Update 1
January 1, 1820
The War of Ottoman Succession
(War of French Reunification)
Music
Ever since Selim III’s deposition and murder in 1808, the Ottoman lands have been divided among its successor states which coexisted in an uneasy and fragile peace. But the ideal of a united Empire still burns in the hearts of rival ambitious potentates. The peace could not last.
Nedim Kotromanić made the first move. While his special embassy was sent to Croatia with great fanfare, a secret messenger armed with a partition plan for the old Ottoman realms was sent to the Ottoman pretender in Anatolia. Though Nedim Pasha is technically a rebel, the Turks were tempted enough to send special envoy Ecebay Çelik to Bobovac, and also, unexpectedly, to the Ottomans’ traditional enemies in Moscow, to negotiate an alliance against the Stamboulis. Thus emerged the strange tripartite pact between the Turkist pretender, Slavist rebel, and the Russian Tsar; in March of 1816, their forces converged on Istanbul.
The City of the World’s Desires
One does not simply walk into Constantinople
Sultan Yahya received the news with characteristic calm, which strengthened the resolve of the Houses and the populace. Instead of factional squabbling, the invasion united the Stamboulis like never before, and foreigners who managed to leave before all routes out of the city were cut reported an energised, purposeful and orderly preparation for war of the sort that recalls the glory days of the Ottoman Empire and its long-forgotten martial spirit and organisational marvels.
The invaders moved quickly, and Bulgaria was overrun by the Bosnians within a month; the Free Army has already abandoned the territory to reinforce the capital, and local resistance was half-hearted. The Russians looked set to do the same to the Danubian Principalities, but for some reasons which are still not clear were held back. Certainly the voivodes of Moldavia and Wallachia are known for their crafty arcane manoeuvrings, the sort which convinced the Transylvanian princes to throw their lot in with the Sultan in the middle of a war.
These going-ons in the north did not halt the advances of the Turkish and Bosnian armies towards Istanbul, with the Turks amassed at Uskudar, on the Asian side of the Bosporus, and the Bosnians at the gates of Edirne by the end of April. It was at this point that the Free Navy left port, heading in the general direction of France. The combined navies of Bosnia and Turkey intercepted the fleet at the entrance to the Dardanelles, near Canakkale. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Free Navy stood no chance.
The city, however, is a different matter; this is, after all, Roman Constantinople, famous for being nigh-unconquerable, with its imposing walls and stubborn citizenry. Sailing up the Dardanelles, the recently victorious Turco-Bosnian fleet soon face an intense artillery barrage from the coastal guns. The Turkish camp on the Asian side was also subject to constant bombardment.
The Free Army forces were split between the city itself and Edirne; the Free Army troops in Edirne were to harass the Bosnians as they emerge over the border from the west. They were subsequently caught off guard when the bulk of the Bosnians poured in from the north. The Stamboulis suffered heavy casualties as they fought to avoid being encircled by the Bosnians. Fierce street fighting in Edirne claimed many Bosnians as well, but the Stamboulis might have been completely destroyed had the Russians been present; in the event, most of the Stamboulis, who in any case never had any intention of giving the Bosnians a decisive battle unless they were in sight of Constantinople’s Walls, and were mobile, escaped back to the City.
Geography was on the side of the defenders. The Bosnians pursued the retreating army, all the while also fighting off armed bands constantly harassing them to its left and right, finally reaching a bottleneck just west of the City itself, where they were met by concentrated cannon fire. Here the City’s defenders have established a strong fortified defensive position. After the fighting around Edirne, and with the Russians still up in Moldavia, the Bosnians did not have the strength to break through, and could only resort to siege. In the east, the situation was even more difficult for the Turks, with their smaller force separated from the City by the Bosporus. Nevertheless, the Turks fought well under the command of Ugur Korkmaz, with ships from the Black Sea providing cover for landing parties. The Turks briefly managed to land troops in Pera but were soon cut to pieces in street fighting. A more successful landing at Tekirdag was eventually abandoned after sustained guerrilla attacks in the vicinity.
As summer turned into autumn and winter, the City still stood unassailed. The besieging Bosnians were themselves in hemmed in by raiding militia bands roaming the countryside. The Bosnians retreated back to Bulgaria, fighting their way out of encirclement with heavy casualties, razing Edirne to the ground as a parting gift. Korkmaz Pasha likewise called off the Turkish offensive. Istanbul, though exhausted and running out of supplies and ammunition, lives to fight another day.
The War in the East
Guess the number of Turkish guerrilas in this picture
Caliph Ibrahim’s objective in life is humble: unite all the lands of Islam. The conquest of Iraq as far as Mosul brought the frontiers of the Caliphate up to the Turks’ own realms. Conscious of the Osmanlis’ own claims to the Caliphate, Ibrahim soon began making plans to confront the Turks, but even he was caught off-guard by the fast-moving events to the north. But the Caliph is a flexible man; the Osmanlis will just have to be destroyed before schedule. As soon as the news of the march on Istanbul reached Medina, the Caliph declared his support for the Free City and ordered the entire army to march north to take eastern Anatolia.
