• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Easy, From Rus to Russia! by RGB.

You are of course correct. One of the greatest Russian AARs on the paradox boards.

A wild Romanov appears.

:confused:

Nooo! Why all the AAR writers have to side with the Russians? >:/

I just hope the Rzeczpospolita doesn't meet the same fate as in RL, slow decline and loosing everything to the Three Bastards. Russia can expand all it wants to the East though.

Poland is going to be the centre of events in the north in a few years time. Many different interests are floating around in the Baltic and even though the Commonwealth might have lost some ''border posts'' to the Orthodox, Poland-Lithuania remain one of the big players in the region. Imminent decline isn't in sight yet.

The post is eye-candy and it's always good to know what's going around at the frontiers of Europe. alas, there are no options to choose from this time! ;)

Trust me, I'm enjoying writing on the events around Naseby quite a bit, but I ended up making the map of Russian expansionism instead.

Also, I got a bit lost, who owns Danzig now? The Swedes?

Yup, Danzig was originally Austrian in the game's early years, but later rebelled only to be conquered by the Swedes.
 
Well in that case I second Vidboy10 :D
 
If you think the maps of this update is something, I dare say that you ain't seen nothing yet, camarada :D
 
Well. What is D'Artagnan doing meanwhile?
 
I imagine he's somewhere in-between Flanders and Calais making some kind of Dutchman talk ;)
 




openingOttomanintermission.png


Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will he be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!"

[video=youtube;PdyhVf5EDRg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdyhVf5EDRg[/video]

***

From the annexation of Constantinople on the Golden Horn to the Battle of Lepanto, the Ottoman Empire and its ruling House of Osman had taken a leap of expansionism that shook and shattered Christendom to its very core.

Under crimson banners that sparkled with golden crescents, the armies of the Padishahs reached the banks of the Danube and the sandy beaches of Malta and the dunes of Mecca, holiest of the holy cities of Islam.

Yet this gargantuan empire of the Osman Turks, where only 14 of 48 grand viziers[1] were ethnically speaking Turkish, had begun to show a certain degree of weariness despite its immense successes. The empire’s threat still hung heavily over the rulers of Vienna and Venice, but since the clash of the Ottoman and Christian League’s naval formations off Lepanto in 1571, the High Porte had steered unto the path of stagnation that would characterize it through the 1600s.

Constantinoplefallen.png

Ottoman troops wave their banners over the ruins of one of Constantinople’s guard towers during the fall of the city in 1453

Although staggering to keep the pace with her Catholic rivals in the Mediterranean, the Turks still instilled fear to the hearts of the Habsburgs and Poles – a fear that had helped the Huguenots in France several times by anchoring large Austrian formations on the Hungarian border when they could have wrought havoc in Flanders or Lorraine.

In 1566 Suleiman the Magnificent reached the Danube, shortly before his death, with a huge army determined to finally take Vienna which he had failed at doing some 30 years earlier. Even though this second attempt also ended in defeat, the territorial expansionism of the Ottomans did not stall completely. In 1571 Cyprus fell, a high water mark for the Turk navy only months before the disastrous engagement at Lepanto.

At the turn of the 15th century a massive popular revolt broke out in Ottoman Greece against a renewed round of recruitment to the janissary class. Reaching its zenith in 1597, the uprising never penetrated the Corinthian isthmus and remained confined to continental Europe in the Peloponnese, but on Crete – in a show of national and religious solidarity never seen before – the Cretans overthrew the Venetian government on the island and joined forces with their brothers in arms on the Morea[2].

This renewal of a ‘Peloponnesian League’ (a name shortly used by the rebels themselves) did, however, little to hold back the furious onslaught which the Porte sent against her ungrateful subjects. Over the course of half a decade, the Turks stomped out the fire of the uprising and strangled the nascent Greek Orthodox identity in its cradle.

OttomanEmpire.png

Extent of the Ottoman domains in 1650. Note Transylvania, although part of the part empire, was enjoying de facto independence despite its vassalage status.

