omg... I imagine the situation for the catholic italians: a muslim barbarians from far far away come to their lands... Obviusly, they fight with all their forces In nomine Patris et Filli et Spiritus Sancti !!!! 
The Caliphate of al-Rus: A Kievan AAR
- Thread starter Cora Giantkiller
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
I rather liked Halfdan. Shame how it ended, but he got enough in while he could. Very good fun.
Well, Halfdan's path came to an abrupt end. But he'd been successful, and not only martially - taking a tolerant approach (not that he did it on purpose) can only help when you are ruling over a recently converted people and all prospects for conquest are heathens too.
As a side note, I can't help but feel like going with CK3's cause of death would have been very interesting. After days of fasting on prison rations, the Slovenians show themselves generous beyond bonds - and Halfdan literally eats too much, just as the Christians planned in order to give him an ironic death .
As a side note, I can't help but feel like going with CK3's cause of death would have been very interesting. After days of fasting on prison rations, the Slovenians show themselves generous beyond bonds - and Halfdan literally eats too much, just as the Christians planned in order to give him an ironic death
.
Dare did well defeating his enemies.
Halfdan was pragmatic, and that was good...
Still, his ambition killed him in the end...
Halfdan was pragmatic, and that was good...
Still, his ambition killed him in the end...
Loving this AAP so following for sure. Really hope the family manage to avenge Halfdan's death.
Tsar Vasilko of Ruthenia
Born: 904
Reigned: 925 - 972
Part I: His Father’s Legacy
Did you ever see Fires on the Bosporus? It’s a fifties sword-and-sorcery movie, the kind that they used to make all the time, and when I was a kid it was on tv every year on two separate nights, like The Ten Commandments on Easter weekend. I used to look forward to the weekend that it would air and would sit enraptured in front of the tv in the basement while it was on. My older brother started talking once during the scene where Basileus Symeon makes his doomed charge against the Ruthenians, and I punched him in the arm so hard that he had a bruise for a week.
As I got older I began to lose interest in the whole doomed-romance-of-Byzantium thing; Tyrone Power was never my favorite and his Symeon gets saddled with a pretty limp romance too. Every time that Laurence Olivier shows up as Vasilko, though? I’m still hooked. What a fascinating, tricky performance. He may be the villain of the movie but he’s the most vivid and alive character. You know that Constantinople is doomed just by looking at him.
When I was thirteen, I found the Robert Massie biography of Vasilko at the library and read it cover to cover that weekend. I was the only girl at school the next week who wanted to talk about the battles of the First and Second Crusades. My description of the poor Crusaders during the ‘slaughter at Ghazza’ was so graphic that my mom got a call from the homeroom teacher, wanting to see if “everything was okay at home.”
I say this to say, Vasilko was my gateway drug into the whole wild world of medieval Ruthenian history. Here in what passes for Christendom, he gets treated as the great villain of the tenth century, but he was in my view a man of tremendous contradictions: terrifying and tender, ambitious and self-deprecating. These great contradictions would go far to shape the medieval world.
Vasilko’s reign began in the midst of high confusion. Half of his father’s army had been slaughtered on the coast of Italy, and with King Halfdan alive in Slovenian captivity the throne was effectively empty. Vasilko needed to rally his father’s men but he could not assume the throne prematurely.To complicate matters further, the caliph had denounced Halfdan’s Italian raid as reckless, and some in Baghdad were saying that Russian foolhardiness would be responsible for a Christian victory in Palestine. Vasilko was hardly likely to criticize his captive father, and yet he could not say that the endeavor had been fruitful.
There was perhaps no better man to navigate these tricky diplomatic currents. Vasilko was a witty, conciliatory young man and his gift for languages carried him in great stead with Arab diplomats and Vlach chieftains alike. He had a tremendous amount of what we would call emotional intelligence as well as basic political savvy. In this instance he sailed directly for Palestine to treat with Caliph Nasraddin, then encamped outside Jerusalem. Before the caliph he offered a sober report on the condition of his father, expressed hope that Russian sacrifice may have divided the crusading armies, and placed his army at the disposal of the caliph. The vizier raised an eyebrow at Vasilko’s thin justification for the disaster at Velletri, but they could not turn up his nose at four thousand warriors.
The situation for the caliphate army was not as dire as might be expected. The crusaders substantially outnumbered their Muslim counterparts, and the slaughter at Velletri had provided an early morale boost while depriving the enemy of three thousand veteran warriors. And yet, the crusaders were fundamentally divided in a way that the caliphate army was not. Pope Clemens with his retainers and hired mercenaries commanded perhaps fifteen thousand men, a third of the crusading armies. The other thirty thousand men were typically under the sway of charismatic regional leaders, and Clemens’ efforts to unify them under a single command was repeatedly frustrated.
The caliphal defenders were not a uniform bloc, as the dispute between Halfdan and Nasraddin makes clear. During the crucial year of 925, however, Caliph Nasraddin was able to keep his co-religionists in good order, ensuring that each crusading army arriving in Palestine was met by a numerically superior force of Muslim defenders. Vasilko provided crucial assistance during this period, often serving as peace-maker between rival factions. He could speak as easily with common soldiers from Sindh and educated scholars from Alexandria.
Reports arrived at last that Halfdan had died in Slovenia and his body unceremoniously dumped into a pauper’s grave, and the news was greeted with uniform outrage. In life, Halfdan may have been an irreligious adventurer, but he was now recalled as a stalwart holy warrior and martyr for Islam. The myth of the martyred king, and the brave young son fighting to avenge him, quickly spread among the Muslim warriors, and when the papal forces disembarked in Ghazza at last their opponents were spoiling for a fight.
