Chapter 26: The Wrath of Timur (Khan)
“I am the Lord of Asia. I am the Khagan of the Mongols and Khazars and the Padishah of the Turks and Tartars. I am the heir of the Khan of Khans himself. I am the Sword of the Sun, the champion of the Giver of Justice. I am the Iron Khan, here to avenge the defeat of my namesake with blood and iron. I am the rightful ruler of the civilized world, and you, Khagan of Rome, will submit to my power, whether you want to or not, just as the heathen Khagans of Persia and the Turks have.”
-Timur “the Conqueror”
“Blessed are we Romans, for we live in the age of the Augustoi
! To battle!”
-Kaiser Martin I “the Noble”
Friedrich Augustin II was killed early on in the cavalry charge, slain by Timur himself, and an absolutely ferocious battle was waged over his body, one that only ended with the death of every single Reich soldier. Timur, the Lord of Asia, took no captives. “Kill all, burn all, loot all,” his eldest son and heir Shah Rukh later said of the Iron Khan’s approach to warfare. The body of the Kaiser, now uncontested by the Roman armies, was taken to Samarkand, where its head was paraded through the streets on a pole before being used as a decoration for the front door of Timur’s palace. As for the body…well, that was as far as the Reich spies got before they were found and executed.
And so ended the great battle, or disaster, of Tabriz, which became to be known as “Double Eleven” as the charge occurred on November 11, 1378. In terms of the percentage of troops lost, it ranked up there the Hebrides, Ergyng, Gloucester, and Worcester of the previous century (at or near one hundred percent casualties). Over ten thousand Ottomans, Fatimids, and Romans, about two thousand Timurids, the numbers of the slain were among the highest of any battle of the fourteenth century, at least on the Roman side.
A second legion under the command of Gunzelin and the kings of Scotland and Bavaria, numbering forty thousand, attempted to fight the Timurid force at Kirkuk. Twenty-two thousand Timurid soldiers were killed. There were no Reich survivors.
Savur fell back to Baghdad. In the cities of first Mesopotamia and then the rest of the Reich, the news of Friedrich Augustin II’s death spread rapidly, and the priests and patriarchs began calling the faithful to war. It did not matter that Timur was an almost unstoppable warlord like Ocuil Acatl was before him. The war against the second Lord of Asia was no longer, in their eyes, just a simple war as the barbarian invasions of Ocuil Acatl and Temur Khan were a century ago. It became a crusade, a holy war, despite the fact that Imperial Orthodoxy had no military doctrine. Under the call of the patriarchs, all of the people of the Middle East, Turk and German and Ashkenazi alike, answered.
Despite the fact that the eastern tagmata had been all but annihilated, allowing Timur to run freely through the Ottoman, Fatimid, and Komnenoi domains, all was not lost. A few weeks after Tabriz, all four legions from Britannia, accompanied by the legions of Gallia, Italia-Afrika, Hibernia, and Caledonia, arrived in Provincia Syria-Palestrina on the Imperial Fleet.
They were immediately marched over land to the battlefields in Mesopotamia. Leading the famed fifty-thousand strong Twentieth Legion, the legendary scourge of barbarians and the ultimate decider of battles, was Kaiser Martin I von Hohenzollern himself, seeking vengeance for the untimely death of his father, the sword of Friedrich I at his side.
As the legions began their march across the deserts and plains of Iraq and Syria, the Timurids continued their march westwards, sacking and looting all in their way. It would not be long before the Ottoman capital of Baghdad fell to the Iron Khan. A small Kurdish militia under Baron Rafiq of Maragheh sacrificed itself to buy the Twentieth Legion and Baghdad more time.
Finally, at the city of Deir, on the fields of Anah, just a few days away from Baghdad, the combined forces of Christendom engaged Timur’s invasion force in a brutal battle.
Caliph Savur led a charge on the center of the Timurid army, while Duke Heinrich von Hohenzollern of Saxony attacked the left flank and Commander Gunzelin von Hohenzollern’s divisions attempted to surround the right flank. However, this left the joints between the three Reich divisions open, a fact that Timur exploited mercilessly. Day after day he relentlessly pounded the gaps with his heavy cavalry, attempting to separate the flanks and then finish off each division separately. Savur could not afford another Tabriz. If he died, his armies would fall apart, and then they would all die. No, that could not happen.
Once Heinrich and Gunzelin had secured their positions, Savur ordered all of his flanks to simultaneously strike at all sides of the Timurid army. The sipahis, kataphraktoi, and knights charged straight at the center while the longbowmen rained volley after volley of arrows down on the Lord of Asia’s armies.
Seventy thousand Romans. Seventy thousand Timurids. There could only be one winner.
