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Nope, I've destroyed nations only when I've tried to play CK MP games in England. :p

Ike in ohterhand has destroyeded nations in all continents and games...usually 3-4 times per game he is playing. It is real title among Ike, and if you speak about "destroyer of nations" to some experienced players, they all remember Ike with Fondess.


It's definitely a term of endearment.
 
King of Men (Komnenos, Antioch)
Varyar (al-Akbarzib, Sevilla)
Gollevainen (Don, Wales)
Von Rundstedt (Rurikovich, All the Russias)
Carillon (de Flandre, Flanders)
Foelsgaard (Abbasid, Baghdad)
Fasquardon (de Toulouse, Toulouse)
Beamed (de Hauteville, Two Sicilies)
Kolibri (Knautshcling, Stordanske Rige)
Fivoin (Goldstrand, Lotharingia)
FrozenWall (Fatimid, Alexandria)
orangeyoshi


this list still accurate?
 
Naw. Here's the current list:

King of Men (Komnenos, Byzantium)
Gollevainen (Don, Finland)
von Rundstedt (Rurikovich, All the Blobs)
Carillon (de Flandre, France)
Foelsgaard (Abbasid, Persia)
Jakalo (de Toulouse, False Empire)
Kolibri (Knautschling, Denmark)
Fivoin (Goldstrand, Bavaria)
FrozenWall (Fatimid, the Caliphate)
OrangeYoshi (Radomir, Croatia)
Oddman (Dhul'Nun, al-Andalus)
Ike (Tilius, nominally some minor Count in Finland, more often subbing)

Immortals:
Blayne (Rasputin, alive and in Russia)
IrshFaq (Mad Arab, slowly digging himself out of the grave, will be placed in Persia when he succeeds)
 
The Fatimid Caliphate: The last battle of Jerusalem


islamy.jpg


Calipha Abdul-Gawfur, of the 4th branch Fatimids, surveyed the field before him from his vantage point outside Jericho. He had hoped to repel the Abbasid usurpers at the Jordan, but the warm summer had lowered its flow and a contingent of Daylami had forced their way across a sparsely guarded ford, much to his chagrin. Not that he had not gotten used to setbacks during this campaign, but this was Jerusalem by Allah! He had retaken it from the Cross-Danes himself, and he was not about to surrender it to anyone. He looked out over his cavalry reserve, his Sayyedi Guard were still as loyal as ever despite the situation they were in. The situation he had put them in.

It was not as though he had not prepared for this. He knew full well there could not be two Caliphas claiming universal infalliability with peace between them. True, the clergy of the Islamic realms recognized not the temporal borders within the Ummah and held long debates in Holy Mecca over how to med the rift. But spiritual wrangling would not satisfy the greed of the ruling classes, and certainly not Byzantine revanchism. And so the Calipha had sent envoys in every direction of the wind, bearing gifts, threats, dire warnings and soothing words. The Imperial court of Milan had been all to happy of the Calipha declaring he would not contest their rule in Sicily, and the Croat tribesmen all to willing to take to the field at a chance of loot. He even managed for the first time to convince the ever enigmatic Rus to allow for the establishment of an embassy within the walls of Fortress Novogorod, and gained the Tsars ear.
He had amassed a respectable treasury, strengthened the border fortifications and seen to it that all the Banners were well equipped and commanded by able minded Fatimids. And yet he had failed to prepare himself of the realities of campaigning deep within Persia.

Indeed, it was not as if he was not aware of the accusations against his apostate counterpart concerning the use of black magiks, but as most learned men of Alexandria he had dismissed it as simple superstition that one could allow for the sake of propaganda. He should have known better. And for the thousandth time he kicked himself for sending simple city guards after the Mad Arab, instead of the Hassassins like any sane ruler would have. It was all to clear now, the connections between what was found in those cellars and the disaster by the two rivers.

When the war started the Fatimid preparations had paid off, the Black Banners had been swiftly driven back, their spirits broken and their mercenaries swiftly switching allegiance. Syria was soon overrun as the Greeks retreated to their fortified harbors, and the Emerald banners swept down the Euphrates and Tigris through stiff opposition. Abduls crowning moment was the fall of Mosul, it had seemed the keys of Baghdad herself were within his grasp then, before the sickness began. It had started in the Banners securing Kurdistan, innocuous coughing, then men losing their orientation, then spewing and diarrhea. At first the officers had assumed the men had looted alcohol from the locals and scolded them for their sinful disobedience. Then bulbous growths started to appear and their skin turned black.

