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That would be a great way to go,
but first it seems you need to handle the arabian hordes and their collaborators (and it might be a step in the direction to make poland israel contiguous). you know i didn't expect this from the tatars after all, but bad apples good apples i guess
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Wars of the Emperors – 1546-1559
With the majority of the Polish army in the Upper Volga region putting down the rebellion of the Tverian Tatars, the Arab invasion achieved rapid successes. Sweeping away the limited Polish forces in the region, the Arabs and their Turkish rebel allies overran the North Caucuses and Caspian region – capturing Astrakhan without a fight. As the progressed deeper into Polish territory, the Arabs found their path blocked by the fortress of Ust-Medveditskaya situated between the Don and Volga rivers. Defended by just 500 Cossacks, the Arabs expected the fort to act as little more than a spead bump in their push towards the Polish heartland.
The Cossacks bravely refused to surrender to the attackers and showed incredible fortitude in resisting efforts to storm the fort. It would take the Arabs almost five months to finally overwhelm Ust-Medveditskaya and slaughter its defenders. The leader of the Cossacks – Semyon Khalinshevksy – would become a national hero, celebrated for his patriotic determination to fight to the very last. Indeed, the performance of the Cossacks at the siege would contribute to the continued development of their reputation as fierce fighters, steadfastly loyal to the motherland. In the context of the war, Ust-Medveditskaya was incredibly significant as it gave the Poles the time they needed to bring their army south from Tver and bolster their numbers with new recruits. This meant that by the time the fortress fell, the Arabs were no longer in a position to pour into the Tsardom’s Russian speaking heartland but were instead put on the defensive from a Polish counterattack.
Following the arrival of the mainstay of the Polish army in the region the two opposing armies engaged in a shadow conflict – fighting a string of minor engagements across Poland’s south-eastern territories through 1542 and 1543. However, for both parties the war was proving incredibly costly – pushing the Arabs and Poles towards a direct confrontation that could break the deadlock. This came in 1544 at the Battle of Kabadia. With two evenly matched armies, both almost 60,000 strong, this was one of the largest battles of the era. Ably marshalled by Dobrynia Adalhard, the Prince of Prussia, the Poles suffered greater losses than the Arabs but were able to claim victory on the battlefield through the power of their charging hussars. Following Kabadia the Arabs began to fall back from the North Caucuses – allowing the Poles to liberate most of the territory they had occupied, including Astrakhan, by the end of the year and isolating the Oghuz Turks.
The Caucuses were not the only front in this conflict. In the Carpathians, the Pannonians had invaded Polish-ruled Slovakia at the outset of the war and even raided the lands around Krakow before the Tsar’s armies arrived in the region and drove them back across the border. By the Battle of Kabadia, much of their own country was under Polish occupation. In the Black Sea, the Arabs had left the fighting to their navy, sinking the small Polish fleet and tormenting her ports. The Arabs also sought to ferment rebellion in the region, achieving some success through sending Georgian agitators from their own lands to provoke the Crimean Georgians to take up arms. The most important front outside of the Caucuses was in the Middle East. Cut off from the Motherland, Israel and Ascalon were hopelessly outnumbered and could only hope to slow the Arab advance. By mid-1543 all of Israel outside of a few holdout Zealot fortresses had fallen, with the Kohen Gadol negotiating Jerusalem’s surrender in exchange for guarantees that the Jewish holy sites would be protected. Ascalon proved a tougher opponent for the Muslims, with its last fortresses on the Palestinian coast holding out through to 1544 while its capital at Damietta would remain in Jewish hands right to the end of the war.
