A Parting of Ways
Branches of the Great Tree
“Oleg’s brave brood slumbers in the field; far has it flown!”
- Tale of Igor’s Campaign
“You’re what?” I say incredulously and of course the smile on his face disappears. He looks uncertain for a moment and then says:
“You know, I’d thought you’d be happy for me”
“I am happy for you, Demetre” I say, sounding anything but. “So where’s the posting?”
“Uzbekistan” he says.
“Oh good. Don’t drink the water, watch out for the big mean hepatitis”.
“I’d have liked it to be the Russian Pacific of course, but you have to be a distinguished fart on the very edge of retirement to get sent there. Besides, you wouldn’t believe how much sucking up even this took me; granted there’s more than a few places in the world where Russian is a requirement, but then I’m not the only youngster wanting to get into the diplomatic thing”
“No, I understand, it’s your big opportunity and all and the blood of all the goats you sacrificed will have been split in vain if you don’t go. I just want to know why you didn’t tell me earlier?”
“It wasn’t certain yet, so I didn’t want to jinx it.”
“To your success, then” I say, and raise the glass.
“It’s just water" he says.
“Yeah. Drink it while you can. It has no hepatitis in it. Before long you will miss it more than all the wine in Greece”. So we drink water for a while.
“I’m going to miss you, just a little” he admits afterwards.
“It’s a parting of ways” I say, putting on a serious history-professor face “that was long in coming; the trajectories that briefly united are now pulling us apart, and my interests are no longer your interests. However, in the pursuit of our separate destinies, we’re going to have to undergo strenuous tests and great hardship…”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re going to get invaded by the Turks and I’m going to have to collaborate with the Mongols in their world-domination plans”
He’s always quick to catch these things. Maybe I’m going to miss him too. Just a little.
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Well – back to the Turks and the Mongols and the Parting of Ways, which is of course what this is all about - here’s what happened after the boyars in Vidin and Kiev decided they’ve had enough of the Empire.
Perhaps they didn’t count on the rift being so permanent, after all, Constantinople depended on Rus and Rus depended on Constantinople for several centuries already; but immediately they were drawn into separate orbits by their neighboring states, and if there was ever a path that would have lead them back together, neither took it, and so the great Empire was no more.
The Elegemitoi in Constantinople took no time at all to start exerting their power Westwards, which was easier than trying to fight back against the great Mongol and Turk states to the east; they pressured the Paleologoi in Dalmatia into vassalage, and then after that the Sicilians; they returned the overlordship of Provence to the Western Emperor in Burgundy, and talked about reconciliation of West and East with the Pope in Salzburg. This resulted in the next-to-last great effort by the mediaeval West to push back against the Turks. The Pope called for yet another crusade, with both the Byzantines and the Christian states in Nicea, Damascus, Tripoli, Adana and Jerusalem promising support. The Western Kingdoms were busy fighting over France with the Muslims and with each other; the East, however, responded. Hungarians, Carnathians and Bohemians all contributed, but overwhelmingly the Tenth Crusade in 1301 was a Polish undertaking, and achieved significant success, pushing the Seljuks from Anatolia. In just ten years however, the crusaders had upset the Mongols, and made the Golden Horde consider Europe a potential enemy.
In 1316 the Emperors in Nicea and Constantinople went to war with each other, and the Petzikopouloi won, with the Empire in the end a larger state, but less well-regarded, losing its Sicilian and Cypriot vassals. Their newfound strength was an illusion, of course. Despite the Seljuks’ several military setbacks and their great disaster in 1346, it’s all downhill for the Greeks. The Egyptian rebellion by Ahmed Bahadur sets off a chain of other rebellions against the Turk Sultans, and several wars for power among the princes of the blood. Despite the splintering, the Turks don’t seem to lose momentum. The descendants of Hassan in Baghdad fight several wars with the Christians, eliminating the Ilkhans, Tripoli and finally Cilicia under the great Malik Sulayman. The sons of Osman settle in Antalya and soon conquer parts of the Aegean and then mainland Greece, and then finally Istria and Venice. The Greeks are powerless to stop them, and instead fight their former allies – the Mongols, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Polish Crusader state, losing Bosnia, Crete and Butrinto to rebellions, and finally even Constantinople itself to the Bulgarian Tsar in 1390; by then they are roughly in the same position they were after the disasters under the Ducids: scattered possessions here and there, safeguarded by an aging navy based in Rhodos, the last significant stronghold.