The battle of Ghazza was a smashing victory for the Caliph. Pope Clemens and his mercenaries were outnumbered and disorganized. Ruthenian veterans in the Muslim vanguard punched through the papal lines, and Levantine warriors poured into the gap. Stragglers, fleeing back to the papal galleys, were ridden down by Tajik horse archers. On a single day in September, the hopes of the First Crusade were smashed utterly.
All was not well at home, however. When the Ruthenian army had departed three years before, High Chieftain Yemelyan Alexandrovich Oskyldr had been named regent in Kiev. Yemelyan was well liked and honest with the realm’s accounts, and so long as Halfdan was expected to return, the regent did quite well. Once the news reached Kiev that Halfdan had died in captivity, however, trouble arose, in the form of Halfdan’s younger son Feodor Halfdanovich.
Feodor was a capable warrior and an accomplished administrator, generous to his friends and a terror to his enemies. He might have been a fine general for the crown or chieftain of some important province, but relations between Feodor and his father were forever strained. Since the young prince was born, the rumors had swirled that Feodor was not truly Halfdan’s son at all, but the son of his brother Feodor Dyrovich. Whether true or not, Halfdan took them to heart, and could not love the perpetual reminder of his reputation as a cuckold. So while Vasilko was trained to assume the throne and all that entails, Feodor was left with nothing.
A disaffected heir is a source of trouble, and indeed it was not long before he had fallen in with a crowd of Vlach warriors eager to tempt him with visions of a throne of his own. The young prince was reluctant to stand against his father, less out of affection than fear: Halfdan was a brutal war-chief, after all. With Halfdan’s captivity and Vasilko’s long absence from Kiev, the situation changed, seemingly to Feodor’s favor. In 925, the young prince had claimed a seat in Iași and crowned himself the king of Moldavia, coequal (at least in his own mind) with his brother’s kingdom of Ruthenia.
With the best warriors in Palestine, Yemelyan foundered ineffectually against the Moldavian rebellion. So when Vasilko sailed back to Kiev in early 926, he discovered that his father’s lands had fractured while he was gone, and immediately pledged war against his faithless brother. As we shall see later, Vasilko was inclined to leniency so far as his family was concerned, but those without the Oskyldr name were to be punished savagely.
In the battle of Ladyzyn, on April 3, 926, Vasilko’s army quickly overcame a Moldavian warband numbered perhaps seven hundred and had them slaughtered to a man. He repeated this same tactic at Soroca in January, 927, and in Halych that November. These were, he said, ‘salutary lessons’ to the Moldavian chiefs, that they would be wise to listen. Eventually, the bloodshed took its toll, and Feodor bent the knee on February 7, 928. Characteristically, the wayward Chieftain Feodor Halfdanovich was permitted to retain his holdfast at Iași, and in later years he would indeed become the great general of Ruthenia that he always wished to be.
It was by now three years since the death of Halfdan, and King Vasilko had only just knitted his father’s kingdom back together. He had in the process won the respect of his Sunni brethren and the hatred of the Christians. However, the restless king was even then planning a series of conquests to the north that would create a mighty empire and strike fear in his enemies. Soon he would be not just king, but king of kings.
Born: 904
Reigned: 925 - 972
Part I: His Father’s Legacy
Did you ever see Fires on the Bosporus? It’s a fifties sword-and-sorcery movie, the kind that they used to make all the time, and when I was a kid it was on tv every year on two separate nights, like The Ten Commandments on Easter weekend. I used to look forward to the weekend that it would air and would sit enraptured in front of the tv in the basement while it was on. My older brother started talking once during the scene where Basileus Symeon makes his doomed charge against the Ruthenians, and I punched him in the arm so hard that he had a bruise for a week.
As I got older I began to lose interest in the whole doomed-romance-of-Byzantium thing; Tyrone Power was never my favorite and his Symeon gets saddled with a pretty limp romance too. Every time that Laurence Olivier shows up as Vasilko, though? I’m still hooked. What a fascinating, tricky performance. He may be the villain of the movie but he’s the most vivid and alive character. You know that Constantinople is doomed just by looking at him.
When I was thirteen, I found the Robert Massie biography of Vasilko at the library and read it cover to cover that weekend. I was the only girl at school the next week who wanted to talk about the battles of the First and Second Crusades. My description of the poor Crusaders during the ‘slaughter at Ghazza’ was so graphic that my mom got a call from the homeroom teacher, wanting to see if “everything was okay at home.”
I say this to say, Vasilko was my gateway drug into the whole wild world of medieval Ruthenian history. Here in what passes for Christendom, he gets treated as the great villain of the tenth century, but he was in my view a man of tremendous contradictions: terrifying and tender, ambitious and self-deprecating. These great contradictions would go far to shape the medieval world.
Vasilko’s reign began in the midst of high confusion. Half of his father’s army had been slaughtered on the coast of Italy, and with King Halfdan alive in Slovenian captivity the throne was effectively empty. Vasilko needed to rally his father’s men but he could not assume the throne prematurely.To complicate matters further, the caliph had denounced Halfdan’s Italian raid as reckless, and some in Baghdad were saying that Russian foolhardiness would be responsible for a Christian victory in Palestine. Vasilko was hardly likely to criticize his captive father, and yet he could not say that the endeavor had been fruitful.
There was perhaps no better man to navigate these tricky diplomatic currents. Vasilko was a witty, conciliatory young man and his gift for languages carried him in great stead with Arab diplomats and Vlach chieftains alike. He had a tremendous amount of what we would call emotional intelligence as well as basic political savvy. In this instance he sailed directly for Palestine to treat with Caliph Nasraddin, then encamped outside Jerusalem. Before the caliph he offered a sober report on the condition of his father, expressed hope that Russian sacrifice may have divided the crusading armies, and placed his army at the disposal of the caliph. The vizier raised an eyebrow at Vasilko’s thin justification for the disaster at Velletri, but they could not turn up his nose at four thousand warriors.
