Chapter Twenty One: The Storm Breaks
Chapter Twenty One: The Storm Breaks
“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Matthew 7:27, Parable of the Builders
“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Matthew 7:27, Parable of the Builders
Ākǔttǎ Khan had no intention of repeating the mistakes of his forebear Šurhaci.[1] The great failure there, Ākǔttǎ reasoned, had been the failure to properly engage with the Roman navy, and the fact that Šurhaci had engaged in a one-sided assault. The story of Constantinople’s defences was legendary, and the Great Khan was more than shrewd enough to realise that a simple blunt attack would end in certain defeat. He decided, therefore, that a multiple pronged attack was the best strategy. In the circumstances, it had its difficulties- most obviously, his total inability to co-ordinate the attacks with his allies in anything like a detailed manner. But it was a gamble he had to take if he wanted to rule the world.
Unfortunately for the Romans, things went better than the Great Khan could have hoped. As soon as spring allowed, a Jušen host, together with several thousand Bulgarians, descended into Roman territory with a clear target in mind: Thessalonica, second city of the Empire.[2] By early summer, the city was thronged with immigrants, desperately seeking safe passage and a new life on the Aegean Isles, protected by the fearsome Imperial navy. By the time the enemy had descended, the city was packed to bursting with peasants and their animals, with precious few soldiers to defend them.
Thessalonica’s walls were formidable and had stood the city in good stead before, but ultimately the siege could only end one way. A direct order by Constantine X, countermanding his brothers-in-law, saw the arrival of perhaps twenty warships in the harbours of the city in late June, and hundreds of women and children were evacuated: but thousands more remained. Meanwhile, the Jušen were bringing up a terrifying new weapon that they had acquired from the Far East: firelance technology.[3] These early firelances were primitive weapons, prone to explosion and backfiring, but the psychological impact the massive tubes that launched thunder and death upon the defenders could not be overestimated. Behind its walls, Thessalonica increasingly began to collapse into anarchy. Dark tales would circulate afterward about the roving bands of cannibals that prowled the city’s streets, seeking easy meat. Whatever the truth in them, the fact that such stories were considered at all is illustrative of the mood: Thessalonica was being besieged by all the forces of Hell.
In such circumstances, then, it is surprising that men of the Cross should be the ones to bring the siege to an end, but that was what the city’s leading Helots did.[4] Claiming that Thessalonica needed to be purged of its sins by fire and ordeal, the Helots opened the gates, and bid the leader of Jušen host, a swaggering sky-worshipper who nonetheless took the thoroughly Russian name of Igor, sack the city. Igor was only too happy to oblige. Thessalonica was torn apart, its people carted off to slavery or simply butchered in the streets. No Roman city had suffered so savage a sack since the triple examples of Germanikeia, Damascus and Iconium two generations before.[5]
With Constantinople’s attention thoroughly captured by the horrors befalling Thessalonica, ĀkǔttǎKhan launched his next attack. A second huge Jušen army crossed the Taurus in May 1281, and marched rapidly across the plateau: so rapidly, in fact, that a very large army of several regiments of Tagmata led by the former envoy Michael Photopoulos missed it altogether and found itself arriving at Caesarea a week after the Jušen had passed by to the West.
Photopoulos had failed to prevent the next great thrust of the plan. At the time the imperial navy was split between ships evacuating Thessalonica, others guarding Constantinople and others harassing Jušen positions on the Bulgarian coast: a mess of a strategy that owed much to divisions between Constantine Palaiologos and his brothers-in-law. With the navy divided, a large and freshly constructed Jušen fleet had passed into the Aegean without trouble, pausing only to overwhelm the island of Crete and ransack it for provisions before raising the banners of the Khan over the island’s capital at Chandax. It met with the Great Khan’s land army at Smyrna, and while there was not time to ferry across the whole Jušen host Ākǔttǎhimself together with a picked retinue was able to make the crossing to Europe, where they met with Igor’s blooded troops at Trajanopolis.[6]
It is said that the Great Khan fell to his knees and kissed the earth when he arrived in Europe. Trajanopolis surrendered almost immediately and was treated with conspicuous kindness for doing so- Ākǔttǎ reputedly ordered that the plunder Igor had taken from Thessalonica be used to beatify the town’s largest monastery and to feed the poor. It is a mark of the respect the Great Khan held that Igor, an experienced warlord who had never even met Ākǔttǎ before, was willing to obey the order without question. Next to a conqueror of the world, even the greatest of warlords was only a servant.