After Kabadia, the conflict in the Caucuses developed into a gruelling war of attrition – but the momentum was flowing in only one direction. The Poles gradually fought their way into the South Caucuses – capturing Tbilisi and Derbent in 1545 and Yerevan in 1546. The losses endured by both sides in the mountain passes of the region were astonishing as hundreds of thousands lost their lives. In the Middle East, the Jews achieved some successes. As the Arabs withdrew troops from this front to send more men to the Caucasian meatgrinder, the Jews counterattacked – pushing the Arabs from the Egyptian Delta and, combining with Jewish rebels in the area, liberating the Levantine coastline from Gaza to Jaffa. The war had clearly been won, and the Arabs were willing to come to terms. Some in the Polish camp wished to continue to fight deep into the Caliphate and push for annexations in the Caucuses, the Levant and even Constantinople. However, these voices were outweighed by the heavy price being paid by the empire to prosecute the conflict. Four years of fighting had seen the Tsardom’s supposedly limitless reserves of manpower run dry, while the heavy debts taken on to pay for the army were severely straining the empire’s finances. Poland therefore agreed to peace in exchange for a huge tribute from the Caliph that would allow the Tsar to repay the majority of his war loans.
Alongside concerns over finance and loss of life, one of the main factors pushing Igor III towards peace in 1546 was fear of the enemy within. The Tsar had been deeply disturbed by the number of his own subjects who had collaborated to a lesser of greater extent with the invading Arabs. Fearing that there existing a vast fifth column within Polish society that might push the Tsardom back towards the chaos that his grandfather had conquered – he seized the opportunity to move against his real and imagined enemies, instituting a new reign of terror. Lands were seized, titles revoked, relatives kidnapped as collateral, nobles arrested and some executed. With the majority of the rebels during the Arab war having been Tatars, and to a lesser extent Georgians, the hammer fell heaviest on these groups, although many Jewish Boyars were impacted as well. This targeting of the Tatars marked the final break between the Tsar and his long-time chancellor Oronartai Belgunutei. By 1546 the two aging allies, the Tsar 60 years old and his chancellor 63, had ruled Poland together for decades. Belgunutei’s Muslim religion had placed him under suspicion from the beginning of the war with the Arabs, straining his relationship with Igor, but it was the post-war purges that finally broke this bond. In 1547 Oronartai had been dismissed as chancellor, and in early 1548 he had come close to being arrested by the Tsar’s men before a personal appeal to the sovereign spared him.
Igor III’s reign of terror was cut mercifully short in 1548 by the Tsar’s peaceful death. Unfortunately, there would be no peaceful passing of the torch from one generation to the next as Poland quickly sank into a succession war. Igor III had had two children – Illiya and Natalya. Illiya had died in a hunting accident in 1541, leaving behind a young son Lev who was nine years old in 1548. Igor’s daughter Natalya had married the Prince of Smolensk and given birth to Nikita Andrei, twenty-two at the Tsar’s death. Young Lev was the legal successor and was duly crowned Tsar Lev III shortly after his grandfather’s death. The quest of the new Tsar’s regency council was the spark for civil war. Igor’s terror had reminded much of the nobility of the dangers of untrammelled monarchical power, and many hoped to rebalance the state in favour of the Boyars once more. Furthermore, there was a clear appetite among the Jewish nobility and Rabbinate to restore the supremacy of the true faith. However, the old dog Oronartai Belgunutei, determined to hold together the humanist imperium he had forged over his lifetime, moved to seize control of the government himself by taking on the role of Lev’s sole regent. The reformist faction of the nobility therefore looked to Igor’s elder grandson, Nikita Andrei, to lead a rebellion on their behalf.
Nikita won a great deal of support among the Jewish Boyars in Poland’s core territories – taking control of Smolensk and much of White Ruthenia, including Minsk itself, while winning the backing of many of the nobles of Galicia, Old Poland and Ukraine. Unfortunately for him, the Boyars were not the force they had once been. The imperial army, depleted yet at the same time battle hardened from the recently concluded Arab war, remained solidly behind their legal sovereign, while the Tatar lords of the east rallied strongly behind the regent, one of their own. The conflict was therefore relatively brief. The pretender’s army met with the loyalists at two key battles in 1548 at Brest, in White Ruthenia, and then Smolensk – facing defeat on both occasions. After these engagements the rebellion quickly began to fizzle out as many of Nikita’s backers dropped their support for him. The pretender himself agreed to renounce his claim to the throne in 1549, bringing an end to his revolt.