When the Calipha was informed of the strange diseases cropping up within almost every banner the field armies of Syria and Jerusalem had all but dissolved, and were easy prey for the reinvigorated Persian forced which engaged them. Abdul had immediately suspected the captured grain storages, from where the Banners had supplied themselves. Realizing those of Mosul were in all probability also poisoned, and the impossibility of supplying the Nile Banners across the Syrian desert, he was forced to a humiliating retreat back to the line of fortified cities of the Levant where he could rally his tattered forces. The Persians had pursued him relentlessly, taking the majority of the desert region and attempting to flank Jerusalem through the gap between the dead sea and the Arabian desert.

The situation had been stabilized by the levying of the city guard of the Holy Cities, who had beaten back the Persian flanking army. At sea the underfunded Alexandrian fleet had been met by disaster at the reemergence of Greek fireships, a technology thought lost with the fall of Constantinople many years past. The island harbors had been lost, but the Greeks failed to press their advantage as their marine forces had to be rerouted to address the timely arrival of 20.000 Andalucian Spear in Greece.
The Persians lacked sufficient equipment to breach the massive walls of Edessa or Damascus. And so had committed their available resources here, at Holy Jerusalem where they knew Abdul would have to meet them or see the Caliphate cut in twain. Indeed if they reached the sea there was a good chance the Infidels would smell blood in the water and descend upon him.

The gold glistened of the Guards armor, its tattered pennants fluttered freely in the breeze. No, no, they would not waver. They would not abandon him. Nor his veteran militia and levies, who had destroyed the apostate Banners of Baghdad outside Acre. No, the men of the Nile would not fail here. Nor would those from Jerusalem, demoralized by the black death that had befallen their brothers perhaps but that would only make them hold on to their homes ever more. He could not say the same of his mercenaries, many of whom had demanded more gold where there was none. Indeed this was a battle that one could not afford to lose.

Three lone riders galloped like crazy men in between the lines, young hotheads showing off no doubt, curiously clad in white linens. Bedouin perhaps? Abdul waved unimportant details away. He looked over a small map covered in chess pieces again, a deep frown showing under his golden helm. Had the Engineers Guild had another day to finish their warmachines on the hills this battle would have been a foregone conclusion. But the armies were arrayed now, not tomorrow, awaiting only for the mullahs to finish their blessings of the front line before the battle began. Abdul was jerked suddenly from his papers by a loud shouting and the thunder of tens of thousands of men advancing.

"Who gave the order to advance?!" the Calipha demanded "Who?! We haven't even loosed proper volley at them!"

There was silence. The Emirs looked in pain and astonishment as the two armies met without even a pretense of order, and the lines intermingled with each other. Far to early, far to disorderly and hard. There was no way now that the levies would hold long enough for the Fatimids to flank and bring their superior cavalry to bear. The Calipha calmed his mind as he calculated how long Jerusalem could be held if the Guard retreated there now and fortified themselves. Acre would be lost, but African reinforcements could be landed in Alexandria and Beirut. Milan would have to be sent offers of....

"Peace insh'Allah! We have Peace!" A rotund Mullah exclaimed as he made his way up the hill. "The Ayatollahs in Mecca have agreed! The rift is bridged! The Dar al Islam is finally one whole again!"

The Calipha looked at the little man in turban, dumbfounded, then he heard it. The cheers. Wild unadulterated cheers. The shields, armor and spear scattered behind the army.The two armies were dancing with each other, there were celebratory call from the muezzin, riders in white were seen heading in most every direction to spread the word.

Several thoughts flew through Calipha Abdul-Gawfurs mind. Was it a trap? Who were the Ayatollahs to lecture him on the faith? Surely there could only be one true Calipha, or had Allah abandoned him for his worldly ways and revealed his truth in Mecca instead? Could he order the Guard to attack now and take the Persians by surprise? No, it was much to late for that now, they were already celebrating. No, it was to late for that. Best to turn his coat and appear the wise leader of the Ummah and make friends of the Persians now that he could. The Greeks on the other hand, were not part of the Ummah....

abbasidsjerusalem.jpg

The Holy Intervention of the joint high clergy of the two Caliphates came as a mixed blessing to the Abbasid Calipha. On one hand the Holy cities were now out of his grasp, on the other hand his armies were now freed up to tackle the massive nomad incursions to his east. Both thoughts hung heavy on his mind.

fatimidsjerusalem.jpg

The realization that the Persian armies had been turned back and he now had a free hand with the Greeks in Syria and the Isles hung somewhat lighter on the Fatimid Caliphas shoulders...
 