The situation for the caliphate army was not as dire as might be expected. The crusaders substantially outnumbered their Muslim counterparts, and the slaughter at Velletri had provided an early morale boost while depriving the enemy of three thousand veteran warriors. And yet, the crusaders were fundamentally divided in a way that the caliphate army was not. Pope Clemens with his retainers and hired mercenaries commanded perhaps fifteen thousand men, a third of the crusading armies. The other thirty thousand men were typically under the sway of charismatic regional leaders, and Clemens’ efforts to unify them under a single command was repeatedly frustrated.
The caliphal defenders were not a uniform bloc, as the dispute between Halfdan and Nasraddin makes clear. During the crucial year of 925, however, Caliph Nasraddin was able to keep his co-religionists in good order, ensuring that each crusading army arriving in Palestine was met by a numerically superior force of Muslim defenders. Vasilko provided crucial assistance during this period, often serving as peace-maker between rival factions. He could speak as easily with common soldiers from Sindh and educated scholars from Alexandria.
Reports arrived at last that Halfdan had died in Slovenia and his body unceremoniously dumped into a pauper’s grave, and the news was greeted with uniform outrage. In life, Halfdan may have been an irreligious adventurer, but he was now recalled as a stalwart holy warrior and martyr for Islam. The myth of the martyred king, and the brave young son fighting to avenge him, quickly spread among the Muslim warriors, and when the papal forces disembarked in Ghazza at last their opponents were spoiling for a fight.
The battle of Ghazza was a smashing victory for the Caliph. Pope Clemens and his mercenaries were outnumbered and disorganized. Ruthenian veterans in the Muslim vanguard punched through the papal lines, and Levantine warriors poured into the gap. Stragglers, fleeing back to the papal galleys, were ridden down by Tajik horse archers. On a single day in September, the hopes of the First Crusade were smashed utterly.
All was not well at home, however. When the Ruthenian army had departed three years before, High Chieftain Yemelyan Alexandrovich Oskyldr had been named regent in Kiev. Yemelyan was well liked and honest with the realm’s accounts, and so long as Halfdan was expected to return, the regent did quite well. Once the news reached Kiev that Halfdan had died in captivity, however, trouble arose, in the form of Halfdan’s younger son Feodor Halfdanovich.
Feodor was a capable warrior and an accomplished administrator, generous to his friends and a terror to his enemies. He might have been a fine general for the crown or chieftain of some important province, but relations between Feodor and his father were forever strained. Since the young prince was born, the rumors had swirled that Feodor was not truly Halfdan’s son at all, but the son of his brother Feodor Dyrovich. Whether true or not, Halfdan took them to heart, and could not love the perpetual reminder of his reputation as a cuckold. So while Vasilko was trained to assume the throne and all that entails, Feodor was left with nothing.
A disaffected heir is a source of trouble, and indeed it was not long before he had fallen in with a crowd of Vlach warriors eager to tempt him with visions of a throne of his own. The young prince was reluctant to stand against his father, less out of affection than fear: Halfdan was a brutal war-chief, after all. With Halfdan’s captivity and Vasilko’s long absence from Kiev, the situation changed, seemingly to Feodor’s favor. In 925, the young prince had claimed a seat in Iași and crowned himself the king of Moldavia, coequal (at least in his own mind) with his brother’s kingdom of Ruthenia.
With the best warriors in Palestine, Yemelyan foundered ineffectually against the Moldavian rebellion. So when Vasilko sailed back to Kiev in early 926, he discovered that his father’s lands had fractured while he was gone, and immediately pledged war against his faithless brother. As we shall see later, Vasilko was inclined to leniency so far as his family was concerned, but those without the Oskyldr name were to be punished savagely.
In the battle of Ladyzyn, on April 3, 926, Vasilko’s army quickly overcame a Moldavian warband numbered perhaps seven hundred and had them slaughtered to a man. He repeated this same tactic at Soroca in January, 927, and in Halych that November. These were, he said, ‘salutary lessons’ to the Moldavian chiefs, that they would be wise to listen. Eventually, the bloodshed took its toll, and Feodor bent the knee on February 7, 928. Characteristically, the wayward Chieftain Feodor Halfdanovich was permitted to retain his holdfast at Iași, and in later years he would indeed become the great general of Ruthenia that he always wished to be.
It was by now three years since the death of Halfdan, and King Vasilko had only just knitted his father’s kingdom back together. He had in the process won the respect of his Sunni brethren and the hatred of the Christians. However, the restless king was even then planning a series of conquests to the north that would create a mighty empire and strike fear in his enemies. Soon he would be not just king, but king of kings.
Last edited:
- 3
Indeed! I rather like it, as storytelling; sometimes the randomness of the Clausewitz engine will create something that feels as anticlimactic as real life.
omg... I imagine the situation for the catholic italians: a muslim barbarians from far far away come to their lands... Obviusly, they fight with all their forces In nomine Patris et Filli et Spiritus Sancti !!!!
I imagine it must have reminded it of barbarian invasions from the past, although this one was not terribly successful at the end of the day.
You know, I did too. He didn't make as much of an impression playing as he did when I was writing him later, but in context of the story he feels like a very human character and a person caught between the Viking world of the past and the Muslim world of the future.
Well, Halfdan's path came to an abrupt end. But he'd been successful, and not only martially - taking a tolerant approach (not that he did it on purpose) can only help when you are ruling over a recently converted people and all prospects for conquest are heathens too.
