King – with the stroke of knife ending any chance of an heir. Entering into a profound depression, Todos came to believe that God had cursed him for his killing of his nephew and spent the last years of his life in a state of utter despondency. In 1426 he took his own life, bringing to an end three centuries of Qatwa rule in Assyria and leaving behind no obvious successor.

 

[Tommy4ever]

End of an Auld Sang - 1426-1438

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With the death of King Todos and the demise of the male line of the Qatwa dynasty, two primary claimants to the Assyrian throne emerged – both tracing their legitimacy through the three daughters of Niv III. The eldest, and by 1426 the only surviving, of the former King’s children was Princess Marte, who had been sent away in her youth to marry the English King of Sicily, bearing him two daughters who both died in infancy before political struggles on the island realm ousted her husband from power and sent her back into exile in Assyria, where she had absconded from politics and joined a nunnery. The candidate with the greatest support within the Kingdom was Dinkha Chahar Teghi, son of the respected Malik Rahim of Sinjar – one of the pious Nestorians who had participated in the killing of King Sabrisho’ alongside Todos – and Niv’s youngest, and by now deceased, daughter Morta. The greatest threat to Dinkha’s ascension to the crown came from outwith Assyria itself – to the Armenian ve Zhamo clan. Niv III’s second daughter, Shapira, had married the mercurial King Levon the Liberator of Armenia and birthed a brood of four sons and two daughters, before passing away following an outbreak of typhus – the eldest of which was Crown Prince Aboulgharib, the eldest grandson of Niv III and the figure with the strongest legal claim to the Assyrian inheritance

The tale of King Levon and the recent history of Armenia was in itself a captivating story of heroism and transformation. Through most of the Medieval period, as late as the early fourteenth century, there had been an independent Armenian Kingdom in the region around Lake Van. Although for almost a millennium from the nation’s conversion to Christianity, the Armenians had maintained an independent Apostolic Church, outwith the confines of Chalcedonian Christendom, the Middle Ages saw Byzantine influence encroach and Armenia’s Church enter into communion with Constantinople. The nation’s independent was brought to an end by the Mongol invasions of the Caucuses and eastern Anatolia in the first decades of the fourteenth century, with their homeland later passing over to the Timurids as the Iron Khan chased the Mongols north of the mountains at the end of the century. It was in this unstable context after the expulsion of the Mongols that a little known shepherd named Levon ve Zhamo came to attention. Abandoning his flock for a life of anti-Khazar banditry in the 1390s, Levon’s fame, prestige and ranks of followers quickly grew as he gained wealth and sparked a wave of revolt throughout the Armenian lands. By the turn of the century he controlled the lands around Lake Van and was already styling himself as King. Through the first decade of the 1400s, he continued his wars against the Timurids and his neighbours – pushing on to capture Yerevan, Tbilisi and Abkhazia and claiming the Kingship of Georgia.

As impressive as this rise had been, Levon was no mere warlord, and possessed both diplomatic cunning and a vision for religious reform. The titanic Christian empires that neighboured him to the south and west – Assyria and Byzantium – were both happy to see the Armenians give the Timurids a bloody nose and both sought to exert their influence. Levon played the two powers against one another, and achieved the legitimacy and geopolitical security he craved when Nechunya II of Assyria sent his sister Shapira to be his bride. Levon then embarked on his next great task – restoring the independence of the Armenian Apostolic Church under its traditional Oriental Orthodox doctrines. This dramatic reassertion of Church sovereignty has mixed results – drawing the largest part of the Armenian community within Levon’s realm to the new national Church, but creating a divide with the Armenian populations living within the Byzantine and Assyrian empire – whose populations largely ignored the change. Most immediately, Levon’s attempts to push Georgian Church – that had no history outwith Eastern Orthodoxy – to break its links with Constantinople and adopt Miaphysite doctrines led to civil war and rebellion. By 1420, Levon had lost all of his Georgian lands, although he continued to style himself as King of Armenia and Georgia, even if the latter was in name only.