For days the Timurids held out against the Reich assault, the Iron Khan’s infantry locking their shields together in an improvised testudo formation. The shield-wall was the only thing between the Mongols and certain death at the hands of the vengeful Romans. Timur, getting desperate, called for reinforcements from occupied Persia. However, Martin simply called in the Twentieth Legion from Mesopotamia to reinforce his own armies. A bloodbath ensued at Deir, both sides throwing thousands upon thousands of men at each other to die and drag out the battle for day after day. Neither side wanted to give up. German knights cut down Mongol keshiks, only to be cut down in turn by more keshiks, which were then cut down by kataphraktoi and sipahis.
For every Reich soldier killed, three Timurid warriors were killed in a slaughter that shed so much blood even the barbarian false god Huitzilopochtli would have had trouble drinking it all. For weeks the fields around Deir ran crimson red with the blood of both Mongols and Romans. For months the grass and soil of the area would be stained red. For years the population of the entire region would remain at thirty percent of its pre-Tabriz levels. For decades the Reich would reel from the immense casualties it had taken at Deir, thirty thousand if its men cut to pieces under Timurid hooves and Mongol blades.
But it was Timur whose empire suffered even more.
Thirty thousand Romans were killed in that bloodbath, but fifty thousand Timurids had been taken down with them. Martin could easily replace his casualties with reinforcements from his European legions, but as for the Lord of Asia, the troops lost at Deir included many of Timur’s best troops, those which had fought in Afghanistan, Turkestan, Khiva, and northern Persia, those which had won victory for their khan and for the Sun. Timur could not replace his veterans. It was as simple as that. From the moment the Timurids retreated from Deir, their armies crippled by the bloodbath, the tide of the war began to turn.
Savur chased the Timurid survivors into nearby Oromieh, where his forty thousand men attacked Timur’s broken army of twenty thousand men. Despite being outnumbered, Timur made good use of the nearby terrain. He situated his troops on the roughest terrain available so that the Reich legions would have trouble moving. He also camped and entrenched himself on the banks of a river, so that any Reich assault would have to cross the river to get to him.
When Savur did arrive, he fell right into Timur’s trap. But that didn’t matter, as the organization of the Lord of Asia’s army collapsed rapidly under the Ottoman assault. In the end, Timur was forced to retreat again, although he had lost one of his commanders, the mayor of Samarkand.
Both sides lost about eight thousand men, which dropped Timur’s army to thirteen thousand but left Savur’s army at around forty thousand, including the reinforcements from a nearby legion that Martin had sent him.
Timur rapidly recalled his other large invasion force, which was sieging Samarra, to reinforce his broken army. However, Savur’s men moved fast and caught up to him on the hills of Chaldiran, where Timur had set up his defenses on the tops of the hills. Day after day Savur sent his infantry to march up the hill and dislodge the Timurids, but Timur simply rained down hail after hail of arrows on the Ottoman troops. Cannons weren’t of much use here either, as they had horrible accuracy and long reload times; both sides nonetheless still employed cannons during this battle, which was probably the reason for the extremely high death tolls suffered by both the Reich and the Timurids.
Both Timur and Savur continuously called for reinforcements from reserve armies, though it was Savur who could get more reinforcements. By the end of the battle, the Ottoman forces numbered about sixty thousand, outnumbering the Timurid armies two to one. Again, Timurid morale collapsed in the last days of the battle, and another slaughter ensued, one almost as devastating as Deir. Over eighteen thousand men were killed on both sides, though on the Reich side that meant twenty-five percent casualties and on the Timurid side that meant over fifty percent casualties.
Timur’s armies did not retreat into Timurid-occupied northern Persia. Instead, they ran back into the heart of Mesopotamia, where Savur attacked the eight thousand Timurids with an army of almost forty thousand Ottomans. Again, both sides called for reinforcements, though Savur managed to call in twenty thousand and Timur could only call in another two thousand. Both sides lost about six thousand men, and Timur’s force was routed again.
While Duke Heinrich of Saxony stayed behind in Baghdad to recover from his wounds, Savur and Gunzelin marched on to destroy the Timurid survivors. At the city of Erebuni, Savur’s forty thousand men assaulted the one thousand Timurids, who were entrenched in the hills again. As the call of “Allahu akbar!” and “For Tabriz!” rang out from the legions, the Timurids stood at their defenses, ready to die for their khan and for the Sun.
Twenty-five Romans were killed in the ensuing slaughter.
There were no Timurid survivors.
Meanwhile, Martin began diverting some legions to attack and destroy the Immortal forces that were sieging southern Mesopotamia. That was accomplished quickly and effectively. At the Battle of Samoudah, almost seven thousand Persians were annihilated by the Roman legions, who suffered 128 casualties.
Timur fled into Persia, where he made a stand with three thousand troops at the city of Rayy, which also happened to be an Immortal stronghold. At the battle of Shahryar, Timur managed to negotiate a temporary alliance with the leader of the Immortals, allowing him to integrate the Persian holy order’s forces into his own army. That didn’t help him much, as a Reich legion of about eight thousand came down upon the combined Timurid-Immortal army of four thousand and utterly annihilated them. Only four hundred Timurids and Immortals survived Shahryar, while only nine hundred Romans were killed. Rayy subsequently fell to a Reich assault.
