Well, bad news everyone. I've run into a CTD error that I can't fix, so this will be the last update to the AAR. Fortunately, events unfold in such a way prior to the CTD that there can be some closure to things. I suppose it's another reason to get me back to writing my Crusader Kings AAR.
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'Let there be no mistake. All in good time, there will be a reckoning the likes of which the world has never seen, and can scarcely comprehend.'
The Byzantine state emerged from its first great excursion against the mighty Ottoman Empire bruised, battered, and disappointed. Many tens of thousand had perished in a long, grueling campaign of attrition. For every Ottoman army destroyed, it seemed another would take its place, fortresses seemed to stretch on to the horizon. The very religious fanaticism that had drawn the Byzantine Puritans back across the Atlantic eventually became a source of weakness. Failures and setbacks on the battlefield bred uncertainty and disillusionment, while in the New World, word of the stumbling crusade emboldened those who still clung to the old Orthodoxy to rebel against the harsh, often draconian war measures imposed on the homefront.
When peace negotiations were concluded, much of the trans-Appalachian region had risen up in rebellion and overthrown the tenuous grip of New Constantinople's authority. Though the empire was more centralized than at any point in its one and a half century history, there was little that could be done to police these regions. With the demands of the Ottoman war no longer pressing, however, fresh military forces could be dispatched to reassert control in these remote backwaters. Of course, such disruptions had done little to diminish the expansionist nature of the Greek settlers, who continued to push beyond the limits of the imperial frontier. Settlements had trading posts had been established during the war along the whole length of the great Mississippi River, incursions were made into the Texan wilderness, and a few intrepid explorers managed to blaze a trail all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where they established a new colony.
Pleased as she was by this persistent Greek urge to explore and colonize the world, the Empress refused to let it distract from the greater goal of liberating the Old World empire from the heathens. Refusing to accept any blame for the campaign's overall failure - though it seems no one conceived of the possibility that she was at fault - the Empress scolded her Archons for allowing themselves to grow complacent and arrogant as a result of their early victories. God's punishment had cost the empire many thousands of soldiers, and their sacrifices could not be allowed to be in vain. Once the peace treaty expired in 1574, war would be resumed.
What money was not spent training new units and shipping them to the newly-reclaimed Greek lands was invested in a reform of the army's weaponry. Rumors and spy reports indicated that the Ottomans were on the verge of producing new and improved gunpowder weapons that would provide them a decisive firepower advantage over the Greek soldiers. Much effort was put into producing Byzantine counterparts to outfit the new armies amassing in Attica and Epirus. In the long-run, the Ottomans would likely emerge the victors in a dedicated arms race, but the Empress was determined to see to it that there was no Ottoman state in the long-run. For their part, the Turks squandered much effort in the five-year breathing space on less pressing matters: a punitive expedition was sent against the Bosnians, and the empire's attention was directed to the far north, where the Turks struggled again and again to bring the Crimean khans to heel. Thus, when the Crusaders declared war once again on June 1, 1574, only 18,000 Turkish soldiers stood ready at the border, divided unequally between Albania and Thessaly, to contest the invasion of Byzantine army totaling slightly more than one hundred thousand.
The Byzantine plan was simple, and covered only the initial phase of the invasion. While the navy was dispatched into the Aegean to bottle up the Turkish fleet and conduct reconnaissance, the army would launch a two-pronged assault north from Epirus and Attica into Albania and Thessaly respectively. Once the border defenses had been breached, the knights of the Order of Hagios Isaakios would lunge forward into the open country of Macedonia and Thrace and serve as a shield while the infantry forces reduced the Ottoman citadels. Events unfolded favorably for the Greeks: the border defenses were battered aside and the invasion corridor was opened up. Eighteen thousand Turkish infantry were caught in the fields of Macedonia, moving too late to escape the wrath of the Order knights in a ghastly massacre on July 27. Already, thirty-thousand Ottoman soldiers had fallen in the fighting.
But there was a seemingly-endless supply of reinforcements. In August, the Bosnian expedition, forty thousand strong, returned from the northern Balkans, assuming a defensive posture in the Kosovo region while reserve units poured in behind them. In September, the Ottomans launched their first counterattack, thirty thousand descending on the Order siege of Thessalonica while another twenty-thousand marched into Albania. The army sent against the knights was slaughtered to a man, those hurled against the Archon Michael Komnenos in Albanian merely repulsed with heavy casualties. The route was now clear all the way to Constantinople. Without a moment's hesitation, the Order charged headlong through Thrace and arrived at the outskirts of the city on October 16. It was the first time a crusading Greek had come within sight of their goal.
The Order of Hagios Isaakios arrives at Constantinople.
