Hierosalma Shines Once More!

*tsk* *tsk* ;D Oh ye of little faith. Naturally, Crusaders are given forgiveness for all the sins they're about to commit before they ever step foot off native soil. That's the beautiful thing about absolution. It's a lifetime ticket out of Hell, no matter what you do so long as it's in the name of God. *ladle on gratuitous sarchasm* Gotta love those pragmatic Crusaders.

Several years of peace then reigned, blissful idyll for the fledgling Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was sorely in need of it, the better to convert the heathen and strengthen the faithful against the struggles to come.

The alliance with Venice, Bosnia, and Ragusa seemed the perfect pact, all states within proximity of Jerusalem and able to react against the Turks and other heathen agents should they choose to move against Christendom. Thus, in May of 1432, when the Ottomans declared war on Byzantium, the shrewd King Philip saw a perfect opportunity to claim new lands more directly connected to Europe proper, and promptly declared war against the Turks, Venice, Ragusa, and Bosnia following suit. Perhaps there was some miscalculation amongst his advisors, or maybe it was due simply to impetuosity, but the armies of Christ met with great difficulty against the Turk, thrown back from their initial positions besieging Macedonia and Hellas, thrown north and penned in against the borders of Bulgaria. However, here the Angevins and their allies could marshal and group, and when the Ottomans foolishly threw their largest forces against this assembled host, they were utterly slaughtered, not a man living to tell the tale, and Christendom had free rein to invade the Ottoman domain. Thus freed, Philip moved his men back south once more, taking the Turkish capital in Macedonia, the northern proximity of Bulgaria, and the vital province of Hellas before moving his men back across the Bosphorous to besiege Anatolia and Smyrna.

When in November of 1533 Trebizond joined in the war on the side of Byzantium, the Ottomans were loathe to continue fighting two conflicts, and sued for peace with Jerusalem, granting them Hellas, Smyrna, and Anatolia. This accomplished, Philip had the advantage of a strong position in the north as well as his domain in the Holy Land, a disjointed realm but one which could be wielded from two sides to, like the vice of the fist of God Himself, squeeze the black blood from the heathens.

Undesiring to maintain the Grecian territory gained against the Turk, its people rebellious in their erroneous Orthodoxy, in February 1434 they were granted vassalage, the Duchy of Athens hitherto assimilated by the Ottomans once more given titular freedom, though the ties which bound them to Jerusalem would not and could not be broken easily, Philip ensured this with his armies closeby in Smyrna.

Work could now be directed to the conversion of the other prizes of war, and in March 1437, Syria converted to Catholicism with great joy. Samaria, however, to the consternation of Philip in his rabid insistence upon obedience to the Holy Mother Church, remained obstinate in their paganism, and rejected the missionaries sent, slaughtering them and sparking a brief uprising which was crushed with like brutality, reaping the same bloody and slow deaths which they had visited upon the men of God.

Otherwise, the years after the Ottoman war were typically peaceful. Of course, in order to maintain momentum against the hostile agents of Islam which surrounded Jerusalem, and what is more to satisfy the insatiable ambition of Philip, this could not be maintained for long. In a surprise to all Christian states, and to the Muslims as well, in October 1437, Philip made use of a royal marriage forged some years earlier with Byzantium to claim their throne as his own, his sister the wife of the Emperor Iohannes. Ambition to do more than the Crusaders had imagined before, to not merely hold the Holy Land under one central power but to wield that to take the jewel of Christendom once more from the Greeks, Venice was drawn into its old enmity with Byzantium, and for the first time in two hundred years the Lion of St. Mark besieged the walls of Constantinople ... this time with help from the largest and most powerful Christian state in the East: Jerusalem.

With no allies, and weakened from the war only just ended with the Turks, the vacillating and indecisive Emperor was not long for this world. Philip had agents smuggled into Constantinople under cover of night, these given expert maps from his trecherous sister, detailing ever twist and turn and Byzantine secret of Blacharnae, the summer palace of the Emperor. Thus, they snuck into his chambers and with a blade far more certain and sure in its task than the life it ended, the Emperor was murdered and his body taken back out into the camp of the besiegers, there displayed within clear sight of the walls in his full Imperial regalia. Disheartened, without leadership, their Empress fled to join her brother in his siege, Constantinople threw open her gates to the invaders with the condition that her people would be spared and her faith respected. Willing to give Orthodoxy a place as tolerated alternative to Catholicism, Philip nonetheless insisted that Hagia Sophia's patriarch be replaced with a cardinal ... one who could crown him as Eastern Emperor.