As a side note, I can't help but feel like going with CK3's cause of death would have been very interesting. After days of fasting on prison rations, the Slovenians show themselves generous beyond bonds - and Halfdan literally eats too much, just as the Christians planned in order to give him an ironic death
Oh, that is very clever! I should have thought of that.
Oh, indeed. I had it in my head that taking Rome was the best way to stop a Crusade, but in 1.2 it's easier for the defenders in a Crusade/Jihad to rack up war score by defeating the invaders in battle.
Halfdan was a daring warrior, and that carries inherent risks, but I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way.
I will say that the Christians will surely rue the day when Halfdan was replaced by his son Vasilko, that's for sure.
Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Last edited:
I wonder, maybe the christians will launch a crusader against Ruthenia if it ever grows large enough?
Enjoyed the framing story about Fires on the Bosporus a great deal. Lovely stuff, very well done. Vasilko is certainly being set up for big things.
A nice favorable twist to the Rus we always knew and loved. How's the religious map looking for Eastern Europe?
Lost a battle and a king, but not the war. Vasilko is clearly determined enough not to be taken aback too much by things if they don't go exactly as planned.
Which is one of the makings of a great ruler, and he's apparently also far more diplomatic than his father to boot.
Which is one of the makings of a great ruler, and he's apparently also far more diplomatic than his father to boot.
Tsar Vasilko of Ruthenia, Part 2
Tsar Vasilko of Ruthenia
Born: 904
Reigned: 925 - 972
Part 2: The Rise of a Tsar
I've been writing this updates from Tsargrad the past couple of months, dashing out a quick Ruthenian post for fun here and there when I have time at the end of the day. I’m here doing work for my dissertation on the great Sunni schisms of the eleventh century, so this silly little history blog of mine is what my grandmother calls a busman’s holiday. Being more or less alone in this foreign city, thousands of miles away from my girlfriend Natalya and my apartment in Ann Arbor, I find it easy to drift between past and present. Perhaps that’s why, on my day off yesterday, I found myself wandering into the Bol'shaya mechet' Ayya-Sofiya, the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque.
Standing inside, I couldn’t help but imagine the first Russian warriors to step into this place. It would have been four hundred years old, and already a great wonder in the eyes of the world. I imagine the warriors standing in awe, feeling both intimidated and enthralled.
Of course, the Ayya-Sofiya doesn’t look exactly like it did when they first arrived. Many of its most valuable treasures would have been looted in 952, as Vasilko permitted his men three days to sack the great city and the Ayya-Sofiya was believed to have the most to loot. Even then, there were limits. Vasilko had a Vlach warrior executed for attempting to pry loose one of the paving slabs on the Proconnesian marble floor. The minarets, the mahrab and the minbar all date to the rule of King Sviatpolk, fifth son of Vasilko, who was granted rule over Thessalonica
The story of the mosaics is particularly interesting. The Byzantines had lavishly decorated their greatest monuments with mosaics depicting Christ and the Virgin and various mighty emperors of Byzantium. You can’t see them now, as they have been covered up by the plaster of pious Russian craftsmen many centuries ago. King Sviatpolk was, however, curiously reluctant to cover up the striking mosaics, and indeed had a deep appreciation for their beauty. According to a Greek convert to Islam, the mosiac of the Virgin Mary seated with the Christ child was still visible in the semi-dome above the apse in the east end well into the reign of King Sviatpolk II (ca. 1000 CE).
It was just this sort of practice that led to the al-Muwaḥḥidūn reaction in the 11th century and the sectarian strife of Tsar Ivan’s reign. But I’m getting ahead of myself, of course.
The great conquests of Vasilko began in a not-terribly-promising cell in Kiev. Antavas Palemonaitis was a notorious rogue, a disgraced heir to tribal holdings in Lithuania who had sold his sword to whomever could promise to restore him to his family’s lands. He had plotted together with Feodor Halfdanovich in the Moldavian rebellion, and at the end of that sorry affair Antavas was brought before King Vasilko in chains.
The king’s advisers expected a swift execution, but Vasilko had other plans. He had been harboring an ambition to unite the land of the Rus under Dar al-Islam, and it would be useful to have a Lithuanian staging ground for his northern campaigns. The captive said the shahada with alacrity (if not much sincerity), and then Vasilko announced his deep conviction that Antavas Palemonaitis was the rightful ruler of Samogitia on the Baltic coast, and called his swords for war.
The war itself was swift, lasting perhaps a year, and by 930 Ruthenian traders were setting forth from the port in Memel to sail the Baltic Sea. However, Samogitia proved more challenging to hold than to take. It was not long before the rogue Antavas was assassinated and a Vidilist pagan took the high chiefdom in his stead to scheme against their new master in Kiev. For the next four decades of Vasilko’s reign, he would struggle in vain to impart stable Islamic rule in his Lithuanian holdings.
The conquest of Samogitia was but a precursor, however. Vasilko’s true aim was Khazaria, which then bordered Ruthenia to the north and east. The crafty Ruslan Ruslanovich, once King of White Rus’, had subjugated the Khazar hordes in the 910s. As a deliberate provocation to Kiev, whose kings named themselves Kings of the Rus’, Ruslan took the title Tsar of the Rus’ and the Khazars. Tsar Ruslan proclaimed that the true ruler of the Rus’ needed no foreign gods, and implied heavily that he considered Kiev part of his natural domain.
Ruslan’s commitment to his Slavic gods would prove to be his downfall, however. While the White Rus’ worshipped in the pagan fashion, the Khazars had long since adopted Jewish practices, and they would not give up their own god in exchange for Chernobog. Civil war soon became endemic in Ruslan’s realm, sapping his strength. As one Arab wit later put it, Ruslan might have been Tsar of the Rus’ and the Khazars, but never at the same .
