Isaac's Empire 2.0
- Thread starter Basileus Giorgios
- Start date
Are the Jusen in Baghdad still pagan? It seems logical that their next target would rich, juicy Egypt. Perhaps they can soften up Egypt and Palestine for a future Roman reconquest?
Good update, BG!
Thanks!
As I discussed above, the Jurchens have a whole spectrum of religious views, ranging from fully converted Muslims and Christians to fully unconverted worshippers of the sky goddess Abka Hehe. In between is a wide spectrum of belief. On the whole, the majority of them still follow the traditional religion, but the numbers of traditionalists are slowly falling as the Abrahamic faiths (and Zoroastrians) make more and more inroads. The question at this stage is what the religious endgame is for the Jurchen Empire: plenty of options exist.
As for Egypt... perhaps. We'll certainly be looking at Egypt in the next update, and there're some spoilery details on the Wikia page which set us up for the next update: which is by the way 2/3rds written. Up to you if you want to check them out!
Great update BG, fantastic as usual.
Thanks!
I'm considering rebooting the old spinoff thread that the original IE had, as we're now approaching the beginnings of the territory it covered. Also, Ares96 has got a cracking series approaching that'll cover the history of the ATL Baltic, with a particular focus on the Swedes. Any thoughts? Better to open a new thread, or to keep things all together at the main IE 2.0 "base"?
Thanks!
I'm considering rebooting the old spinoff thread that the original IE had, as we're now approaching the beginnings of the territory it covered. Also, Ares96 has got a cracking series approaching that'll cover the history of the ATL Baltic, with a particular focus on the Swedes. Any thoughts? Better to open a new thread, or to keep things all together at the main IE 2.0 "base"?
Maybe a separate thread would best?
Anyway ,love the updates as usual and I am curious to see how the Europeans face the Jurchens and to see if they try and move into Central Europe.
I think I'll probably do a separate thread: I just hope I can fit a link to it into my signature! Does anybody else have any thoughts on this matter?
As for the Jurchens: their European exploits will be mentioned in the next update, but not dwelt on in detail. I may do a "main narrative" update next, then a "spin-off" one talking about Europe in the thirteenth century, before returning to the main narrative. I have to say, I was always excited to get to the fourteenth century when re-writing, as that was probably my favourite part of the original IE, with my favourite characters. Now, it's within touching distance!
Well, I don't think you'd find anyone who would object to weekly updates (unless, of course, you'd previously been updating more often than that), so long as you feel you can maintain the quality of this timeline on such a schedule
Well, I don't think you'd find anyone who would object to weekly updates (unless, of course, you'd previously been updating more often than that), so long as you feel you can maintain the quality of this timeline on such a schedule
I think for the next few weeks at least a weekly update schedule can be maintained. Chapter Twenty is ready to go live now, and Chapter Twenty One is half done. Ares' Baltic chapter might slot between the two of them, and I'll try to get a German-centred piece in too. Definitely get your feeling on quality, though!
Chapter Twenty: Ākǔttǎ Khan
Chapter Twenty: Ākǔttǎ Khan
"This man fancied himself the Great Alexander reborn... and was to other barbarians as a bull is to a lamb"
Eumathios the Librarian, fifteenth century Cypriot historian
"This man fancied himself the Great Alexander reborn... and was to other barbarians as a bull is to a lamb"
Eumathios the Librarian, fifteenth century Cypriot historian
In the spring of 1268, the Prince of Tao, David VIII Bagrationi rose up in revolt against his Jušen masters. An army despatched by Wúqǐmǎi Khan was routed, and the newly independent prince claimed for himself the lost glories of the kingdom of Kartvelia. For one brief summer, David’s independence thrived, but it could not last. Then a second Jušen army marched north in October, and this time the rebels’ luck ran out. The principality’s armies were destroyed in detail in half a dozen battles, and its fields and towns put to the torch. David Bagrationi himself was brought back to Baghdad and sacrificed to the spirit of the Jušen sky goddess, Abka Hehe. Disloyalty, for a vassal of the Great Khan, would not be tolerated.
