Chapter 15: The Anatolian War
The time had come to strike at our old enemy yet again. Negusa Nagast Susenyos intended to personally lead his troops all the way to Yerevan, in Georgia, and retake it for Christianity, but first he would have to secure a route through Ottoman territory.
While the Ottomans were not the threat they once were, the circumstances of this war were somewhat different from our previous conflicts. Our Polish allies were unwilling to tackle the Turks so soon after the Serbo-Ottoman war. Without the Commonwealth threatening their northern flank, the Ottomans were free to concentrate all their attention on our northern border. In addition, we would not only be fighting the Ottomans and Tunis, but Hejaz too.
Despite these changes, however, our overall strategy remained roughly the same - use our forts to hold back the enemy, while our armies attacked their allies and knock them out of the war. With that in mind, our troops marched on Tunis and Hejaz.
There was one potential flaw in this plan. Instead of attacking our northern border, the Ottomans could move their forces to aid Hejaz and directly engage our forces there. With a third of our troops attacking Tunis, the combined forces of the Turks and Hejaz could potentially have driven us back, or at least inflicted heavy casualties. Thankfully, however, the arrogant Turks instead chose to demand that the Hejaz army join in their attack on Damascus and Aleppo. This allowed us to overrun Hejaz's border defences and march on the capital.
Hejaz was knocked out of the war, taking a significant army with them. Our own casualties remained light, but we would now have to march into the teeth of the enemy army. In previous wars we had been able to time our attacks so that we only ever had to deal with a fraction of the Ottoman army at any one time, relying on their need to defend their northern border to divide their forces. This would not be the case this time. In preparation, the emperor passed a number of acts focused on improving the morale and equipment of our troops (I activated a number of military policies). Battle would soon be joined.
Meanwhile, on the western front, our advance went well. The fall of the capital forced the Tunisian fleet into the guns of our waiting ships. Spain had landed troops in the east to help press our advantage and the Tunisians had given up any attempt to engage us directly. Some of the emperor's councillors advised patience - why not wait until the invasion of Tunis was completed, then redeploy the troops there before engaging the Ottomans? But as he gathered his forces in Damascus, word reached Susenyos that the garrison in Aleppo was on the verge of surrender. It was time to destroy the Turks.
The Relief of Aleppo was easily the most shocking defeat in Ottoman history. Caught by surprise, General Piri found himself trapped between the walls of Aleppo and an army twice the size of his own. Rather than throwing away the lives of his men, he surrendered. The Turks had lost half of their army in a single engagement.
The Ottomans were left scrambling to form any kind of coherent defence. Our forces spilled across the border. Over twelve thousand infantry, without cavalry or artillery support, were captured in Erzincan, throwing the Ottoman defence plans into further disarray. General Salih Alemdar tried to muster another army in Erzurum, but after a short skirmish his 30,000 troops threw down their arms.
The last Tunisian holding fell to our forces. Having little interest in the region, the emperor decided to take only a small amount of territory for Ethiopia. Instead he chose to reward our Spanish allies for their assistance. Unlike the Poles, they had not directly benefited much from our long friendship, but now they were granted a huge swathe of Tunisian territory. The emperor hoped that this would both strengthen our ally and cripple Tunis, allowing us to more quickly overwhelm them in any future conflicts.
The Ottomans had finally rallied enough to actually face our forces in battle, but were unable to do more than slow down our progress. The arrival of Spanish troops in Greece sealed their fate.
With the fall of the capital, the Ottoman's were in no position to stop us from seizing territory from them. A ceasefire was arranged and the emperor ordered our troops to pull back to a defensible position - one that became the de facto new border.
A number of cities and towns along the southern Anatolian coast had been seized, but for the most part our expansion had been focused on the territory between Aleppo and Georgia. We could now move to secure Yerevan.
Our attack on the Georgians provoked the Ottomans into resuming hostilities. This time, however, the Poles were happy to come to our assistance. The Turkish army had not had enough time to recover from our attack and with enemies on two fronts, they didn't stand a chance.
The Turkish army was soon defeated, losing engagements in Van and Mentese. As were were fighting them there, the Poles dispatched a force to besiege the capital, while the rest of their troops moved on into Greece.
Ankara fell, leaving all of Anatolia vulnerable to our forces. With the Ottomans effectively out of the war, our turned their attention back to Georgia, moving to occupy the south of the country.
The Georgian and surviving Ottoman armies focused their efforts on the Commonwealth's southeastern border, hoping to knock them out of the war. But their efforts were in vain. The Poles didn't even bother dispatching an army to oppose them, instead continuing their attack on Greece. With Georgia on the verge of defeat, Hejaz decided to take advantage of the situation and launched their own invasion.
The Turks finally accepted defeat. We took a little more territory, forced them to grant the long-suffering Greeks their independence, and demanded the payment of war reparations. The Ottoman Empire was a shadow of its former strength. It was now no longer able to remotely threaten Ethiopia.
The Georgians surrendered their southern provinces, finally granting us control of holy Yerevan.
Consolidating our control over our new conquests took a few years. There were rebellions to put down and heathens to convert, but nothing we could not handle. New churches were built in Yerevan to celebrate its return to the Coptic fold. Our armed forces celebrated their victory with new uniforms - but also by implementing a new policy of giving battlefield commissions to promising soldiers (I took the first idea in the Defensive group).
When Negusa Nagast Susenyos had taken the throne, little had been expected of him, yet he had secured the throne of Alodia, crippled the Ottoman Empire and secured Yerevan for Ethiopia. He had also arranged for the governance of Medri Bahri to move to the capital upon his death. The empire was in a seemingly unassailable position - but the European powers continued to jealously eye our colonial holdings. We would soon be tested by the other Great Powers of Christendom.
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