Oops - I thought you meant Philip of Swabia, not the Turks.It's a good thing that they didn't last too long.
Oh well, Axuch was a Turk too and he turned out okay.
Alternate History Thread IV: The Sequel
- Thread starter Dachs
- Start date
Oh well, Axuch was a Turk too and he turned out okay.Smoke on the Water.
Smooooke on the water and fire in the sky!
-Deep Purple
The struggles for survival and domination what seemed to have come to a head in the eleventh century following the birth of a rather remarkable Jewish carpenter-theologian were clearly not the epoch-defining events that many non-serfs had expected them to be. While some clashes were resolved with some semblance of finality the Norman threat to France being the major one most of the centurys conflicts seemed sure to carry on into the next one. Romans still fought against Persians, who were once again under new management in the form of the Seljuk Turks, who had perhaps finally halted the revolving door of the past century or so. The Germanic Holy Roman Empire had won a critical victory in the half-mythical Drang nach Osten, but much remained to be done if living space were to be secured for the Teutonic settlers of the East. Normans lived on in the syncretic Kingdom of Iberia, which had survived despite Castilian and Ifriqiyan attempts to wipe it out. The office of the papacy, while it had been forced to submit to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV and even though perhaps a third of Christianity now answered solely to the Patriarch of Constantinople, still retained considerable power and had not yet been relegated to a minor role. Anglo-Saxon England was still at large after removing the Danish yoke, but neither had the Norse exhausted their energy. Meanwhile, the Kievan Rus were alive and well, Hungarys religious troubles went on and on, Egypt was under new and vigorous leadership in the form of the Sadaqid Emirs, and faraway India was witnessing a united Chalukya renaissance as the Chola Empire began to decay. All in all, the strife-torn world was alive and well, and promised to stay that way for a good while.
The largest and certainly most impressive (in the meaning of making an impression) event of the early 12th century can be attributed to the mad genius in charge of the Holy Roman Empire, Otto IV. Having cleared his east of Poles, relatively secure from the French in the west, able to ignore the weak Danes entirely, and with most of his feudal lords fairly cowed into submission, Otto was relatively free to focus on a pet project: the conquest of the Holy Land. Roman troops had seized Syria and held it firmly against the Sadaqids and Seljuks, but the Emperors of the East had reached no further south than that, deeming it to be useless overreach in an age of relatively cautious, defense-minded rulers. The Emperor had always had a burning desire to be seen as the man who reconquered the birthplace of Christ and the land in which He walked; as a somewhat pragmatic man who liked the continuing support of the Pope, Paschal II, he was interested in perhaps establishing Catholic control over a territory in the East, outflanking the dastardly Easterners and forcing them back into the fold. He had the means to do so: his conquest of Venice and the relatively quiescent state of Genoa (mainly due to the profits that Genoese would realize by skipping around the Roman monopoly on eastern trade) would get him the navy necessary to overcome the Sadaqids and land an Imperial army; the army was also in his possession, having not been relinquished to his feudal lords after the War of German Succession. His troops were motivated partly by the idealistic exhortations of his tame Pope, and partly due to the prospect of starting anew in Palestine. He had a base from which to strike, controlling the formerly Roman lands in southern Italy after the flight of Alexius Comnenus. Money, with the Pope and Genoa behind him (and Venices wealth in his pocket), was no object. In general, Otto IV was ready, able, and willing to launch an expedition to seize Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land; after two years of preparations and with an army swelled to enormous size (some 50,000 men, most of them peasant volunteers), Otto set sail from Naples in 1103 and launched the Great Crusade. [1]
It was autumn before Otto landed with no small amount of surprise at Ascalon, the seaport what serviced the southern end of Palestine; his troops seized the port after a brief siege against massively outnumbered opponents and spent the subsequent autumn and winter fortifying the place and slowly expanding the beachhead. Otto knew that the Sadaqids would be able to react quickly; he didnt think that he could move on safely without a base, though, and figured that the absence of risk there outweighed the possibility of failure beneath Jerusalems walls. During the winter, the Sadaqid Emir, Taiyab abi al-Sadaq, learned of this initial attack, flew into one of his usual rages, and assembled an army with which to crush the infidels; believing that the Romans were behind this (that sneaky Alexius was always pulling those tricks after all), he ordered his frontier general Malik al-Afdal to commence attacking the Roman fortifications at Damascus while he himself wiped away the Christian stain at Ascalon. Malik, accustomed to these outbursts and a good deal more prudent than his emir, stayed relatively inactive and merely launched several probes at Damascus during the winter, heightening Roman vigilance and forcing Alexius I to depart from Constantinople with the Army of the Emperors Presence to keep a watchful eye on the situation. Following this unusually active winter, both sides moved with lightning speed, each confident of victory over the other.
Emir Taiyabs army of 57,000 left Fustat in February and sped along the Mediterranean coast towards Ascalon, making excellent time. Otto, for his part, had to try to keep his similarly sized querulous army together on the march towards Jerusalem. It was only in the first week of March that he heard of Taiyabs approach; abandoning his Jerusalem project, he moved back to Ascalon and then south to Gaza, where the two armies clashed on the 17th of March. Otto managed to smash apart the Sadaqid right flank, which attempted a clumsy envelopment; following this, he and the knightly elite rolled up the Sadaqid line, nearly reaching the emir and routing the Egyptian army, which fled back into Fustat. The crusaders moved back to the northeast, towards Jerusalem, which was relatively undefended. Malik al-Afdal was unable to move to Jerusalems rescue, for he himself was embroiled in an indecisive war of maneuver with Alexius in the Bekaa Valley. The city fell on August 9th after a siege of four months followed by a brutal assault; the pillage lasted for three days before Otto could regain control of his army. The Emperor moved back north to eliminate Maliks threat to his rear; the imminent Imperial colony that looked to be established over Palestine spurred Alexius to action, and he agreed to a truce with Malik to allow the Sadaqid general to attack Otto. For his part, the Holy Roman Emperor elected to attempt to consolidate his control of the Holy Land and reform his perhaps half peasant force into a real army. It took two years of cautious maneuvering and no small number of crusader desertions before Otto finally felt ready to fight against Malik, who had in the meantime abandoned Syria and moved back to the Mediterranean coast south of Gaza after a minor anabasis; with perhaps thirty thousand men each the two armies faced off at El Arish in May 1105. The Emperor was low on supplies and weak with disease, and he was forced to watch his subordinate Conrad of Styria launch his planned attacks against the Sadaqid army, which managed to hold together and withdrew in good order after sustaining heavy losses. It was too late for Otto, though, for despite his tactical victory he passed away from an unknown disease in mid-June.
The death of the Holy Roman Emperor shook the Crusaders to their core; somehow, too, the Sadaqids regained numbers and strength and launched a counteroffensive. Conrad took over the army after Ottos death but was forced to concede Jerusalem in 1106 after an epic tactically drawn battle at Jaffa. Maliks army continued to gain strength as the crusaders lost ground, and finally in 1109 Conrad was confined to Ascalon. Leaving a shell of crusaders to resist as the Egyptian armies approached to begin a siege, he and ten thousand of the best of the remaining core crusading troops left on board the Imperial navy to reestablish control over the Holy Roman Empire, which had disintegrated entirely after the death of the Emperor. Lothair of Supplinburg was leading a coalition of nobles the League of Freising against Ottos regent Heinrich of Hoyer, and thus far the Imperial troops had been forced out of several key areas, including the Ostmark, Carinthia, Swabia, and Bavaria. Italy too was in flames. Even though Alexius had just died, his son and successor John II had dispatched an army under George Palaeologus to secure the former Roman territory in Apulia and Calabria. Unfortunately, there were also assorted Imperial, rebel, and even Ifriqiyan troops there; a confused four-way conflict raged across the southern Italian mountains. Conrad upon reaching Naples quickly agreed to allow the Romans everything south of the Papal States if they could hold it and collected his loyalists for the march north. The new Pope, Gelasius II, had been acting a little feisty, what with the apparent attempts to make the Papal States completely independent of the HRE, and trying to reestablish some form of papal supremacy over the Emperors. Conrad reached Rome in fall 1109, had the Pope chased out and deposed, then convinced the cardinals to elect a new Pope, one of his friends, Gregory VIII. With his own tame Pope Conrad first got himself made Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III on a sort of spurious relation to Otto IV and claim of inheritance of the Kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, and Italy. He then set to reducing Papal power wherever he could, including the reinstitution of the necessity for Imperial approval after conclave before the Pope could be officially the Bishop of Rome and the Vice-Gerent on Earth. Finally, he drove a Freisinger army under Friedrich of Staufen out of Lombardy and established firm control over Italy during the winter, including a quick defeat of the Venetians, who had tried to reassert their independence under Doge Ordelafo Faliero.
At the beginning of 1110 the situation was desperate for the Freisinger League. The Imperial loyalists had a strong presence in Italy, and pro-Conrad armies still held out in the Rheinland, Bohemia, and Prussia [2]. The Alpine barrage would surely not hold against the Emperors army for long, and then loyalist troops would spill into the North German Plain help was needed. King Louis VI the Fat of France was willing to lend some support the nobles that he was trying to crush in the Ile de France were being briefly quiescent and he wanted to reduce Imperial power by perhaps sneaking a chunk of Lorraine [3] and revising the less than satisfactory conditions of the Arelate partition. Early in 1110 a French army under Count Eudes of Dreux stormed into Burgundy and the Rhineland, brushing Imperial resistance aside in conjunction with Lothairs main Freisinger army. Conrad was spurred to act; he first feinted towards the Brenner Pass to draw Friedrich of Staufen into the Tyrol, and then cut through the Laibach Gap [4] into his home of Styria and to the loyal Margrave of Austria Leopold III of Babenburg. Leopold and Conrad quickly stamped out Freisinger resistance in the Ostmark and then smashed Friedrich of Staufens army at the Battle of Reichersberg. Conrad would have continued to the Rhineland to fight Eudes and Lothair but for a French countermove: Godfrey de Bouillon led a French army into Arelate and then even pressed into Lombardy. The next year was spent mostly unprofitably: Conrad maneuvered Godfrey out of Italy and into Arelate without decisive actions, while Leopold attempted to keep away from a major battle with the Freisinger-French army on the Danube. In mid-1112 Conrad was finally able to catch and annihilate Godfreys army at Vienne, and then moved north to join with Leopold and smash the rebels at the Battle of Toul. After that decisive battle, the Freisinger League was finished; Lothair and a few diehards survived for another three years before finally being hunted down in Silesia, captured, and executed.
That doesnt mean, of course, that all of the fallout from the Ottonian Expedition (or Great Crusade) was resolved as easily. John II managed to get Italy under control easily enough, driving the Ifriqiyans out and even mounting an invasion of Ifriqiyan Sicily in 1113 that succeeded primarily due to Emir Ali ibn-al-Muizzs preoccupation elsewhere in his territory. Louis VI ended up narrowly fighting off yet another noble revolt in Ile de France and elsewhere that he had to finally call in a favor from the English to suppress. The Normans managed to grab a lot of Ifriqiyan territory in 1112-5 due to the Emirs aforementioned concerns in another place.
And then there was the Sadaqid Emirate. Malik al-Afdal spent a year reducing Ascalon, and in the end there were still surviving Imperial troops in the citadel of the port that he eventually had to let go. Malik had spent the past six years molding his army into a brilliantly effective fighting force; his army was loyal to him and him alone, not even his sovereign Emir Taiyab, who had recovered from his defeat and was now commanding him to return to Fustat and disband his army. Malik knew that this would likely as not mean his death; the emir could hardly let a successful warlord and an army stay alive after the apparent danger was passed. He had two options: oblivion or open civil war, and he chose the latter. In 1111, Malik launched a whirlwind campaign, speeding across the Sinai and smashing the two armies that his emir could raise at the Battles of Az Zaqaziq and Mansura. By August his army was drawn up at the walls of Fustat; aided by treachery within the city he gained entry and slaughtered the few remaining troops loyal to Emir Taiyab, who similarly was killed. Malik claimed the title of Emir of Egypt and spent a year and a half consolidating his new territory, especially in the Hejaz, which had insensitively rebelled against the new emir. By spring 1113 he was ready to go on a campaign of conquest. His target, as you may have guessed, wasnt the Roman Empire, which seemed strong enough to resist a shock attack; it wasnt Seljuk Persia, which was using a vast army to crush Sunnis [5] in Mesopotamia and thus would be able to respond to incursions quickly. On the other hand, the Ifriqiyans were busy in Italy and Sicily and had just fought a debilitating war with the Romans. Theyd be a very easy target indeed so Malik launched another one of his characteristic lightning campaigns. Emir Ali ibn-al-Muizz was still entangled partly in Sicily and against the Normans, but not enough to succeed on either of those fronts; he was similarly unable to concentrate enough troops to fight Malik. A short, sharp battle at Al Khums ended in the defection of most of the Ifriqiyan army to Maliks side; the only reason the Egyptian army spent three years besieging Alis capital at Kairwan was because half of it was occupied elsewhere fighting the Iberians. While Malik was engaged at the blockade of Kairwan his subordinate Abu al-Hadi kept King Tancreds Iberian army occupied around Oran; when Malik had conquered Kairwan in 1116 he rode to Abus aid and smashed the Iberians in a double envelopment at Ceuta and drove them into the fortress itself, from which Tancred barely managed to extricate himself by sea. Maliks united Ifriqiyan/Sadaqid/captured Iberian navy set sail only the next year and landed at Malaqah which fell without a fight; Tancred desperately tried to levy Normans to make a stand at Yayyan, but he ended up withdrawing without a fight and abasing himself before the Castilians to gain support. King Sancho II was certainly interested in helping repel the infidels for a price perhaps the great fortress of Toledo? Tancred desperately agreed; the united Iberian and Castilian army managed to defeat Abu al-Hadi at Chinchilla in 1119, but failed to come to grips with Maliks main army; after another year of indecisive warfare Malik agreed to be contented with merely annexing all of the Iberian African possessions as well as the Geb el-Tarik and parts of Andalusia. As the Norman Kingdom began to weaken again (especially after Tancred inconveniently died and his sons immediately started fighting over the corpse of Iberia), Malik set his sights east once more; while the Iberian Peninsula might be a difficult nut to crack, the east was once again an option with the retirement of John II to a monastery and renewed Seljuk succession crises. Malik spent but two years reorganizing his domains and installing a government that wouldn't fall over with the touch of a feather; he also declared himself a caliph, and since the Abbasids in Baghdad had been gone for a few decades no one really objected. Unfortunately, Caliph Malik died in 1122 before he could launch his projected invasion of the Roman Empire; he fortunately had but one son, Badr al-Malik, who was briefly immobilized due to minor revolts scattered across the now-vast domains of the Afdalid Caliphate. Badr proved to be quite competent, smashing rebellions in Ifriqiya and the Hejaz and even repelling an opportunistic Dongolan attempt to seize land in southern Egypt. He might have had to relinquish the practically useless land in Iberia if not for the unusual crisis that that Kingdom was undergoing; as it was it took Badr four years to crush dissenters and prepare for another massive conquest. By 1127 he was ready to start what his father had been forced to prematurely abandon; that spring a vast army of 70,000 men rode north across the Syrian border with the Roman Empire, brushed aside border patrols and besieged Damascus.
