Part L: The Gates of Alexander (1455-1525)
In the middle years of the 15th century, Basileios of Funa and several companions had journeyed into the untamed wilds of the eastern Caucasian Mountains, hoping to spread the good news amongst the even wilder men of the region. The Avars, Vainakhs had the numerous other peoples of the eastern mountains had gained a reputation for martyring missionaries, and so it was to the shock of many that Funa was able to baptize several thousand converts from amongst the heathens, even securing the baptism of an Avar king, Rusalan I. The seed that Funa had planted would sprout like a mustard tree[1], as Rusalan and his successors, painting themselves as the Sword of Christ, unified much of the highlands under Christian rule and won a series of impressive victories against the pagans and the Muslims. This would prompt missionaries would enter the lands of the Muslim Golden Horde, an action which brought the ire of Sarai down upon them and sow the seeds of Saint Zphosas’ War[2], the largest conflict in the region since the War of the Caucasian Gates a quarter-century before.
In the years after Rusalan’s consolidation of the Avar Highlands, the official support of an established state on the northern side of the mountains gave the Orthodox Church a sudden inroad into the tribal region which had so long defied their attempts at proselytization. Traveling through the previously-inaccessible Malla-Kheli pass[3], churchmen from Kartvelia and beyond could go eastwards into the lands of the Kumyks and the Lezgins, or westwards into the lands of the Vainakhs. Efforts at conversion were most successful in the latter two peoples. Despite the Vainakhs’ nominal subservience to the Golden Horde, the Kartvelians were able to keep them in their sphere of influence by projecting power through the Caucasian Gates, which allowed money, embassies and even armies to march north and support factions friendly to Tbilisi in the region. This state of affairs led to the rise of one Ma’aru, a mercenary captain of mixed Avar and Vainakh descent, in the late 1510s. Ma’aru was able to rally the Orthodox Vainakh bands to his banner and, with support from Tbilisi and Kunzakh, crush the pagan and Muslim Vainakhs. At the Battle of the Terka River--hereafter known as the Battle of the Ts’yehn River[4]--in 1519, Ma’aru’s alliance utterly annihilated his enemies, with some 1,500 Vainakhs and several hundred Avar and Kartvelian mercenaries routing 3,000 enemies (a mixture of Vainakhs and Muslim Circassians) and slaying so many that the river ran red with blood, hence the name. With this victory, Orthodox ascendancy in Ciscaucasia was confirmed almost indefinitely. Ma’aru established a capital at Zaur (OTL Vladikavkaz) and set about transforming his alliance into a functioning state.
For the next few years, the Orthodox Vainakhs got along happily. The khan was distracted in the east, beating back invasions by the expansionist Uzbek Khanate, and as far as Sarai was concerned Ciscaucasia might have been on the moon. This happy state of affairs would end abruptly with the ascension of Nogai Ahmed to the khanate in 1521. Nogai Ahmed had been the victor against the Uzbeks at the great Battle of the Ural River in 1520, and had used this as a foothold to overthrow and murder his brother, the reigning khan Selim Ahmed[5]. Nogai Ahmed Khan was in a bad position from the outset. While he had succeeded in repulsing the Uzbeks from the western side of the Ural River, he had been unable to recover the vast swathes of the east which they still controlled. The Golden Horde controlled only the territories of the former Blue Horde; in effect, it had lost much of its eastern heartland, and as such would be greatly weakened as far as steppe empires went. The Russians were on the verge of reunification under the militarist Volga Novgorod, and they would soon pose a grave threat to the Khanate; the Polish-Lithuanians were growing in strength and were starting to push back against his realm’s western edge, and the Uzbeks would soon be able to push against his eastern frontier once again. If his state was going to survive the coming crisis, he needed to act swiftly and crush the upstart breakaways who were nibbling away at his borders to put the fear of God back into his tributaries. Only then, by presenting a united front to his many enemies, would he be able to keep his state alive and face down the many threats that were gathering against him from all directions. In the spring of 1524, he mustered six tumens--120,000 men--more than three-quarters of the men available to him, and marched southwards.
Word of the approaching Mongol horde spread swiftly, and within a few weeks Ma’aru was able to scramble together some 6,000 men, an impressive number for the region but a woefully small force to take on the great khan. He sent out a call for aid to his coreligionists, which by now included the Circassians, the Kartvelians, the Trapezuntines, the Avars and the Lezgins. The latter two quietly ignored his pleas for help, as they themselves could easily become targets of the horde’s fury and so decided to sit this one out. The Circassians did the same, and the aftokrator David apologized for being unable to help but stated that he was busy with other matters, like not losing Perateia to a deluge of horsemen. This left Kartvelia to tentatively answer the call, with Vakhtang dispatching a few thousand mercenaries and volunteers to help Ma’aru in his war against the infidels. Most importantly, he allowed a small number of Vainakhs who had settled in the Pankisi Gorge in the preceding years to cross back over the mountains and aid their fellows in the coming struggle. At the time, Vakhtang considered this to be allowing his rebellion-prone subjects to go off and get themselves killed, essentially creating a self-resolving problem..