It was a lesson well noted in Constantinople. Shortly after the death of David Bagrationi, an embassy was despatched by Demetrios Simeopoulos in the name of Constantine X to the Khan’s court. Led by one Nikēphoros Synadenos (i), a minor noble who had risen high under the regime of the Uncle, it lavished the Great Khan and his court with gold, precious silks, and soaring panegyric. Four years later, with Simeopoulos dead, the same policy was repeated, this time with Nikēphoros’ younger brother John leading the expedition. When it came to relations with the Empire’s most dangerous neighbour, the policy of Constantinople was simple: avoid hostility, whatever the cost.
Yet as John Synadenos and his companions would find out, this was a task that was becoming increasingly difficult. The embassy arrived in Baghdad in the last weeks of December 1273, to find the city gripped by a sense of deep foreboding. The Great Khan Wúqǐmǎi was now in his late sixties and had not been seen outside his palace since the summer, and the rumours were that he had fallen deeply ill. Lining up succeed him were an array of Jušen princelings, the Khan’s sons and nephews by Arabs, Iranians and Armenians. When news of Wúqǐmǎi’s death finally reached the city on the tenth of January, there was uproar. The Great Khan’s funerary celebrations were interrupted by fractious squabbling by the men who aspired to be his heir: one nephew was actually butchered on the day of the funeral and burnt alongside Wúqǐmǎi (ii).
Weeks more furious and violent squabbling continued unabated. The ambassadors found themselves trapped within the fevered atmosphere of the Round City, and their writings back to Constantinople began to take on a distinctly more agitated tone. “I pray that God defend us”, wrote John Synadenos in late March, “for the fury of the Scythians knows no bounds on this Earth”. Synadenos’ prayers went unanswered. By April, a clear candidate had emerged to succeed Wúqǐmǎi: a talented twenty four year old who unusually retained his native Jušen name of Ākǔttǎ. Ākǔttǎ largely could thank his dominance on the reliability of a large host of Arab heavy cavalry, provided by the King of Oman (iii). Such a force did not come cheap, however, and Ākǔttǎ had also racked up debts paying off his rivals. A ready source of disposal income was required, and to find it, the new Khan looked to the hitherto-forgotten Roman embassy. The demand went out that Constantinople would begin paying back the sums Wúqǐmǎi had provided twenty years before- and at a crippling rate of interest. When John Synadenos tried to protest, he was thrown into jail, along with the majority of the other ambassadors. Only one of their number, a young man named Michael Photopoulos, was allowed to return to Christian territory to repeat the terms (iv).
In the court of Constantine X, the demands of Ākǔttǎ Khan were heard in shocked silence. The Emperor himself apparently favoured paying the sums, but few listened to the words of plump, gentle Constantine. In the absence of Demetrios effective power in Constantinople had come to rest on the shoulders of the Caesar Gregory Maleinos, the husband of Constantine’s elder sister Helenē. Maleinos was a military man from a middle ranking noble family and in the absence of any heir from Constantine himself was confidently expected to take the throne in turn. Tough and experienced in the ways of war, the Caesar had little time for the demands of an untested young barbarian. The order went out: the days of capitulation were over, and it was time for war.
The regime of Demetrios the Uncle had largely been interested in peace, and the Tagmata had not conducted large scale operations for a generation by the middle of the 1270s, but Gregory Maleinos was undaunted. In a series of small wars on the Bulgarian frontier the armies had shown that their old power was not to be taken for granted, and an attack by the Salghurids on the strongly fortified Syrian coastal city of Laodicea had been beaten back in 1267 with relative ease (v). The Caesar calculated that this was enough of a show of force to make even the mighty Great Khan pause and consider: and, for a while, he appeared to be right. The demands were quietly dropped, and a very relieved John Synadenos finally arrived back in Constantinople in the autumn of 1276.
Ākǔttǎ Khan however was still in need of money, and quickly: for the patience of his Omani backers was reaching its end. With his rivals claiming their new Khan to be nothing more than a money-grubbing coward, Ākǔttǎ was in urgent need of a triumph. Fortunately for him, there was another option. The Roman Empire might have been trickier to bully than the Khan had imagined, but it was not the other state to his west that was not all that it had been.