King Todos’s poor health had been known for sometime prior to his death, and although he failed to designate a clear successor, the factions competing for the grand prize of the Assyrian throne had had plenty time to lay their plans. Upon the last Qatwa King’s death, the Armenians were quickest to react. Emphasising the seniority of Aboulgharib’s claim as the eldest male grandchild of Niv III, King Levon provided his son with a sizeable army and sent him to march south the claim his birth rite. In Nineveh, having only recently ejected the apostasy of Sabrisho’, the Assyrian nobility were in no mood for a heretical foreign to take power in their homeland and instead looked towards the Chahar Taghli family. With the teenage Dinkha installed on the throne, his father Rahim took charge of a powerful alliance that dominated Mesopotamia and the Gulf, although possessing weaker ties to the western Kingdoms.

Seeing the Assyrian heartland rally against him, Aboulgharib changed course away from Nineveh and instead marched westwards to Edessa. Taking advantage of alliances with the city’s large Armenian minority, the Prince took the city without a fight. There, he took the important political decision of turning away from the Oriental Orthodoxy of his father to embrace the Church of the East. This step saved his campaign from collapse. There were many magnates in opposition of Rahim and the Nineveh-faction who had been hesitant to align with the Armenians whose concerns were now eased, in particular the Maliks of Palmyra and Amman who had both been supportive of the short-lived policies of religious toleration under King Sabrisho’ and saw in Aboulgharib a tool with which to weaken the growing influence of Nestorian fundamentalism. With this, the Armenian Prince had established himself as a major force in the western provinces.

Aboulgharib’s presence in Edessa was far from universally welcomed in Syria. Despite his conversion to Nestorianism, he remained closely associated with his father’s campaign to re-establish Oriental Orthodoxy that had seen Greek Christian clergymen – Paulicians and Old Orthodox alike – denounce the ve Zhamos from the pulpit for decades. The threat of an Armenian takeover in Assyria therefore pushed the Greek Christian majority of north western Syria into revolt. The Greek Christian revolt turned Syria into the epicentre of the ensuing civil war as a three sided struggle emerged between the Syrian rebels, Aboulgharib and his Assyrian allies and Rahim’s forces.

The fighting was bitter and chaotic. In the east, Rahim brought sieges against Edessa and Palmyra, while engaging in raiding throughout the western provinces and seeking to attract allies to his cause. Yet the heaviest fighting was between the Armenian Prince and the Syrian rebels, with Greek Christians expanding their war by massacring the large Armenian minorities in the regions they controlled and pushing south from their core holdings around Aleppo and Antioch to attack key minority-populated territories in southern Syria home to the Messalians, Marionites and Druze. This struggle culminated in the decisive battle of Samsat in 1426, in which Aboulgharib led a veteran force to a great victory over a Syrian army twice its number.

This important battlefield victory coincided with key diplomatic manoeuvres initiated by the wily old King Levon. Breaking off a proposed marriage to the Crown Prince of Alania, Levon offered the hand of his youngest daughter Sirvart to the Crusader King of Egypt, Simon, a man more than twice her age. As a behemoth among relative pygmies in Eastern Mediterranean Catholicism, Egypt held substantial cultural sway over the Cuman and Latin Catholic nobility of Philistia. The lords of the smallest of the Assyrian realms had sought to avoid committing heavily to any side in the civil war, with many considering a push for independence in the style of the Syrians. Yet the new connection forged between the Armenians and Alexandria, coupled with the tide of the war in the west appearing to turn in Aboulgharib’s favour after Samsat, convinced the Philistians to throw their lot in with his claim. Having already made alliances among the Marionites, Messalians and Druze through their mutual conflict against the Greek Christian Syrians, Aboulgharib had achieved a dominant position in the west. By the end of 1426, Syria and Philistia were firmly under his control, with Rahim withdrawing his armies towards the capital.