Thus the empire emerged in the 16th century with a surprisingly strengthened position in the Mediterranean. Christian discontent had been subdued brutally and Venice had lost an important base of operations in the Greek archipelago as Crete had been annexed into the empire alongside the rest of the dissident League.

Further north in Hungary, split between Austria and the Turks since the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the Ottoman goal gradually changed from taking the rest of the Habsburg Magyar provinces (known as Royal Hungary) for themselves to a simple hope for a maintenance of the status quo. As a result the Principality of Transylvania remained de facto independent of both empires whilst still paying homage and tribute to Constantinople. Under the command of the Bocskay family, the principality faced a large Hungarian immigration from both the Habsburg and Ottoman domains, although Austrian Érsekújvár still held a large and very loyal Hungarian population.

Whilst the Transylvanian princes managed to keep their vassalage status with the Porte intact, vice versa, Constantinople reacted very harshly to the increasingly rebellious attitude of the Wallachian fiefdom, dispatching armed forces to Bucharest in the late 1630s that deposed the Romanian rulers and imposed an Ottoman governor in their place.

Although the Ottomans avoided any further escalation with the larger Christian kingdoms after Lepanto, they did both lose and gain territory on account other than already mentioned. The third of the ‘Danube Principalities’, Moldavia, successfully wrested themselves loose of Turkish suzerainty and, under the protection of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, continued the raids of the late Wallachian principality. On the Adriatic coast, however, the Porte made up for its loss of the bridge connecting Bulgaria to its Crimean possessions by taking and incorporating the small state of Ragusa which had served as a haven for Slavic, Greek and Italian intrigues against the empire.

tree21.png

List of successive sultans, or Padishahs, of the Ottoman Empire – showing name, birth and death.

However, even though the western borders of the House of Osman’s domains settled down in eerie foreboding of coming conflicts, the east was far less dormant.

The reason for this is simple.

Persia.

Boasting a colourful as well as turbulent history, Persia had finally been united under the rule of the Shi’ite Safavid dynasty in 1501.

Funded on and thriving through their adoption of the Shia version of Islam, the Safavids found few allies amongst the predominantly Sunni Middle East where the Ottomans held almost complete hegemony.

It cannot then be hard to imagine how threatened the new Persian dynasty in Isfahan felt when the armies of the Padishah marched into Egypt and Mesopotamia in the first decades of the 15th century and cemented Turkish influence and lordship from Baghdad to Cairo.

The uncertain air of latent hostility soon escalated into open conflict in the mid 1500s, resulting in Turkish conquest of Azerbaijan and the expulsion of the Safavids from their former capital of Tabrix. However, Mesopotamia remained a disputed battleground between the two great Muslim branches and the Shia movement caught hold of the north-western part of the Fertile Crescent.

Under the guidance of shahanshah Abbas I, the Shia dynasty relocated to central Persia and established a new capital in the form of the city of Isfahan wherefrom Abbas waged new wars against the Turks, ultimately leading to the Persian conquest of the Luristan region.

His campaigns in modern Iraq brought the Safavid armies to the banks of the Tigris and into the suburbs of Baghdad, however, the city’s citadel withstood the onslaught and the shah had to retreat in the face of a resurgent Ottoman offensive.

Following the Persian retreat from Mesopotamia a sort of peace descended on the border between the two rivalling Muslim empires, yet Isfahan did not sit idly by as the Ottomans used the breathing space from the eastern conflict to renew their presence in Europe.

With untold blessings and prayers from the holy city of Qum following them, the cavalry armies of the Shia Twelvers[3] rushed eastwards and fought many battles with the Uzbek Khanates and the Afghan tribes and conquered much land and many cities.

Safavidos.png

Map of Safavid Persia in 1650

As such the High Porte faced a stronger and stronger Persia on its eastern flank, but whilst the Safavids accumulated wealth and power, the Christian nemesis of Austria waned as a result of her untold wars with the Protestants.