Through the 1550s the old regent maintained his iron grip on court in Kiev while Tsar Lev entered into his teenage years. In the east, Poland continued its consolidation of power over the Tatar lands. Ipaosid was formally incorporated into the Tsardom, while between 1554 and 1555 the Khanate of Eymür was swept aside and vast territory between the Volga and Ural Mountains annexed by Poland and their vassals in the Yazi tribe. In Kiev, by the final years of the 1550s Lev was beginning to exert pressure of his own for his regent to relinquish power to him. Having ruled personally for a decade by this point, Oronartai was reluctant to step aside. Only his death in 1559, aged 74, brought an end to his reign as regent. Power in Poland had now, finally, passed on to a new generation and Tsar Lev III assumed the same all-powerful role as his predecessors.
On Poland’s far eastern frontier, events outside of Kiev’s control were leading the Tsardom towards a conflict with a distant foe. The rapid expansion of Polish rule in the east had allowed Russian explorers, merchants and buccaneers access to a whole new world. A number of expeditions had been launched into the lands east of the Urals, which lay under the rule of the Mongol Empire, mostly making use of Siberia’s great river networks. The explorers were often armed and were aggressive with local. Seeing these groups as encroaching on their sovereignty, the Mongols cornered one such expedition travelling along the Ob River in 1558 and massacred it. This action provoked rage in Kiev and when the Mongol Khagan refused to provide compensation, and give access to Siberian trade to Russian merchants, Poland went to war. The Mongol Empire had been in terminal decline for a century by this point. Overstretched, near bankrupt and riven by internal conflict it could only muster around 10,000 men to fight the Poles – a force that was completely destroyed by the Poles at the Battle of Kypshak near the shores of the Aral Sea. All of Siberia lay open.
Conquest was not to be as easy as the Poles had hoped. The mighty Chinese Empire had close connections to Central Asia and was well aware of the encroachment of Poland into the region. To the Celestial Empire, a weak Mongol Khanate – a force they understood well after thousands of years of interaction – was far preferable to the unknown of a highly aggressive Polish state. The Chinese therefore chose to deploy a large army to Siberia to defend the Mongols’ western border and keep the Slavs west of the Urals. This set the scene for a remarkably clash between two empires and civilisations that had, to this point, never before confronted each other directly in all human history.
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It certainly will be a pivotal time, with Poland getting involved in a lot more foreign conflicts on multiple continents. We will see how well the Tsardom comes out of all these wars and what sort of state emerges from them.
In game when I saw that 'Popular Religion' event I thought it would be a great framing device to have some diversity seep into the Jewish religion. Having the Muscovite reconversion be the cause of this made a lot of sense - especially as there will be an ethnic divide between the 'Ukrainian/ Greater Russian' majority and 'Muscovite/ Little Russian ' minority by the time we get to Victoria 2 (the converter splits the Russian ethnic group), so laying some groundwork for that difference. As for 'Olegite Christmas' and Chanukah - we can imagine the Orthodox Jews would shun the former entirely, while the Olegites would probably have an extended festive period taking in both. I suspect their more unique holiday would probably get greater prominence though, as a means of highlighting their differentiation.
Having this more relaxed approach his helping to bring more people into the Jewish fold - but at the same time weakening the central church by giving birth to new denominations and non-standard beliefs.
There wasn't any room for annexations in my peace deal with the Arabs. If I had wanted to take land I would have had to have fought on for several more years - but by 1546 my manpower was close to zero, revolt risk was rising at home and my finances were a horror story. Taking the money (I got over 900 gold) and running was the best option.
A Siberian trans-continental destiny surely awaits
Well you called this one right!
