New Constantinople in the Age of Exploration - A Byzantine AAR

TheExecuter: Now with twice the Reconquista for all your reconquista needs.

General_Hoth: Ha! That's a rather appropriate analogy, I'd say.

Kurt_Steiner: Not even ultra-jingoist ex-Byzantine puritans?

Enewald: Must be something in the drinking water.

Zzzzz...: Thanks! Hopefully I can keep it interesting.


'What are all those ships out there in the harbor? Someone find out what it is they want.'

The huge armada that set sail from New Constantinople in February of 1555 very nearly did not survive the crossing. Storms buffeted the ships as they sailed past Bermuda, and several were lost at sea, either from the weather or failures to adequately prepare the many Byzantine coastal galleys for the trans-Atlantic voyage. Some of the more cautious commanders took these inauspicious beginnings as divine portents from God. But Archon Arkadios Karxarias and the many knights of the Order of Hagios Isaakios were quick to smother such dissentious talk before it could come to fruition. The Empress had ordained the conquest of the Old World, and no mere weather would deter them from their holy task.

The whole force finally arrived at Lisbon on June 6 tired, seasick, but still eager for a fight. Taken completely off-guard, the Portuguese found themselves facing an onslaught of unrivalled ferocity. Over forty thousand Byzantine crusaders swarmed ashore, killing or scattering the twenty thousand Portuguese soldiers standing in their way. Within two weeks, the capital had been captured by assault and the rest of the kingdom lay open to Byzantine invasion. With most of its European army either dead or deserted, Portuguese cities and towns surrendered one after another as the Byzantines advanced. Those cities too stubborn to cave in were swiftly captured. Troops were landed in the Portuguese colonial holdings in Brazil, and another expeditionary force was dispatched to 'reclaim' the island of Madeira, originally colonized by the exiled Greeks more than a century earlier. Within two years, the whole of mainland Portugal was under occupation, save for the lone stronghold of Faro on its southern edge, which fell in turn on May 4. Faced with such an unmitigated disaster, the monarchy had no choice but to accept the Byzantines' outrageous demands: the cession of nearly all mainland Portugal had much of the colony of Brazil.


Having gained so much so quickly, the Byzantine crusade soon lost momentum. Though the constant string of battles, skirmishes, seiges, and city assaults had noticeably depleted the ranks of the Byzantine military, fresh reinforcements were already on their way across the ocean, even as locals were converted and conscripted to the cause. But the Byzantines were at a loss were to go from here. The Empress, thousands of miles away to the West, could not offer the army commanders the guidance they had come to expect and rely upon. Some believed that a direct strike at the Ottoman Empire was now in order. Others believed that the Byzantine armies should sweep across the face of Europe, so that by the time they finally arrived at the gates of Old Constantinople, a vast Byzantine empire would be that their backs.

In the end, Karxarias opted for a compromise between the two extremes. Portugal, he conclude, was insufficient by itself to sustain the Byzantine foothold or to act as a platform for an invasion across the Mediterranean. At the very least, a port on the Mediterranean was necessary before any invasion of the Ottoman Empire could be carried out. Conveniently, Spain offered a prime opportunity for the Byzantine crusaders. Following the abdication of Emperor Charles, the vast Habsburg realm had been wracked by a series of fierce rebel uprisings; though allied with the Kingdom of France and several Italian states, Karxarias gambled that Spain would be easy prey. In May 1558, just a year after their victory in Portugal, the Byzantines went to war against the Spanish.


Karxarias' predictions proved to be correct. Distracted by rebellions in distant lands, the Spanish armies were in no position to counter the Byzantine onslaught. Meeting scarce resistance, the cavalry squadrons of the Order of Hagios Isaakios swept from one end of Spain to the other while the conventional infantry forces set up sieges of the various Iberian strongholds. Fifteen thousand Spanish troops hastily mustered at Valenica were caught by surprise by the Order's forces and massacred with ease. By the spring of 1559, the southern half of the kingdom was devoid of organized resistance. Seville surrendered on April 26 of that year, while the French city of Granada was captured on July 4. By this point, it seemed the only hope for a Spanish counteroffensive lay with the thirty thousand French reinforcements marching from across the Pyrenees under the command of Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Conde. Conde's target was clear: the soldiers of the Order of Hagios Isaakios, then ranging freely through Aragon and Catalonia. Using their superior speed to great advantage, the Order knights escaped south to Valencia, luring Conde into a giant trap. On July 27, 1559, on the same field where the Spanish had been defeated a year before, the French army was surrounded and all but destroyed. The Prince fell in the fiercest of the fighting, leaving the few survivors to flee back north on their own.