The Roman Empire since the death of Alexius I had seen some ups and downs. John II upon his ascension in 1108 had intervened in southern Italy to reclaim the former Roman holdings there; after the agreement with Conrad III the following year, the Romans quickly subdued the rebels and drove out the Ifriqiyans (except for a garrison at Crotone, which held out until 1111). John continued building up overwhelming strength, and with this impressive Great Armament he landed at Messina in 1113 and quickly overran most of the island, which had been denuded of most of the garrisons save at Palermo, which held out for a few months, and Marsala, which managed to keep alive into the next year, and became a black hole for Ifriqiyan naval reinforcements. Sicily was consolidated over the next few years, and in the meantime the Emperor campaigned elsewhere along the frontiers, beating up on the Vlachs north of the Danube - and wiping out some Pechenegs while he was at it - and briefly intervening in the ongoing Hungarian religious warfare. After thirteen years of securing the frontier, Emperor John voluntarily abdicated in order to be a monk at Mount Athos, leaving the throne to his eldest son Alexius II. Alexius, though still fairly young, was determined to secure absolute power and eliminate any trace of his father's influence. The Grand Domestic [6], John Axuch, was probably the ablest soldier in the empire and one of the major barriers between the Caliphate and Europe; Alexius had him removed and replaced with Nicephorus Bryennius, his uncle. Under Bryennius and Alexius the army was downsized to save money; the Army of Syria especially was stripped of many of its personnel and a relatively safe political appointee, Constantine Phocas, was put in charge as opposed to a hard-bitten soldier.
Thus the Roman Empire was horribly unprepared for a war with the Caliphate when Badr invaded in 1127. Constantine Phocas made an admirable showing for an inexperienced commander, maneuvering broadly and avoiding a general engagement for a a few months, but through an extremely unfortunate series of communications errors ended up with a divided army, part of which was wiped out by Badr's main army at the Battle of Sidon in July. Badr then ignored Phocas' army and led his troops across the Litani River into Syria proper, besieging and assaulting the comparatively ill defended Damascus in the fall. Phocas managed to prevent the Emperor and Bryennius from forcing an engagement on him for the rest of the winter, refusing to attack the Caliphal army that was camped in and around Damascus; after Alexius reluctantly sent him another ten thousand men (bringing his total to an impressive 45,000), he finally had to move. In April 1128 Phocas marched towards Damascus along the Palmyra road and clashed with the full Caliphal army at Dumayr; despite an impressive showing on the part of the Romans, Phocas was overwhelmed, partly by weight of numbers, and was defeated in detail, fleeing back towards Antioch where he was promptly executed by an unforgiving sovereign. Badr spent the rest of 1128 marshaling his forces to push further into the Roman Empire; the following year he renewed the push. John Phocas, Constantine's brother and new commander of the Army of Syria, could do nothing but watch from Antioch as Badr swept past, leaving but a small corps of observation to prevent Antioch from adding any effort to the main Roman army. That army, the Army of the King's Presence (or oikeioi), commanded by Bryennius with the Emperor in attendance, was making its ponderous way from Constantinople towards Cilicia as Badr's army irrupted through the Taurus into Anatolia after perfunctory resistance by fortresses at Arabissos and Loulon. The Cappadocian strategos managed to occupy the Caliphal army long enough to allow the imperial army to take the field; the combined Roman army of about 55,000 faced 60,000 Caliphal troops on the field of Tyana. At Tyana on September 9 and 10, 1129, the Roman Army initially scored impressive successes against the Caliphal center, and after the first day forced Badr's army to make its camp further back in a disadvantageous spot; the following day Badr himself personally commanded a cavalry charge that broke the Romans' left wing and forced the Romans to withdraw after another four hours of sanguinary combat in the center. Bryennius himself was killed in the attempt at a countercharge by the reserves and the Roman right wing that came close to succeeding but eventually bogged down in the huge infantry mass that the Arabs maintained. The Emperor, assisted by the strategos Leo Maniakes, managed to preserve much of his army and retreated in fairly good order back towards Iconium; Badr refused to let up, and spent the rest of the year aggressively pushing into the Anatolikon Theme while sending outriding units into Roman Mesopotamia and Armenia, meeting with some resistance but overall succeeding fairly easily without much cost.
Emperor Alexius retreated back to Constantinople with his army and Leo Maniakes, bent on wiping out everyone that had caused this defeat, including Maniakes himself, John Phocas, most of the civil service, and all of the imperial family. The first assassinations those of the various Comnenid uncles and other power holders that had been in high positions since the ascension of Alexius I fifty years ago predictably warned off most of the others who thought that they were in immediate danger; a plot was hatched, and Leo Maniakes led a group of nobles past a few bribed Varangians into the imperial bedchamber which rapidly changed ownership to...Leo Maniakes, who had managed to cement his support amongst the few remaining Comneni and at the same time was the man most qualified to drive off the Caliphal troops. In February of 1130 Emperor Leo VIII launched a fresh campaign even earlier than Caliph Badr; his army, reinforced by European troops and held together by the core of the army that had lost the Battle of Tyana, outmaneuvered the tired, massive, and undersupplied Caliphals in the Opsikion Theme and drove them back towards their forward base at Iconium; Badr attempted to relieve the supply situation by splitting his army, but a few large detachments were wiped out by the united Roman forces at Amorium and Badr kept retreating. John Phocas, reinforced by sea, broke out of Antioch and defeated the Caliphal observation troops; suddenly the Caliphals' position appeared very desperate indeed. Badr, however, was no fool, and after retreating through his Lycandian corridor he met up with remnants of his troops from elsewhere, including the thus-far successful expeditions into Mesopotamia and Armenia. Leo was hot on his heels, so Badr drew back, towards Beroea [7], where he finally felt as though he could risk a battle in August 1130 under the blazing Middle Eastern sun; the result was a draw, but Badr had stopped his retreat and now held Syria fairly firmly. A few more years of skirmishing by both sides had fairly barren results outside of the failure of the Caliphal attack on Samosata and the subsequent Roman failure to retake Edessa; in 1136 Emperor Leo and the Caliph agreed to a peace at roughly-current boundaries, with the Romans yielding Syria (except for the Antiochian Theme) and most of the Great Mesopotamia and Aramean Themes, including Edessa. The Caliph also paid a sizable indemnity that was easily made up by the usually astronomical Egyptian and North African revenues.
The Romans had been forced to yield ground, but both sides knew that the decisive battle was yet to come; Badr spent much of the rest of his reign laying the foundation for a further successful war, resolidifying his control over North Africa and securing his Andalusian gains with greater fortresses and a larger detachment to garrison them. The Roman Emperor Leo VIII similarly cleaned house, defeating a Catholic Hungarian incursion into Illyricum, shoring up his coreligionists in the Voivodeship of Transylvania, reclaiming his Armenian and Georgian lands, and actually expanding elsewhere, conquering large portions of Dacia Transdanuvia [8]. A commercial crisis led to a brief war (1139-41) between the Romans and the Genoese Imperial Free City, culminating in a narrow Genoese naval victory off Amalfi and a subsequent failure of an amphibious landing in Sicily. The Romans managed to halt further Genoese attempts on territory after a naval victory at Cape Matapan in 1141 that helped usher in a peace that restored the status quo ante bellum. Leo was succeeded in 1145 by his only son, Andronicus I Maniakes, who mainly let his government run most of the same programs put in place by his father.
Smooooke on the water and fire in the sky!
-Deep Purple
The struggles for survival and domination what seemed to have come to a head in the eleventh century following the birth of a rather remarkable Jewish carpenter-theologian were clearly not the epoch-defining events that many non-serfs had expected them to be. While some clashes were resolved with some semblance of finality the Norman threat to France being the major one most of the centurys conflicts seemed sure to carry on into the next one. Romans still fought against Persians, who were once again under new management in the form of the Seljuk Turks, who had perhaps finally halted the revolving door of the past century or so. The Germanic Holy Roman Empire had won a critical victory in the half-mythical Drang nach Osten, but much remained to be done if living space were to be secured for the Teutonic settlers of the East. Normans lived on in the syncretic Kingdom of Iberia, which had survived despite Castilian and Ifriqiyan attempts to wipe it out. The office of the papacy, while it had been forced to submit to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV and even though perhaps a third of Christianity now answered solely to the Patriarch of Constantinople, still retained considerable power and had not yet been relegated to a minor role. Anglo-Saxon England was still at large after removing the Danish yoke, but neither had the Norse exhausted their energy. Meanwhile, the Kievan Rus were alive and well, Hungarys religious troubles went on and on, Egypt was under new and vigorous leadership in the form of the Sadaqid Emirs, and faraway India was witnessing a united Chalukya renaissance as the Chola Empire began to decay. All in all, the strife-torn world was alive and well, and promised to stay that way for a good while.
The largest and certainly most impressive (in the meaning of making an impression) event of the early 12th century can be attributed to the mad genius in charge of the Holy Roman Empire, Otto IV. Having cleared his east of Poles, relatively secure from the French in the west, able to ignore the weak Danes entirely, and with most of his feudal lords fairly cowed into submission, Otto was relatively free to focus on a pet project: the conquest of the Holy Land. Roman troops had seized Syria and held it firmly against the Sadaqids and Seljuks, but the Emperors of the East had reached no further south than that, deeming it to be useless overreach in an age of relatively cautious, defense-minded rulers. The Emperor had always had a burning desire to be seen as the man who reconquered the birthplace of Christ and the land in which He walked; as a somewhat pragmatic man who liked the continuing support of the Pope, Paschal II, he was interested in perhaps establishing Catholic control over a territory in the East, outflanking the dastardly Easterners and forcing them back into the fold. He had the means to do so: his conquest of Venice and the relatively quiescent state of Genoa (mainly due to the profits that Genoese would realize by skipping around the Roman monopoly on eastern trade) would get him the navy necessary to overcome the Sadaqids and land an Imperial army; the army was also in his possession, having not been relinquished to his feudal lords after the War of German Succession. His troops were motivated partly by the idealistic exhortations of his tame Pope, and partly due to the prospect of starting anew in Palestine. He had a base from which to strike, controlling the formerly Roman lands in southern Italy after the flight of Alexius Comnenus. Money, with the Pope and Genoa behind him (and Venices wealth in his pocket), was no object. In general, Otto IV was ready, able, and willing to launch an expedition to seize Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land; after two years of preparations and with an army swelled to enormous size (some 50,000 men, most of them peasant volunteers), Otto set sail from Naples in 1103 and launched the Great Crusade. [1]
It was autumn before Otto landed with no small amount of surprise at Ascalon, the seaport what serviced the southern end of Palestine; his troops seized the port after a brief siege against massively outnumbered opponents and spent the subsequent autumn and winter fortifying the place and slowly expanding the beachhead. Otto knew that the Sadaqids would be able to react quickly; he didnt think that he could move on safely without a base, though, and figured that the absence of risk there outweighed the possibility of failure beneath Jerusalems walls. During the winter, the Sadaqid Emir, Taiyab abi al-Sadaq, learned of this initial attack, flew into one of his usual rages, and assembled an army with which to crush the infidels; believing that the Romans were behind this (that sneaky Alexius was always pulling those tricks after all), he ordered his frontier general Malik al-Afdal to commence attacking the Roman fortifications at Damascus while he himself wiped away the Christian stain at Ascalon. Malik, accustomed to these outbursts and a good deal more prudent than his emir, stayed relatively inactive and merely launched several probes at Damascus during the winter, heightening Roman vigilance and forcing Alexius I to depart from Constantinople with the Army of the Emperors Presence to keep a watchful eye on the situation. Following this unusually active winter, both sides moved with lightning speed, each confident of victory over the other.
Emir Taiyabs army of 57,000 left Fustat in February and sped along the Mediterranean coast towards Ascalon, making excellent time. Otto, for his part, had to try to keep his similarly sized querulous army together on the march towards Jerusalem. It was only in the first week of March that he heard of Taiyabs approach; abandoning his Jerusalem project, he moved back to Ascalon and then south to Gaza, where the two armies clashed on the 17th of March. Otto managed to smash apart the Sadaqid right flank, which attempted a clumsy envelopment; following this, he and the knightly elite rolled up the Sadaqid line, nearly reaching the emir and routing the Egyptian army, which fled back into Fustat. The crusaders moved back to the northeast, towards Jerusalem, which was relatively undefended. Malik al-Afdal was unable to move to Jerusalems rescue, for he himself was embroiled in an indecisive war of maneuver with Alexius in the Bekaa Valley. The city fell on August 9th after a siege of four months followed by a brutal assault; the pillage lasted for three days before Otto could regain control of his army. The Emperor moved back north to eliminate Maliks threat to his rear; the imminent Imperial colony that looked to be established over Palestine spurred Alexius to action, and he agreed to a truce with Malik to allow the Sadaqid general to attack Otto. For his part, the Holy Roman Emperor elected to attempt to consolidate his control of the Holy Land and reform his perhaps half peasant force into a real army. It took two years of cautious maneuvering and no small number of crusader desertions before Otto finally felt ready to fight against Malik, who had in the meantime abandoned Syria and moved back to the Mediterranean coast south of Gaza after a minor anabasis; with perhaps thirty thousand men each the two armies faced off at El Arish in May 1105. The Emperor was low on supplies and weak with disease, and he was forced to watch his subordinate Conrad of Styria launch his planned attacks against the Sadaqid army, which managed to hold together and withdrew in good order after sustaining heavy losses. It was too late for Otto, though, for despite his tactical victory he passed away from an unknown disease in mid-June.