I was very keen to try out the Siberian Frontiers mechanic, which is why I focused so much expansion in the east against the Tatars. The Mongols were hideously weak in this game - constantly going bankrupt, having civil wars and being invaded by their neighbours. I thought I had some easy prey - the Ming decided otherwise ... That would be a great way to go,
but first it seems you need to handle the arabian hordes and their collaborators (and it might be a step in the direction to make poland israel contiguous). you know i didn't expect this from the tatars after all, but bad apples good apples i guess
As I noted above - I didn't have the warscore to make annexations, and although I had won the upper hand the costs of continuing the fight were simply too great if I wanted to keep the empire unscathed.
The Tatars have certainly had an interesting half century - largely losing their independence to Poland, but at the same time seeing one of their own dominate the new Empire for decades and decades. We will have to see how their position will change now Oronotai has passed away, if the cosmopolitan approach will continue or if there will be a Russo-Jewish resurgence under Lev.
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Well, seems we now have to fight the Chinese. Wonder if we could get the Indians or Japanese to help us? Though considering how far they are from us, that seems unlikely.
Interesting to hear that we can expect wars on multiple continents going forward. We’ve got Europe and Asia, obviously. And I guess conflict in the Levant will likely spill over into parts of Africa. Will the Poles be making themselves known to the Americas before the century’s out, I wonder?
Almost reassuring to see a return to something like civil disorder in the aftermath of Lev’s accession. Oronotai was certainly a massive figure, and it stands to reason that a degree of plurality would be lost with his exit from power. It seems to a pressing question for the next period in Polish history: will Lev embrace the legacy of his regent or his grandfather?
Almost reassuring to see a return to something like civil disorder in the aftermath of Lev’s accession. Oronotai was certainly a massive figure, and it stands to reason that a degree of plurality would be lost with his exit from power. It seems to a pressing question for the next period in Polish history: will Lev embrace the legacy of his regent or his grandfather?
The untamed wilderness of Siberia lies upon Poland. The door to the east is open beyond the Urals.
You really do know how to pace your updates to create the proper level of tension and excitement. Things sounded like they were going reasonably well right up until the small issue of the Ming came up in the last couple of sentences.
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Clearly whoever controls Siberia/Mongolia shall be master of Asia. And it better be Poland
Poland has humbled an ancient foe and is well on its way to becoming a truly transcontinental empire. With the Mongols in decline, the vast realm of Siberia with all its natural resources awaits -- assuming the Poles can overcome the Mongols' Chinese allies, of course.
Speaking of imperial expansion, how is the colonization of the New World coming along at this time? I'm always a little fascinated to see who gets involved in the colony rush, and where they end up settling.
Speaking of imperial expansion, how is the colonization of the New World coming along at this time? I'm always a little fascinated to see who gets involved in the colony rush, and where they end up settling.
China as an enemy, at this time while they presumably are still strong as ever... And after a long and exhausting war against the Arabs. Not good news, no sirree.-
let's wrap this war up with the Chinese, but having a weak Mongol buffer between us and them is actually not a very bad idea for the time being. The Arabians seem to be they're going to be the big problems for some time to come.
About the Tatar issue, well I'm still happy at the outcome. They did backstab, but then they did pay for it harshly. And then, for quite some time the most powerful person in the empire kept it a cosmopolitan place. Now, I hope is the time for conciliation and unity between Jews, Tatars and Georgians (and others). My mind is still on that colonization path from Red Sea, and the steps that needs to be taken between now and then to first be a prosperous empire with naturally defensible neat borders.
About the Tatar issue, well I'm still happy at the outcome. They did backstab, but then they did pay for it harshly. And then, for quite some time the most powerful person in the empire kept it a cosmopolitan place. Now, I hope is the time for conciliation and unity between Jews, Tatars and Georgians (and others). My mind is still on that colonization path from Red Sea, and the steps that needs to be taken between now and then to first be a prosperous empire with naturally defensible neat borders.
