1632 continued: Before Blucher can invade the theme of Bulgaria, he must first reduce the northeast section of Serbia, which has thus far remained free. Disgusted after hearing of Lazar’s capitulation and installation as Despot by Theodor, when he hears word of Durad’s arrival in Ohrid the regional governor immediately recognizes Durad as the King of Serbia as opposed to ‘Lazar, the betrayer of the Serbian people’.
Domestikos Laskaris knows that he doesn’t have the numbers to take on Blucher, who has at least 25,000+ more men in his main host, head-on. But he aims to fight. The Allies will be engaged daily, at some point or another, wherever they happen to be. His aim, to bleed the army as much as possible. As Blucher advances, Laskaris retires before him, but every day is accompanied by gunfire.
June 3 sees the start of the Long Battle of the Iron Gates, not a set piece battle but a series of continuous rolling engagements, with at some points over forty thousand soldiers in action. Blucher continues steadily pushing forward but clearing the Iron Gates costs him over nine thousand casualties alone.
Whilst Vidin is important, Laskaris knows his army is far more crucial than any fortress, so he does not contest Blucher when he sets it under siege. But he remains in the area, constantly harassing Blucher’s ranks as Vauban sets up his siege lines.
Meanwhile on the Danube the Roman and Allied fleets battle, the Allies fielding a new weapon, called ‘battle-barges’. They are barges with a stern paddlewheel which is powered by pedals, the peddlers cranking to the beat of drums just like rowers on a galley but without the vulnerable banks of oars. The paddlewheel is obviously a weakness but set in the stern it is much harder to hit when approaching an enemy.
Their sides are raised to protect the crew but still make for a much lower profile in the water, as there isn’t the need for above-water oar ports. This makes them a smaller target.
They are armed with heavy muskets and some light cannon but their primary weapon is the new blast-ram. On the ship’s bow is fixed an underwater spar, partly hollow, at the front end of which is a box with a reinforced rear end and a spike on the front. The whole apparatus is attached to the barge with chains. The idea is that explosives are placed in the box and then the barge rams the enemy vessel, the spike sticking in the enemy hull below the waterline. Then a fuse is lit on the barge, which races down the hollow part of the spar and then ignites the explosives. With the rear end of the box reinforced, the explosion takes the path of least resistance, forward into the punctured underwater (and therefore weaker) timbers of the enemy ship. The chains are then broken so the spar falls off, letting the barge reverse-paddle out of the battle.
These come as a nasty surprise, inflicting heavy losses on the already battered Roman river flotilla, but they quickly figure out the paddlewheel weakness. They equip their gunboats with more light (and faster-firing weapons), aiming to shoot up the paddlewheels. Easily damaged, a battle-barge is helpless then.
The Allies then get a nasty surprise as their gunboats approach Vidin. Vauban himself watches as the flotilla approaches and then suddenly an explosion erupts under the bow of the lead ship, damaging several oars on the port side. The galley slaloms to the side, another pair of explosions bursting under its starboard side, sending clouds of wooden splinters, some as thick and long as a man’s arms, chewing through the crew, whilst a fourth explosion bursts under the stern. The shattered wreck sinks shortly afterwards. No Roman vessels are in sight.
Before retiring downstream, the Roman river fleet started laying the first known contact mines, a series of two-chambered barrels. One chamber is filled with air to keep them buoyant and the other filled with gunpowder. The whole apparatus is then sealed and anchored to the river bottom, ideally so that it is a couple of feet below the surface, deep enough so that it’s hard to spot but shallow enough that they’ll hit the enemy on the weaker underwater timbers but not on their tougher keels. Inside the barrels beside the gunpowder is a flintlock mechanism. A strong enough impact trips the flintlock, the sparks igniting the priming powder around it, and then the barrel’s whole contents explode. To help direct the explosion sideways, the tops and bottoms of the barrels are reinforced. The disadvantage is that the charges are quite weak because of the need to keep a lot of air in the barrel.
Despite the setback Vauban presses his siege of Vidin, which has modern fortification but not the size of Belgrade. This time there are no unlucky accidents and the garrison resists stoutly. Vauban’s barrages are met with sulfur stink-bombs and catapults hurling clods of burning belladonna giving off clouds of poisonous smoke, besides the usual weapons of war.
This early chemical warfare is not enough though and Vidin is eventually forced to capitulate, but not before costing the allies three thousand casualties and a month.
Blucher pushes on, the campaign continuing in the same vein. Laskaris remains just out of range, snarling and bickering with Allied contingents, gradually working up the casualty lists. Almus (Lom to the Bulgarians) and Kozloduy both fall but each take a fortnight to be reduced. Meanwhile the Vlachs are raiding all across the Danube as Blucher is unable to secure both banks, no raid individually significant but each one another cut to the Allied behemoth.