With Antavas (seemingly) secure in Samogitia, Vasilko began to plan his next campaign. He meant to show this Ruslan exactly who the true ruler of the Rus’ was by forcing him to bend the knee, and then to stabilize Ruslan’s lands himself through his superior diplomatic acumen and the power of the Russian ulema. Vasilko’s Lithuanian army would invade Minsk from the west while his Russian warriors marched from the south. In September, 931, as marauding peasants set Minsk aflame while Ruslan was battling Khazar rebels in the south [1], Ruthenia declared war.
The War of Khazar Subjugation, as it would later be known, was neither easy nor quick. It was not Ruslan’s strength but his weakness that plagued Ruthenia. On May 8, 932, Vasilkov took Minsk and captured Ruslan’s son Vsevolod, shattered the morale of Ruslan’s loyalists--but the rebel armies marching through Khazaria cared little for Vsevolod, and were just as hostile to Kiev as Minsk. As the Ruthenian army divided itself to occupy the Khazar lands and put down Ruslan’s many rebellions, the Tsar himself slipped past their lines and attempted a daring march on Kiev in 934. In August of 934, Vasilko was obliged to dispatch three thousand warriors to lift the siege of Kiev, an embarrassing necessity. It was not until April 9, 935, that Vasilko could settle the Khazar lands and receive the subjugation of Ruslan.
On the tenth anniversary of his ascension to the throne, Vasilko was crowned Tsar of the Rus’, the Khazars, the Vlach and the Lithuanians, Master of the Pontic Steppe and the Black Sea. Ruslan was permitted to retain the title of King of the White Rus’, a title which made him preeminent among the boyars of the realm. Within five years, Ruslan’s son [2] would marry Vasilko’s daughter Marina in exchange for the family’s conversion to Sunni Islam. (It seemed that Ruslan had need of foreign gods after all.)
Converting the Khazars proved a bigger challenge. For many Russians, Islam had melded with vestigial elements of Slavic religious practice, which made the faith seem almost familiar even to those who did not practice. The Khazars, however, had adopted the Jewish faith to declare their independence from Christian and Muslim powers, and they would not surrender that independence so easily. Vasilko’s first success came when the high chieftain of the Ashima clan died suddenly after being thrown from a horse, leaving his young daughter Özlem to inherit.
Özlem, then perhaps six months old, was swiftly placed under the care of a Kievan nanny. In short order, Vasilko declared that the child was to be raised in truth of Islam and would in her maturity be raised to the title of Queen of Zaporizhia. In time, the pious young queen of indisputable blood would be far more effective in converting her people to Islam than any Russian army.
The fall of Constantinople had its birth in Jerusalem. Tsar Vasilko had slowed the pace of his northern conquests, intending to avoid Ruslan’s mistake by ensuring the stability of his realm first and foremost. By 945, Islam had made substantial inroads in the lands of the White Rus’ and the Khazars, permitting him a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to tend to his foreign alliances. The tsar was in mourning after Feodor’s untimely death, and restless to cross swords with the unbelievers again.
While Vasilko’s strategic ambitions pointed north, his most determined rival was to the south, in Constantinople. Much to his chagrin, the mighty Byzantines were wealthier, more advanced, and their rule more stable than the Muslim tsardom of Ruthenia. Their conquests in north Africa ensured that their strength was steadily increasing. Their position on the straits of the Bosphorus allowed them to stop Russian trade to the Mediterreanean. Even the act of taking a longship to the hajj was potentially fraught, and many pious Russians had to slip through the straits under cover of darkness like common smugglers. Beyond that, I think the splendor of Constantinople was its own sort of provocation. Nothing in Kiev matched the strength of the Theodosian Walls, or the majesty of the Hagia Sophia, and the boastful Russians knew it.
(Nat rolls her eyes when I say things like this; she says any girl from Tekamah, Nebraska [3] is bound to be easily impressed.)
Vasilko had recently been smuggled through the Bosphorus himself when he had a crucial encounter with Shahbaz, the Shahzada of Transoxiana. Shahzada Shahbaz was a long-time ally of Kiev, having married one of Halfdan’s daughters twenty years earlier. In 940, the Tajik king had courted international controversy by privileging the Maturidiyyah school of Islamic jurisprudence above the then-dominant Ashari school, leading to a tense diplomatic situation with Caliph Nasraddin. Vasilko’s open support for his brother-in-law had been crucial then, and Shahbaz was now eager to return the favor. Like Vasilko, he was restless for foreign glory after years of agonizing diplomacy.
With the support of Shahbaz’s seven thousand Tajik riders, Vasilko realized that the rare chance existed to strike against Byzantium. The Orthodox king of Bulgaria had died, leaving his kingdom to several squabbling sons; with Bulgaria in crisis their alliance with the basileus had also broken down, leaving Constantinople with no allies of consequence. Now was surely time to move, to not simply defeat the Byzantines but leave them crippled forevermore. And how better than to take their capital and wealthiest lands and split the empire in two?
The war was launched four years later, on July 5, 949. Like his grandfather ninety years ago, Vasilko raised hundreds of longships and sailed for Constantinople, this time for conquest. The battle plan called for Vasilko to besiege the city from land and sea, expecting that years might be required before the city itself fell.
It was a perilous moment. Basileus Symeon commanded an army as large as Vasilko’s own, and the riders from Transoxiana were hundreds of miles away. Symeon’s commanders urged him to attack the Russians and lift the siege, but the fretful emperor feared a trap and kept his forces east of the Tauros mountains. In 951, the Russians caught out a pro-Byzantine mercenary band some two thousand strong and slaughtered them nearly to a man, reinforcing Symeon’s fears. The Greeks might well have saved their city then, but their emperor’s premonitions of doom became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The starving city opened its gates on January 22, 952.