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Part 2 already. Well, it looks like I'll have to make an exodus out of Part 1 and traverse new seas to arrive here.
Do you think you'll be able to do any expansion in the Middle East? Building up Israel and Ascalon so they can stand on their own without Polish support seems like a worthwhile goal (unless until they rebel, that is).
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Enemies at the Gates – 1559-1576
The arrival of Chinese forces in the region completely upended the balance of power. Badly outnumbered and outgunned by the more advanced Ming artillery, the Poles were sent into headlong retreat towards the Urals. With their Siberian expedition in tatters, the Poles had the choice of either abandoning their Asian ambitions at relatively modest cost, or investing all available military and financial resources in total victory. The Tsar chose the latter option. New armies were raised, and troops drawn from every corner of the empire to march into the east.
The scale of the Polish mobilisation in Siberia was astounding. In this far off province, a continent away from the nation’s heartland, the Poles were able to maintain an army running into the many tens of thousands. The Chinese were astounded at the scale of the Polish army and initially withdrew, before their key commander Daoxing Dai was pinned down into a pitched battle at Irtesh and badly beaten by a vast Polish force. There were few other battles fought on this scale, yet through 1560 the Ming and Poles fought a series of gruesome engagements across Siberia and Central Asia – with the Chinese gradually withdrawing back towards their borders. The Poles were highly fortunate that their opponents were unable to unleash the endless resources of China against them – faced as they were with significant peasant unrest at home.
The general pattern of a gradual eastward march by the Poles was not universal. With most of the imperial army engaged in Siberia, restive groups in European Poland sensed their opportunity to strike. Tatars in the Volga region rose up in a major rebellion – sweeping away the pitiful imperial garrison in the region and quickly securing control over a large swathe of territory. This revolt was supported by the famous Ride of the Five Thousand Sons – a remarkable journey of around 5,000 Chinese riders behind Polish lines, across the Urals and deep into Polish land. The troops aided the Tatars in the capture of the sacred city of Tver and supported the proclamation of a restored Emirate of Tver. They then proceeded to run riot across much of European Poland -
For all the adventures of the Five Thousand Sons and the Tverian Tatars, by the summer of 1562 the Chinese had withdrawn from Mongolia, seeing the cost of defending the Khanate as completely out of proportion to the benefit. With the Chinese threat gone, Poland agreed a devastating peace with the Mongols – annexing the small remnants of the Blue Horde in Europe, and extending the Tsar’s dominion thousands of miles eastward into Siberia at the expense of the Mongols and their allies in Transoxiana.
Despite the comparatively short length of the war, victory over the Chinese had been extremely costly. The crown had taken on large debts, raised very unpopular war taxes and lost many thousands in the fighting. Furthermore – the dramatic successes of the Tverian Tatars in establishing a functional Emirate within Poland’s borders had shaken confidence in the Tsar. As the hulking Polish army began its march back to Europe in 1562 they faced an array of threats. In the new Siberian lands many of the native tribes continued their resistance to Polish rule even after the Chinese withdrawal and Mongol surrender – forcing the Poles to leave a substantial permanent garrison east of the Urals. In the west, the army had its sights on the Tverian Tatars – beginning a long battle to restore order in the region that would last well into the 1570s. These were far from the only rebel threats facing the empire – with a substantial peasant rebellion beginning in Ukraine in 1563 and soon spreading across much of the Russian-speaking Jewish heart of the empire.
In the Middle East, the Ascalon erupted into civil war in 1561 when the Egyptian Christian majority rebelled against the ruling Jewish caste – forcing the Jews to take flight to their coastal fortresses. The Ascalonites sent a plea for assistance to Kiev, yet with the Tsardom facing threats on all sides it was unable to send more than token assistance – leaving the Principality to fend for itself. In 1563 the Christians of the west intervened when the powerful Duchy of Algiers, themselves subjects of the King of Sicily, accepted the Egyptian rebels’ offer of vassalage in 1564. In no position to wage a war in the Mediterranean, the Poles could do little more than protest this violation that left Ascalon a broken remnant of its former power.