Nikopolis proves to be a harder nut to crack, keeping even Vauban out for six weeks. During the siege Laskaris comes up, mauls a large foraging detachment, and when a twenty-thousand strong force stationed to cover the foragers moves up, he mauls that as well before retiring as Blucher comes up with the main body.
Still Blucher presses on, investing Svishtov, Vauban taking it after a fortnight. By this point winter is now descending in force across Bulgaria, bringing major operations to a halt. The next serious fortress on the Danube is Ruse, where the Danube starts curving north. Ruse is a major port along the Danube, the terminus of a major highway, the other end of which is Varna on the Black Sea coast.
Whilst Blucher had hoped to secure Ruse before the winter to use as a base against Varna, the planned springboard for the attack on Constantinople, the campaign seems to be quite a success. He has taken five major fortresses, two of which, Vidin and Nikopolis, are first-class, and seized a significant chunk of the Danube river valley, although no point is secure from raids from the northern Vlach bank.
Said fortresses are repaired and well-garrisoned, meaning that the Romans can’t swing behind him and take them back quickly. They’d be forced into a siege and potentially pinned between the citadel in question and Blucher’s host. And despite the need to garrison those fortresses, Blucher’s field army is still the same size as when he started his advance in the spring. Supplying his huge army is difficult but control of the Danube and forced requisitions from the Bulgarian population (conducted in a much more disciplined manner then in Macedonia) make it possible, although the proportion of cavalry in the army, heretofore a significant advantage he had over the Romans, is dwindling.
Yet having said all that, things are not all roses. Despite several receiving bloody noses, Vlach raids are incessant, whilst Roman trapezites and local partisans add their own blows to the fray. Between those, Laskaris’ constant drive to rack up kill counts, and the normal wastage of war, Blucher’s host has taken 30,000 casualties, over a third of their number. The flow of reinforcements means he’s able to replace those losses, for now, but he and his entire senior staff are openly concerned about what’ll be left of Germany’s menfolk at this rate. The Romans are taking heavy losses as well; although he was failed to bring above a general engagement Blucher has been energetic about attacking the Romans for his part. But despite those losses, Laskaris’ army has grown by 10 tourmai over the campaign and the Domestikos expresses optimism for more forcefulness in the coming year.
Although Demetrios III Sideros approves wholeheartedly of the Domestikos’ aim to kill Germans wherever and whenever they are, his success inadvertently undermines the Emperor’s efforts to exploit the fact that the enemy host is composed of various allies. Sheets of propaganda pamphlets are constantly left where Allied soldiers can get their hands on them, which work on existing grievances. Brandenburgers don’t care for Poles; Rhinelanders fear and hate the Triunes.
During the siege of Nikopolis, a brawl breaks out between the Cologne contingent commanded by the Archbishop ‘Bone-breaker’ and Polish troops, which leaves over two dozen wounded, none too seriously save one Pole who is paralyzed from the waist down. Casimir is utterly furious and sends troops down to arrest the Cologne soldiers responsible. The Cologne troops prominently brandish their weapons in response, the tense confrontation not helped by the Archbishop, who has developed a strong personal antipathy towards the Polish King (he is not alone in that), publicly announcing that king or not, he’ll break Casimir’s nose personally if Polish troopers seize any of his men.
Blucher is highly irritated by the whole affray. Now dependent almost entirely on Hungarian and Polish cavalry for horsemen, he cannot afford to alienate Casimir. Yet Archbishop Hohenzollern is his most effective point-man and commands the second largest contingent (after that commanded by the Crown Prince of Bohemia) from the Holy Roman Empire not drawn from imperial lands. The other princely contingents look to him for leadership. So he can’t alienate him either. Plus Blucher is irritated that Casimir unilaterally took it upon himself to arrest men from a contingent that was not under his authority.
Fortunately for Blucher, this is the point where Laskaris comes up to pummel the foragers and then their covering force, so the potential fight breaks up to go pursue the Romans. Given a stark reminder by the six thousand casualties Laskaris inflicts before he withdraws, that here if they don’t cooperate they will die, a compromise is patched up. Casimir will drop any charges in exchange for the Archbishop paying a large annual stipend to the paralyzed Pole and his family for the rest of his life. That settles the matter.
But on the march to Svishtov Blucher privately has a talk with Hohenzollern, pointing out that his threat of breaking Casimir’s nose was hardly diplomatic. Hohenzollern agrees and promises not to do so again. ‘He’ll break something else instead.’