The war was over, and the Angevin king had bought with blood the prize he had desired for so many years ... the restoration to one born on French soil the most coveted title in Christendom, however derelict it may have been. His own demesne strong, Philip was convinced he could use this new prestige to bring more of Christian Europe to his banner in a new Crusade against the children of the bastard Ishmael, the heathens able to be erradicated once and for all.

Willing to gather strength for a few years, his course seemed all the more certain when in October of 1440, Smyrna was successfully converted to the Church Universal and Triumphant. However, this would be the last triumph for Philip to celebrate in his long life. Still physically fit, and having risen from a mere claim upon a land fast in the grip of the Mameluk to undisputed Master of the East, his ambition and lust for power did not sit well with those he conquered, and in particular with the noble families of Constantinople. Since the very day their city was taken, they began conspiring to remove this heretic overlord who had so sullied the Byzantine glory which they had wrested back only not too long before from the Franks. This desire to regain their freedom, however, was tempered with a suitable measure of pragmatism, aware of the floods of Catholics who daily were moving to a land denied them for centuries. The conspirators were willing to settle upon a compromise ... a Catholic lord of Grecian descent, the heir to the ancient Paleologean dynasty. It was thus in bitterest irony that Philip, himself a claimant through his Angevin heritage to the throne he had taken by force was himself unseated by an even older claim.

On November 25, 1440, as he celebrated Mass in Hagia Sophia, Philip was handed the most trecherous chalice in the act of drinking the blood of Christ. Poisoned, and with a particularly powerful blend only the devious Greeks could devise, he vomited his own life's blood there and then, a poetic moment for the onlooking Byzantine nobility. As he breathed his last, moved in his gasping to the vacated throne of the defrocked Patriarch of Constantinople, it was with poetic justice perhaps that he gave up the ghost in a fit of choking. The Greeks would claim in years to come that it was not poison, but the hand of God which Philip had claimed to command which choked the heretic as he dared defile the Church of Holy Wisdom.

This act done, it was with little opposition that two days later, Frederick Paleologus was crowned with two diadems: both as Eastern Emperor and as King of Jerusalem.

Thanks for the encouragement. I'll have more hopefully either today or tommorrow, have been away from my EU2 all weekend for a short visit to my folks, but I'll be hitting it hard soon as I get back to home sweet home. In creating the monarch file for Jerusalem, I made a whole mythos and 'history' behind the rulers I created, and it's been great fun to flesh it out and give it true life through the conduct of those monarchs through my actions in the game. I'm considering writing up some events for Jerusalem now that I've given them such colourful monarchs (and believe me, if you think Philip was a pip, wait until you get a load of what's to come ), but we'll see how things go. In any event, (bad pun, I know), expect more of Jerusalem's one-man Crusade very, very soon.

The African Wars

The years immediately following the ascension of the usurper Frederick Paleologus were, contrary to the expectation of contemporary onlookers, oddly peaceful. The provinces recently conquered from the Turks and Byzantium were held in general peace and prosperity, though all proved obstinate and closed to the truth of the missionaries who vigorously attempted to convert them to the True Faith. Despite a miracle in 1443, a star which shone down upon the Emperor's palace in Constantinople (often vacant, to the discontented murmerings of the Byantine nobility, their Emperor more often to be found in his capital of Jerusalem), the Orthodox heretics and the Muslim heathens remained unrepentant.

The general peace of the Kingdom was at last broken, as ever through the ambition of its liege, in 1448. In March of that year, Emperor Frederick declared war against the Mameluke, sparking anew the hatred against the very heathens from whose grasp his predecessor had torn a weak domain ... but one which had, in the thirty years since, grown into a power to rival any in Asia Minor. Frederick, recognizing the power which he now wielded, the prestige of being not merely sovereign of the Most Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, but Emperor of the East, inheritor to a title older and more steeped in tradition and prestige than even His Holiness the Pope. Intent upon flexing that perceived might, he saw in the Old Adversary a means of continuing to bring wrath upon the heathens, as well as increasing his holdings from a Mameluke state never quite recovered since it lost Judea so many years before.