With the principal armies of both the French and Spanish destroyed, Spanish fortunes were at their low ebb. The Papacy and Florence made token gestures to the war effort, but little could now be done to alter the course of the war. On January 30, 1560, Toledo fell to the Byzantines, and two months later Cordoba followed suit. Even so, even the crusaders recognized that their demands for peace were inordinately harsh: Spain would be forced to surrender all its territory in Andalusia and Granada. Yet such was the sad state of affairs with the kingdom that, as news of the crown's refusal to accept these demands reached the ears of the commoners, anti-war riots erupted all across the Spanish empire. After several months unfolding in this manner, the Spanish finally relented and accepted the Byzantine offer in May of 1562. The Byzantine crusade now had its base from which the liberation of the homeland could be launched.

Well, I figure I've been dragging my feet on an update for long enough, so here you go!


'Our armies are invincible. Against all we have emerged triumphant. We do not travel halfway across this world for wealth, for glory, for salvation. We are here for only one reason: revenge. You have been warned.'

The victorious result of the Byzantine war against the Portuguese and then the Spaniards left the empire in possession of a solid base of operations from which to conduct further wars in the Old World. But despite the outward appearance of invincibility and territorial aggrandizement, the conflict had, so far, come at a heavy cost. Most of those who had originally sailed forth from New Constantinople in 1555 were now either dead or injured. Those who had followed after to reinforce the Byzantine armies were as well, as were their replacements as well. The human cost of war was great, both within the army and without. Southern Iberia was devastated, and Spain itself, once so mighty and powerful, was on the brink of collapse. Within a few short years, rebels in Catalonia, the Basque country, and Sicily would all proclaim their independence.

But Spain was merely the first step in the Empress' grand plan, not the ultimate destination. Using a combination of coercive measures and tapping the empire's vast treasury, the Byzantines appropriated the enormous shipyards of Seville and put them to work churning out a new fleet suitable for the closed waters of the Mediterranean. Calls went out for as many mercenaries as the empire could find, and all the while, more and more recruits continued to pour across the ocean, ready to do their part in the Holy Revolution. The Greek armies had already crossed half the globe. How hard could the rest of the journey truly be?

In fact, the task facing them was about the most daunting any army could hope to undertake. The armies of the Ottoman Empire were easily the largest, most advanced, most battle-hardened fighting forces in early modern Europe. The empire the Turks ruled from Constantinople stretched from the Euphrates to Algiers, and from Ethiopia to the Ukraine. It was a wealthy, prosperous, well-governed realm, and much of that wealth had been turned inward to make it one of the most heavily-defended places on earth. Though the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople remained formidable, the Ottomans had built comparable fortifications and city defenses in nearly every other city under their control. There was no chink in the army for an invading army to exploit. Attack from any direction would meet the same massive fortifications; the typical Ottoman garrison stood at 15,000 strong. There would be no repetition of the sweeping campaigns the Byzantines had conducted in Iberia.

Even if the Archon Karxarias had been privy to such details, it would have hardly deterred the crusaders. By the end of 1565, the Byzantine armies had been fully resupplied and reinforced, and the navy expanded to over a hundred war galleys. Modern estimates put the assembled invasion force at anywhere between eighty and ninety thousand soldiers. The Archons elected not to risk the whole invasion force in a single voyage, so only approximately half the army was present when the declaration of war was sent and soldiers landed at Corfu on January 22, 1565. By all rights, the Ottomans should have been better prepared for a potential attack; the Greeks had not been subtle about their intention of dismantling the Turkish state. There were only five thousand mobile forces in the whole of Greece when the Byzantines arrived.