Aboulgharib invaded Mesopotamia in early 1427, confident of victory. Such was the Armenian’s momentum, Rahim chose to abandon the capital in order to withdraw deeper in an attempt to buy time. This gambit, although battering the confidence of his faction, proved a masterstroke. For more than a year the two armies parried back and forth, with Aboulgharib failing in every effort to push deeper into Mesopotamia. Finally, Rahim pinned his rival to a pitched battle at Samarra, vanquishing his force and sending him into a headlong retreat back to Syria – seeing Nineveh change hands once again. Receiving reinforcements from his father, the Armenian Crown Prince finally turned to stand his ground at the Battle of Darbasak, west of Edessa. In a close engagement, Aboulgharib came out with a clear battlefield advantage, forcing Rahim to abandon his push into Syria. Far more importantly, the would-be King Dinkha was captured on the field.

Dinkha was Rahim Chahar Teghi, and therefore the only alternative to the ve Zhamo clan who could trace their ancestry through the daughters of Niv III. Aboulgharib therefore offered his foes an amnesty. Should Rahim and his followers surrender and accept his ascension as King, and Dinkha renounce his royal pretensions and join the priesthood, Aboulgharib would allow his enemies to retain their titles, swear to the preservation of Church authority and provide positions of influence to his erstwhile enemies. Should they refuse, he would execute his imprisoned rival to the throne and continue to war to its bitter end. Malik Rahim took the fateful decision to accept peace, allowing Aboulgharib to return to Nineveh once more in 1429 where he was formally crowned King of Assyria, Syria and Philistia – marking the true birth of Assyria’s Armenian dynasty.

This might have been the end of the bloody succession struggle, but just as the conflict was dying down a third title claimant emerged in the deserts to the south. When King Sabrisho’ was overthrown 1422, remarkably just seven years before Aboulgharib’s final victory over Rahim Chahar Teghi, his young son Nerseh was believed to have been killed in the bloodshed the accompanied Todos’s palace coup. However, from the very first rumours had swirled, predominantly in the Muslim Belt of central Babylonia, that the young boy had been spared by supporters of his fallen father and spirited away to the friendly Muslim communities in the desert. During the late 1420s a boy in his early teenage years emerged in the heart of Arabia claiming to be the lost Prince Nerseh. Popular interest in the boy quickly grew, as a number of figures of Sabrisho’s regime began to claim that they could recognise him as the young child they had once known. He was drawn to the court of the Sulaymans in 1429, where the Sunni Caliph recognised him as the rightful successor of Sabrisho’, the last of the Qatwa, and the true King of Assyria. Seeing him as a tool with which the briefly promised Islamic resurgence in Assyria might be pursued, in 1430 the Caliph invaded the tired Assyrian realm in the name of Nerseh.

The Muslims made quick progress initially, finding largescale popular support among the Muslim communities living east of the Jordan in Philistia and, most potently, the Zikri of Babylonia. The Caliph had hoped than after half a decade of civil war, the Assyrian realm would be too weak and divided to offer a staunch resistance, yet his offensive only solidified Aboulgharib’s position by binding together the recently warring factions of Assyria’s political landscape against their shared infidel foe. The Caliph’s army was routed at Karbala in 1431, melting back into the Arabian Desert. However vicious fighting continued to roll on for years as Assyria’s Muslims fought to the end in the name of the supposed Prince Nerseh. In 1433, the Assyrian King launched a daring raid into the Nedjaz – receiving naval support in the Red Sea from Crusader Egypt – and successfully parleyed the surrender Nerseh in exchange for the safety of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Brought back to Assyria in chains, Nerseh was denounced as an imposter and a traitor and executed. Finally, the long battle for the Assyrian crown was over.

In 1438, the great King Levon of Armenia finally passed away after a remarkable life that had taken him from the humble beginnings among his sheep herds on the Armenian hillsides, to establish his progeny on the throne of a mighty empire. His death left Aboulgharib another inheritance, bringing the crowns of Armenia and Georgia into the sprawling collection of Assyrian dominions. He was now ruled a collection that contemporaries styled the Five Kingdoms – Assyria, Syria, Philistia, Armenia and Georgia. With the Armenian dynasty firmly secure in Assyria, and the union of their homeland with the Assyrian crown complete, a new age was dawning on the Near East.