By the 1270s, the rule of the Salghurid Dynasty in Egypt had visibly run its course. Though the dynasty would always be remembered for the daring exploits of its greatest leader Kürboğa, his immediate successors had hardly been slackers either. Kürboğa’s son Tuğtekin and his own son Ahmed had ably held together the Salghurid realm. But with the death of the Sultan Ahmed in 1265, things had begun to slide. Ahmed’s heir was his decadent playboy of a son Tutuş, who had done very little besides reviving the ancient Egyptian wine industry and masterminding the failed attack on Christian Laodicea. Tutuş was murdered in 1268 while in a drunken slumber by a cousin: another Ahmed, who attempted to impose strict religious law while reigning as Ahmed II. But Ahmed II’s reign was even shorter than before: he was himself murdered, reputedly by a slave girl, in 1270 (vi). Ahmed was followed by his two equally unsuccessful brothers, who fought a four year civil war which killed them both and saw a nine year old son of the deposed Tutuş imposed as Kürboğa II. The anarchy left Egypt’s armies shattered, its fertile fields and irrigation systems destroyed, and its cities in ruins.
It was, in short, a perfect opportunity for an opportunistic predator. And to sweeten the pill for the Great Khan even further, he had a perfect motive to invade, given Ahmed II and his dead brothers had been the nephews of Ākǔttǎ‘s Omani ally. As John Synadenos made his way west from Baghdad in 1276, he was accompanied by an enormous Jušen army, stiffened as usual by reinforcements from the Christian client states. Sailing round the coast of Arabia, meanwhile, was the large Omani fleet, laden with provisions to keep the invaders fully supplied. All was perfectly prepared to ensure that the hapless Salghurids would be utterly flattened.
As things turned out, victory was easier than anyone could have predicted. Damascus surrendered without a fight, as did the old Salghurid capital of Jerusalem, where Ākǔttǎ Khan entered in the fifteenth of September, the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the city to the Emperor John II (vii). Unlike John, the Khan had little intention of marching on the fortified Gaza, although he did send several thousand soldiers west in an attempt to draw out the remains of the Salghurid forces, which had massed there. Battle was joined and the Jušen were duly routed: but the boy-Sultan in Cairo had no opportunity to celebrate. For Ākǔttǎ had marched the greater part of his army south to the Sinai, and there rendezvoused with the Omani fleet and crossed to Egypt. A harsh march across the eastern desert followed, but the Jušen were well provisioned and suffered minimal casualties. Cairo was taken almost unawares and quickly stormed. The child Sultan Kürboğa II was sent back to Baghdad a prisoner, but died en-route. Ākǔttǎ, meanwhile, had proved himself to be a commander of daring and talent: and had doubled the size and wealth of his empire at a stroke.
Like any great conqueror, though, Ākǔttǎ Khan was not sated by one conquest. His armies had been barely blooded by the expedition and remained in a state of battle-readiness, and his supplies of grain and gold had been immeasurably strengthened. Already master in theory of all the Jušen people, the Great Khan began to harbour an intoxicating dream: why not make himself master in reality too? If Egypt could be brought into the fold with a minimum of fuss, why not too his compatriots in Kiev and their own rapidly expanding domain? (viii)
Ākǔttǎ, like most of his people, had absorbed much of the knowledge and history of the lands he ruled over. The great pyramids of Egypt he treated with especial awe, going so far as to ostentatiously restore a number of the country’s greatest monuments, including the rapidly decaying Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse of Alexandria (ix). In 1278 he crossed to Mecca, and entered the city in triumph, to the horror of Islamic opinion. Muslims need not have feared: the Khan treated their holy sites with reverence, and even lavished new buildings on them. The following year, it was the turn of Jerusalem and the Holy Land for a respectful pilgrimage from the would-be world conqueror. Warlord Ākǔttǎ Khan might have been, but he was determined to fully understand all the ancient wisdom of the globe he aimed to make his own (x).