Nogai Ahmed arrived in Ciscaucasia in June 1523. He made a circuit of the northern side of the mountains, reminding the Circassian vassals of their duties to supply him with gold and slaves and exacting the tribute that many of them had ‘misplaced’. He then sent embassies eastward to the Kumyks, who were under lose Horde control, threatening to quote ‘fall upon you like a bolt from on high, slaughter your men like pigs, rape and slaughter your women and sell your children in slavery in the distant lands of the Arabs, then grind your bones and scatter your dust across the breadth of the Caspian Sea’ if they did not submit to paying tribute. The Kumyks wisely did so, as did the Avars when confronted with a similar missive. With his flanks secured, the khan then plunged into Vainakhia(?) proper with a crossing of the Terek River in August.
The resulting campaign was a literal and metaphorical massacre. Nogai Ahmed was a cagey ruler, and before he had embarked on his mission of vengeance he had made sure to study the Vainakhs and every element of his society. Upon concluding that the Vainakhs were some of the most clannish people on the planet, he quickly devised his master plan. After crossing the frontier, he raced for the heart of Vainakh territory, shrugging off enemy bands from all directions as they tried to assail the far superior Mongol force from all directions. His target was Nasare, the second largest settlement of Ma’aru’s state and home to one of the five bishoprics north of the mountains. He arrived at Nasare on 16 August, finding that many of the local Vainakhs and their allies had holed up there to protect those who were unable to accompany Ma’aru in his retreat up into the mountains. While Nasare was an impressive fortress by the standards of Ciscaucasia, it was woefully pathetic compared the Lithuanian and Russian fortresses that Nogai Ahmed was used to battering down. As such, a bombardment of only two days served to level the entire eastern half of the city, and the irregular foot soldiers that rushed through the ruins en masse were able to quickly reduce the rest of the city. He but the Nasareans to the sword, believing that they had forfeited any right they had to ‘life’ or ‘surrender’ in rebelling against him.
Moreover, this calculated massacre had the exact effects that Nogai Ahmed hoped it would. Previously, Ma’aru had been able to convince many of the tribal leaders to accompany him on his planned retreat into the mountains, where he (rightfully) believed his chances would much better, as the Mongols weren’t exactly famed mountaineers. Now, however, with many of their clan members butchered by the invaders, many of the elders and war-chiefs felt that they were honor-bound to fight the Mongols on the field of battle. Ma’aru desperately tried to convince them of the foolishness of this, but many of them were determined and sure that God would secure them victory. The resulting Battle of Zaur--actually fought a few miles north of the capital--was about as one-sided as you’d expect, the khan’s men riding down the poorly-armed Vainakhs en masse and losing only a handful of men to their brave but suicidal charges. At the end of the day, 3,000 Vainakhs and 200 Mongols were dead, and the war making ability of the Vainakhs had been irrevocably crippled. The small force that still remained loyal to Ma’aru shattered, as many clans chose to gather up all of their surviving members and flee to Circassia or Avaria rather than try and continue what would surely be a suicidal war. With no other option available to him, Ma’aru fled up into the high mountains with his small band, establishing a new capital settlement in one of the most isolated valleys of Ciscaucasia, known as Bashtorostan (OTL Nizhnyaya Unal). While he refused to surrender to his hated enemy, Ma’aru was effectively knocked out of the war, unable to project power beyond the four valleys closest to Bashtorostan.
With the first target of his wrath all but eliminated, Nogai Ahmed then looked southwards. The Vainakhs were the most direct affront to his control of the region, but they were only as insolent as they had been because of the promise of foreign support. Circassia and Avaria had both been returned to the fold, but as soon as there was no massive army threatening to make it as if they had never, ever lived they would almost certainly resort to their old ways. In order to secure his hold on the region of Ciscaucasia, he needed to reduce what was, in his mind anyway, a state sponsor of rebels: Kartvelia. Not only was this region rich and mostly untouched by Mongol armies[6], in ravaging the region and utterly annihilating the Kartvelians and their state he would prove himself equal to, if not better than, Ahmed Sultan, who had failed to fight through the Caucasian Gates nearly thirty years previous. Indeed, Nogai Ahmed thought, if he could break through then all of Transcaucasia would be his, cementing him as one of the greatest khans to have ever lived, allowing him to take tens of thousands of slaves and levy thousands more pounds of gold and other valuables from the new territories. As he retired to winter camp that year--he wasn’t stupid, trying to force a crossing that late in the year would be suicide--visions of plunder and murder danced in the great khan’s head. In allowing the Pankisi Vainakhs to join their fellows, the Kartvelian king had unknowingly sown the seeds for his own destruction in giving the Horde the pretext it needed to invade.