The Turks were led by Kahraman Çalik Pasha, the commander of the disgraced Janissary corps. Having taken charge of the reformation and modernisation of the janissaries over the last five years, against the interests of many powerful enemies, Calik Pasha saw the defence of Anatolia as an opportunity to redeem the Janissaries and silence his critics. A brilliant tactician who uses his spies efficiently and knows well the rugged terrain of the Anatolian mountains, and its effects on hungry armies on the march, he devised a plan to lure the Hejazi forces deep into Turkish territory, relying on quick cavalry raids to harass supply lines. The main forces of the janissaries would be in fortified positions near their bases in Erzurum and Diyarbakir, where the exhausted Arabs would be lured in and encircled. It would be a war of attrition, long and nasty, and the Turks would have the huge advantage of being on home ground.
Even so, the Turks were outnumbered more than two to one, and the Caliph hoped that by attacking in many directions the Turks would be forced to spread their defences thin. Initial advances met very little resistance; Ibn Abdjul’s horsemen roamed the Kurdish hills randomly pillaging while the Crown Prince and
General Hamid took the rest of the invasion force in the direction of Adana and Van respectively. Van was easily taken, which disappointed Hamid Khan, who hoped to take a major janissary base. He duly sent part of his force to take Sivas, as previously arranged. But communication between armies proved difficult in the guerrilla-infested mountains. In any case, that particular expeditionary force took the exact route which Calik Pasha predicted they would and was hunted down to the last man; not one Arab managed to escape to warn Hamid Khan, who was soon forced to leave Van. The Arabs wandered the mountains, lost, famished, cold and worn out, constantly harassed by the Turks, who seemed to be everywhere and capable of anything, so that even the land under their feet appear hostile. Hamid Khan himself lasted barely a month under these conditions; he was last seen running in the direction of an avalanche, screaming some nonsense about an Armenian princess.
The Crown Prince fared only a little better, having run into a pocket of serious resistance a little to the west of Diyarbakir, and soon got himself encircled. The Crown Prince was not expecting much in the way of resistance, and was rather ill-prepared to do serious battle; in any case, he proved to be very obdurate, and managed to break the encirclement, though he now had only a very sorry excuse for an army, certainly not enough to march to Adana with. The Crown Prince was forced to retreat the way he came, this time harassed all the way by Turkish cavalry. He eventually made it, in rags, to Nisibis (Nusaybin) where Ibn Abdjul was encamped. The old general got servants to shoo the beggar away, before realising with a shock that he was talking to the heir of the Caliph of Islam. It did not bode well for the battle that is to come.
The armies of the two empires now converged on Nisibis, with the Turks encircling the Arab camp. The Arabs still technically outnumbered the Turks, but their morale was at rock-bottom; if they stayed, annihilation was inevitable. Ibn Abdjul and the Crown Prince were still not on speaking terms on the eve of the battle, but both resolved to fight their way back to Mosul. Not a few soldiers took a third option and walked off in the general direction of Dayr al-Zawr.
The Battle of Nisibis was probably the single bloodiest day in the Middle East since the Mongol invasions. Quantity, even a demoralised kind, has a quality all of its own, as the janissaries who fought there can attest, and the Turks were cut down in droves. The Crown Prince personally dispatched a hundred Turks single-handedly, Ibn Abdjul reportedly more than fifty before he was hit in the eye by a stray bullet (or not stray, but it’s only rumour, and anyway the Caliph has forbidden its discussion on pain of death). But at the end of the day, Calik Pasha was still the winner. The invaders had been beaten back, and the janissaries redeemed.
The War in the West
An American ship casually setting itself on fire to impress a nearby French frigate
Historians are still not quite sure whether to count the French Theatre as part of the larger war centred on Istanbul, or its own separate conflict. Certainly the Ottoman struggle provided a useful pretext for the Mediterraneans and the French to settle their differences. The Americans? Well, the Americans, it seems they just like war.
The participation of the USNA came as a surprise to many observers, and controversial even within the country, due to a liberal interpretation of the “defensive” in “defensive alliance”. Anyway, the Marines never reached France; a joint Franco-Hejazi fleet put paid to that plan off the islands of Chausey, so that’s that.
France, however, still faced an organised offensive from its south. Massene chose to largely abandon the rest of the country and concentrate all his forces in the Paris region. Intelligence suggested that the assault would come from the west and north, from the sea, but Massene was sceptical. Sure enough, the Mediterraneans crossed the border en masse from the south, and the east and north of France was quickly overrun by the Mediterraneans. But the defence of Paris was well prepared. The Mediterraneans attacked from three directions, but their forces were spread too thin, while the French mobilised a citizen army of the sort that enabled the embattled French Republic to survive two decades prior.
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