With Poland suffering badly under the weight of these rebellions, her old foe in the south sensed an opportunity and launched an invasion across the Caucuses in 1568. Unlike in the previous conflict, the Arabs were not able to deploy their full strength against Poland – as they were in the closing stages of a successful conflict against the Papacy and Serbia. Nonetheless, they felt confident that the chaos in Poland would leave them defenceless to a swift invasion. This plan quickly turned into a fiasco, with the Arab forces on the frontier facing a string of defeats along the Caucasian border forts. The Polish army largely abandoned its wars against internal rebels, most notably cutting of a siege of Tver that left the city in the hands of the titular Tverian Emirate, to march southward to face down the foreign enemy.
Just as it had two decades before, this second Arab war devolved into a grinding attritional struggle along the high mountains of the Caucuses. The Poles were able to wrestled the Arab lands in the North Caucuses and even advanced into Georgia before eventually being repulsed by 1570. Thereafter the conflict developed into a stalemate – with neither side willing to suffer the losses necessary to force the mountain passes open. In 1572 the two empires agreed to a white peace – returning to their pre-war borders with no exchange of tribute.
Beyond the loss of life, the 1568-72 war with the Arabs had push Poland over the edge economically. A decade and a half of fighting, and the fall in revenues caused by the collapse of political authority in areas blighted by revolt, had left the crown deeply impoverished. Its solution to this problem had been a rapid debasement of the currency – minting coins with ever dwindling gold and silver content. This caused a form of Early Modern hyperinflation. By the 1570s the Polish currency was near worthless, with merchants taking to bartering rather than dealing in the Tsar’s coin. This naturally had significant economic consequences for the empire – seeing commerce dry up across the realm, ruining much of the burgher class and further hampering what foreign trade Poland still maintained with the outside world.
Mere months after the truce with the Arabs, Poland faced another invasion as King Petar III of the Serbian empire, the dominant force in the Balkans, crossed the frontier with 30,000 men. With the Polish army a reduced force, still mostly in the Caucuses and beset by rebel threats across the empire – the Serbs hoped a lightening campaign could see them force a quick and favourable peace. They certainly achieved impressive early successes – destroying the modest Polish garrison on the frontier and overwhelming much of Slovakia, Galicia and Moldavia, including the city of Lvov. By early 1573 they had reach Owrucz – a fortress protecting the western approaches of Kiev itself. Fearing for his safety, Tsar Lev III retreated from the capital with his court to Minsk, awaiting the arrival of the mainstay of the Polish army.
However, arrive they did. With the fortress of Owrucz still holding fast against the Serb siege, the Tsar’s grand army arrived on the scene. Despite the odds against him when faced with the massed Polish ranks, King Petar III bravely chose to stand his ground and fight – a decision that lost him a fifth of his army and sent the Serbs on a long retreat back to their homeland. For the next three years the Serbs pursued a spirited fighting retreat as the Poles recaptured the occupied territory and advanced into Serbia. Petar finally agreed to peace in 1576 following the Polish sack of Bucharest – agreeing to pay a substantial war indemnity to Kiev.
After two decades of warfare, Poland had been utterly exhausted. While the empire had held firm in the face of invasion and extended its reach into the depths of Asia; her economy was in tatters, Tver remained the centre of a rebel Tatar Emirate, the Baltic had descended into religious civil war, much of the empire was beset by peasant unrest and the Siberian provinces had fully accepted the Tsar’s rule. If the Tsardom was to escape the fate of the Late Medieval Polish Kingdom, drastic action was needed.
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The Indians were mostly too distant for us to engage with - although they have a big influence in the Persian and Central Asian world (which is Hindu in this world remember!). They are certainly no friends of the Mongols themselves. The Japanese stay fairly isolationist though, its actually the Koreans who are the more aggressive far eastern neighbour of the Chinese.
