The Reign of the Soldier – 1240-1274
Illiya II became King as a 13-year-old boy following the murder of his grandfather, and came under the guardianship of a hastily formed Regency council of powerful Boyars – men who had been his predecessor’s implacable enemies. Following their seizure of power in Minsk, these nobles proceeded to hunt down the allies of Illiya I, who had fled the city, winning a decisive battle at Smolensk. This victory ensured that a cabal of wealthy Princes were able to maintain an iron grip on governance in Poland, with the young King kept far away from the affairs of state.
For the best part of a decade this settlement held. King Illiya was happy to avoid involving himself in political struggles and palace intrigue. He was fixated on the legend of his great grandfather, Illiya the Bloodhound, and was captivated by the stories of the greybeards who could still remember his triumphs. Illiya II had no other desire than to emulate the great man and build a famous legacy of his own. As he grew into his maturity, he therefore began to pressure his Regents to give him the opportunity to fulfil his destiny by winning a great military victory. With the Kingdom enjoying a period of prosperity, and eager to avoid a confrontation with the monarch that could disturb the existing political settlement, the Boyars agreed to support Illiya with the resources he needed.
With this backing, the now 20-year-old King marched to war in 1247. His target were the lands of Crusader Poland, now under the authority of the Kingdom of Burgundy and no longer owing allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor directly. By attacking the Crusader lands he drew in outside intervention from nearby Catholic rulers – with the Danes, Swedes, Italians and a number of Dukes from the Empire, although not the Emperor himself, sending troops to oppose the Jewish invasion.
No one could have known when this young boy had gone to war what kind of mighty warrior-King he would be. Illiya II had an incredible lust for battle, throwing himself into the thick of melee combat in each engagement – slaying dozens of Christians as he went. He was also an expert tactician – inflicting ten times the casualties on the Latins as his own army suffered at the Battle of Czarknow. After just two years of fighting, the Burgundians desperately sued for peace in 1249 – agreeing the end the conflict in exchange for the return of Lesser Poland, the area around the city of Poznan that had been heavily Christianised since the Crusade yet retained a large ethnic Polish majority, and a heavy war indemnity.
King Illiya returned to Minsk a triumphant hero. The war had been short and relatively cheap, meaning few additional exactions had been placed upon the people, while the liberation of land in Old Poland and its distribution among the land hungry nobility was extremely popular. The King used his new political capital to sideline the noble clique that had dominated his court since his grandfather’s murder. In the years after 1249, the royal council was filled with allies and acolytes of the King. A number of legal reforms were instituted in this period that angered many Boyars – with Primogeniture re-adopted as the Polish law of succession and the Kingdom of Galicia once again being formally abolished. Hereafter Illiya was King of Poland and Ruthenia, with the lands to the south and west of Kiev following the laws of Poland, and north and east of the city Ruthenia’s.
Naturally, through this period the soldier-King was eagerly planning his next great conquest. For many years Poland had been ceaselessly burden by Tatar raids – that plundering its lands, sacked its cities and carried away thousands of its people in the eastern provinces. It had been hoped that the conquest of the Steppe lands west of the Dnieper would stem the flow of these raids, yet the impact had been minimal. Illiya believed he would be the man to finally end this burden upon his people, by taming the Steppe once and for all. His first target in this would be to conquer the Crimea and the lands around the Sea of Azov. This diverse region was predominantly inhabited by Khazars and Georgians, who had migrated westward following the conquest of their homeland by the Arabs, while the prosperous trading city of Azov itself was ruled by the Greeks and aligned to the Constantinople-based Kingdom of Thrace. Compared to the enemies he had felled in Old Poland, these foes appeared to be mere ants. As such, Illiya marched south for his first campaign on the Crimean Steppe in 1255 in expectation of a swift victory.
The conflict on the Steppe quickly developed into a quagmire. Illiya struggled to keep his large army well supplied in these barren lands, particularly with enemy raiding parties harassing his baggage trails, and was therefore forced to move very slowly. Meanwhile, individual battlefield victories over the Georgians and Khazars appeared to have little value as they would quickly rise up as soon as Polish troops left their territories. The King’s solution to this was to construct a string of well garrisoned fortresses throughout the region and wage a war of utter annihilation against the tribal leaders of the Georgians and Khazars. These tactics would eventually begin to break the will of Poland’s enemies, but only after years of warfare.