Symeon did not advance until that summer, and by then it was far too late: Vasilko caught his army while crossing the Bosphorus and defeated them piecemeal. Four thousand Greek soldiers died beneath the Theodosian walls on September 22, 952, while the Ruthenians lost perhaps half that number. In their haste to retreat, hundreds of cataphracts spilled into the strait and drowned as their armor pulled them to the bottom. The battle of Byzantion, as it was called, was a strategic catastrophe for the Byzantines, and when Symeon returned to Anatolia, he found the Tajik riders there waiting for him.
On March 30, 953, Basileus Symeon was forced to surrender his claims on the Kingdom of Thessalonika. The loss was devastating, but Vasilko’s next actions were worse. The tsar meant to hold this mighty city, and so he opened up his treasury to pay the smallholders of Ruthenia to take lands and houses in the duchy of Frakiya (i.e., Thrace), in an explicit (and unusual) campaign to replace the Greek population with more loyal, Muslim subjects. The violence inherent in this process is perhaps the largest stain on his reign, as thousands of ordinary Greek speakers were subject to violence or even death so that the Rus’ might claim their lands.[4]
In this way, Tsar Vasilko would destroy Greek-speaking Constantinope and leave the Russian city I sit in now. Maybe it’s the isolation of the past couple of months, but I confess I often find myself thinking of the blood that resulted in that mighty and terrible deed.
[1] According to some analyses, Ruslan was facing five separate rebellions, a striking example of his realm’s instability.
[2] Prince Vselovod died in a hunting accident in 938; this was Ruslan’s second son, Ruslan the Younger.
[3] Population 1,736. Birthplace of early western actor Hoot Gibson, which it turns out nobody cares about.
[4] One might call this ethnic cleansing, but a pre-modern ruler like Vasilko was more concerned with religion than ethnicity as we would think of it.
Born: 904
Reigned: 925 - 972
Part 2: The Rise of a Tsar
I've been writing this updates from Tsargrad the past couple of months, dashing out a quick Ruthenian post for fun here and there when I have time at the end of the day. I’m here doing work for my dissertation on the great Sunni schisms of the eleventh century, so this silly little history blog of mine is what my grandmother calls a busman’s holiday. Being more or less alone in this foreign city, thousands of miles away from my girlfriend Natalya and my apartment in Ann Arbor, I find it easy to drift between past and present. Perhaps that’s why, on my day off yesterday, I found myself wandering into the Bol'shaya mechet' Ayya-Sofiya, the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque.
Standing inside, I couldn’t help but imagine the first Russian warriors to step into this place. It would have been four hundred years old, and already a great wonder in the eyes of the world. I imagine the warriors standing in awe, feeling both intimidated and enthralled.
Of course, the Ayya-Sofiya doesn’t look exactly like it did when they first arrived. Many of its most valuable treasures would have been looted in 952, as Vasilko permitted his men three days to sack the great city and the Ayya-Sofiya was believed to have the most to loot. Even then, there were limits. Vasilko had a Vlach warrior executed for attempting to pry loose one of the paving slabs on the Proconnesian marble floor. The minarets, the mahrab and the minbar all date to the rule of King Sviatpolk, fifth son of Vasilko, who was granted rule over Thessalonica
The story of the mosaics is particularly interesting. The Byzantines had lavishly decorated their greatest monuments with mosaics depicting Christ and the Virgin and various mighty emperors of Byzantium. You can’t see them now, as they have been covered up by the plaster of pious Russian craftsmen many centuries ago. King Sviatpolk was, however, curiously reluctant to cover up the striking mosaics, and indeed had a deep appreciation for their beauty. According to a Greek convert to Islam, the mosiac of the Virgin Mary seated with the Christ child was still visible in the semi-dome above the apse in the east end well into the reign of King Sviatpolk II (ca. 1000 CE).
It was just this sort of practice that led to the al-Muwaḥḥidūn reaction in the 11th century and the sectarian strife of Tsar Ivan’s reign. But I’m getting ahead of myself, of course.
The great conquests of Vasilko began in a not-terribly-promising cell in Kiev. Antavas Palemonaitis was a notorious rogue, a disgraced heir to tribal holdings in Lithuania who had sold his sword to whomever could promise to restore him to his family’s lands. He had plotted together with Feodor Halfdanovich in the Moldavian rebellion, and at the end of that sorry affair Antavas was brought before King Vasilko in chains.
The king’s advisers expected a swift execution, but Vasilko had other plans. He had been harboring an ambition to unite the land of the Rus under Dar al-Islam, and it would be useful to have a Lithuanian staging ground for his northern campaigns. The captive said the shahada with alacrity (if not much sincerity), and then Vasilko announced his deep conviction that Antavas Palemonaitis was the rightful ruler of Samogitia on the Baltic coast, and called his swords for war.
The war itself was swift, lasting perhaps a year, and by 930 Ruthenian traders were setting forth from the port in Memel to sail the Baltic Sea. However, Samogitia proved more challenging to hold than to take. It was not long before the rogue Antavas was assassinated and a Vidilist pagan took the high chiefdom in his stead to scheme against their new master in Kiev. For the next four decades of Vasilko’s reign, he would struggle in vain to impart stable Islamic rule in his Lithuanian holdings.
The conquest of Samogitia was but a precursor, however. Vasilko’s true aim was Khazaria, which then bordered Ruthenia to the north and east. The crafty Ruslan Ruslanovich, once King of White Rus’, had subjugated the Khazar hordes in the 910s. As a deliberate provocation to Kiev, whose kings named themselves Kings of the Rus’, Ruslan took the title Tsar of the Rus’ and the Khazars. Tsar Ruslan proclaimed that the true ruler of the Rus’ needed no foreign gods, and implied heavily that he considered Kiev part of his natural domain.