The death of the Holy Roman Emperor shook the Crusaders to their core; somehow, too, the Sadaqids regained numbers and strength and launched a counteroffensive. Conrad took over the army after Ottos death but was forced to concede Jerusalem in 1106 after an epic tactically drawn battle at Jaffa. Maliks army continued to gain strength as the crusaders lost ground, and finally in 1109 Conrad was confined to Ascalon. Leaving a shell of crusaders to resist as the Egyptian armies approached to begin a siege, he and ten thousand of the best of the remaining core crusading troops left on board the Imperial navy to reestablish control over the Holy Roman Empire, which had disintegrated entirely after the death of the Emperor. Lothair of Supplinburg was leading a coalition of nobles the League of Freising against Ottos regent Heinrich of Hoyer, and thus far the Imperial troops had been forced out of several key areas, including the Ostmark, Carinthia, Swabia, and Bavaria. Italy too was in flames. Even though Alexius had just died, his son and successor John II had dispatched an army under George Palaeologus to secure the former Roman territory in Apulia and Calabria. Unfortunately, there were also assorted Imperial, rebel, and even Ifriqiyan troops there; a confused four-way conflict raged across the southern Italian mountains. Conrad upon reaching Naples quickly agreed to allow the Romans everything south of the Papal States if they could hold it and collected his loyalists for the march north. The new Pope, Gelasius II, had been acting a little feisty, what with the apparent attempts to make the Papal States completely independent of the HRE, and trying to reestablish some form of papal supremacy over the Emperors. Conrad reached Rome in fall 1109, had the Pope chased out and deposed, then convinced the cardinals to elect a new Pope, one of his friends, Gregory VIII. With his own tame Pope Conrad first got himself made Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III on a sort of spurious relation to Otto IV and claim of inheritance of the Kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, and Italy. He then set to reducing Papal power wherever he could, including the reinstitution of the necessity for Imperial approval after conclave before the Pope could be officially the Bishop of Rome and the Vice-Gerent on Earth. Finally, he drove a Freisinger army under Friedrich of Staufen out of Lombardy and established firm control over Italy during the winter, including a quick defeat of the Venetians, who had tried to reassert their independence under Doge Ordelafo Faliero.
At the beginning of 1110 the situation was desperate for the Freisinger League. The Imperial loyalists had a strong presence in Italy, and pro-Conrad armies still held out in the Rheinland, Bohemia, and Prussia [2]. The Alpine barrage would surely not hold against the Emperors army for long, and then loyalist troops would spill into the North German Plain help was needed. King Louis VI the Fat of France was willing to lend some support the nobles that he was trying to crush in the Ile de France were being briefly quiescent and he wanted to reduce Imperial power by perhaps sneaking a chunk of Lorraine [3] and revising the less than satisfactory conditions of the Arelate partition. Early in 1110 a French army under Count Eudes of Dreux stormed into Burgundy and the Rhineland, brushing Imperial resistance aside in conjunction with Lothairs main Freisinger army. Conrad was spurred to act; he first feinted towards the Brenner Pass to draw Friedrich of Staufen into the Tyrol, and then cut through the Laibach Gap [4] into his home of Styria and to the loyal Margrave of Austria Leopold III of Babenburg. Leopold and Conrad quickly stamped out Freisinger resistance in the Ostmark and then smashed Friedrich of Staufens army at the Battle of Reichersberg. Conrad would have continued to the Rhineland to fight Eudes and Lothair but for a French countermove: Godfrey de Bouillon led a French army into Arelate and then even pressed into Lombardy. The next year was spent mostly unprofitably: Conrad maneuvered Godfrey out of Italy and into Arelate without decisive actions, while Leopold attempted to keep away from a major battle with the Freisinger-French army on the Danube. In mid-1112 Conrad was finally able to catch and annihilate Godfreys army at Vienne, and then moved north to join with Leopold and smash the rebels at the Battle of Toul. After that decisive battle, the Freisinger League was finished; Lothair and a few diehards survived for another three years before finally being hunted down in Silesia, captured, and executed.
That doesnt mean, of course, that all of the fallout from the Ottonian Expedition (or Great Crusade) was resolved as easily. John II managed to get Italy under control easily enough, driving the Ifriqiyans out and even mounting an invasion of Ifriqiyan Sicily in 1113 that succeeded primarily due to Emir Ali ibn-al-Muizzs preoccupation elsewhere in his territory. Louis VI ended up narrowly fighting off yet another noble revolt in Ile de France and elsewhere that he had to finally call in a favor from the English to suppress. The Normans managed to grab a lot of Ifriqiyan territory in 1112-5 due to the Emirs aforementioned concerns in another place.
And then there was the Sadaqid Emirate. Malik al-Afdal spent a year reducing Ascalon, and in the end there were still surviving Imperial troops in the citadel of the port that he eventually had to let go. Malik had spent the past six years molding his army into a brilliantly effective fighting force; his army was loyal to him and him alone, not even his sovereign Emir Taiyab, who had recovered from his defeat and was now commanding him to return to Fustat and disband his army. Malik knew that this would likely as not mean his death; the emir could hardly let a successful warlord and an army stay alive after the apparent danger was passed. He had two options: oblivion or open civil war, and he chose the latter. In 1111, Malik launched a whirlwind campaign, speeding across the Sinai and smashing the two armies that his emir could raise at the Battles of Az Zaqaziq and Mansura. By August his army was drawn up at the walls of Fustat; aided by treachery within the city he gained entry and slaughtered the few remaining troops loyal to Emir Taiyab, who similarly was killed. Malik claimed the title of Emir of Egypt and spent a year and a half consolidating his new territory, especially in the Hejaz, which had insensitively rebelled against the new emir. By spring 1113 he was ready to go on a campaign of conquest. His target, as you may have guessed, wasnt the Roman Empire, which seemed strong enough to resist a shock attack; it wasnt Seljuk Persia, which was using a vast army to crush Sunnis [5] in Mesopotamia and thus would be able to respond to incursions quickly. On the other hand, the Ifriqiyans were busy in Italy and Sicily and had just fought a debilitating war with the Romans. Theyd be a very easy target indeed so Malik launched another one of his characteristic lightning campaigns. Emir Ali ibn-al-Muizz was still entangled partly in Sicily and against the Normans, but not enough to succeed on either of those fronts; he was similarly unable to concentrate enough troops to fight Malik. A short, sharp battle at Al Khums ended in the defection of most of the Ifriqiyan army to Maliks side; the only reason the Egyptian army spent three years besieging Alis capital at Kairwan was because half of it was occupied elsewhere fighting the Iberians. While Malik was engaged at the blockade of Kairwan his subordinate Abu al-Hadi kept King Tancreds Iberian army occupied around Oran; when Malik had conquered Kairwan in 1116 he rode to Abus aid and smashed the Iberians in a double envelopment at Ceuta and drove them into the fortress itself, from which Tancred barely managed to extricate himself by sea. Maliks united Ifriqiyan/Sadaqid/captured Iberian navy set sail only the next year and landed at Malaqah which fell without a fight; Tancred desperately tried to levy Normans to make a stand at Yayyan, but he ended up withdrawing without a fight and abasing himself before the Castilians to gain support. King Sancho II was certainly interested in helping repel the infidels for a price perhaps the great fortress of Toledo? Tancred desperately agreed; the united Iberian and Castilian army managed to defeat Abu al-Hadi at Chinchilla in 1119, but failed to come to grips with Maliks main army; after another year of indecisive warfare Malik agreed to be contented with merely annexing all of the Iberian African possessions as well as the Geb el-Tarik and parts of Andalusia. As the Norman Kingdom began to weaken again (especially after Tancred inconveniently died and his sons immediately started fighting over the corpse of Iberia), Malik set his sights east once more; while the Iberian Peninsula might be a difficult nut to crack, the east was once again an option with the retirement of John II to a monastery and renewed Seljuk succession crises. Malik spent but two years reorganizing his domains and installing a government that wouldn't fall over with the touch of a feather; he also declared himself a caliph, and since the Abbasids in Baghdad had been gone for a few decades no one really objected. Unfortunately, Caliph Malik died in 1122 before he could launch his projected invasion of the Roman Empire; he fortunately had but one son, Badr al-Malik, who was briefly immobilized due to minor revolts scattered across the now-vast domains of the Afdalid Caliphate. Badr proved to be quite competent, smashing rebellions in Ifriqiya and the Hejaz and even repelling an opportunistic Dongolan attempt to seize land in southern Egypt. He might have had to relinquish the practically useless land in Iberia if not for the unusual crisis that that Kingdom was undergoing; as it was it took Badr four years to crush dissenters and prepare for another massive conquest. By 1127 he was ready to start what his father had been forced to prematurely abandon; that spring a vast army of 70,000 men rode north across the Syrian border with the Roman Empire, brushed aside border patrols and besieged Damascus.
The Roman Empire since the death of Alexius I had seen some ups and downs. John II upon his ascension in 1108 had intervened in southern Italy to reclaim the former Roman holdings there; after the agreement with Conrad III the following year, the Romans quickly subdued the rebels and drove out the Ifriqiyans (except for a garrison at Crotone, which held out until 1111). John continued building up overwhelming strength, and with this impressive Great Armament he landed at Messina in 1113 and quickly overran most of the island, which had been denuded of most of the garrisons save at Palermo, which held out for a few months, and Marsala, which managed to keep alive into the next year, and became a black hole for Ifriqiyan naval reinforcements. Sicily was consolidated over the next few years, and in the meantime the Emperor campaigned elsewhere along the frontiers, beating up on the Vlachs north of the Danube - and wiping out some Pechenegs while he was at it - and briefly intervening in the ongoing Hungarian religious warfare. After thirteen years of securing the frontier, Emperor John voluntarily abdicated in order to be a monk at Mount Athos, leaving the throne to his eldest son Alexius II. Alexius, though still fairly young, was determined to secure absolute power and eliminate any trace of his father's influence. The Grand Domestic [6], John Axuch, was probably the ablest soldier in the empire and one of the major barriers between the Caliphate and Europe; Alexius had him removed and replaced with Nicephorus Bryennius, his uncle. Under Bryennius and Alexius the army was downsized to save money; the Army of Syria especially was stripped of many of its personnel and a relatively safe political appointee, Constantine Phocas, was put in charge as opposed to a hard-bitten soldier.
Thus the Roman Empire was horribly unprepared for a war with the Caliphate when Badr invaded in 1127. Constantine Phocas made an admirable showing for an inexperienced commander, maneuvering broadly and avoiding a general engagement for a a few months, but through an extremely unfortunate series of communications errors ended up with a divided army, part of which was wiped out by Badr's main army at the Battle of Sidon in July. Badr then ignored Phocas' army and led his troops across the Litani River into Syria proper, besieging and assaulting the comparatively ill defended Damascus in the fall. Phocas managed to prevent the Emperor and Bryennius from forcing an engagement on him for the rest of the winter, refusing to attack the Caliphal army that was camped in and around Damascus; after Alexius reluctantly sent him another ten thousand men (bringing his total to an impressive 45,000), he finally had to move. In April 1128 Phocas marched towards Damascus along the Palmyra road and clashed with the full Caliphal army at Dumayr; despite an impressive showing on the part of the Romans, Phocas was overwhelmed, partly by weight of numbers, and was defeated in detail, fleeing back towards Antioch where he was promptly executed by an unforgiving sovereign. Badr spent the rest of 1128 marshaling his forces to push further into the Roman Empire; the following year he renewed the push. John Phocas, Constantine's brother and new commander of the Army of Syria, could do nothing but watch from Antioch as Badr swept past, leaving but a small corps of observation to prevent Antioch from adding any effort to the main Roman army. That army, the Army of the King's Presence (or oikeioi), commanded by Bryennius with the Emperor in attendance, was making its ponderous way from Constantinople towards Cilicia as Badr's army irrupted through the Taurus into Anatolia after perfunctory resistance by fortresses at Arabissos and Loulon. The Cappadocian strategos managed to occupy the Caliphal army long enough to allow the imperial army to take the field; the combined Roman army of about 55,000 faced 60,000 Caliphal troops on the field of Tyana. At Tyana on September 9 and 10, 1129, the Roman Army initially scored impressive successes against the Caliphal center, and after the first day forced Badr's army to make its camp further back in a disadvantageous spot; the following day Badr himself personally commanded a cavalry charge that broke the Romans' left wing and forced the Romans to withdraw after another four hours of sanguinary combat in the center. Bryennius himself was killed in the attempt at a countercharge by the reserves and the Roman right wing that came close to succeeding but eventually bogged down in the huge infantry mass that the Arabs maintained. The Emperor, assisted by the strategos Leo Maniakes, managed to preserve much of his army and retreated in fairly good order back towards Iconium; Badr refused to let up, and spent the rest of the year aggressively pushing into the Anatolikon Theme while sending outriding units into Roman Mesopotamia and Armenia, meeting with some resistance but overall succeeding fairly easily without much cost.