Edited.
 
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I seem to remember it's against Pdox rules to link to other forums. Please try not to get our thread closed. Also, just how much cross-posting do you really need?
 
Two Emperors War

The Two Emperors War ended in defeat and the cession of important provinces; its name, indeed, comes from the two Komnenoi emperors who died leading their armies in battle. Nonetheless, both at the time and in retrospect, it was seen as demonstrating the deadly prowess of Roman armies and the skilled diplomacy of the Byzantine court. Nor is this hard to understand: Facing foes with twice or three times its weight of metal, the wonder was not that the Empire lost the war, but that it got off so lightly.

The 1231 Treaty of Friendship had left Rome and Persia in possession of several disputed border marches; but, failing to break the power of Russia over the Ukrainian steppe, the victorious powers had not achieved their real goal of dominating the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Levant. Indeed, it is a commonplace to argue that, by doing their powerful enemy a small injury, they had merely awakened a sleeping bear. Worse, the war had convinced the Caliphate's diplomats that their neighbours could not be trusted to remain content with the new border. Both sides, then, expected that the other would eventually strike, either for further gains or to recoup their losses. Naturally, this was a perfectly self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the best possible intelligence (and both Caliphate and Empire had highly-placed informers in the other's court) would only confirm the existence of preparations for war - triggering a renewed bout of shoring up defenses, which would in turn be reported to the other side as an aggressive act!

Victory, moreover, is a poor teacher, while the two decades before the outbreak of war in 1251 demonstrated that the Caliphate and Russia had learned not to depend purely on their own resources. The Sicilian Pact and the marriage treaty forced on a reluctant Denmark by Russian threats cleared the flanks of the revanchist powers, while Croatia added to its strength by overrunning doomed Poland. No balancing gains occurred on the Romano-Persian side; by 1251, both courts were desperate, and saw a pre-emptive strike as their only option. Their hope was to swiftly overrun the Caliphate's Levantine possessions, before the Russians could mobilise their vast forces or reinforcements be brought from Africa, and then negotiate a lasting peace, or at least another temporary truce during which allies might be found, from a position of strength.

Militarily, this scheme worked reasonably well; Persian troops reached the Red Sea and even threatened Mecca, while Byzantine armies took Aleppo and Edessa and, on the other side of the realm, destroyed vast Cossack and Croatian armies. However, its success relied not only on victory in the field but also on establishing psychological dominance. "Defeat," the Caliph observed, "is an event that takes place in the mind of a ruler", and he refused to be thus defeated. Rather than yielding, he stamped new armies out of the ground, sent vast subsidies to his allies, and offered peace based on the borders of 1200, including a demand that Constantinople admit a Croatian garrison as surety for the behaviour of the Emperor.

In so doing, he proved that willpower is a double-edged sword: In refusing to submit even when his armies melted away, he had saved his realm from defeat; but in stubbornly insisting on the restoration of a bygone era, he handed his enemies the weapon they needed. No amount of Roman diplomacy or gold had been able to restore the old Crusading spirit; the Western kingdoms very reasonably pointed out that Rome's ally Persia was infidel, that Croatia and Russia were Christian powers (and Croatia wasn't full of schismatics, at that), and that, if anything, they could just as well launch a crusade against the Persian necromancers and treat Rome as a traitor against Christendom. The Pope - remembering, perhaps, that his predecessor had been forced to hand Thomas the keys to the city of Rome - pointed out that Rome was still in schism against the authority of St Peter; if they wanted spiritual help, he acerbically suggested, they might consider repenting their sins. This was, of course, completely impossible for an Emperor who did not want his head on a pike; the cession of Constantinople would have been less disastrous. Nothing, therefore, came of these efforts until the Caliph made public his demand for a complete overthrow of the balance of power in the Middle East. At that point, when the actual interest of the Western states was touched, the Crusade that had got nowhere became suddenly the order of the day, and "Deus Vult!" was on everyone's lips.