Ruslan’s commitment to his Slavic gods would prove to be his downfall, however. While the White Rus’ worshipped in the pagan fashion, the Khazars had long since adopted Jewish practices, and they would not give up their own god in exchange for Chernobog. Civil war soon became endemic in Ruslan’s realm, sapping his strength. As one Arab wit later put it, Ruslan might have been Tsar of the Rus’ and the Khazars, but never at the same .
With Antavas (seemingly) secure in Samogitia, Vasilko began to plan his next campaign. He meant to show this Ruslan exactly who the true ruler of the Rus’ was by forcing him to bend the knee, and then to stabilize Ruslan’s lands himself through his superior diplomatic acumen and the power of the Russian ulema. Vasilko’s Lithuanian army would invade Minsk from the west while his Russian warriors marched from the south. In September, 931, as marauding peasants set Minsk aflame while Ruslan was battling Khazar rebels in the south [1], Ruthenia declared war.
The War of Khazar Subjugation, as it would later be known, was neither easy nor quick. It was not Ruslan’s strength but his weakness that plagued Ruthenia. On May 8, 932, Vasilkov took Minsk and captured Ruslan’s son Vsevolod, shattered the morale of Ruslan’s loyalists--but the rebel armies marching through Khazaria cared little for Vsevolod, and were just as hostile to Kiev as Minsk. As the Ruthenian army divided itself to occupy the Khazar lands and put down Ruslan’s many rebellions, the Tsar himself slipped past their lines and attempted a daring march on Kiev in 934. In August of 934, Vasilko was obliged to dispatch three thousand warriors to lift the siege of Kiev, an embarrassing necessity. It was not until April 9, 935, that Vasilko could settle the Khazar lands and receive the subjugation of Ruslan.
On the tenth anniversary of his ascension to the throne, Vasilko was crowned Tsar of the Rus’, the Khazars, the Vlach and the Lithuanians, Master of the Pontic Steppe and the Black Sea. Ruslan was permitted to retain the title of King of the White Rus’, a title which made him preeminent among the boyars of the realm. Within five years, Ruslan’s son [2] would marry Vasilko’s daughter Marina in exchange for the family’s conversion to Sunni Islam. (It seemed that Ruslan had need of foreign gods after all.)
Converting the Khazars proved a bigger challenge. For many Russians, Islam had melded with vestigial elements of Slavic religious practice, which made the faith seem almost familiar even to those who did not practice. The Khazars, however, had adopted the Jewish faith to declare their independence from Christian and Muslim powers, and they would not surrender that independence so easily. Vasilko’s first success came when the high chieftain of the Ashima clan died suddenly after being thrown from a horse, leaving his young daughter Özlem to inherit.
Özlem, then perhaps six months old, was swiftly placed under the care of a Kievan nanny. In short order, Vasilko declared that the child was to be raised in truth of Islam and would in her maturity be raised to the title of Queen of Zaporizhia. In time, the pious young queen of indisputable blood would be far more effective in converting her people to Islam than any Russian army.
The fall of Constantinople had its birth in Jerusalem. Tsar Vasilko had slowed the pace of his northern conquests, intending to avoid Ruslan’s mistake by ensuring the stability of his realm first and foremost. By 945, Islam had made substantial inroads in the lands of the White Rus’ and the Khazars, permitting him a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to tend to his foreign alliances. The tsar was in mourning after Feodor’s untimely death, and restless to cross swords with the unbelievers again.
While Vasilko’s strategic ambitions pointed north, his most determined rival was to the south, in Constantinople. Much to his chagrin, the mighty Byzantines were wealthier, more advanced, and their rule more stable than the Muslim tsardom of Ruthenia. Their conquests in north Africa ensured that their strength was steadily increasing. Their position on the straits of the Bosphorus allowed them to stop Russian trade to the Mediterreanean. Even the act of taking a longship to the hajj was potentially fraught, and many pious Russians had to slip through the straits under cover of darkness like common smugglers. Beyond that, I think the splendor of Constantinople was its own sort of provocation. Nothing in Kiev matched the strength of the Theodosian Walls, or the majesty of the Hagia Sophia, and the boastful Russians knew it.
(Nat rolls her eyes when I say things like this; she says any girl from Tekamah, Nebraska [3] is bound to be easily impressed.)
Vasilko had recently been smuggled through the Bosphorus himself when he had a crucial encounter with Shahbaz, the Shahzada of Transoxiana. Shahzada Shahbaz was a long-time ally of Kiev, having married one of Halfdan’s daughters twenty years earlier. In 940, the Tajik king had courted international controversy by privileging the Maturidiyyah school of Islamic jurisprudence above the then-dominant Ashari school, leading to a tense diplomatic situation with Caliph Nasraddin. Vasilko’s open support for his brother-in-law had been crucial then, and Shahbaz was now eager to return the favor. Like Vasilko, he was restless for foreign glory after years of agonizing diplomacy.
With the support of Shahbaz’s seven thousand Tajik riders, Vasilko realized that the rare chance existed to strike against Byzantium. The Orthodox king of Bulgaria had died, leaving his kingdom to several squabbling sons; with Bulgaria in crisis their alliance with the basileus had also broken down, leaving Constantinople with no allies of consequence. Now was surely time to move, to not simply defeat the Byzantines but leave them crippled forevermore. And how better than to take their capital and wealthiest lands and split the empire in two?
The war was launched four years later, on July 5, 949. Like his grandfather ninety years ago, Vasilko raised hundreds of longships and sailed for Constantinople, this time for conquest. The battle plan called for Vasilko to besiege the city from land and sea, expecting that years might be required before the city itself fell.