Emperor Alexius retreated back to Constantinople with his army and Leo Maniakes, bent on wiping out everyone that had caused this defeat, including Maniakes himself, John Phocas, most of the civil service, and all of the imperial family. The first assassinations those of the various Comnenid uncles and other power holders that had been in high positions since the ascension of Alexius I fifty years ago predictably warned off most of the others who thought that they were in immediate danger; a plot was hatched, and Leo Maniakes led a group of nobles past a few bribed Varangians into the imperial bedchamber which rapidly changed ownership to...Leo Maniakes, who had managed to cement his support amongst the few remaining Comneni and at the same time was the man most qualified to drive off the Caliphal troops. In February of 1130 Emperor Leo VIII launched a fresh campaign even earlier than Caliph Badr; his army, reinforced by European troops and held together by the core of the army that had lost the Battle of Tyana, outmaneuvered the tired, massive, and undersupplied Caliphals in the Opsikion Theme and drove them back towards their forward base at Iconium; Badr attempted to relieve the supply situation by splitting his army, but a few large detachments were wiped out by the united Roman forces at Amorium and Badr kept retreating. John Phocas, reinforced by sea, broke out of Antioch and defeated the Caliphal observation troops; suddenly the Caliphals' position appeared very desperate indeed. Badr, however, was no fool, and after retreating through his Lycandian corridor he met up with remnants of his troops from elsewhere, including the thus-far successful expeditions into Mesopotamia and Armenia. Leo was hot on his heels, so Badr drew back, towards Beroea [7], where he finally felt as though he could risk a battle in August 1130 under the blazing Middle Eastern sun; the result was a draw, but Badr had stopped his retreat and now held Syria fairly firmly. A few more years of skirmishing by both sides had fairly barren results outside of the failure of the Caliphal attack on Samosata and the subsequent Roman failure to retake Edessa; in 1136 Emperor Leo and the Caliph agreed to a peace at roughly-current boundaries, with the Romans yielding Syria (except for the Antiochian Theme) and most of the Great Mesopotamia and Aramean Themes, including Edessa. The Caliph also paid a sizable indemnity that was easily made up by the usually astronomical Egyptian and North African revenues.
The Romans had been forced to yield ground, but both sides knew that the decisive battle was yet to come; Badr spent much of the rest of his reign laying the foundation for a further successful war, resolidifying his control over North Africa and securing his Andalusian gains with greater fortresses and a larger detachment to garrison them. The Roman Emperor Leo VIII similarly cleaned house, defeating a Catholic Hungarian incursion into Illyricum, shoring up his coreligionists in the Voivodeship of Transylvania, reclaiming his Armenian and Georgian lands, and actually expanding elsewhere, conquering large portions of Dacia Transdanuvia [8]. A commercial crisis led to a brief war (1139-41) between the Romans and the Genoese Imperial Free City, culminating in a narrow Genoese naval victory off Amalfi and a subsequent failure of an amphibious landing in Sicily. The Romans managed to halt further Genoese attempts on territory after a naval victory at Cape Matapan in 1141 that helped usher in a peace that restored the status quo ante bellum. Leo was succeeded in 1145 by his only son, Andronicus I Maniakes, who mainly let his government run most of the same programs put in place by his father.
While the situation in the Middle East stabilized (in the inevitable preparation before high entropy and destabilization) that in Europe itself was beginning to look like it was getting out of control again, or at least decidedly more interesting than it had been. The Kingdom of Iberia had been seriously weakened by the death of King Tancred in 1120, which threw the country into a four-way civil war, with the Castilians gleefully meddling and seizing small chunks of territory right and left; finally in 1125 King Sancho II began a concerted offensive against Norman Iberia, operating from his Toledo base to break apart most of the remaining Norman factions and successfully capturing the remaining possible Hauteville heirs to the throne. By 1128 he was in control of all Iberia save the portion of Al-Andalus that had been awarded to the Caliphate by the now gone Iberians; the Balearics fell easily enough as well and Sancho settled down to commence integration of the conquered territories. The Normans themselves, exhausted from the civil war, were virtually gone and easy enough to get rid of; the Muslims were something else and decidedly harder to integrate, and a series of forced conversions almost brought the Castilians to war with the Caliphate in the mid-1130s. The expulsion of the Normans, though, was the straw that broke the camel's back on the subject of peace in Western Europe; the renegade knights didn't head for the Holy Land, or even France to regain their old patrimony they saw an opportunity in Ireland and they took it. In a remarkably similar fashion to the conquest of Iberia itself a century before, Roger of Hauteville [9] landed at Cork and with his small body of about a thousand knights managed to construct a Norman Kingdom of Ireland, playing the warring factions against each other and marrying into Irish nobility (or what passed for it), even being acclaimed High King after the untimely death of Tairrdelbach mac Ruaidri Ua Conchobair in 1133. Roger's efforts to strengthen and centralize Ireland didn't go too well initially (obviously enough); outside of Connaught his authority was rather miniscule if the other Kings recognized it at all. The Normans attempted to abolish the privileges of the other Kings one by one, isolating them and rewarding the others with relatively useless titles or gifts. Eventually, after seven years of ceaseless internecine warfare (which Roger himself encouraged so as to have a reasonable pretext for warfare with his massively superior Norman knights), Ireland was reasonably centralized as compared with say Scotland and England. The King began to cast his eyes westwards, towards the rapidly shrinking Welsh territories and the near-constant civil wars in Scotland...just waiting for an opportunity to present itself. And in Scandinavia, the new King of Norway, Sigurd II, had recently triumphed after a fifteen year long civil war that provided a handy opportunity to clarify the succession laws of that kingdom, and cast his eyes once more to the old Norwegian spheres of influence in the British Isles.
France, after undergoing another round of civil warfare even inside the Royal demesne, was once again decentralizing, this time for a brief and fruitless war against the similarly feudal English in Normandy. King Louis VII was forced to fight the Angevin family, which was rapidly gaining prominence in many former Hauteville domains as well as Brittany; another conflict was likely in the offing.
The Holy Roman Empire was reasonably quiescent, continuing its Ostsiedlung policy in Poland and reasonably centralized; after a brief renewed conflict with the various angry nobles, Emperor Conrad III (who had had to fight for his own election, which happened after he was made Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope) had managed to get his descendants more or less acknowledged as the legitimate, non-elective Kings of Germany, altering the position of Holy Roman Emperor to that elected; the Pope probably would have been annoyed but he wasn't in much of a position to complain.
Poland continued to develop in Livonia and even carried out some brief and inconclusive conflicts with the Kievan Rus'. That latter country was once again descending into relative chaos, what with its innumerable civil wars and the rise of regional centers such as the (feudal) Republic of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal, the latter of which was even beginning to receive refugees from the impoverished south as Turkic raids increased in intensity.
Hungary remained religiously violent with few breaks; most of it was of course covered up as a succession dispute between Bela II and Ladislaus III, the former of which was pro-Catholic and received sporadic support from the Empire and the latter of which was the Voivode of Transylvania and had off and on assistance from the Romans.
It was clear that this condition of relative peace would not hold for long; titanic conflicts were in the offing again, and the world order would once again be redone in ways most of the contemporaries would never have expected.
The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
I have a cunning plan, My Lord...
-S. Baldrick
The world was about to descend back into chaos in 1145; in an effort to lower the entropy of the world system, events were introduced that put off the colossal conflict for awhile, but the inexorable force of human catastrophe pushed the world towards the ultimate showdown that everyone knew would come despite all efforts to divert it.
First, to the Middle East, where instability seemed to be almost a regular part of life for most people. The inconclusive Caliphal invasion of the late 1120s had resulted an inherently unstable situation, with the new territories acquired being almost untenable. They did however make a dandy jump-off point for an invasion, which was imminent for the first half of the 1140s. In 1147 something occurred that put the Afdarid plans off balance: the Seljuk Empire burst into flames. Sultan Ahmed Sanjar of Great Seljuk had been crushing revolts off and on for most of his reign; a really major one arose suddenly in Mesopotamia despite all efforts to forestall it, and this one managed to somehow wipe out the army sent to quash it at the Battle of Taza Khurmati and continued to spread throughout the Seljuk western domains. Caliph Khilafa al-Badr quickly came to an agreement with the Khwarezmian Shah Aziz to divide the Seljuk domains between their two empires; as Ahmed Sanjar desperately tried to quell the revolts the vast army that had been assembled to invade the Roman Empire stormed into northern Mesopotamia and suddenly appeared to assist the rebels by smashing the Seljuk army that had been sent to destroy the rebels at Altin Kupri in the fall. Meanwhile, Shah Aziz led an army from his Khorasanian fastness across Persia to the Gulf coast at Hormirzad [10], then towards the Seljuk capital of Isfahan which was besieged and easily captured in the spring of 1148. For all intents and purposes, Seljuk resistance effectively collapsed after the fall of Isfahan, though holdouts remained scattered all throughout the former Empire that needed crushing for another six years. Great Seljuk was partitioned according to the prearranged scheme; the Caliphate acquired all of Great Seljuk west of the Zagros, including most of the important Gulf ports; the Khwarezmians naturally enough got everything to the east of that. The northwestern corner of the empire, in Adharbayjan [11], was awarded to the Caliphate because it'd have been absolutely absurd for the Khwarezmians to try controlling it.
The time required to crush the Seljuk holdouts was put to good use by the Roman Empire, who had had a regime change in 1149 from weak Andronicus I; the brief Maniakid dynasty was ended and with support from members of the civil service (especially everybody who hadn't been slaughtered by Alexius II) Manuel I Comnenus ascended the throne. While he did originally plan to go on a westward conquering spree in the true fashion of a latter-day Justinian, his adviser megas logothetes [12] Michael Curcuas [13] dissuaded him in favor of preparations for war with the Caliphate, which was obviously enough the more major threat; as Khilafa fumed and crypto-Seljuks popped up all over Mesopotamia, Manuel was busy having fortresses made, increasing the size of the army, stockpiling grain and other resources and generally getting ready for a war. The Romans also did their best to make their own time; the Castilians were bribed to launch an invasion of Al-Andalus that was only repelled with difficulty by the weakened forces of the Caliphate in the west and sucked even more men from the projected invasion of Rome, and the Makkurans, still very much alive, mounted raids on southern Egypt and interfered with the admittedly weak attempts by the Caliphate to proselytize on the Horn of Africa. Disasters occurred in the Caliphal ranks; generals ended up mysteriously dead, while messengers got lost and failed to deliver their reports. This very intensive program of sabotage, disinformation, and distraction combined with the worry of subjugating the Seljuk domains bought the Romans an amazing ten years; by the time Khilafa was ready to unleash his 100,000 man army against the Romans in 1159, Manuel was as ready as he'd ever be.
That is, he was ready for anything save perhaps the horrid effects of Murphy's Law; when the main Roman army, with Manuel at its head, marched from Constantinople word came that the commander of the Lycandos and Mesopotamian defenses had been bribed and that his army had been disastrously defeated by the overwhelming forces of the Caliphate at Sebastea; marching further, Manuel received disturbing news that a secondary invasion force of 40,000 men was laying waste to Roman Armenia and had even briefly threatened Trebizond on its way into central Anatolia to assist the Caliph's main army. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Emperor reluctantly decided to retreat; pragmatism was the order of the day after all, and the chances against even one of these armies was pretty slim. [14] Manuel retreated through Anatolikon and Opsikion, pursuing (albeit reluctantly) a scorched earth policy in order to deprive the inbound Caliphal army of supplies. Already he and Michael Curcuas had begun to plan out the obvious and imminent defense of Constantinople; the navy, busy in another brushfire war against the Genoese, was unable to come to the capital's aid. Indeed, Manuel saw an excellent opportunity for a revised campaign: the Muslim hordes would be lured across the Bosphorus and crushed at the tail end of a poor supply route. The not-insignificant Caliphal navy swept away the brief vestiges of resistance off Lemnos and moved through the Hellespont to ferry the vast Caliphal army across the Marmara and Bosphorus; Khilafa, in a symbolic gesture of world conquest, even used many of his ships to build the famous bridge of boats across the Hellespont to carry a portion of his army to crush the resistance in the Chersonesus. Perhaps he had not known of the similar gesture by a certain Shahanshah a millennium and a half before; perhaps he knew and didn't care. Whatever the reason, 120,000 Caliphal troops were soon across the Straits into Europe in the spring of 1160, and the truly epic siege of Constantinople began.
Naturally, the Theodosian Walls held against the impressive (but not very serious) first assault by the Caliphal forces in April; after this Sultan Khilafa began to search for more viable options. A siege was undesirable but apparently necessary; the time needed to crush the infidels would need to be decreased however possible. The navy was brought in to try to force open the Golden Horn in early May, but a combination of the famous chain as well as the sizable flotilla protecting the Horn repulsed the attackers. Naval assaults against the base of the Sea Walls also failed miserably, in great part to the use of Greek fire against the attackers, who not only had a good chance of being burned alive but also of having their ships destroyed as well. Briefly terrified by the prospect of having his vast army burnt to a crisp, the Caliph halted the attacks for a few weeks and decided to concentrate on blockading the city instead a policy with little effect and which took a good deal of toll on the attackers as well. Besides, in free Thrace a pro-Roman army was beginning to coalesce under the command of strategos Andronicus Kontostephanus; this threat to the rear of the Caliphal army spurred the Muslim forces to great speed in making preparations for a bombardment by siege engines and a second assault. Inside the city itself, the Emperor and Patriarch Lucas Chrysoberges made the rounds of the wall every day, exhorting the defenders to greater heights and sometimes even taking part in the fighting themselves (the Patriarch was wounded by a Caliphal arrow and the Emperor slew three men while fighting on the wall during the first assault). Monks from the monasteries scattered around the city paraded about the perimeter with relics from Hagia Sophia and the Nea while nuns lent their aid as nurses to the wounded. By August Khilafa was finally ready to make his next assault; siege engines, including gigantic towers that reached the height of the walls and trebuchets that hurled half-ton stones every half minute, were assembled near the Theodosian Walls in support of the attack. On August 17, the Caliphal army began to bombard the walls, and the next day in the early morning the assault went forward, wave after wave of determined Muslim shock troops breaking on the Theodosian Walls, seeking for a breach in the defenses. It took six hours before a breach could be opened at the Mecoteixion, but when it was the besiegers swarmed through, unending numbers of attackers sweeping away the defenders that could be initially assembled and nearly breaking into the city. The Golden Gate was also breached and defenders had to move quickly to reinforce the men guarding the newly finished Pentapyrgion fortress. The Emperor himself led a cavalry charge into a mass of Caliphal infantry and miraculously came out alive with most of his men after flattening the troops of a fresh attacking wave; this bought time for the defenders to reorganize and begin forcing the Caliphal attackers back. Through the day of August 18, the fighting surged back and forth throughout the Exokionion [15] as charge and countercharge broke on the respective defenders. The fighting didn't even stop as night fell and only let up slightly because of lack of visibility there was a lunar eclipse, which briefly halted action. The Caliphal forces renewed their assault at five in the morning the following day after briefly organizing their troops, and launched once more towards the Constantinian Walls; the Romans had been reorganized as well, and as the Caliphal troops began their assault a cavalry charge sped out of the Blachernae Palace and rode down the Caliphal lines, smashing into the flank of the charging Muslim horde and breaking it apart. Almost as one, the attackers began to break and run back through yesterday's breaches; the cavalry, joined by a detachment led by Manuel himself, chased behind them and captured huge swathes of the fleeing Caliphal army. Khilafa himself was captured by the Roman klibanophorii; only thirty thousand of his men managed to escape across the Straits, only beating the Roman navy to the spot by a day.