Azov, meanwhile, proved far harder to capture than the Poles had anticipated. The city was well-fortified by the Greeks and was kept in steady supply by the Thracian fleet. This forced the Poles to engage in a long and costly siege, made only more difficult by the constant harassment of the besieging army by Khazar warbands. Illiya therefore engaged in an audacious expedition – advancing along the Black Sea coastline through Moldavia and Bulgaria to attack Constantinople directly. Ransacking its suburbs and threatening to attack its walls, he was able to force the Greeks into agreeing to surrender Azov to him. By 1260, the Crimean Wars were over, and Poland had gained vast new territories. Yet victory had come at a heavy cost – with the King having been forced into pressurising many of his nobles into providing sizeable ‘donations’ to the crown to fund the war effort.
At war’s end, the Boyars expected their debt to be paid. They pushed for the King to rid his council of his close allies, bringing in a collection of the realm’s most respected Princes, and surrender power to his nobles and repay the costs they had endured during the war. In the style of his great grandfather, Illiya II refused to dilute the hard-fought power he had won and went to war with his nobles.
Striking out from their based in Galicia and Old Poland, the rebels sought to march against the capital. Despite being clearly outnumbered, Illiya faced them down at the Battle of Volkovysk and secured a mighty victory. Many of the rebel leaders were captured in their attempts to retreat – and placed in captivity in Minsk. The remnants of the rebel army fought on bitterly until their leader, Prince Feodor of Red Ruthenia, was captured in 1262. Infamously, Illiya had his enemy decapitated and would keep his skull as a trophy in his throne room for the rest of his reign – striking terror into the hearts of all those who would oppose him
This noble rebellion was followed quickly by a larger popular rising – the Great Orthodox Revolt of 1263-1267. The Orthodox Jews had long been forced to the margins of Polish society and had frequently faced the threat of state oppression and pogroms. Yet, on the ground Orthodoxy remained as firmly rooted as ever in its own communities – while the annexation of Khazar lands, where the population was solidly Jewish Orthodox, had further strengthened their presence in the realm. They had rebelled in the 1260s in the hopes of overturning the Samaritan elite and, if not conquering the Kingdom, at least establishing a toleration of their way of life. With rebellions breaking out across Khazaria, but also among the large Ashkenazi and Slavic Orthodox populations of Ruthenia and Old Poland, the monarchy was severely threatened. At various points the Orthodox rebels were able to capture Azov, Warsaw, Plock and Smolensk – although by 1267 their last armies had been firmly crushed.
This war would leave a long shadow over Jewish religion and Polish history. For the Orthodox elites and commoners alike, the defeat of the rebellion left a wave of hopelessness in its wake and led to a period of deep introspection amongst the Rabbinate. On a smaller scale, a number of Ashkenazi decided to migrate to the recently conquered Steppe lands – where their shared faith with the Khazar population granted them a degree of protection from Samaritan pogroms. Among these migrants was a young man named Jacob Shamir. An intensely spiritual, learned and charismatic man, Shamir had fought during the Great Revolt, but had now turned his back on violence. He called for an end of warfare between Jews, a spiritual revival of Judaism around strict Orthodox principles and spread the millenarian belief that God would soon return the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, restore the Temple, spread the Israelite faith across the earth and bring about the end of days. Jacob would quickly start to win a large following among the Khazars.
Back at court, following a decade of internal conflict, King Illiya II itched for another opportunity for conquest. Over the course of recent decades, the Holy Roman Empire had steadily increased in power. Beyond its German heartland, the Emperor ruled over much of Francia and had vassals stretched across Europe – including in Moldavia and Bulgaria. Seeking to push Polish influence south towards the Danube, Illiya saw these latter vassals as a threat. Hoping to further his strategic aims, and win yet more glory through war against a mighty enemy, Illiya invaded Moldavia in 1273 and quickly overran the area.
An Imperial army would arrive in Moldavia in the spring of 1274 to eject the Polish forces, entering battle with them at Bacau. As he had throughout his life, Illiya involved himself in the thick of battle and entered personal combat with the imposing Bishop of Lechtermund. During this fighting, while slaying his opponent, Illiya suffered a fatal wound from the Bishop’s morning star mace. The greatest warrior Poland had known since the Bloodhound was dead.