The Russians in Kiev, once the split of 1277 takes place, are first consumed by infighting among the boyar houses, with different factions favouring different children of the slain Stanislav – Alexandra, Stanislav and Oleg. Alexandra, although barely of age, took power in Kiev while the faction favoring Oleg stayed in Ryzan. Out of necessity, the young queen married a Rurikid prince, Voislav of Trubchesk, who was twenty years her senior, but there was stable government until her younger brother Stanislav could take the throne; in fact, the two seemed to be allies rather than rivals, and she, the young prince’s protector in the treacherous world of Kievan politics. However, shortly before his coming of age, the strong-willed, capable Alexandra finally lost her battle of wits against whoever her enemies were at the time, and died suddenly, with most people convinced an assassination took place. Young Stanislav, fearing himself in danger, took refuge with the Church, who protected him until allies could be found elsewhere and it was time to strike back. His revenge for his sister was brutal, and after it was over, he wept and prayed for days and days in the royal chapel. After that, he was formally crowned Tsar. He favoured the Church more than any ruler before or after him, restoring the rights and the power and the wealth and the pride of the priests at the expense of the nobles and at times even the people. However, all was not going well for Kiev. In 1320, Togli Timur, the new Khan of the Blue Horde, got rid of Nogai’s sons, and the horde, no longer directed by a pro-Russian shadow government, started preying on its neighbours again. Ryazan was sacked and annexed in a lightning campaign, Moscow’s noble republic was forced to become a vassal soon after. Disputes between Kiev and Moscow over the Oka region lead to a confrontation between Stanislav and Togli Timur, which ended in the sack of the old capital of Pereyaslavl in 1324. The next war came just four years later, and Kiev itself was only saved by a miraculous victory in which the already not-quite young Stanislav himself played a large part, and for which he was canonized by the Russian church.
When Stanislav died, his son Sviatopolk took the throne, but he was bed-ridden for most of his feeble reign, and the government was run by his Polish-Lithuanian wife Premislava, and his cousins Rurik Trubezkoy and Rurik Ryazanskiy, one of whom assassinated the unwell Tsar in 1342. By then, Kiev was a vassal of the Mongols in all but name (the Blue Horde had at the time achieved supremacy over the Shaybanids, Chaghatids and the Sibir Khans and drew their troops into all the Westward expeditions), supplying small amounts of troops and large amounts of grain to the great raids into Europe that the Mongols undertook. In fact, Russian supplies and Russian engineers are often said to be the vital extra advantage that the Mongols had in the prolonged struggle between the Steppe and Europe which ended in utter devastation of Hungary, Bohemia, and southern Poland, as well as Eastern Germany, where major cities were razed and the countryside subjected to heavy raids and taxes from the new Mongol overlords. The strength of the Golden Horde took a severe blow with the rebellions from the Khanates in the East, and its European Empire collapsed in the 1360s, with Poland being the strongest of the restored states, pushing its influence far west into Germany. Kiev, however, under the timid Tsar Alexandr still complied with the wishes of the Khans, and lost thousands of souls to the waves of plagues that swept from the east in the 14th century. It wasn’t until the enthronement of Vsevolod IV that the Russians began to exploit the Mongols’ newfound weakness; in alliance with Novgorod, Vsevolod won no less than four major wars against the Khans, restoring wealthy Crimean possessions and the lands of Ryazan and Novgorod-Severskiy back to Kiev. In 1392, while staving off a Polish attack on his western domains he was severely wounded, and died a year later, leaving the throne to his son Keistut, with whom the Monomach line ends, but a much greater destiny arises for the Russians; one that looks east, over the steppes, towards the rising Sun.
This is the way that I see the Barbarian Empire; the Rus and the Greeks were thrown together by chance, and stayed together by necessity. It was inevitable that the two should part, but while they were together, they had a chance to learn important lessons; whether what they learned was good or not in the long run, that’s a tale for another time.
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“You know, sometimes collaborating with the Mongols isn’t the worst you can do” I reply to him.
He grins. “What, lessons from history?’
“Nonsense. History has no lessons to teach. I spent a year learning and learned nothing.” I reply, not quite confidently.
“Liar” he grins. “I can see you love it. Here, I will give you a prophecy. One day I’m going to walk into a book shop and there will be a book about the Empire there, with your name as the author”
“It’s not certain yet. Don’t jinx it” I say. I’m going to miss him. Just a little.
The End