With no Caliph and a revanchist Roman Empire on the borders (as well as an opportunistic Khwarezm), the Afdalid Caliphate would be expected to collapse quite rapidly. As usual, though, there was an impressive new leader that would salvage something out of the colossal wreck: Adid al-Faiz, one of the Caliphal commanders in Al-Andalus, saw his chance and eliminated his fellow generals in Iberia, thus removing any opposition to his unilateral truce and sale of some land to the Castilians; he then took the reinforced and battle hardened Andalusian army on a wild ride through North Africa, wiping out a tiny Genoese detachment that tried to seize Carthage and continuing to Egypt, where he defeated the grand vizier and asserted his claim to the title of Caliph. Riding north, he joined the pitiful remnants of the army that was to have conquered the Second Rome near Iconium, only a few miles away from the Romans themselves, who were led by Andronicus Kontostephanus and who were hopping mad. Skillfully avoiding an engagement, Adid managed to establish a breakwater of sorts in the Taurus during the winter of 1160-1 and then continued to withdraw southwards, past Antioch and into Syria. He then turned back into Mesopotamia and dealt a sharp defeat to a small Khwarezmian force that had been ordered to seize a slice of Caliphal territory and then practically gave away Mesopotamia and Adharbayjan anyway in exchange for an alliance against the Romans, who were spilling into northern Mesopotamia and Syria. With consummate skill Adid managed to hold onto Damascus after six years of off and on fighting around the city; similarly, the Romans couldn't advance any farther than Edessa into Mesopotamia after Shahanshah Il-Arslan brought up the main Khwarezmian army to resist the Roman advance; in 1168 Manuel was finally forced to sign a peace agreement with the Khwarezmians and Caliphals in exchange for retaining his conquests thus far, which included Beroea and Edessa and a slice of Adharbayjan. Thus was peace restored in the Middle East; it would obviously soon be broken, but the status quo was confirmed and protected. There would be no great united Muslim assault on the bastion of Christendom any time soon; the Romans had managed to defend their land and their livelihood and even retake much of the territory lost under Alexius II.
For the other major war that dominated the latter half of the twelfth century, we must turn to the British Isles, where a clearly expansionist Norman Ireland and a revanchist Norway were eyeing England and Scotland greedily. King Roger I passed on in 1157 but his son William I maintained his interest in conquest; Norway's Isle of Man seemed a tempting target, a juicy grape that was barely connected to the vine. The Irish launched a full-scale attack on the Isle of Man in 1164 and easily seized it; for his own part, King Haakon II, son of Sigurd, was overjoyed at the excuse to intervene in the British Isles and immediately sent an expeditionary force to combat the coalition of the Irish with the Alban King [16] Malcolm IV. The Scots launched a disorganized attack on the Norwegian possessions in northern Scotland, which was easily repulsed; the Norwegians in their turn decided to attack the stronger partner first and landed on the Irish coast at Derry; the Norman-Irish army drove them back, but Haakon landed a second force at Dublin, where many of the Norse citizens assisted the amphibious assault that easily carried the city and began to spread out into the rest of Ireland. While the Scots spent most of the 1160s fruitlessly attacking the Norwegian possessions in northern Alba and even lost control of Inverness to a brief Norwegian attack the Irish fought two major battles against the Norwegians at Kildare and Mullingar, neither of which was particularly decisive, primarily due to the poor Norman-Irish leadership. Towards 1170 the Irish finally began to force the Norwegians back towards Dublin; that year was dominated by a siege that ended when the Norwegians decided to abandon their position in Ireland to assist their new allies the English (under Harold V), who were launching a full-scale attack into southern Scotland, practically unopposed by the Scots themselves. The Irish mustered enough men and ships to actually invade Wales in 1173, which naturally was a minor blow to the English themselves; it was almost completely useless when viewed next to the near-complete collapse of the Scots after the successful English-Norwegian siege of Glasgow and the subsequent assassination of Malcolm IV by discontented nobles. Eventually (in 1175) the Irish and the Scots (as much as the latter even existed) agreed to a compromise peace; the Irish seized northern Wales and the Isle of Man, while the English annexed a large chunk of the Alban domains, bringing them north to the Cheviot Hills, and the Norwegians got to keep Inverness, Skye, Arran, and assorted islands along the coast that they added to their duchy of the Isles. Scotland stayed destabilized until at least 1180, for its own part, while the other three sides began to develop cunning plans of their own to readjust the situation in their favor.
France began to slowly stabilize and even centralize some in this period; the seemingly fruitless struggles of Louis VII had yielded fruit, first managing to seize a slice of English Normandy during the Scottish War in the 1170s and then recentralizing the Royal demesne; the Angevins were defeated outside Orleans and retreated for awhile, while swearing their revenge and determination to seize true power.
The Holy Roman Empire actually weakened somewhat during this period, as a succession of weak Styrian Emperors led to a final civil war between them and the Welf family [17] in the 1160s, during which Heinrich VII, called der Löwe, or the Lion, triumphed over the legal Emperor Heinrich VI and forced the Pope to crown him Emperor; the highlights of his reign as of 1180 included mostly a renewed involvement with the struggle in Hungary, even briefly engaging some of Manuel Comnenus' Roman troops, though the HRE and the Romans didn't officially go to war again. Heinrich VII also exhibited no small interest in forcing the papacy under, and installed a series of weak Popes at Rome.
Castile had stayed somewhat quiet during this period; outside of grabbing a bit of Caliphal territory in Al-Andalus the Castilian kings confined themselves to dabbling in French affairs.
And once again, the stage was being set for a titanic conflict between the powers of Europe and the Middle East, one that might be slightly more decisive than before. Even as the nations of the western world were rearming for renewed conflict, rumors were received from travelers of a rising power in the East...one that would overthrow the existing order and disastrously alter the course of world events for centuries to come.
Next: House of the Rising Sun.
[1] = Ugh. I know that there are many elements missing from the puzzle that put the crusades together a much different Iberian situation, for one thing, plus no Turks in Anatolia, and a recent war with that same monarch who had in a certain other universe pled for mercenaries from Pope Urban II. This Crusade is much different than the other ones; it is mostly politically motivated with religious overtones instead of the other way around, and it was initiated by an Emperors tame Pope, not a firebrand wannabe who went the extra mile for the other Emperor and who would be subsequently hated by Greeks forever. In any event, this isnt the same thing at all, and the only reason Im calling it a crusade is because of the papal blessing and the similar target location.
[2] = The first time they were called Prussians being a good forty years prior to this. Just barely under the mark, eh?
[3] = OMD Burgundy, Alsace-Lorraine, most of Belgium, and a large chunk of northwestern France. Controlled by the HRE as of 1110.
[4] = OMD Gap of Ljubljana.
[5] = Due primarily to pro-Shiite policies despite the fact that the Seljuks themselves were Sunni; they weren't stupid, after all.
[6] = Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army (megas domestikos).
[7] = OMD Aleppo.
[8] = OMD Wallachia.
[9] = OTL Roger II of Sicily. That ought to explain his remarkable successes eh?
[10] = OMD Bandar Abbas.
[11] = Obviously enough OMD Azerbaijan.
[12] = Chief Accountant, but literally the man in charge of the civil service; equivalent to a chancellor.
[13] = Who didn't become a Patriarch, putting his unique talents to decidedly better use than as the puppet of the Roman Emperors.
[14] = Manuel was in OTL very rash (or at least overenergetic as compared with his father and grandfather); his experiences in being hunted and almost killed by his brother and even briefly cast out of the Imperial line of succession affected him deeply, somewhat like what happened to Constantine VII a while earlier. Also, he wasn't infected by the knightly spirit due to the lack of a real series of crusades. Makes for a much better Emperor, IMHO.
[15] = The area between the Theodosian and Constantinian Walls of Constantinople; basically a suburb.
[16] = King of Scotland.
[17] = Because the Staufens were disastrously destroyed during the War of the Freisinger League.
France, after undergoing another round of civil warfare even inside the Royal demesne, was once again decentralizing, this time for a brief and fruitless war against the similarly feudal English in Normandy. King Louis VII was forced to fight the Angevin family, which was rapidly gaining prominence in many former Hauteville domains as well as Brittany; another conflict was likely in the offing.
The Holy Roman Empire was reasonably quiescent, continuing its Ostsiedlung policy in Poland and reasonably centralized; after a brief renewed conflict with the various angry nobles, Emperor Conrad III (who had had to fight for his own election, which happened after he was made Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope) had managed to get his descendants more or less acknowledged as the legitimate, non-elective Kings of Germany, altering the position of Holy Roman Emperor to that elected; the Pope probably would have been annoyed but he wasn't in much of a position to complain.
Poland continued to develop in Livonia and even carried out some brief and inconclusive conflicts with the Kievan Rus'. That latter country was once again descending into relative chaos, what with its innumerable civil wars and the rise of regional centers such as the (feudal) Republic of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal, the latter of which was even beginning to receive refugees from the impoverished south as Turkic raids increased in intensity.
Hungary remained religiously violent with few breaks; most of it was of course covered up as a succession dispute between Bela II and Ladislaus III, the former of which was pro-Catholic and received sporadic support from the Empire and the latter of which was the Voivode of Transylvania and had off and on assistance from the Romans.
It was clear that this condition of relative peace would not hold for long; titanic conflicts were in the offing again, and the world order would once again be redone in ways most of the contemporaries would never have expected.
The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
I have a cunning plan, My Lord...
-S. Baldrick
The world was about to descend back into chaos in 1145; in an effort to lower the entropy of the world system, events were introduced that put off the colossal conflict for awhile, but the inexorable force of human catastrophe pushed the world towards the ultimate showdown that everyone knew would come despite all efforts to divert it.
First, to the Middle East, where instability seemed to be almost a regular part of life for most people. The inconclusive Caliphal invasion of the late 1120s had resulted an inherently unstable situation, with the new territories acquired being almost untenable. They did however make a dandy jump-off point for an invasion, which was imminent for the first half of the 1140s. In 1147 something occurred that put the Afdarid plans off balance: the Seljuk Empire burst into flames. Sultan Ahmed Sanjar of Great Seljuk had been crushing revolts off and on for most of his reign; a really major one arose suddenly in Mesopotamia despite all efforts to forestall it, and this one managed to somehow wipe out the army sent to quash it at the Battle of Taza Khurmati and continued to spread throughout the Seljuk western domains. Caliph Khilafa al-Badr quickly came to an agreement with the Khwarezmian Shah Aziz to divide the Seljuk domains between their two empires; as Ahmed Sanjar desperately tried to quell the revolts the vast army that had been assembled to invade the Roman Empire stormed into northern Mesopotamia and suddenly appeared to assist the rebels by smashing the Seljuk army that had been sent to destroy the rebels at Altin Kupri in the fall. Meanwhile, Shah Aziz led an army from his Khorasanian fastness across Persia to the Gulf coast at Hormirzad [10], then towards the Seljuk capital of Isfahan which was besieged and easily captured in the spring of 1148. For all intents and purposes, Seljuk resistance effectively collapsed after the fall of Isfahan, though holdouts remained scattered all throughout the former Empire that needed crushing for another six years. Great Seljuk was partitioned according to the prearranged scheme; the Caliphate acquired all of Great Seljuk west of the Zagros, including most of the important Gulf ports; the Khwarezmians naturally enough got everything to the east of that. The northwestern corner of the empire, in Adharbayjan [11], was awarded to the Caliphate because it'd have been absolutely absurd for the Khwarezmians to try controlling it.
The time required to crush the Seljuk holdouts was put to good use by the Roman Empire, who had had a regime change in 1149 from weak Andronicus I; the brief Maniakid dynasty was ended and with support from members of the civil service (especially everybody who hadn't been slaughtered by Alexius II) Manuel I Comnenus ascended the throne. While he did originally plan to go on a westward conquering spree in the true fashion of a latter-day Justinian, his adviser megas logothetes [12] Michael Curcuas [13] dissuaded him in favor of preparations for war with the Caliphate, which was obviously enough the more major threat; as Khilafa fumed and crypto-Seljuks popped up all over Mesopotamia, Manuel was busy having fortresses made, increasing the size of the army, stockpiling grain and other resources and generally getting ready for a war. The Romans also did their best to make their own time; the Castilians were bribed to launch an invasion of Al-Andalus that was only repelled with difficulty by the weakened forces of the Caliphate in the west and sucked even more men from the projected invasion of Rome, and the Makkurans, still very much alive, mounted raids on southern Egypt and interfered with the admittedly weak attempts by the Caliphate to proselytize on the Horn of Africa. Disasters occurred in the Caliphal ranks; generals ended up mysteriously dead, while messengers got lost and failed to deliver their reports. This very intensive program of sabotage, disinformation, and distraction combined with the worry of subjugating the Seljuk domains bought the Romans an amazing ten years; by the time Khilafa was ready to unleash his 100,000 man army against the Romans in 1159, Manuel was as ready as he'd ever be.