However, intern strife had begun to take hold of the bulging Ottoman state apparatus and cliques fought each behind the Sultan’s back. The janissaries, who had developed into an oriental praetorian guard, sought extension of their privileges at the expense of the authority of the monarchy.

Purges of the corps only postponed the inevitable confrontation between the two sides and by the 1660s several coups had already been performed by the janissaries lowering the empire’s stability noticeably.






[1]This is actually historically correct.
[2]Greece formed, surprisingly, out of the two Greek provinces in Morea and Crete joined shortly after.
[3]A way to describe the adherents to the greatest branch of Shia Islam.



So there you are, I’m going to leave for the Danish West Country in a few hours time where internet availability is sparse… take this update as the Christmas edition :D

Merry Christmas to all of you and may your present loot be large and good!
 
Were not for the mess that it would cause, it would be funny to see the Ottomans advancing to Paris as Viennas would be no threat to them :D
 
Were not for the mess that it would cause, it would be funny to see the Ottomans advancing to Paris as Viennas would be no threat to them :D

Tempting proposal, but no :D

Savary_Franco_Ottoman_Capitulations_1615.jpg


I think the Frenchies got to the Ottos in time.

I see OE a natural French ally. Possible? Doable? Worth it?

They certainly did their part in serving Huguenot interests by keeping so many Austrian soldiers on the Hungarian border, but now that Nicolas Henri is courting the members of the Holy Roman Empire, I think he'd discard a Turkish alliance in favour of the title of imperial protector against the heathen Ottomans.

Not worth it.
AI can betray.

Indeed XD

Damn Turks! :D

Indeed, I was very surprised to actually see the Greeks form (a republican dictatorship if I remember correctly), but even more so at how quickly and merciless the Ottomans reacted.
 
1. Monck doesn't get as lucky as in the Maccabean retelling of English early modernity, eh?
2. D'Artagnan has no time to interrogate prisoners!
3. Timofey Petrovich never has enough cavalry, it's like a curse or something.
4. The Greeks are a few centuries too early and this rightfully crushed. But the Persians are something.
5. Malta has a handful of sandy beaches at the most generous estimation. Malta's sunny, rocky shores?
6. Maps. Are. Amazing.
7. There's so much convergence, eh? Even the Safavids and an Alexei Mihailovich. Brings the EU2 feel back, somewhat.
8. Woodhouse - he's a popular fellow, one of those alternate-timeline travelling guys. Like an even more British Dr.Who.
9. That's the first thing they teach you in Cossack school, never leave your lyulka behind!
 
Last edited:
Okay, I have some good news and some very bad news.

Over the course of the much missed Holidays my main computer which holds all my notes, the maps, photoshop, paintings etc. decided to self-implode. Now this doesn't mean that it's completely finished off and that the material is inaccessible. What it does mean, however, is that I have to get all that stuff over to my new machine (after running XP for like for ever, I find Windows 7 completely alien) and that will take some time.

Furthermore, the save game is smashed up beyond repair. That's not so horrible though, the game had, by the point I reached the events I'm narrating right now, become far too easy. Spain is in a world of pain, just like Austria, and the high standards I've attempted to relay in regards to convergence (thank you RGB :D) have become impossible to maintain. I'll work on getting the material transferred tomorrow and then I'll move on to finishing the Naseby-arch as well as the misadventures of D'Artagnan and the other musketeers.
 
Last edited:
If you keep Spain suffering and have France in some deep trouble, I'll be happy. Take your time.
 
I missed the Ottoman update when it was first published. Made me want to play the Ottos in EUIII for the first time. :D
 
don't dispair, from what I gather, we will get our dose :)

@Milites, it's a sad mpment when you reach this point when the game is no longer interesting; in real life potential dangers can rip the seemingly strongest empires apart, in EUIII, when played by a human, they're undestructible