At this point the cracks in the revanchist coalition began to show. Croatia, bordering as it did all three of the suddenly-restive Western powers - Denmark, Bavaria, and the German Empire - and therefore guaranteed to take the brunt of their intervention, proved quite unwilling to suffer an invasion from the West to support Egyptian notions of jihad justice; they sent out feelers for a separate peace. The Caliph, shocked at the sudden threat on what he had considered a secure flank, sent out bitter communiques about the sanctity of treaty and the need for a supranational authority (unspoken was the implication that the Successor of the True Prophet was the obvious candidate) to restrain the sovereignty of kings. However, when no such authority volunteered for the job, he quickly reduced his demands rather than face an invasion from Sicily. Russia, meanwhile, was hampered in negotiation by the sheer distance of Novgorod from the fighting front; by the time instructions arrived for its diplomats, they were months out of date. The Caliph, personally leading what remained of his armies in the Levant, was able to take advantage of this slowness to arrive at a peace that favoured the Caliphate far more than its erstwhile allies; he thus gained Roman Syria, Crete, and important border adjustments in Iraq, while Russia was given the sop of a worthless Trans-Caucasian conquest and Croatia (perhaps because of the affair of the separate-peace feelers) had to be satisfied with the promise of a future subsidy.

Rome, then, had got off lightly; although Crete was a valuable base for privateers, and Syria a wealthy province, they were still border marches - strategic assets, certainly, but not vital to the very survival of the empire as a sovereign nation, as was the case with the Straits and the Anatolian heartland.

At this point, however, the internal politics of Rome became important. Two Emperors, Andronikos and his son Michael, had fallen during the war, both in combat with the Cossack hosts invading along the Black Sea coast. In previous Roman history, such deaths had been disasters, leading to civil war, usurpation, and massive losses of territory. But the Komnenoi, unlike earlier dynasties, had managed to place family members in most of the important positions of the Empire, the main exceptions being the themes of Samos and Macedonia. Now, at the moment when the Empire most needed unity and leadership, they rose to the challenge by providing both, and by commanding the armies to make their decrees stick. It was clearly out of the question that Rome should be ruled by a child Emperor during such a crisis, and the dangers of a regency had been amply demonstrated by the Palaiologos Deluge sixty years before. The Komnenoi, meeting in conclave (which they declared to be a quorum of the Senate; since many of them did in fact have Senatorial rank and they also, between them, controlled most of the Empire's fighting men, nobody felt impelled to protest, although no non-Komnenos Senator (of which there were several in the City) was invited) in Constantinople with a Cossack host barely a hundred miles north of the city, solved the problem in typically ruthless fashion: They completely ignored the hereditary custom, revived the theoretical principle that the Emperor was appointed by the Senate, and gave the purple to the general commanding the largest army - who, naturally, happened to be one of their own.

In a sense this was a breach of the principle of legitimacy that had been the guiding star of the Komnenoi since the days of the Loyal Peace; but it could also be argued that the hereditary custom was just that, a custom, and that the Komnenoi had merely restored the original intent of the office of Emperor, not to mention the power of the Senate. It also could not have escaped anyone's notice that the Emperor had been elected by the Komnenoi from their own ranks; clearly, if the strict hereditary principle had been abandoned, the dynastic principle remained alive and well. In any case, in the midst of war nobody was likely to quibble over legalities; inter armes, silent leges had been a maxim of Rome since the days of the Republic. The intellectual establishment thus went to work, as one man, to demonstrate that the new system of electing the absolute ruler was a true expression of the Republican idea, that it was a splendid compromise between the old custom (which was excellent) and the meritocratic principle (which was also excellent), that it was necessary for prosecuting the war, and that in any case there were precedents going back to Augustus.