It was by this point July, and Ākǔttǎ was eager to press on to Constantinople before effective imperial resistance could be gathered together and while the terror of the Jušen was at its peak. More importantly, he was determined to take the city quickly before the bad weather of winters on the Bosphorus did the damage to his armies that no enemy army had so far inflicted.[7] Outriders fanned across Thrace to take the riches of the province’s autumn harvest, while the main body of the Jušen army marched on the Queen of Cities herself.
The Great Khan was no man’s fool, and his deep appreciation for feats of engineering and architecture meant he was well aware of the defences that awaited him at Constantinople, but even so, the sight that greeted the vanguard of the Jušen army when it arrived upon the Bosphorus in August 1281 must have given even a conqueror like Ākǔttǎ momentary pause for thought. Before him rose the triple defences of the Land Walls of Theodosius: first a deep trench, then a formidable twenty-five foot high stone wall that, for all its strength, was dwarfed by forty-foot tall Great Wall.[8] Upon the battlements were an array of catapults and thousands of defending soldiers, supplied by several acres of agricultural land between the walls and the city proper. Constantinople was, quite simply, the most formidably defended city a Jušen army had ever come across.
An obvious counter to this, though, is the fact that no Jušen army before had had a leader quite as inventive and intelligent as ĀkǔttǎKhan. Determined to avoid the mistakes of previous would-be conquerors of the city, the Great Khan worked methodically to seal off Constantinople from the outside world by seizing fleeing merchants, cutting the city’s main aqueduct, and defeating a small mixed force of Thracian provincial levies and rebellious Bulgarians.[9] These men he then impaled before the walls of the city, in full view of the defenders, while at the same time offering them generous terms for their surrender and opening the gates. Simultaneously, a force of cavalry swept north around the Golden Horn to attempt to harass Roman ships sheltering in the great harbour and prevent them departing to attack Jušen vessels in the Aegean. Within a couple of weeks, the noose had been drawn well and truly tight, and Ākǔttǎ settled down to let hunger and fear do their work. In Constantinople, meanwhile, the Emperor Constantine made a show of leading the city in prayer, beseeching the intervention of the Virgin Mary to save the city as she had done so many times before.[10]
On September 26th 1281, it began to rain.
Initially, the downpours were no more than an irritant to the Great Khan and his men, and something of a deliverance to the Emperor, who saw Constantinople’s great cisterns filled to the brim with fresh water just as the autumn harvest had been collected. By the end of the second week of constant rainfall, however, things were becoming more difficult. Anticipating the difficulty of a winter on the Straits Ākǔttǎ had made a point of seizing the autumn harvests of much of the Haemic peninsula to properly sustain his army if a quick conquest of Constantinople proved to be impossible. A large amount of fodder had duly been collected, but the vast Jušen baggage trains had been greatly slowed down by a combination of roads turned to liquid mud and roaring rivers that had burst their banks. Furthermore, the persistent damp was doing much to spoil what crops had made it to the main siege camp.
It was not only on the Bosphorus that the weather was bad: the rains had spread down into the Aegean as well, pinning the Jusen fleet down at Smyrna where it had been due to carry across the remainder of Ākǔttǎ’s army. There, disaster struck. Michael Photopoulos, eager to assuage the embarrassment of failing to contain the initial Jusen crossing of the Taurus, had spent the summer slowly gathering together men and shadowing the Great Khan across the plateau. His final rally point had been Chonae[11] in the Thracesion, where he had amassed a formidable force perhaps approaching thirty thousand armed soldiers of the Tagmata, plus a number of mercenary divisions, most notably several hundred Kartvelian heavy cavalrymen eager to avenge the humiliation their countrymen had suffered back in 1268.[12]
Vengeance was exactly what Photopoulos delivered. Conveying his army to the walls of Smyrna in such terrible weather amply proved his capability as a commander, and doing it without detection by the Jušen soldiers and sailors who were encamped outside and within the city proved his genius. The Romans fell upon their adversaries with a savagery that, as even supportive writers would later write, “shamed Christians everywhere”.[13]Shameful or not, the butchery of half of the Great Khan’s army and the seizure of his fleet as it lay at anchor in Smyrna’s harbour was the greatest victory a Roman army had seen in generations, and would forever after be seen as the most important stepping stone on Photopoulos’ road to the pinnacle of imperial politics.