Meanwhile, on the southern side of the mountains, Vakhtang was blissfully unaware of the Sword of Damocles that hovered above him. The Horde had made frequent raids against the states of Ciscaucasia, so this was nothing new. Supposedly, he was more concerned with the ascension of David to the Trapezuntine throne and the diplomatic and economic ramifications of this than he was of the massive Mongol horde that was massing on his northern border. As such, the provincial dukes remained in their territories that winter and spring, rather than being marshalled for war. Aleks’andretsikhe and the other six fortresses of the Caucasian Gates were reinforced, sure, but Vakhtang was woefully overconfident in their capabilities. He believed that the Mongols, a steppe horde as they were, would be behind the times in terms of siege technology and so would be unable to break through the aging fortresses, many of which had been built more than a quarter of a century before and had not been built-up or expanded since. Nogai Ahmed was in fact an experienced siege commander with a personal love for the development and usage of cannons, which would have been a warning sign if Vakhtang hadn’t been dying of syphilis.
That spring, April of 1525, the khan sent 20,000 men into Circassia to threaten the Circassian Gates as well as remind the Circassian tribes of their subservience to him once again. This force, reinforced with several hundred Circassian mercenaries, bore down on the Duchy of Abkhazia, the westernmost territory of Kartvelia. Had they managed to break through, they would have been able to utterly ravage the Kartvelian heartland in advance of the main invasion force. The Kingdom of Saint George was only spared this destruction because Mamia Dadiani, the march-ward of the Abkhazes and Duke of Tsukhumi, happened to be the only competent feudal ruler in Kartvelia and had taken the arrival of Nogai Ahmed the year before as a sign to start mobilizing. He had some 4,000 men ready and waiting in addition to several thousand more militiamen ready to be called up at a moment’s notice, and so was able to quickly scramble together nearly 11,000 Kartvelians and Abkhazians and several hundred Circassian and Vainakh exiles to meet the invasion force at the fords of the Myzmta near Anakopion (OTL Adler) along the coastal plain. While the Mongols outnumbered Dadiani by more than two-to-one, they were unwilling to risk a forced crossing of the river against a force of heavy infantry that were helped by defensive works, and so elected to withdraw back to Circassia to await reinforcements.
This probing action had its desired effects, in spite of its tactical defeat. Vakhtang was finally roused from his idle and mustered out all the men and lords of Kartvelia, mustering a host of some 30,000 and marching with all speed towards the Circassian Gates. He feared that the Mongols would attempt to push through the western crossings, which were, logistically speaking, far less daunting than the Caucasian Gates. As such, he knew he needed to act swiftly to cut off any potential attack from that region, which together with the impressive fortifications of the Gates would allow him to hold off Mongol attacks until he was able to negotiate a peace. Vakhtang and his army advanced to the Myzmta by the end of June, and so brought a combined host of 40,000 against the Mongols.
Nogai Ahmed then set the next stage of his plan in motion, sending two tumens (40,000 men) and the Circassian vassals to attack the king in the west, with orders to pin them down while taking as few casualties as possible. The fighting along this front began as soon as mid-July, as the Horde and their allies launched probing attacks all along the frontier, fighting a half-dozen small actions before falling back to the west, gradually wearing down the defenders’ numbers and morale. However, this was not the chief area of the war. With Vakhtang pinned down and the Kartvelians thoroughly distracted, Nogai Ahmed was free to move against his true target: the Caucasian Gates.