A masterful tactician, the Emperor took pride in marshalling the Kingdom's forces himself, and at the moment the declaration reached the Tyrant's court in Cairo, the Armies of Christ were already marching through the Sinai into Egypt, and north into Aleppo, now sole outpost of the Mameluke outside of Africa. Little opposition stood to the two armies, both twenty thousand strong, and in January 1449, both fell to Frederick, and the campaign extended from the conquered capital of Cairo to the Nile Delta and Cataract. The war effort was hampered in July with a particularly violent revolt in Samaria, the heathens present in Acre rising up and slaughtering the governor and the small garrison left to ensure the general peace. A furious Frederick immediately dispatched ten thousand men from Judea to quash the rebellion, but Acre had been fortified and its gates closed for a siege ... which was promptly begun.

In June of 1450, after months of starving out Christian and Moslem alike, Acre finally surrendered, and every Moslem male above the age of 13 was put to the sword, their heads heaped in the marketplace to remind the women, children, and youth left alive of the costly price of insurrection. Perhaps inspired by news of this triumph, Frederick ordered the invasion of the Sinai, and for a quick end to sieges elsewhere. Thus admonished, the armies in the Cataract assailed anew the walls of the province's seat, and its disheartened populace surrendered. This accomplished, Frederick had his generals move the men, glorying in their victory, onward to Quattara.

Six months later, in January 1451, the Nile Delta and the Sinai gave way to the Light of Christ and gave up their resistance. Freed of the burden of these provinces, the armies previously engaged moved on to strengthen the siege in Quattara and to begin a new objective to take Cyrenaica. In May, Quattara fell. The Sinai, however, remained resolute in its defense, and to the ever-shrinking coffers of Jerusalem it fended off the besieging army for over a year. At last, in October 1452, its citizenry starving and thousands dead, the gates were opened and Akaba was taken.

Meanwhile, sin plucked on sin, and Algiers and Tunisia turned upon their Muslim brother and declared war on the Mamelukes as well, their own armies invading Cyrenaica from the sea. Its provincial capital weakened by the Christian onslaught, and thinking it better to give in to a power which would allow it to continue in darkness, Cyrenaica surrendered to Algiers, to the outrage of the Emperor.

Not to be denied his triumph, and the entire rest of the Tyrant's lands under his control, Frederick bled the Moslem for peace, and in February 1453, one month shy of five years since the declaration of war, the conflict was ended. Delta, Quattara, Cataract, Aleppo, Sinai, and four hundred fifty thousand ducats (450) in reparations were paid, the heathens reduced to the singular and land-locked province of Egypt, the Nile's Delta firmly in the hands of Christendom as well as the rest of the Mameluke's demesne.

For Emperor Frederick, however, this was no grand tribute, however much Christendom and Jerusalem may have celebrated at the joyous news of his victory. The Kingdom's treasury was drained, and a hundred thousand ducats (100) owed to the Medici bankers for loans taken during the war. Prosperity had been traded for an increase in domain, and enmity rose from within the Kingdom, and in particular in Constantinople, those who had seen to the death of Philip now rethinking their choice of Paleologus to succeed him. Thinking himself upon an impoverished but powerful throne, Frederick had no idea just how loosely indeed the Imperial diadem rested upon his brow.

Originally posted by Doc
J.,
Very nice work! Perhaps a unification with Rhodes soon?

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Anything is possible, my friend. ;D

Originally posted by Mariani
any chance of screenshots?

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Sure, if I could remember how to take them?

Originally posted by DasKomodo
Woo! A Crusading AAR. Good stuff.

<nitpick> The adjective form of Greece isn't Grecian, it's Greek, unless you're George W. </nitpick>

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Hrmm. So 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is incorrect, eh? ;D I was going by the fact that Greece, long before it was Greece, was the region known as Grecia, and thus the adjective form applied to it should mirror its status then rather than now. But thanks for the heads-up.

Originally posted by Doomcow
This is quite good. Will you be posting this nicely fleshed out "Kingdom of Jerusalem" set up as a mod? Even without events it sound quite fun; with a couple events it'd be fantastic. (That conspiracy against Philip could be one, for starters)

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I would love to, yes. I think it'd be great fun, and am intending, once I finish the AAR, to use it as basis for some event proposals in the Event Exchange Project, but we'll see how things go.