Spurred on by this fortuitous circumstance, the Byzantine armies began their assault on the fortresses of Corfu on February 14. Unlike in Iberia, the progress was slow and exceptionally bloody. It took an entire month for the island to be taken fully on March 16, but in the end, the Byzantines had access to an excellent port on the very doorstep of the Turkish realm. Angry at how long it had taken, the Greek soldiers massacred those in the Ottoman garrison that had not perished in the fighting.

After seizing control of Corfu, the war fell into an uneventful lull until August, when the Byzantine fleet returned with the remainder of the invasion force. The knights of the Order of Hagios Isaakios stormed ashore in Epirus and rushed north into the mountains of Albania, while the infantry remained in Epirus in preparation for another assault. From their vantage point in Albania, the Order knights made a shocking discovery. Further to the east in Macedonia was a massive Ottoman relief army that easily numbered 90,000 soldiers. With shocking ease, the Turks had put an army into the field that outnumbered the entire Byzantine invasion force.

But long odds could not overcome the fanatical religious zealotry of the crusaders, who joked that an army so large would just make it easier to kill their enemy. In a fit of defiance, the Byzantines completed their occupation of Epirus by September 18. Enraged by the invasion, the Ottoman Sultan ordered his generals to attack at once. The great army in Macedonia split in half, with one contingent remaining in place while the other moved to attack the exposed Order knights in Albania. Prepared for such an eventuality, Archons Anqrakias and Abraxos hurried to the Order's relief with nearly thirty thousand of their own. Their intervention tipped the balance back in the Greeks' favor. On November 21, the Ottoman attack was beaten back decisively, but the victory proved short-lived, as the other half of the great Ottoman force simple pushed into Epirus, dispersing the tiny defense force there and splitting the main body of the Byzantine invasion - one in Albania, the other in Attica - in half.

The move, however, presented Karxarias with an opportunity to isolate and defeat in detail a sizable Ottoman force. Epirus was never a particularly prosperous or bountiful province, and the presence of forty thousand Ottoman soldiers rapidly depleted local food stores. Within six months, hunger and winter weather conditions had bled the Ottoman forces besieging Epirus down to half strength, a state only exacerbated by a botched assault in April. Karxarias sprung his trap, sending an army into Thessaly in the hopes of encircling the Ottoman army still in Epirus. The move ultimately proved unsuccessful, merely provoking the a counter-attack that pushed the Byzantines back behind their lines. But in so doing, it strung the Ottoman forces out into several vulnerable pockets. Of the once-enormous ninety thousand that had stood watch in Macedonia, only twenty thousand remained. This proved too tempting for the Order knights, who sallied forth from the protection of the rugged Albanian terrain to attack.


The battle was short, bloody, and decisive. Caught out in the open with nowhere to take shelter, the predominantly infantry force was easily surrounded and swarmed over by the irresistible force of twenty thousand fanatics. Within a few hours, an entire Ottoman army was wiped off the map. Not even two thousand knights fell in combat. It was just the sort of crushing victory the Byzantine crusade needed to maintain momentum against such an opponent. But it was only the beginning.

Enewald: That army is the sum total of the Byzantine cavalry force, and represent the Order of Hagios Isaakios. The other armies are all-infantry forces. It's about as fair as the Ottomans having medium forces in 99% of their provinces.

Kurt_Steiner/Misconstruction: More troops? Oh yes! Oh yes, indeed....


'I was there when we won a great victory against twenty thousand hapless Turks. I was also there when their comrades appeared to take revenge.'

The startling Byzantine victory in Macedonia in June 1567 left approximately forty-five thousand Ottoman soldiers trapped in Epirus and Thessaly, surrounded by hostile Byzantine armies on all sides and cut off from reinforcement and, most important of all, resupply. Guided by their experiences in Portugal and Spain, the Byzantine Archons supposed that they could wear down and ultimately destroy the Ottoman forces at a leisurely pace before turning to deliver the killing blow at Constantinople. As time would soon show, this was a fatal miscalculation.