The Alans, who inhabited the region around the pass, had had the fear of God put into them with the utter crushing of the Vainakhs and so were willing to, if not join the Horde’s forces then at the very least not fight against them. Because of this, the pickets that were supposed to inform the defenders of Baltatsike, the northernmost fortress, of any approaching host abandon their positions and allow the outer bulwark to be taken by surprise. Nogai Ahmed has light cannons sent ahead of the main force with the scouts and hauled up the side of the valley under the cover of night. Once the attack begins, the Circassian and other vassal troops that are being used as human shields surge forward to assail the fortress, whose defenders are caught completely off-guard. Shot rains down from both the pass to the north of them and from the heights to their east, and the defenders soon rout and flee down the valley, leaving the ruins of the fortress to the Horde. Similar tactics are employed at Larshtsike and Daritsike, the next two fortresses, to much success. Then Nogai Ahmed and his army reached Aleks’andretsikhe, the greatest fortress of all the Caucasus. Alek’sandre II had chosen the location of his citadel well, and it was nearly unassailable. It sat on a sheer-faced plateau jutting out into the center of the pass, surrounded by a bend of the Terek that made direct assault almost impossible. The only heights around the city that could be used for bombardment were also fortified, essentially making it impregnable. For a week the Mongols laid siege to the fortress, pounding away with cannons that could barely be elevated enough to even hit the cliffs below the walls and making suicidal assaults across the river and the cliff face. Nogai Ahmed was forced to admit that his whole plan might be foiled by Alexander’s Bastion, and had begun mulling over a strategic withdrawal before the solution appeared to him. An Alan shepherd had been captured by a foraging party, and in exchange for the safety of his family he would tell them of a secret pass around the fatal gorge. Nogai Ahmed was intrigued, and allowed the man to give his peace. It took sixteen days of trekking through the wildest parts of the mountains, at elevations where snow clung to the ground even in summer and where horses would regularly asphyxiate simply from walking, but at long last the advance force descended into the valley of the Jutistskali River. Over the following weeks, thousands of men would make the arduous journey across the Juta Pass, but eventually a full tumen would camp in the valley. In late August, they sallied out into the Terek Valley proper.
Aleks’andretsikhe’s south-facing defenses were still quite impressive, but were much easier to bombard. After several days of round-the-clock bombardment, the guns of the great fortress finally fell silent.
Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, the khan and his army slipped around the fortress and continued down the pass. Gudauritsikhe, the next fortress, had been abandoned by the time they reached it, its garrison retreating down the valley to the more defensible Zakatsikhe, which like the great fortress sat atop a plateau overlooking the entirety of the valley. Here, the Mongols were also forced to lay siege to the fortress, whose guns were able to rain hell down upon them from a great distance. After a few days of non-stop attack, the khan devised a plan. He had ranks of captured prisoners shackled together and marched back and forth along the valley for several days in the row. At such distance, the defenders were unable to discern their countrymen from enemy soldiers and so opened fire, burning through much of their powder reserves as they did so. On the fourth day of this, Nogai Ahmed ordered an assault on the western face of the castle, which was the least steep and thus least defensible. The third wave made it over the walls, and the fortress was taken with much bloodshed on both sides. Nonetheless, with Zakatsikhe taken, there was only one fortress left between the khan and the lowlands: Ananuri, a decrepit castle built during the reign of Tamar, and which would surely be no match for the full weight of the Horde’s army.
On 12 September, Nogai Ahmed and his army arrived at Ananuri and laid siege to it, pummeling the cliffside hardpoint with dozens of cannons of all sizes. The defenders stood strong under the withering fire, but as the second day dawned they appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The towers of the fortress had been reduced to rubble, and the walls sported many gaps; only the unexpectedly fast current of the Arkala River prevented the Mongols from simply swarming it. They had the numbers, after all, some three tumens of 60,000 men were still in the host. Nogai Ahmed was on the verge of ordering the final assault when word reached him from his pickets down the valley:
An army flying the Five-Cross Flag approached from the south-east, numbering nearly as many as the Mongols themselves. The battle to decide the fate of all the Caucasus was to be fought at Ananuri, on the morrow….
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[1] This is a reference to Matthew 17:20
[2] Zphosas was the Avar missionary who had converted many of the Vainakhs and Ma’aru himself, and so was considered to be responsible for the rebellion in Ciscaucasia by the Horde
[3] This is a minor pass across the Eastern Caucasus that is too high and too narrow to be used by an army, but is still large enough for particularly daring merchants to travail. It had previously been unusable because of the many feuding tribes of the area, but with Rusalan’s unification of the region it was now open to trade, which further bound Avaria into the Kartvelian sphere.
[4] Literally translates as “Battle of the river which was red”, more precisely “Battle of the Bloody River”
[5] After Ahmed Sultan’s many victories, ‘Ahmed’ had been adopted as a common regnal suffix for the khans of the Golden Horde. It translates as ‘Most praiseworthy’, and so it was added directly into the ruler’s title as well.
[6] Kartvelia had been devastated by the armies of Temur-e-Lank, but many of the Mongols of the steppe did not consider him to be one of them, instead regarding him as a Tajik or Persian.