In Constantinople, it came as cold comfort to hear of the great Khan’s learning and wisdom- if anything, each story of his just moderation inspired more fear amongst the courtiers of Constantine X. The Salghurids had been the great enemies of the grandfathers of these men, but their passing was deeply mourned by the Romans, now the Empire found itself facing for the first time in five centuries a power that controlled both Mesopotamia and Egypt. News from the north was hardly more encouraging: in 1277 the Bulgarian Tsar had formally submitted himself to Jušen rule as a client, and the news coming out of Germany was a cause for horror (xi). The mood was apocalyptic, a mood best encompassed by the rise of the Helots. Former followers of the preacher Paul of Messenia, the Helots modelled themselves explicitly on the slave-race of ancient Sparta, arguing that all men should enslave themselves to God by giving up property in service to the poor. More menacingly, the Helots were happy to forcibly encourage rich men into this. Across the Empire, the wealthy found themselves more and more under siege from a movement that could claim the tacit support of even some bishops, and thus a degree of legal immunity.
The Roman Empire thus entered the 1280s besieged from within and without, and led by an Emperor who, to say the least, failed to inspire confidence. Given more time, perhaps affairs might have sorted themselves out. Constantine, after all, had three capable nephews, any one of whom would have made a good soldier Emperor. But time had finally run out. In the spring of 1281, Ākǔttǎ Khan finally concluded an alliance with his Kievan counterpart and declared war. All the world was marching on the Queen of Cities.
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(i) Nikēphoros’ sister is the widowed sister-in-law of the Emperor Constantine.
(ii) Jurchen funerary traditions seem to have involved cremation.
(iii) Previously under the loose control of the Turks, Jurchen conquest allowed for the Omani Arabs to secure a shaky independence. As in OTL, they rule a rather secular and tribal state, styling themselves as “King” (Malik) rather than “Emir” or “Sultan”.
(iv) Michael Photopoulos, the son of a glass merchant, was one of the low-born men raised up by Demetrios Simeopoulos. He also featured in the first version of IE, if anybody recognises the name.
(v) Laodicea is one of a handful of fortified port cities of the Levantine coast that are all that remain of the great conquests of John II a century previously. It is administered by the Grand Duke of Cyprus, George Evagoras, nephew of the Emperor George I.
(vi) The story goes that Ahmed II’s killer was a slave girl who had been married in secret to Tutuş and was killing Ahmed for her baby son. It’s only recorded from sources writing two centuries later, however.
(vii) Why exactly the Khan chose to do this is nowhere mentioned. Perhaps he hoped to lure the Salghurids into a false sense of security by aping an invader who had ultimately been defeated by the first Kürboğa.
(viii) The Khanate of Kiev is at its apogee in the 1270s.
(ix) is a slip into the perspective of TTL. “Great Pyramid” is singular because the Khan partially pulled down the other two to restore the limestone casing of the main pyramid: and the remains were then slowly nibbled away at as the centuries progressed. IOTL, the limestone casing only began to really decay in 1300, but from the POV of the IE universe, the Khan is the great restorer of the Pyramid singular. As for the lighthouse, it really was in decay by the thirteenth century, and collapsed in the fourteenth. Not here.
(x) Most Jurchens from the first generation onwards have received a thorough literary education. This is largely based on Islamic Iranian historians, but there’s a significant amount of Greek and Christian influence too.
(xi) This will be explored in more detail in a future update.
Well...I wonder how Constantinople is going to get out of this one. The prospect of more frequent updates is exciting!
Nice update, BG.
Does he really intend to restore every ancient building he finds though?
I guess that means Akutta Khan doesn't care which Religion his people follow as long as they accept him as ruler.Basileus Giorgios said:
Does he really intend to restore every ancient building he finds though?
I couldn't help but imagine most people at court in Constantinople going "oh crap" after I read that lineBasileus Giorgios said:
Well, I try to be unique! Later on I'll be destroying a very well known Ancient world building though, that survives IOTL: so it's all balanced out.
Indeed! I can offer a 90% guarantee of weekly updates for the next three weeks. It'll be two "spin off" updates, one from Ares and one from myself, and then a main narrative update from me.
That's right. For now, the Jurchens are relatively tolerant.
Yorel said:
Hmmm, more or less. The Khan likes to show off as a magnanimous enlightened despot, which largely involves throwing money at cultural centres. Obviously he can't do everything, but he shows more interest in this stuff than any other Jurchen leader: and for that matter the Romans, Arabs or Turks.
Yorel said:I couldn't help but imagine most people at court in Constantinople going "oh crap" after I read that line
There's a lot to be saying "oh crap" about!
Another wonderful update.
Thanks!
I may have to pinch that line to be used at some point....