Where the massacre of twenty-thousand soldiers might break the fighting spirit of an Iberian lord, it merely enraged the Sublime Porte into a renewed determination to punish the impudent Greek crusaders. True, it had been a heavy military blow, and the remaining Turkish forces in Greece may have been trapped or pinned in place in garrison duty, but the empire was vast, still possessed immense resources to draw upon, and, most importantly, the Byzantines had failed to capitalize on their victory and instead remained in the rugged terrain of northern Greece. If the first army proved insufficient for the task, a second would be dispatched.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman armies trapped inside the Byzantine cordon refused to sit idly by and await destruction. With good reason, the soldiery was convinced that surrender would be suicidal. In August, having heard no word from Ottoman forces outside the pocket and seen no sign of relief, the Ottoman army in Thessaly began its advance south into Attica and toward Athens, which was still under Turkish control but on the brink of capitulation after many months under Byzantine siege. Though outnumbered, the Greeks withstood the Ottoman attack, using the terrain and their more maneuverable infantry armies to good effect.

The defeat severely demoralized the Ottoman forces, many of whom began to desert the Thessalian army en masse and take their chances in the wilderness. The depletion in the Turkish ranks gave the Archons the opportunity they had been waiting all these months for, and in October the Byzantine forces marched north from Attica to tighten the noose. Weakened from desertion and poor supplies, the surviving Ottoman forces had no choice but to fall back in Epirus, which served only to exacerbate the growing supply problems in that region as well. For half the winter, the Greeks waited the Ottomans out, encouraged by the fact no enemy reinforcements had appeared in Macedonia. Finally, in January of 1568, Byzantine armies were drawn from their siege duties in Albania, Attica, and Thessaly for a combined effort to destroy the lingering Ottoman army. The opposing forces met on February 10; fighting was fierce and desperate, but numbers and morale was on the side of the crusaders. Barely fourteen thousand Ottomans out of the original forty still remained at arms as they fled into Attica in the desperate hope of fleeing to safety. With the Greeks in hot pursuit, only ten thousand managed to break through and reach the relative safety of the Aegean islands.

Buttressed by this victory, the Byzantines forces settled back into the work of investing and reducing the Ottoman fortresses before pressing on into Macedonia and Thrace. But the lull only gave the Porte more time to muster its forces. Worse, the high price of war, both in manpower and gold, was beginning to have a serious effect on the stability of the empire. Anti-tax and anti-conscription revolts began to erupt amongst the scattered peasant communities, particularly amongst the as-yet unconverted Orthodox regions. Facing the prospect of domestic revolt and a war that seemed to be dragging on interminably, the Empress began pressuring her Archons to come to some negotiated settlement. Though the Ottomans might not be conquered in one swift stroke, a foothold from which further operations could be conducted could at least be established.

But the Sultan was in no mood to treat with the Byzantine invaders. In late 1568, a massive Ottoman army, 75,000 strong, at least appeared in northern Greece and began its descent upon the Greek forces. The Archons were horrified: arrayed against this vast enemy host was a paltry thirty-five thousand spread out across three provinces. All might have been lost, were it not for the great luck that a new wave of reinforcements had at least arrived. The Ottoman commanders had also committed a serious blunder and divided their armies to attack the Byzantines in Attica and Epirus simultaneously, unaware that thirty-five thousand Byzantine reinforcements were rushing ashore in Epirus. In Epirus, battle was joined on January 26, 1569, and in Attica a day later. The outcome of both confrontations would likely decide the outcome of the war.


Morale and terrain once again played a decisive factor. In Epirus, where the Greeks were actually at an unexpected numerical advantage, the defenders simply entrenched and awaited the expected attack, repulsing each assault with bloody ease. But it was the conduct of the crusaders in Attica, where they emasculated Turkish arms, channeling the enemy into a series of mountain passes and slaughtering them with volleys of withering gunfire as they emerged. Unable to bring their four-fold advantage to bear, the enemy discipline soon broke down and an embarrassing defeat was turned into a rout. The Archons could not let such unexpected good fortune slip by again, pursuing the demoralized enemy into Thessaly, where the combined force was once again defeated and sent flying. Shocked by the defeat of his second great army, the Sultan proved far more welcoming of Byzantine peace overtures. Neither side wanted to continue the fight, so it was agreed that the Ottomans would cede control of Attica, Epirus and the Ionian islands.


The Byzantine dream, to sweep the heathen foe before the glorious crusader armies and reclaim the homeland had failed. The Byzantines had gained their prize atop a mountain of corpses. But the Empress, far away in distant New Constantinople, was not so easily discouraged. Setbacks had been suffered, but the war would ultimately go on.