That is, he was ready for anything save perhaps the horrid effects of Murphy's Law; when the main Roman army, with Manuel at its head, marched from Constantinople word came that the commander of the Lycandos and Mesopotamian defenses had been bribed and that his army had been disastrously defeated by the overwhelming forces of the Caliphate at Sebastea; marching further, Manuel received disturbing news that a secondary invasion force of 40,000 men was laying waste to Roman Armenia and had even briefly threatened Trebizond on its way into central Anatolia to assist the Caliph's main army. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Emperor reluctantly decided to retreat; pragmatism was the order of the day after all, and the chances against even one of these armies was pretty slim. [14] Manuel retreated through Anatolikon and Opsikion, pursuing (albeit reluctantly) a scorched earth policy in order to deprive the inbound Caliphal army of supplies. Already he and Michael Curcuas had begun to plan out the obvious and imminent defense of Constantinople; the navy, busy in another brushfire war against the Genoese, was unable to come to the capital's aid. Indeed, Manuel saw an excellent opportunity for a revised campaign: the Muslim hordes would be lured across the Bosphorus and crushed at the tail end of a poor supply route. The not-insignificant Caliphal navy swept away the brief vestiges of resistance off Lemnos and moved through the Hellespont to ferry the vast Caliphal army across the Marmara and Bosphorus; Khilafa, in a symbolic gesture of world conquest, even used many of his ships to build the famous bridge of boats across the Hellespont to carry a portion of his army to crush the resistance in the Chersonesus. Perhaps he had not known of the similar gesture by a certain Shahanshah a millennium and a half before; perhaps he knew and didn't care. Whatever the reason, 120,000 Caliphal troops were soon across the Straits into Europe in the spring of 1160, and the truly epic siege of Constantinople began.
Naturally, the Theodosian Walls held against the impressive (but not very serious) first assault by the Caliphal forces in April; after this Sultan Khilafa began to search for more viable options. A siege was undesirable but apparently necessary; the time needed to crush the infidels would need to be decreased however possible. The navy was brought in to try to force open the Golden Horn in early May, but a combination of the famous chain as well as the sizable flotilla protecting the Horn repulsed the attackers. Naval assaults against the base of the Sea Walls also failed miserably, in great part to the use of Greek fire against the attackers, who not only had a good chance of being burned alive but also of having their ships destroyed as well. Briefly terrified by the prospect of having his vast army burnt to a crisp, the Caliph halted the attacks for a few weeks and decided to concentrate on blockading the city instead a policy with little effect and which took a good deal of toll on the attackers as well. Besides, in free Thrace a pro-Roman army was beginning to coalesce under the command of strategos Andronicus Kontostephanus; this threat to the rear of the Caliphal army spurred the Muslim forces to great speed in making preparations for a bombardment by siege engines and a second assault. Inside the city itself, the Emperor and Patriarch Lucas Chrysoberges made the rounds of the wall every day, exhorting the defenders to greater heights and sometimes even taking part in the fighting themselves (the Patriarch was wounded by a Caliphal arrow and the Emperor slew three men while fighting on the wall during the first assault). Monks from the monasteries scattered around the city paraded about the perimeter with relics from Hagia Sophia and the Nea while nuns lent their aid as nurses to the wounded. By August Khilafa was finally ready to make his next assault; siege engines, including gigantic towers that reached the height of the walls and trebuchets that hurled half-ton stones every half minute, were assembled near the Theodosian Walls in support of the attack. On August 17, the Caliphal army began to bombard the walls, and the next day in the early morning the assault went forward, wave after wave of determined Muslim shock troops breaking on the Theodosian Walls, seeking for a breach in the defenses. It took six hours before a breach could be opened at the Mecoteixion, but when it was the besiegers swarmed through, unending numbers of attackers sweeping away the defenders that could be initially assembled and nearly breaking into the city. The Golden Gate was also breached and defenders had to move quickly to reinforce the men guarding the newly finished Pentapyrgion fortress. The Emperor himself led a cavalry charge into a mass of Caliphal infantry and miraculously came out alive with most of his men after flattening the troops of a fresh attacking wave; this bought time for the defenders to reorganize and begin forcing the Caliphal attackers back. Through the day of August 18, the fighting surged back and forth throughout the Exokionion [15] as charge and countercharge broke on the respective defenders. The fighting didn't even stop as night fell and only let up slightly because of lack of visibility there was a lunar eclipse, which briefly halted action. The Caliphal forces renewed their assault at five in the morning the following day after briefly organizing their troops, and launched once more towards the Constantinian Walls; the Romans had been reorganized as well, and as the Caliphal troops began their assault a cavalry charge sped out of the Blachernae Palace and rode down the Caliphal lines, smashing into the flank of the charging Muslim horde and breaking it apart. Almost as one, the attackers began to break and run back through yesterday's breaches; the cavalry, joined by a detachment led by Manuel himself, chased behind them and captured huge swathes of the fleeing Caliphal army. Khilafa himself was captured by the Roman klibanophorii; only thirty thousand of his men managed to escape across the Straits, only beating the Roman navy to the spot by a day.
With no Caliph and a revanchist Roman Empire on the borders (as well as an opportunistic Khwarezm), the Afdalid Caliphate would be expected to collapse quite rapidly. As usual, though, there was an impressive new leader that would salvage something out of the colossal wreck: Adid al-Faiz, one of the Caliphal commanders in Al-Andalus, saw his chance and eliminated his fellow generals in Iberia, thus removing any opposition to his unilateral truce and sale of some land to the Castilians; he then took the reinforced and battle hardened Andalusian army on a wild ride through North Africa, wiping out a tiny Genoese detachment that tried to seize Carthage and continuing to Egypt, where he defeated the grand vizier and asserted his claim to the title of Caliph. Riding north, he joined the pitiful remnants of the army that was to have conquered the Second Rome near Iconium, only a few miles away from the Romans themselves, who were led by Andronicus Kontostephanus and who were hopping mad. Skillfully avoiding an engagement, Adid managed to establish a breakwater of sorts in the Taurus during the winter of 1160-1 and then continued to withdraw southwards, past Antioch and into Syria. He then turned back into Mesopotamia and dealt a sharp defeat to a small Khwarezmian force that had been ordered to seize a slice of Caliphal territory and then practically gave away Mesopotamia and Adharbayjan anyway in exchange for an alliance against the Romans, who were spilling into northern Mesopotamia and Syria. With consummate skill Adid managed to hold onto Damascus after six years of off and on fighting around the city; similarly, the Romans couldn't advance any farther than Edessa into Mesopotamia after Shahanshah Il-Arslan brought up the main Khwarezmian army to resist the Roman advance; in 1168 Manuel was finally forced to sign a peace agreement with the Khwarezmians and Caliphals in exchange for retaining his conquests thus far, which included Beroea and Edessa and a slice of Adharbayjan. Thus was peace restored in the Middle East; it would obviously soon be broken, but the status quo was confirmed and protected. There would be no great united Muslim assault on the bastion of Christendom any time soon; the Romans had managed to defend their land and their livelihood and even retake much of the territory lost under Alexius II.
For the other major war that dominated the latter half of the twelfth century, we must turn to the British Isles, where a clearly expansionist Norman Ireland and a revanchist Norway were eyeing England and Scotland greedily. King Roger I passed on in 1157 but his son William I maintained his interest in conquest; Norway's Isle of Man seemed a tempting target, a juicy grape that was barely connected to the vine. The Irish launched a full-scale attack on the Isle of Man in 1164 and easily seized it; for his own part, King Haakon II, son of Sigurd, was overjoyed at the excuse to intervene in the British Isles and immediately sent an expeditionary force to combat the coalition of the Irish with the Alban King [16] Malcolm IV. The Scots launched a disorganized attack on the Norwegian possessions in northern Scotland, which was easily repulsed; the Norwegians in their turn decided to attack the stronger partner first and landed on the Irish coast at Derry; the Norman-Irish army drove them back, but Haakon landed a second force at Dublin, where many of the Norse citizens assisted the amphibious assault that easily carried the city and began to spread out into the rest of Ireland. While the Scots spent most of the 1160s fruitlessly attacking the Norwegian possessions in northern Alba and even lost control of Inverness to a brief Norwegian attack the Irish fought two major battles against the Norwegians at Kildare and Mullingar, neither of which was particularly decisive, primarily due to the poor Norman-Irish leadership. Towards 1170 the Irish finally began to force the Norwegians back towards Dublin; that year was dominated by a siege that ended when the Norwegians decided to abandon their position in Ireland to assist their new allies the English (under Harold V), who were launching a full-scale attack into southern Scotland, practically unopposed by the Scots themselves. The Irish mustered enough men and ships to actually invade Wales in 1173, which naturally was a minor blow to the English themselves; it was almost completely useless when viewed next to the near-complete collapse of the Scots after the successful English-Norwegian siege of Glasgow and the subsequent assassination of Malcolm IV by discontented nobles. Eventually (in 1175) the Irish and the Scots (as much as the latter even existed) agreed to a compromise peace; the Irish seized northern Wales and the Isle of Man, while the English annexed a large chunk of the Alban domains, bringing them north to the Cheviot Hills, and the Norwegians got to keep Inverness, Skye, Arran, and assorted islands along the coast that they added to their duchy of the Isles. Scotland stayed destabilized until at least 1180, for its own part, while the other three sides began to develop cunning plans of their own to readjust the situation in their favor.
France began to slowly stabilize and even centralize some in this period; the seemingly fruitless struggles of Louis VII had yielded fruit, first managing to seize a slice of English Normandy during the Scottish War in the 1170s and then recentralizing the Royal demesne; the Angevins were defeated outside Orleans and retreated for awhile, while swearing their revenge and determination to seize true power.
The Holy Roman Empire actually weakened somewhat during this period, as a succession of weak Styrian Emperors led to a final civil war between them and the Welf family [17] in the 1160s, during which Heinrich VII, called der Löwe, or the Lion, triumphed over the legal Emperor Heinrich VI and forced the Pope to crown him Emperor; the highlights of his reign as of 1180 included mostly a renewed involvement with the struggle in Hungary, even briefly engaging some of Manuel Comnenus' Roman troops, though the HRE and the Romans didn't officially go to war again. Heinrich VII also exhibited no small interest in forcing the papacy under, and installed a series of weak Popes at Rome.
Castile had stayed somewhat quiet during this period; outside of grabbing a bit of Caliphal territory in Al-Andalus the Castilian kings confined themselves to dabbling in French affairs.
And once again, the stage was being set for a titanic conflict between the powers of Europe and the Middle East, one that might be slightly more decisive than before. Even as the nations of the western world were rearming for renewed conflict, rumors were received from travelers of a rising power in the East...one that would overthrow the existing order and disastrously alter the course of world events for centuries to come.
Next: House of the Rising Sun.
[1] = Ugh. I know that there are many elements missing from the puzzle that put the crusades together a much different Iberian situation, for one thing, plus no Turks in Anatolia, and a recent war with that same monarch who had in a certain other universe pled for mercenaries from Pope Urban II. This Crusade is much different than the other ones; it is mostly politically motivated with religious overtones instead of the other way around, and it was initiated by an Emperors tame Pope, not a firebrand wannabe who went the extra mile for the other Emperor and who would be subsequently hated by Greeks forever. In any event, this isnt the same thing at all, and the only reason Im calling it a crusade is because of the papal blessing and the similar target location.
[2] = The first time they were called Prussians being a good forty years prior to this. Just barely under the mark, eh?
[3] = OMD Burgundy, Alsace-Lorraine, most of Belgium, and a large chunk of northwestern France. Controlled by the HRE as of 1110.
[4] = OMD Gap of Ljubljana.
[5] = Due primarily to pro-Shiite policies despite the fact that the Seljuks themselves were Sunni; they weren't stupid, after all.
[6] = Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army (megas domestikos).
[7] = OMD Aleppo.
[8] = OMD Wallachia.
[9] = OTL Roger II of Sicily. That ought to explain his remarkable successes eh?
[10] = OMD Bandar Abbas.
[11] = Obviously enough OMD Azerbaijan.
[12] = Chief Accountant, but literally the man in charge of the civil service; equivalent to a chancellor.
[13] = Who didn't become a Patriarch, putting his unique talents to decidedly better use than as the puppet of the Roman Emperors.
[14] = Manuel was in OTL very rash (or at least overenergetic as compared with his father and grandfather); his experiences in being hunted and almost killed by his brother and even briefly cast out of the Imperial line of succession affected him deeply, somewhat like what happened to Constantine VII a while earlier. Also, he wasn't infected by the knightly spirit due to the lack of a real series of crusades. Makes for a much better Emperor, IMHO.
[15] = The area between the Theodosian and Constantinian Walls of Constantinople; basically a suburb.
[16] = King of Scotland.
[17] = Because the Staufens were disastrously destroyed during the War of the Freisinger League.
Symphony D.
Deity
What's this? Somebody else using song quotes to introduce chapters and their titles for sections? This will not stand.Next: House of the Rising Sun.
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
What's this? Somebody else using song quotes to introduce chapters and their titles for sections? This will not stand.
Yeah, damn people not realise I've had copyright on that since 2006
.Pshh nobody remembers the things that your quotes are from.
That was a great NES, why did it die all of a sudden?
alex994
Hail Divine Emperor!
If it involves a massive Japanese Empire, I swear I will tear any such timeline apart to my greatest ability
"Rising Sun" means the east in general in this context.
carmen510
Deity
What if its a massive Chinese Empire with a massive Japanese Empire, or a massive Japanese Empire which is friendly to China?
What if its a massive Chinese Empire with a massive Japanese Empire, or a massive Japanese Empire which is friendly to China?
That will never happen. Japan is always trying to invade Korea and China and stuff.
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
Because both Emperors claim to be each others god.
*sigh* Remember what time it is? Did you even read the TL?What if its a massive Chinese Empire with a massive Japanese Empire, or a massive Japanese Empire which is friendly to China?
Is there any constructive criticism? I mean, I can understand das not saying anything due to updatingness, but the rest of you should be ashamed.
The Strategos
Thanatos
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2002
- Messages
- 1,175
*sigh* Remember what time it is? Did you even read the TL?
Is there any constructive criticism? I mean, I can understand das not saying anything due to updatingness, but the rest of you should be ashamed.