It was a perilous moment. Basileus Symeon commanded an army as large as Vasilko’s own, and the riders from Transoxiana were hundreds of miles away. Symeon’s commanders urged him to attack the Russians and lift the siege, but the fretful emperor feared a trap and kept his forces east of the Tauros mountains. In 951, the Russians caught out a pro-Byzantine mercenary band some two thousand strong and slaughtered them nearly to a man, reinforcing Symeon’s fears. The Greeks might well have saved their city then, but their emperor’s premonitions of doom became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The starving city opened its gates on January 22, 952.
Symeon did not advance until that summer, and by then it was far too late: Vasilko caught his army while crossing the Bosphorus and defeated them piecemeal. Four thousand Greek soldiers died beneath the Theodosian walls on September 22, 952, while the Ruthenians lost perhaps half that number. In their haste to retreat, hundreds of cataphracts spilled into the strait and drowned as their armor pulled them to the bottom. The battle of Byzantion, as it was called, was a strategic catastrophe for the Byzantines, and when Symeon returned to Anatolia, he found the Tajik riders there waiting for him.
On March 30, 953, Basileus Symeon was forced to surrender his claims on the Kingdom of Thessalonika. The loss was devastating, but Vasilko’s next actions were worse. The tsar meant to hold this mighty city, and so he opened up his treasury to pay the smallholders of Ruthenia to take lands and houses in the duchy of Frakiya (i.e., Thrace), in an explicit (and unusual) campaign to replace the Greek population with more loyal, Muslim subjects. The violence inherent in this process is perhaps the largest stain on his reign, as thousands of ordinary Greek speakers were subject to violence or even death so that the Rus’ might claim their lands.[4]
In this way, Tsar Vasilko would destroy Greek-speaking Constantinope and leave the Russian city I sit in now. Maybe it’s the isolation of the past couple of months, but I confess I often find myself thinking of the blood that resulted in that mighty and terrible deed.
[1] According to some analyses, Ruslan was facing five separate rebellions, a striking example of his realm’s instability.
[2] Prince Vselovod died in a hunting accident in 938; this was Ruslan’s second son, Ruslan the Younger.
[3] Population 1,736. Birthplace of early western actor Hoot Gibson, which it turns out nobody cares about.
[4] One might call this ethnic cleansing, but a pre-modern ruler like Vasilko was more concerned with religion than ethnicity as we would think of it.
- 2
I'm not actually from Nebreska, for the record, although I went to school with somebody from Tekemah.
The bit about Symeon hiding behind the Tauros mountains is absolutely true, too. I really didn't understand why the AI wouldn't attack me, because it seemed like it could have an even shot (at least) of defeating me. I was nervous going into this war because I was sure that the Byzantines had superior troops to mine pound-for-pound and thus could stomp in a fair fight. And maybe that would have been true, but it turned out that they didn't even try.
Also worth a note: I don't have the Russian imperial title at this point; I got the Khazaria empire title and after some internal debate simply renamed it Ruthenia. I think I'm going to keep that name for the medieval empire for the foreseeable future, barring me succeeding in the Unite the Slavs decision.
Good question. I figure that my day is coming, although 1.2 makes it easier for the defenders in a great holy war so I figure that I could do okay.
Glory, to be sure. The conquests in this section ensured Vasilko's place in the (in-universe) history books.
Thanks! I like the idea of making the woman who writes these updates a character in her own right, and also the possibilities of imagining long-term historical implications from what happens in-game.
Let me check if I have a save from the period and I'll post it with the next update.
Vasilko is undoubtedly the greatest ruler of the dynasty that I've played so far, for sure. And his diplomatic acumen has stood him in good stead in fashioning a far larger empire than his predecessors.
The bit about Symeon hiding behind the Tauros mountains is absolutely true, too. I really didn't understand why the AI wouldn't attack me, because it seemed like it could have an even shot (at least) of defeating me. I was nervous going into this war because I was sure that the Byzantines had superior troops to mine pound-for-pound and thus could stomp in a fair fight. And maybe that would have been true, but it turned out that they didn't even try.
Also worth a note: I don't have the Russian imperial title at this point; I got the Khazaria empire title and after some internal debate simply renamed it Ruthenia. I think I'm going to keep that name for the medieval empire for the foreseeable future, barring me succeeding in the Unite the Slavs decision.
Good question. I figure that my day is coming, although 1.2 makes it easier for the defenders in a great holy war so I figure that I could do okay.
Glory, to be sure. The conquests in this section ensured Vasilko's place in the (in-universe) history books.
Thanks! I like the idea of making the woman who writes these updates a character in her own right, and also the possibilities of imagining long-term historical implications from what happens in-game.
Let me check if I have a save from the period and I'll post it with the next update.
Vasilko is undoubtedly the greatest ruler of the dynasty that I've played so far, for sure. And his diplomatic acumen has stood him in good stead in fashioning a far larger empire than his predecessors.
Hmm, I think Constantinople fell a few hundred years too early but that is a good way to one-up the Ottomans!
The Byzantine Emperor was a coward unfit to rule! Fearing defeat like that Interesting that as a Muslim Rus, you've simultaneously pre-empted the aspirations of both the Ottoman Sultans and the Muscovite Tsars a good five hundred years ahead of schedule!
Interesting that as a Muslim Rus, you've simultaneously pre-empted the aspirations of both the Ottoman Sultans and the Muscovite Tsars a good five hundred years ahead of schedule!
Quite an impressive feat, I wonder if the West will react to the fall of the second Rome?
There’s Vasilko’s glory, then, although not without the stain of “cultural conversion”, an exceedingly dark bit of CKIII. Still plenty of time on the clock for our tsar, too. Is it two decades of stable consolidation, or are there twists to come yet?