With communications slowed by the weather, news of the disaster at Smyrna was slow in reaching Ākǔttǎ and his main army, who in any case had an even more pressing problem to deal with: snow. As October gave way to November so the rains appeared, briefly, to halt, encouraging the Great Khan to make a show of force, launching a number of attacks on the walls that did much to restore morale in the besiegers’ camp and lower it for the citizens of Constantinople, who were especially terrified of the thunder of the Jušen firelances. The respite for the Great Khan, however, was only to be a limited one. Within a couple of weeks, the bad weather returned: and this time, it was snow that descended. It only took a few days for both the Jušen camp and the city of Constantinople to be shrouded in an icy white blanket. Ākǔttǎ himself was prepared for this, as was the leader of the Kievan Jušen Igor, but for soldiers who had proved their mettle in the conquest of Egypt the early arrival of horrendous winter weather came as deeply unpleasant shock. In Constantinople, the Emperor could and did make an ostentatious show of taking in the homeless to abandoned rooms of the Great Palace and sharing his food[14], but no such option was available to Ākǔttǎ, who had always believed in the virtue of living cheek by jowl with his soldiers. By suffering with his men, the Great Khan proved himself unable to ease their burden.
It was this perceived helplessness than did more than anything else to doom the greatest leader of his age. The glue that held Ākǔttǎ’s relatively rickety coalition together was his record of success, and once this began to fade, morale quickly started to tumble. The news of the Battle of Smyrna, which reached the Jušen high command early in December, proved to be the final straw. Accounts of what happened next are confused, but the final results are not. A brawl of some sort developed in a meeting between Ākǔttǎ and his lieutenants, most notably Igor of Kiev, that ended with half of the leadership dead. The Great Khan himself escaped the scene alive, ushered out by a bodyguard, but was then repeatedly stabbed to death by that same bodyguard, who fled the scene, reputedly to his native Bulgaria where, according to one tradition, he hid inside a tree and will emerge again when a new great enemy of the Christian people arises.[15] Whatever the case, Ākǔttǎ Khan died on December 7th 1281, and the Jušen siege dissolved almost immediately. Constantinople was liberated: and a new golden age was about to begin.
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[1] The two probably were blood relatives, but the exact relation is unclear: the Jurchens of TTL have a habit of officially claiming after their ascension to power to be the son of their forebear.
[2] Thessalonica was probably one of the largest cities in Europe until the thirteenth century: it may have had a population of over 50,000, about the same size as contemporary Rome or Venice.
[3] “Firelances” is the generic term employed ITTL for gunpowder weapons.
[4] We met the Helots in the last chapter: they’re a radical sect calling for an end to property in the cause of slavery to the Kingdom of Heaven.
[5] See Chapter Seventeen.
[6] A city founded, surprise surprise, by the Emperor Trajan. It’s in the region we call Rhodope, and the Byzantines called Macedonia, to the south-west of Adrianople. See Ares’ map.
[7] Bosphorus winters are surprisingly harsh, as icy winds whip down across the Black Sea. The Arab army outside the gates in 717 was torn apart by the weather, an experience a cultured man like the Great Khan is well aware of.
[8] The inner wall is a little bigger taller than IOTL, owing to a major renovation and improvement of the walls back in the reign of the Emperor Manuel Komnenos in the late 1120s.
[9] Constantinople was largely watered by the Aqueduct of Valens. It was initially cut in 626 and restored by Constantine V.
[10] Most notably from during the Avar/Iranian siege of 626.
[11] The modern OTL Turkish town of Honaz, known in antiquity as Colossae.
[12] See Chapter Twenty.
[13] The writer in this case is a man named George of Cherson, a politician and writer of the sixteenth century that we met in the first Isaac’s Empire.
[14] A very characteristic bit of behaviour from Constantine, who, whatever his failings as Emperor, always showed an unfailing concern for his peoples.
[15] I intend to cover all of this in another POV narrative chapter, through the eyes of this Bulgarian, whose name is Symeon. The prophecy I based on the one about the monks who fled into the walls of Hagia Sophia in 1453, to return when a Christian Emperor does.
. Constantinople is saved. 