Desperate now, Timur ordered an assault on the Azerbaijani city of Lankaran, only for the invading army of five thousand to be destroyed by a small legion of ten thousand under Gunzelin’s command. Timur was rapidly running out of manpower.
Martin began an offensive into Timurid territory, with Savur commanding the legions. In one battle at the city of Rarem in northern Persia, Savur’s army of twenty thousand met a Timurid army of equal strength. The Ottoman and Reich forces lost only a thousand men, while Timur suffered over twenty thousand casualties.
With his entire army devastated, Timur agreed to a peace. Martin was victorious in halting the Timurid advance westwards. A year later, the Zoroastrians were also forced to surrender.
In the north, the Norse attempted to invade Mexica-occupied Iceland, only to be repelled by a Mexica army of over a hundred thousand. In November of 1382, the Norse decided to abandon the invasion of Iceland and instead invade the Reich. By June of 1383, the Norse had been utterly defeated, with Fylkir Hjalmar II suing for peace.
Three years later, news came from Central Asia of the Lord of Asia’s death. Timur had died, though the spies stated that he had “died in battle against himself” for some reason. Whatever the case, his son Shah Rukh was the new Lord of Asia.
The first thing Shah Rukh did was to invade Persia again with reinforcements from the Yuan Dynasty. The Shahanshah, still recovering from his losses in a devastating civil war following the first Timurid invasion, was caught unprepared. Martin attempted to send aid to the Persians, but the Moabadan-Moabad declared a Zoroastrian crusade for Mesopotamia again, eliminating any hope of Roman-Persian military cooperation.
In 1392, a small Portuguese city, a rather insignificant one at that, was inherited by a Norseman who had sworn allegiance to the Fylkirate. Martin promptly invaded both the city in question and Denmark.
As the invasion of Scandinavia continued, Persia fell to the renewed Timurid offensive, with Shah Rukh taking Esfahan and forcing Shahanshah Humayan I Seljuk into exile in Baluchistan. The Persian Empire lost the entirety of its heartland, which fell under Timurid occupation. Shah Rukh ordered force-conversions of the Zoroastrian population to Zunism at once. On the 27th of September 1393, Shah Rukh personally led an assault on the Hashshashin fortress at Alamut, and despite taking heavy casualties and surviving at least twenty assassination attempts, the Timurids stormed the stronghold and killed every single Hashshashin member they could find. The remaining assassins scattered throughout the Reich and Timurid territories, hunted down mercilessly by the Mongol forces. After about two hundred years of existence, the Hashshashin, the former Muslim holy order which had converted to Zoroastrianism and alternatively helped and hindered the Reich, was no more.
Shah Rukh moved his government to the former Persian capital of Esfahan, intent on making it the capital of a new Zunist empire, the true center of the world, while Humayun set up a capital in Makran, on the coast of Baluchistan, where he made an agreement with the Samrat Chakravartin of India. Reinforcements from India began arriving a few months later, allowing Humayun to begin making plans to liberate Persia.
Martin was alarmed at the recent developments in Persia, but he was busy leading troops in central Sweden, so he did not have time to deal with the Timurids. Fylkir Hjalmar II died sometime during the war and was succeeded by his four-year-old daughter, Aleta, who became the Fylkja. Aleta’s regents were forced to surrender after a Reich army of sixteen thousand utterly wiped out an army of eighteen thousand Vikings, taking almost no casualties.
It turned out that the Norse ruler of the Portuguese city was actually the King of Norway, who was forced to swear fealty to Martin. And thus the Kingdom of Norway was established in that single city in Portugal. A few years later, the “King of Norway” inherited the Norse Kingdom of Leon-Andalusia, establishing the Norse Kingdom of Norway-Leon-Andalusia.
With control over Hispania reasserted, Martin turned to the Middle East to deal with the Persians invading Mesopotamia. Originally there were two holy orders that served as the Moabadan-Moabad’s armies: the Immortals and the Hashshashin. The fall of Alamut destroy the Hashshashin Order, leaving only the Immortals to fight the Reich. Gunzelin led the Eighth Legion to attack the Immortal army that was heading for Baghdad. All five thousand Immortals were killed in a single battle against the Eighth Legion, which lost eleven men.
Finally, the Moabadan-Moabad agreed to a white peace with the Reich, as since the Zoroastrians had no armies to fight the imperial legions or any cities to siege nobody could make any progress in the war.
Martin ordered a triumph to be held in Constantinople, as he simply had so much money in the imperial treasury he didn’t know what to spend it on.
That was when Shah Rukh attacked the Reich, intent on avenging his father's losses.