With the Order now preoccupied with the investment of the capital, the gap in Macedonia and Thrace was filled by the Legion of Divine Retribution, the famed army of the brilliant Archon Arkadios Karxarias. As before, the Greek commanders grew complacent, settling into a series of long sieges and allowing the Ottomans to regroup and reorganize after the string of resounding defeats they had suffered during the summer. Indeed, by January, more than sixty-five thousand Turkish reinforcements were marching from Anatolia and toward Adrianople. Had the navy shown greater initiative, those soldiers would never have made it across the Mamara.
The results could have been disastrous if the Ottoman commanding general, a one Sokullu Mehmed, had not shown himself to be incompetent in his task. Throwing his forces piecemeal at Karxarias' defenses in Macedonia, the Turkish commander suffered a crushing defeat on March 25 at Thessalonica, where an army of twenty-three thousand soldiers was all but wiped out in a series of suicidal frontal charges against withering enemy musket fire. The defeats of their comrades outside the walls dealt a crippling blow to the morale of the city's defenders, and Thessalonica promptly fell to the crusaders on May 6, 1575.
With this, Karxarias found himself presented with a golden opportunity: Mehmed's remaining forces were split in half, one in Kosovo and the other wedged uncomfortably between the Order siege of Constantinople and the Legion of Divine Retribution. The opportunity to crush a full half of the remaining Turkish armies in Europe was too great to let slip, and so Karxarias gave chase on May 29, reinforced to twenty-seven thousand soldiers. Battle was met on June 14 in Gallipoli, where the Turkish army had taken refuge after finding the way over to Anatolia blocked by the ships of the Greek admiral Nikephoros Barbarossa. The fighting was as fierce as one ought to expect from an army backed into a corner. Eighteen thousand Turkish soldiers fell either dead or wounded, with the remainder barely managing to break through to the relative security of Bulgaria.
There was now little that Mehmed could do. With Greek ships in the Marmara cutting the empire in half, the Ottoman Empire was facing an utter catastrophe. In early November, the Turkish commander attempted a final, desperate bid to hold back the crusader invasion by advancing into Macedonia with virtually every soldier left at his disposal in the hopes of luring the Greeks into a contest that, with some luck, the Turks might just win. This hope proved illusory, however, as Karxarias descended upon them with armies from all directions. Though outnumbered nearly two to one and beset from all sides, the Ottomans put up a commendable resistance on November 28, repulsing many Byzantine attacks throughout the day. With army morale at the breaking point, Karxarias threw himself personally into the fighting alongside his hand-picked retinue. The sight of their commander, the divine Empress' hand-picked lieutenant and most-favored servant, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy, was enough to rally the men and deliver a final, crushing blow. As the sun set on that cold, windy day, the last Ottoman army in Europe ceased to exist. It was now little more than a mopping-up operation for the Byzantines. Edirne Thessaly was fully secured within days, Edirne capitulated on January 1, 1576, and on January 25, Constantinople itself surrendered to the besieging forces of the Order of Hagios Isaakios.
Even had any of the Archons been present at the moment of the city's fall, it is doubtful they could have restrained the Order knights as they entered the city. These were men who had sacrificed property, family, and all comforts in life to undergo the training to become the elite shock force of the Byzantine military machine. Every day, for years and years, the precepts the Empress' Pure Way were hammered into them, inculcating an unflinching devotion bordering on insanity. They had risked death countless times in battle, seen their comrades killed, wounded, or, worst of all, captured by the enemy. They had returned to the land of their forefathers and seen it under the yoke of a foreign, heathen oppressor. As they marched into Old Constantinople, a city many of them had dreamed over liberating since infancy, they saw a cosmopolitan metropolis brimming with non-Greeks, heathen and heretical places of worship. They immediately went to work.
The stories of what was done in Old Constantinople in the ensuing weeks had been told time and time again, and need not concern us further. It was a revolution born of blood and fire, and it climaxed in a funeral pyre. When the smoke and dust cleared, the city was a very quiet place. The Sublime Porte has gone. All traces of the Ottoman reign had been swept away.
The war did not end there, in February of 1576. The Sultan escaped his capital's apocalypse to the relative safety of Anatolia, where new armies were being raised to resist the crusader onslaught and the Turks' allies were assembling. But it was the beginning of a long, agonizing decline. The conflict would continue beyond the life of those knights who marched triumphant into Constantinople, beyond the life of Archon Karxarias, even beyond the life of the Empress. The New Constantinople survived the death of its prophet with its faith undiminished, indeed proud and reaffirmed in its glorious triumph.
In 1419, an aged and weary emperor fled his homeland with a tiny band of followers. In 1576, an unstoppable army, bathed in blood and holy fire, returned. This was New Constantinople in the Age of Exploration.