The Norman conquest of Ireland annoyed me. The Castilians captured all the Hautevilles yet (presumably) let one go to go off adventuring. Somehow, the defeated Normans managed to scrape together a large enough fleet to transport 1,000 knights, their horses, and presumably their families and assorted camp hanger-ons from Spain. To make it worse (though I could be wrong on this) the impression I got was that Norman Spain was on the Mediterranean side of Spain, so that they would have had to sail all the way around Spain, through hostile waters, traveled along the coast of France, skirted Britain, before finally making it to Ireland. And yet we are to believe that despite succeeding in this immense logistical exodus, the Normans didnt have enough resources to hold their kingdom in Spain.
The Strategos
Thanatos
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2002
- Messages
- 1,175
I had more time than I thought this week.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
In the name of God, for securing greater help, protection and defense in our just cause, we will turn to Him as to the most just avenger of pride, which is unbearable, to His Mother, the Virgin Mary, and to our patrons and those of our Kingdom: Stephen, Imre, Gerhard, Ladislaus and we will ask them to turn their anger against the enemies, the proud as well as the wicked, who are only appeased by spilled blood, the tearing out of entrails and breaking of necks. Placing our trust in the most sure defense of God and His saints, and in their steadfast help, we am sure that they will shield us and their people with their might and intercession and will not allow us and their people to succumb to the violence of such horrible enemies. We do not at all claim the choice of a battlefield, but, as becomes Christians and Christian nobility, we leave it to God, wishing to have whatever place of battle and whatever outcome of the war that God's mercy and fate will determine for us today, hopeful that the heavens will put an end to the Turkish relentlessness so that as a result, their wicked and unbearable pride will be defeated once and for all. For we are sure that heaven will support a more valid cause. On the field we tread, on which the battle will be waged, Mars, the mutual and just judge of war, will erase and humiliate the impudence of our enemies, which reaches to the skies."
-Speech of John Hunyadi before the Second Battle of Zlatitsa Pass as recorded by Jan Długoszs Annals
Though the crusading armies won many victories in the opening year of their crusade, as 1442 turned into 1443, the morale of the crusading armies started to drop. From the south came rumors that Demetrios Palaiologos, the brother of Emperor John VIII and Constantine Palaiologos, who had been exiled due to his general untrustworthiness, had made an alliance with the Turks whereby they would support him in his attempt to gain the throne of the Romans. Meanwhile, in the north, King Władysław had been forced to leave his army in their defensive positions while traveling north to put down a rumored uprising among the nobles in Poland. The crusader armies in Sofia fared no better. Amidst the continued feud between perhaps the two best crusader generals, Hunyadi and Vitelleschi, came news of Serbian despot Đurađ Branković leaving Hunyadis army together with his Serbian troops, going back to the recently liberated Serbia, with rumors of him selling out to the Turks following him home.
As January neared its end, it seemed certain, in certain circles, that the Turks would take the offense in the spring and shatter the fragmented crusading armies, bringing the once hopeful crusade to a bloody end. That, of course, was dependent upon the crusaders doing nothing but fall apart until spring. Which, unfortunately for the Turks, they didnt.
Why John Hunyadi decided to attack Zlatitsa Pass after his last failure, and to make it worse, in the dead of winter, no one knows except for Hunyadi himself. It became popular in later chroniclers to claim that Hunyadi was acting on a vision from God. Perhaps more likely he was acting on a report from a scout. Or perhaps even more likely, he was just bored. Whatever the reason, on 1 February 1443, Hunyadi broke camp under the cover of a snowstorm, with only his loyal, veteran troops of Severin and Transylvania. As the Turks, who were obviously not expecting someone stupid enough to attack in the middle of winter, huddled in their tents, trying to keep warm, dismounted knights stormed the fortifications erected to defend the pass. In a few short hours, Hunyadi erased the stain of his previous defeat at Zlatitsa Pass and had opened the path to the south.
Hunyadi, having been used to fighting in the winter from previous experiences against the Hussites and Turks, kept pushing the battered Turk army that faced him, refusing to give it room to reform. Meanwhile, his rival Vitelleschi, unwilling to see Hunyadi gain all the glory from the impromptu winter campaign, also broke camp, moving south.
Almost immediately, or so it seemed, the crusaders gained new life. The one who defeated Hunyadi in the First Battle of Zlatitsa Pass was an Islamic Albanian named George Kastrioti, one of the Turks best generals. After the defeat of the Second Battle of Zlatitsa Pass, this Albanian, along with three hundred of his countrymen, deserted to the crusaders. Now Kastrioti was the son of Gjon Kastrioti, lord of Middle Albania, who had been forced to give up his son as a hostage after his defeat by the Turks. Approaching Vitelleschi, Kastrioti persuaded him to march on Albania, luring him with promises of an easy victory, which would earn him more glory than Hunyadi.
As spring arrived, the Turks scrambled to contain the crusaders. With Hunyadis success, Murad changed his goals from defeating Władysław to destroying the troublesome Hunyadi. In this, Murad was helped by the civil war that Demetrios started. With the confusion caused by this civil war, the crusaders blockade of the straits broke down, allowing the bulk of the Turkish force, which had been stranded in Anatolia, to cross into Europe. Leaving a small force to hold back Władysław, Murad took control of this newly arrived army to hunt down Hunyadi.
What followed was perhaps the most underappreciated of Hunyadis campaigns. Outnumbered five-to-one, Hunyadi fell back into a war of maneuver. Using the superior mobility his smaller, veteran force gave him, Hunyadi danced around Murads forces, appearing where least expected only to immediately disappear, earning him the title Ghost of Rumelia from the frustrated Turks.
While Hunyadi continued in his underappreciated task of tying down the large Turkish army, Vitelleschi was exploiting his connection with George Kastrioti. When word spread through Albania that Kastrioti was arriving with a liberating army, the Albanians rose up in revolt. Quickly, Vitelleschis army doubled in size due to the influx of Albanian princes, eager to throw of the yoke of the hated Turks. At the castle of Krujë, which had fallen to the crusaders in an almost bloodless battle due to the opening of the gates by sympathizers, Kastrioti was crowned King of Albania by Vitelleschi, acting in his capacity of bishop of Florence. Though there were scattered pockets of Turkish garrisons that Vitelleschi relished stamping out, for the most part Albania was liberated, liberated, that is, unless another Turkish army arrived.
The rest of the campaign season went by in a whirlwind of activity. In Albania, Vitelleschi took out the frustration of being slowed by so many small garrisons by slaughtering everyone in them in the most gruesome ways when they finally fell. In the north, Władysław had finally returned to Wallachia after dealing with his Polish concerns. With renewed energy, he had pushed the depleted Turks out of Wallachia, the Turks Rumelian soldiers especially proved noteworthy for their general untrustworthiness and incompetence.
Even the Romans proved to bring some good news. Demetrios had, with Turkish help, moved on Constantinople, hoping to spark an Orthodox uprising against Emperor John and his pro-western unification policies. However, in this he proved to be stymied by the conciliatory attitude of the counciliarists. With the retention of their own rites, and the sweeping powers of local synods, many of the clergy did not resent the union, at least not enough to jump into bed with the Muslims over it. In fact, the Council of Florence had made so many concessions, especially with regards to its efforts at curbing the spiritual power of the pope, that some even thought that it was the west who had agreed to the easts demands for reunification. As a result, instead of being welcomed by a massive revolt, Demetrios could only muster some mercenaries hired by Turkish gold, as well as a few supporters. Thus, Demetrios was reduced to engaging in a near hopeless siege of Constantinople. This siege faced its expected outcome, when, late in the summer of 1443, Constantine managed to shift a large part of his army from Morea to Constantinople with the help of the crusaders fleet. Caught between Constantines newly arrived army and the walls of the city, Demetrios met defeat, being captured as he attempted to flee. Despite his rebellion, the Emperor proved gracious, merely exiling, instead of killing, him.
In fact, the only place where Crusader fortunes waned was in the theatre commanded by one of their best generals, Hunyadi. This was, however, through no fault of Hunyadis own, but rather stemmed from a lack of soldiers. The size of Hunyadis forces had already taken a blow when Branković left, and as the casualties of his campaigns mounted, Hunyadis forces only dwindled. Outnumbered, Hunyadi was eventually driven back to Zlatitsa Pass, sparking the Third Battle of Zlatitsa Pass. Though taking heavy casualties, Murad managed to break through, forcing Hunyadi to fall back to Sofia. Since Sofia was an undesirable location to make a stand, having never fully recovered from when the Turks burned it the year before, Hunyadi continued to fall back, the Turks nipping at his heels.
Hunyadi was saved, however, not by a friendly army, but by the arrival of winter. Despite the temporary refuge that winter brought, Hunyadi was not comfortable with his position. To the south, the forces of Murad lurked, only a spring offensive away from crushing his army. To the north lay the lands of Branković, whose loyalty to the crusades was doubtful at best. At worst, Branković was a threat to sally against Hunyadi from the north, trapping Hunyadi between his own army and the Turks. If Hunyadis army was defeated, the crusaders would be split, Władysław, along with his important kingdoms of Hungary and Poland to the north with Vitelleschi and the Romans to the south.
To forestall this, Hunyadi busied himself sending out messengers, appealing not only to Władysław to come to his aid, but also begging the other crusader armies to make a vigorous offensive in the spring to relieve the pressure against him. A few weeks later, a messenger from Władysław rode into Hunyadis camp, not with promises of reinforcements, but with authorization for Hunyadi to negotiate a peace on behalf of the crusaders. Though Hunyadi personally preferred to continue the fight against the Turks, he also saw the wisdom in a few years truce. Both Hungary and Poland, the largest of the contributors to the crusade were having difficulties at home, which were starting to impair the efforts of the crusades. In addition, the Turks had received the best blows the crusaders had to offer and not only still stood, but were in position to deliver some crushing blows of their own.
But however much the crusaders, or at least Władysław, wanted peace, Murad perhaps wanted it more. The Balkans were proving to be a whirlpool, sucking in men and resources. Elsewhere in the Empire, Turkish vassals were taking note of the Turkish preoccupation with the Balkans and were using it to assert more independence than their Turkish lords would have liked. Finally, as long as the crusaders controlled the seas, supplies from Asia were uncertain at best, and while Europe could supply most of the armys needs, as had been proved throughout the campaign, the European troops the Turks could call upon were uncertain at best and worthless at worst.
Thus, as the winter months passed, messengers and letters flowed between the Turks and crusaders, and between the various crusader leaders as well. Finally, on 23 February1444, the Turks and crusaders agreed on a peace treaty. Each side agreed to respect a ten year truce. Serbia and Albania were both recognized as independent countries under Hungarian influence, led by Branković and Kastrioti respectively. Rome officially received the fealty of the Duchy of Athens while Venice received Thessaloniki and Galliopoli. Poland-Hungary, in addition to receiving influence over the various newly independent states, also received Wallachia. For his services in the crusade, Hunyadi was made Voivode of Wallachia,[1] which was added to his previous voivodeship of Transylvania.
For his part, Vitelleschi was offered the position of Confessor of the King in Albania, but he refused, having no desire to stay in the area now that it seemed as if peace would descend. So, after staying and enjoying the considerable hospitality of Kastrioti, who treated him as an honored guest for his part in winning him the kingdom, Vitelleschi left Albania in July. A small core from his recent army joined him, as he made the voyage back to Florence, sure that they could gain a small fortune by fighting under Vitelleschi in one of the innumerable wars that were raging across Italy when they left for the crusades. For his part, Vitelleschi locked himself up in the spacious cabin provided for him, pouring over dispatches from Italy, catching up on what he missed while gone, and smiling over the possibilities that awaited him.
[1]Governor of a province, roughly equivalent to the title Duke
The Sacred Bonds:
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
In the name of God, for securing greater help, protection and defense in our just cause, we will turn to Him as to the most just avenger of pride, which is unbearable, to His Mother, the Virgin Mary, and to our patrons and those of our Kingdom: Stephen, Imre, Gerhard, Ladislaus and we will ask them to turn their anger against the enemies, the proud as well as the wicked, who are only appeased by spilled blood, the tearing out of entrails and breaking of necks. Placing our trust in the most sure defense of God and His saints, and in their steadfast help, we am sure that they will shield us and their people with their might and intercession and will not allow us and their people to succumb to the violence of such horrible enemies. We do not at all claim the choice of a battlefield, but, as becomes Christians and Christian nobility, we leave it to God, wishing to have whatever place of battle and whatever outcome of the war that God's mercy and fate will determine for us today, hopeful that the heavens will put an end to the Turkish relentlessness so that as a result, their wicked and unbearable pride will be defeated once and for all. For we are sure that heaven will support a more valid cause. On the field we tread, on which the battle will be waged, Mars, the mutual and just judge of war, will erase and humiliate the impudence of our enemies, which reaches to the skies."
-Speech of John Hunyadi before the Second Battle of Zlatitsa Pass as recorded by Jan Długoszs Annals
Though the crusading armies won many victories in the opening year of their crusade, as 1442 turned into 1443, the morale of the crusading armies started to drop. From the south came rumors that Demetrios Palaiologos, the brother of Emperor John VIII and Constantine Palaiologos, who had been exiled due to his general untrustworthiness, had made an alliance with the Turks whereby they would support him in his attempt to gain the throne of the Romans. Meanwhile, in the north, King Władysław had been forced to leave his army in their defensive positions while traveling north to put down a rumored uprising among the nobles in Poland. The crusader armies in Sofia fared no better. Amidst the continued feud between perhaps the two best crusader generals, Hunyadi and Vitelleschi, came news of Serbian despot Đurađ Branković leaving Hunyadis army together with his Serbian troops, going back to the recently liberated Serbia, with rumors of him selling out to the Turks following him home.
As January neared its end, it seemed certain, in certain circles, that the Turks would take the offense in the spring and shatter the fragmented crusading armies, bringing the once hopeful crusade to a bloody end. That, of course, was dependent upon the crusaders doing nothing but fall apart until spring. Which, unfortunately for the Turks, they didnt.