No spoilers on this one
. It was certainly getting concerningly quiet in Poland
. All these wars completely destroyed our stability and I had to leave large parts of the country over to the rebels for years at a time before I could deal with them. It awaits to be seen if the Tverian Tatar rebellion will contribute to a souring of attitudes towards Tatars and the multicultural imperium of Oronotai. With all the wars going, we didn't have much of a chance to look at the internal dynamics of Poland in this update - but we'll hear more in the updates to come!
It certainly is - and now my frontier touches uncolonised lands, and the opportunity to spread rapidly into the east!
You really do know how to pace your updates to create the proper level of tension and excitement. Things sounded like they were going reasonably well right up until the small issue of the Ming came up in the last couple of sentences.
Haha, thank you! I often cut updates short if a cliff hanger is coming up - I was initially going to end that last one with my victory in Siberia. But thought a bit of Ming drama never hurt anyone
. Clearly whoever controls Siberia/Mongolia shall be master of Asia. And it better be Poland
We now rule from the Baltic to the heart of Asia. Who dares stand in Poland's way now?
Knowledge of the New World didn't spread to me until the 1600s (so don't expect any images for some time yet). But broadly this is the pattern - Dutch and Abbadids in the Caribbean, Italians in Brazil, Sicilians in Colombia, Guyana and Venezuela (although the natives kept wrecking their colonies), Abbadids in eastern American seaboard, Danes in Canada, Skots in Louisiana and a bit later German Imperials in Texas (and eventually Mexico).
The Chinese were certainly a very tough foe. In game they sent army after army into Siberia - usually small enough that I could beat them, but only with all my troops concentrated. That meant I had to give up any hope of putting down rebellions at home, and I didn't notice as they sent a small force into my rear that occupied a bunch of provinces in Europe.
I'm sure the Celestial Emperor will be none too pleased at his smarting defeat, and we will be seeing more of those Chinese cannons before we are through.
We have your wish on the borders. We gain Siberia, but that weak Mongol Empire still stands in between ourselves and the Chinese directly.
The Tatars are in an akward position, with some eager to integrate into the empire (and even run the whole thing like Oronotai) while others still crave independence. It will be hard for them to fully integrate if they are seen as suspicious by the Jewish majority, and difficult to break free if they are not united in their pursuit of independence. We will see this theme continue through the AAR - with the Tatars being by far the largest minority in the empire by this point (atleast twice as numerous as all the Christians combined).
If we are to get to that Red Sea path we really need to turn around these losses we've been having in the Middle East - with both Ascalon and Israel losing territory this century.
We've been working fast! Hope you are enjoying reading the journey so far
. It has been quite difficult to support my Middle Eastern extensions with such a weak navy. Now with Ascalon split we are even weaker in that theatre. Really I need a decisive victory over the Arabs to manage this, and so far they've been too strong to achieve that. We are still in something of a death struggle with them - so there will be plenty more opportunities to try to push for a bigger victory!
Bloody Nora, that was a tough period! Great success against the Chinese empire, but at an incredible cost. I do like the idea of things breaking down to the extent that people are straight up bartering good again. You can see why the Crown would be spooked by the loss of revenue from duties and such.
I guess the question is, where is salvation coming from?
I guess the question is, where is salvation coming from?
Poland is well on its way to becoming a truly continent-spanning empire, but it looks like it may have found itself expanding beyond its means. Overreach is always a tricky problem to manage...
It seems to me the Tsar needs to make a choice and stick to it. Push east as far as he can go (and gobble up the independent states located within the empire as a secondary objective) or the Red Sea path and with access to the sea a possible colonial empire.
It pains me to say it but even with the vast power Poland now has it is simply too hard to do both, the theatres are so far away from one another.
Of course I would love to be proved wrong.
It pains me to say it but even with the vast power Poland now has it is simply too hard to do both, the theatres are so far away from one another.
Of course I would love to be proved wrong.