The election of Nikolaios undoubtedly saved the Empire during the war; but once peace came, the wartime Emperor found the throne less steady under him than his saddle had been. Komnenoi or not, the ruling class of the Empire were still Byzantine Greeks, and the children of the emperor Michael formed a very convenient point for intrigues to swirl around. Nikolaios therefore sought a distraction, something to make his fractious court point all their weapons in the same direction; at the same time, the truce with the Caliphate freed powerful armies for operations in the Balkans. It may have mattered that Nikolaios had fought on the Syrian front, and had not gained a good impression of the Cossack and Croatian hosts; here he was perhaps a victim of the Empire's own propaganda. It is true that the Roman armies in the Balkans had been outnumbered three to one and had nevertheless managed to hold off the attackers and inflict much worse casualties than they suffered; but it is also true that they did so mainly by scorching the land in front of the invaders, and that losses in actual battle were roughly equal. Further, the Czar, fighting Persia on the Caucasian and Caspian fronts and well aware of the traditional logistical strategy of Rome, had not committed his full strength to the Thracian campaign. In any case, the upshot was that, in 1269, Nikolaios declared renewed war on Croatia, this time without Persian support. The formal causae belli were the treatment of the Orthodox communities in Nikopolis and the issue of the Transylvanian Succession; but the reality was that Nikolaios sought a short, victorious war to subdue his domestic problems, and underestimated the difficulty of the project.

He was enlightened in short order; although the disputed border provinces rapidly fell to the kataphracts, the incensed Czar, unhampered by any Persian commitment, mustered the entire Cossack strength of the Ukraine, a force that has been estimated at perhaps two hundred thousand sabres. Such a host could not long be supplied in foreign territory, and it has been suggested that the Czar may have been trying to cement his rule in the southern regions with an early attempt at ethnic cleansing; but while the Cossacks died of hunger and disease in the tens of thousands, they also drove unstoppably to Constantinople and laid siege to its walls.

Meanwhile Nikolaios was fighting a fluid war of maneuver and logistics against the Croatian counter-invasion; but although Croatian casualties are estimated at twice the Roman, this mattered little when his foes could draw on three times his population. In spite of such brilliant exploits as the ambush at Epiros and the famous March of the Lesbians, Nikolaios was eventually forced to concede that he had bit over more than he could chew. Since he had, however, been careful to put his domestic enemies in the front rank and to send them against the Cossacks, the real aims of the war had been achieved, and the loss of the Black Sea coastline and the Transylvanian Succession could not have bothered him much. Indeed, the Komnenos Duke who had inherited Transylvania had promptly repaid Nikolaios's scheming to make it so by rebelling against his authority; one cannot help feeling that, in signing the Duchy over to the Croatians while managing to keep it in his kinsman's hands, Nikolaios was wishing them much joy of each other.

With peace restored to his court, Nikolaios turned to the project of establishing full Komnenos control of all the themes and rebuilding the wealth burned by the invading Cossacks...

Bribes and Barbarians: Byzantium 1200-1314,
Constantinople University Press.​
 
http://i54.tinypic.com/260qv52.jpg

Probably won't be until next week before I can get a proper page out thats clean enough.

But is in order from left to right: Gollevainen, Myself, King of Men, and Yoshi.
 
I'm debating giving a beard or not.
 
Bribes and Barbarians: Byzantium 1200-1314,
Constantinople University Press.​

You forgot to mention that the Constantinopole was sacked by the Russian hordes when the coward greeks ran away under the massive numbers of russian honorable soldiers.
 
Are you asking me, or Ike? :D

If you were asking me, I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about this game, so it stays fresh in my memory. Also, if you don't remember it, how can you be confident that I've got it right? Maybe I just wrote the history book and now you remember what I said about it, instead of what actually happened. "History shall be kind to me, for I shall write it." :)
 
Are you asking me, or Ike? :D

If you were asking me, I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about this game, so it stays fresh in my memory. Also, if you don't remember it, how can you be confident that I've got it right? Maybe I just wrote the history book and now you remember what I said about it, instead of what actually happened. "History shall be kind to me, for I shall write it." :)

The defeated only write the history the victors let them. In this case, I approve. ;)

As for remembering things, I didn't even think about your Charge of the Lesbians until I read it in the AAR. Then I remembers the whole senquence of events.

And besides, I have MSN logs to remember history by. ;)
 
As for remembering things, I didn't even think about your Charge of the Lesbians until I read it in the AAR. Then I remembers the whole senquence of events.

Right, so... how do you know that's a real memory? Maybe I implanted it in history and used my Hypnotic Roman Powers to make you remember it. :D
 
"History shall be kind to me, for I shall write it." :)

Indeed, much as the return of Malta to the Caliphate hands shall be remembered as genious dynastic maneuvering and not me randomly inheriting it under Jakalos nose :D