Why John Hunyadi decided to attack Zlatitsa Pass after his last failure, and to make it worse, in the dead of winter, no one knows except for Hunyadi himself. It became popular in later chroniclers to claim that Hunyadi was acting on a vision from God. Perhaps more likely he was acting on a report from a scout. Or perhaps even more likely, he was just bored. Whatever the reason, on 1 February 1443, Hunyadi broke camp under the cover of a snowstorm, with only his loyal, veteran troops of Severin and Transylvania. As the Turks, who were obviously not expecting someone stupid enough to attack in the middle of winter, huddled in their tents, trying to keep warm, dismounted knights stormed the fortifications erected to defend the pass. In a few short hours, Hunyadi erased the stain of his previous defeat at Zlatitsa Pass and had opened the path to the south.
Hunyadi, having been used to fighting in the winter from previous experiences against the Hussites and Turks, kept pushing the battered Turk army that faced him, refusing to give it room to reform. Meanwhile, his rival Vitelleschi, unwilling to see Hunyadi gain all the glory from the impromptu winter campaign, also broke camp, moving south.
Almost immediately, or so it seemed, the crusaders gained new life. The one who defeated Hunyadi in the First Battle of Zlatitsa Pass was an Islamic Albanian named George Kastrioti, one of the Turks best generals. After the defeat of the Second Battle of Zlatitsa Pass, this Albanian, along with three hundred of his countrymen, deserted to the crusaders. Now Kastrioti was the son of Gjon Kastrioti, lord of Middle Albania, who had been forced to give up his son as a hostage after his defeat by the Turks. Approaching Vitelleschi, Kastrioti persuaded him to march on Albania, luring him with promises of an easy victory, which would earn him more glory than Hunyadi.
As spring arrived, the Turks scrambled to contain the crusaders. With Hunyadis success, Murad changed his goals from defeating Władysław to destroying the troublesome Hunyadi. In this, Murad was helped by the civil war that Demetrios started. With the confusion caused by this civil war, the crusaders blockade of the straits broke down, allowing the bulk of the Turkish force, which had been stranded in Anatolia, to cross into Europe. Leaving a small force to hold back Władysław, Murad took control of this newly arrived army to hunt down Hunyadi.
What followed was perhaps the most underappreciated of Hunyadis campaigns. Outnumbered five-to-one, Hunyadi fell back into a war of maneuver. Using the superior mobility his smaller, veteran force gave him, Hunyadi danced around Murads forces, appearing where least expected only to immediately disappear, earning him the title Ghost of Rumelia from the frustrated Turks.
While Hunyadi continued in his underappreciated task of tying down the large Turkish army, Vitelleschi was exploiting his connection with George Kastrioti. When word spread through Albania that Kastrioti was arriving with a liberating army, the Albanians rose up in revolt. Quickly, Vitelleschis army doubled in size due to the influx of Albanian princes, eager to throw of the yoke of the hated Turks. At the castle of Krujë, which had fallen to the crusaders in an almost bloodless battle due to the opening of the gates by sympathizers, Kastrioti was crowned King of Albania by Vitelleschi, acting in his capacity of bishop of Florence. Though there were scattered pockets of Turkish garrisons that Vitelleschi relished stamping out, for the most part Albania was liberated, liberated, that is, unless another Turkish army arrived.
The rest of the campaign season went by in a whirlwind of activity. In Albania, Vitelleschi took out the frustration of being slowed by so many small garrisons by slaughtering everyone in them in the most gruesome ways when they finally fell. In the north, Władysław had finally returned to Wallachia after dealing with his Polish concerns. With renewed energy, he had pushed the depleted Turks out of Wallachia, the Turks Rumelian soldiers especially proved noteworthy for their general untrustworthiness and incompetence.
Even the Romans proved to bring some good news. Demetrios had, with Turkish help, moved on Constantinople, hoping to spark an Orthodox uprising against Emperor John and his pro-western unification policies. However, in this he proved to be stymied by the conciliatory attitude of the counciliarists. With the retention of their own rites, and the sweeping powers of local synods, many of the clergy did not resent the union, at least not enough to jump into bed with the Muslims over it. In fact, the Council of Florence had made so many concessions, especially with regards to its efforts at curbing the spiritual power of the pope, that some even thought that it was the west who had agreed to the easts demands for reunification. As a result, instead of being welcomed by a massive revolt, Demetrios could only muster some mercenaries hired by Turkish gold, as well as a few supporters. Thus, Demetrios was reduced to engaging in a near hopeless siege of Constantinople. This siege faced its expected outcome, when, late in the summer of 1443, Constantine managed to shift a large part of his army from Morea to Constantinople with the help of the crusaders fleet. Caught between Constantines newly arrived army and the walls of the city, Demetrios met defeat, being captured as he attempted to flee. Despite his rebellion, the Emperor proved gracious, merely exiling, instead of killing, him.
In fact, the only place where Crusader fortunes waned was in the theatre commanded by one of their best generals, Hunyadi. This was, however, through no fault of Hunyadis own, but rather stemmed from a lack of soldiers. The size of Hunyadis forces had already taken a blow when Branković left, and as the casualties of his campaigns mounted, Hunyadis forces only dwindled. Outnumbered, Hunyadi was eventually driven back to Zlatitsa Pass, sparking the Third Battle of Zlatitsa Pass. Though taking heavy casualties, Murad managed to break through, forcing Hunyadi to fall back to Sofia. Since Sofia was an undesirable location to make a stand, having never fully recovered from when the Turks burned it the year before, Hunyadi continued to fall back, the Turks nipping at his heels.
Hunyadi was saved, however, not by a friendly army, but by the arrival of winter. Despite the temporary refuge that winter brought, Hunyadi was not comfortable with his position. To the south, the forces of Murad lurked, only a spring offensive away from crushing his army. To the north lay the lands of Branković, whose loyalty to the crusades was doubtful at best. At worst, Branković was a threat to sally against Hunyadi from the north, trapping Hunyadi between his own army and the Turks. If Hunyadis army was defeated, the crusaders would be split, Władysław, along with his important kingdoms of Hungary and Poland to the north with Vitelleschi and the Romans to the south.
To forestall this, Hunyadi busied himself sending out messengers, appealing not only to Władysław to come to his aid, but also begging the other crusader armies to make a vigorous offensive in the spring to relieve the pressure against him. A few weeks later, a messenger from Władysław rode into Hunyadis camp, not with promises of reinforcements, but with authorization for Hunyadi to negotiate a peace on behalf of the crusaders. Though Hunyadi personally preferred to continue the fight against the Turks, he also saw the wisdom in a few years truce. Both Hungary and Poland, the largest of the contributors to the crusade were having difficulties at home, which were starting to impair the efforts of the crusades. In addition, the Turks had received the best blows the crusaders had to offer and not only still stood, but were in position to deliver some crushing blows of their own.
But however much the crusaders, or at least Władysław, wanted peace, Murad perhaps wanted it more. The Balkans were proving to be a whirlpool, sucking in men and resources. Elsewhere in the Empire, Turkish vassals were taking note of the Turkish preoccupation with the Balkans and were using it to assert more independence than their Turkish lords would have liked. Finally, as long as the crusaders controlled the seas, supplies from Asia were uncertain at best, and while Europe could supply most of the armys needs, as had been proved throughout the campaign, the European troops the Turks could call upon were uncertain at best and worthless at worst.
Thus, as the winter months passed, messengers and letters flowed between the Turks and crusaders, and between the various crusader leaders as well. Finally, on 23 February1444, the Turks and crusaders agreed on a peace treaty. Each side agreed to respect a ten year truce. Serbia and Albania were both recognized as independent countries under Hungarian influence, led by Branković and Kastrioti respectively. Rome officially received the fealty of the Duchy of Athens while Venice received Thessaloniki and Galliopoli. Poland-Hungary, in addition to receiving influence over the various newly independent states, also received Wallachia. For his services in the crusade, Hunyadi was made Voivode of Wallachia,[1] which was added to his previous voivodeship of Transylvania.
For his part, Vitelleschi was offered the position of Confessor of the King in Albania, but he refused, having no desire to stay in the area now that it seemed as if peace would descend. So, after staying and enjoying the considerable hospitality of Kastrioti, who treated him as an honored guest for his part in winning him the kingdom, Vitelleschi left Albania in July. A small core from his recent army joined him, as he made the voyage back to Florence, sure that they could gain a small fortune by fighting under Vitelleschi in one of the innumerable wars that were raging across Italy when they left for the crusades. For his part, Vitelleschi locked himself up in the spacious cabin provided for him, pouring over dispatches from Italy, catching up on what he missed while gone, and smiling over the possibilities that awaited him.
[1]Governor of a province, roughly equivalent to the title Duke
What? The Turks are still alive?!?!?!? Sacrilege!
About the Hautevilles - yeah, I suppose, but I wanted something interesting to happen in Ireland. I suppose it's a bit silly, but one could compare it to the Israelite exodus from early in AFSNES I without the extra population. Maybe the numbers are a bit inflated; maybe I could backdate it to before Norman Iberia gets wiped out.
About the Hautevilles - yeah, I suppose, but I wanted something interesting to happen in Ireland.
I suppose it's a bit silly, but one could compare it to the Israelite exodus from early in AFSNES I without the extra population. Maybe the numbers are a bit inflated; maybe I could backdate it to before Norman Iberia gets wiped out.
The Strategos
Thanatos
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2002
- Messages
- 1,175
You got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Or would you rather it turn out like the Crusade of Varna? (And yes, I do realize you were joking)
About the Hautevilles - yeah, I suppose, but I wanted something interesting to happen in Ireland.
It still doesn't make sense, why would Spanish Normans care about Ireland? It is just too far away and too insignificant to make it worth spending the resources to conquer.
Eh. Veritas.
Also, an idea: Villeneuve isn't a freaking moron (or perhaps someone smarter is in charge of the fleet), and Napoleon manages to land with a few corps in southern England in August 1805. I predict the very rapid dissolution of the French Empire, at least in early 1806...but as to what happens next, there are a few different options. I've looked through Alexander's and Czartoryski's diplomatic missives, and apparently the Pole in charge of Russia's foreign service was quite interested in reestablishing Poland, even if under Russian leadership. I'm not sure what the Russians would demand in exchange for rehabilitating Germany back across the Rhein exactly: perhaps back to pre-Second Partition borders in exchange for some other grand project of Friedrich Wilhelm III (who was damned close to joining the war in earlier 1805; perhaps Haugwitz's counsel would have succeeded in completely turning him if Napoleon were on the other side of the Channel) and/or Franz II.
The question is, what...?
das
Regeneration In Process
And I do agree with the implied assessment of such a campaign's fortune, but this does beg the question of whether or not Villeneuve was so wrong to fail.
Two words: OH YES. I do recall reading about a project to eventually move the Russian Empire's capital to Warsaw, to tie Poland closer to Russia and at the same time to bring Russia even closer into Europe; St. Petersburg is a window, but Warsaw is a door.
Would the Prussians even need Russian help here? [opportunism]While the French forces back in Europe fight the Austrians, the Prussians could move in, landgrab, sign an alliance with the new French government and then march on Vienna together; if it works then the Prussians get a German Confederacy headed by themselves, and the French get a friendly buffer state allowing them to rest and reconstruct.[/opportunism] A less drastic version could work too.
Of course he wasn't. That's why I like this idea.And I do agree with the implied assessment of such a campaign's fortune, but this does beg the question of whether or not Villeneuve was so wrong to fail.
Whoa. I'm not sure if the Russians would have been *that* drastic, but then again Alexander was an odd bird (though not as weird as Paul). I guess that's entirely possible; the Petersburg court moves back and forth between that city and Moscow a lot already as it is; why not a third "capital"?das said:
But how much of Poland would the Prussians and Austrians give up?
Um...we do have the problem of Friedrich Wilhelm III. It would be a problem enough to coax him into a war with France; if Napoleon leaves the Continent then I'm not sure that he would be particularly inclined to fight Austria and Prussia practically all by himself (France of course sort of collapsing into civil war). While the Prussian army isn't as terrible as many say it was (the reasons for the failure at Jena were many, mostly lying among von Braunschweig's command suckiness and the fact that the Prussians were fighting alone against the God of War Himself as von Clausewitz has said), it would have to fight a) the Russian troops mobilized on his eastern border, b) the Austrians that Erzherzog Karl had built into the plan to fight against the Prussians, c) the French in the Rheinland, and d) perhaps even the British, if Berlin tries to go after Hannover like they always wanted to (and like Boney tried to get them to do on several occasions).das said:
But then again, what you said is entirely possible too, especially if the Prussians enlist Alexander's help in exchange for a large chunk of Poland for that other project - again, perhaps the post-First Partition borders would work. Since Bavaria basically hates Austria, they will help to block Austrian expansion into southern Germany; the Habsburgs could be compensated significantly in Italy, although I can't imagine why they'd want to or be happy with it. The Balkans are already becoming a poor location for Habsburg expansion as the Serbs and Greeks get all nationalistic; if Germany and then Poland are closed, then I don't see much of a remedy at all outside of giving them basically all of northern Italy.
Who would get Belgium? The Austrians don't want it at all anymore, and the Dutch Republic isn't in the British good books, while the Oranje don't have enough support to even get the Seven Provinces as of 1805-6.
silver 2039
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What if Tokhataymesh won the war against Timur and preserved Golden Horde's power?
What if the Malmukes had lost at Ain Jalut, or the Il-Khanate was not torn apart by civil war and the Khan was able to revenge the defeat and advance into Egypt and further into Turkey and such?
What if Babur's soldiers mutuined and killed him on their campagin against the Rajputs when he poured their liquor into the ground and the Mughals never took power? Would Sher Khan be able to establish a long lasting empire much more easily? Actually would Sher Khan be able to rise to power in the first place?
What if the Malmukes had lost at Ain Jalut, or the Il-Khanate was not torn apart by civil war and the Khan was able to revenge the defeat and advance into Egypt and further into Turkey and such?
What if Babur's soldiers mutuined and killed him on their campagin against the Rajputs when he poured their liquor into the ground and the Mughals never took power? Would Sher Khan be able to establish a long lasting empire much more easily? Actually would Sher Khan be able to rise to power in the first place?
