1457-1486 – The Ocean Blue
Taniel succeeded his father at the age of thirty six and would rule over Assyria for a further three decades, overseeing the continued flowering of her Renaissance. While art, science, culture and the economy thrived as never before, Assyria would strike out. In character, the King appeared to be partly symbolic of the changing times. While his father had been a gruff warrior prince, Taniel was at home with poets, artists, playwrights and philosophers. Yet for all his claim to be at one with the sophisticated culture of Nineveh, Baghdad and Aleppo, in other aspects the new King remained a decidedly medieval monarch. For all the changes effecting the Five Kingdoms, this was not yet a modern society.
During the first decade of Taniel’s reign Assyria was part of a tripartite rivalry in the Caucuses alongside the Byzantines and Timurids, as the three powerful empires each attempted to outmanoeuvre the other and extend their influence. In 1458, Taniel forced his father’s recently acquired Georgian vassal of Kartil to cede the ethnically Armenian city of Yerevan to his direct overlordship, with the territory placed within the administrative structures of the Kingdom of Armenia. Two years later war broke out in the region as the Timurids invaded Alania, bringing them into a war with the Byzantines. The two powers struggled in the mountains for four years, yet the Timurids proved far stronger – annexing eastern Georgia, including Tbilisi, and the western shore of the Caspian Sea from the Alans. The Alanian Kingdom had been bankrupted by the war, while its ruler felt badly let down by the failure of the Byzantines to sufficiently support him in his fight with the Timurids. Distancing himself from Constantinople, he sought to raise funds and improve relations with his southern neighbour by selling the province of Kars to Nineveh – thereby giving Assyria direct land access to its vassal in Kartil.
Ever since Nahir the Bear’s Crusade to southern Indian at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Assyria had been plugged into the wider Indian Ocean world – its traders bringing spices and silks from East Asia towards European markets and ivory, gold and, above all, slaves from East Africa to the Middle East. In the fifteenth century, with advances in seafaring technology, a greater emphasis on anti-piracy activity by the Assyrian state and a general rise in prosperity, Assyria’s position in this world had steadily grown. Ships was Basra and Muscat increasingly cut out middle men to make the journeys to Asian and African markets themselves, while pushing out rivals.
In the second half of the century it would take a turn towards a new phase in its relationship to the region, not only seeking to trade but to control territory. This began at the beginning of the with King Taniel’s decision to support the plans of a Basran merchant named Dimi Bobawai to establish a settlement on the isolated and uninhibited Seychelles islands – sitting north of Madagascar and east of the African mainland. Here, Bobawai built a staging post for slave trading with the Swahili coast, while also starting plantation agriculture on the islands themselves – importing small populations of slaves from Africa to till the soil and alongside Arab and Assyrian freemen colonists. These were the modest beginnings of an empire to come.
Despite the emergent Golden Age taking shape in Assyria, many within the Church of the East were gripped by a sense of insecurity and weakness. The rise of the Armenian dynasty, and the negotiated religious settlement of Taniel’s father, had undoubtedly reduced the Church’s authority, while its demographic weight within the empire had steadily declined alongside its expansion. These sentiments had undoubtedly been strengthened by Aboulgharib’s suspension of missionary efforts among the Muslims of Babylonia and Arabia. Taniel, having grown up with the faith unlike his father, was far more zealous than his predecessor and gave his redoubled support for a new wave of persecutions and attempts at conversion aimed against his Muslim subjects, often backed by the strength of military force. Further to this, Taniel passed an ordinance banning Muslims from owning property in the Seychelles or any other overseas possession of the Assyrian crown, while giving the Nestorian Church special rights in these lands.
Assyria’s poor treatment of its Muslims elicited condemnation from her Islamic neighbours, and, most importantly, stimulated the rivalry with the mighty empire to its east. After half a century of peace between, the Timurids invaded in 1477, swearing cast the Christians out of Arabia and the Gulf. The hammer blow of the Timurid invasion would be directed principally against two main targets – the twin centres of Assyrian maritime power in Basra and Oman. The assault on the more easterly of these two targets met with quick success. The Timurid fleet clashed with the Assyrians at the Battle of Jask near the Strait of Hormuz and the Assyrians were crippled by the mutiny of a large contingent of Omani Muslim sailors. This allowed thousands of Persians to flood across the Strait into Oman, where the local Sunni Muslim populace greeted them as liberators.
While the occupation of Oman and the defeat of her Indian Ocean fleet was a bitter blow, effectively marooning Assyria from Oceanic trade, these losses proved an exception to the general pattern of the conflict. The largest battles of the war were concentrated around the fortified port city of Basra, where the two empire fought a series of long bloody battles between 1477 and 1479 when the Timurids finally withdrew. After initially wavering, the Egyptians had thrown their lot in with their Assyrian ally during this conflict and sent a sizeable contingent to Mesopotamia who aided in the battles over the region. During this same period, Assyrian armies met with impressive successes on other fronts – its armies overrunning the lightly defended Caucuses to capture Baku and Tabriz in the north and making inroads into the Zagros Mountains. After its Arabian invasion was halted in battle near Qatar in 1480, the Khan finally admitted defeat and agreed to a white truce.
The defeat of the Timurid invasion drastically reduced their influence in the Arabian peninsula, effectively granting Assyria and her Egyptian ally a free hand to strike against the Muslim states of the region. This was an opportunity they eagerly seized upon in a short war fought against the Sulayman Caliph and the Salifid Emirate between 1483 and 1485. Without their powerful sponsor, the Arabs were too weak to resist effectively and were forced to cede lands in Egypt to Alexandria and surrender both the holy city of Medina and a precious outlet to the Red Sea to Assyria.
Perhaps the most important innovations of Taniel’s period on the Assyrian throne was the development of a fledging political institution – the Majlis. Throughout its Medieval history, the nobilities of the various Assyrian realms had maintained various mechanisms, informal and formal, of exerting influence over governance and the crown – but they had never done so in a consistent way across the entire empire. Born out of the ideas of Conciliarism that his father had adopted towards the Churches, the King arranged a gathering of nobles and clergy from all of the Five Kingdoms of his realm in Nineveh for the first time in 1460. Primarily focussed on resolving internal disputes among the bickering internal power brokers in the empire – this assembly coming two years after the forcible transfer of Yerevan into the Armenian Kingdom, amid a host of territorial, religious and political disputes – the nobles soon took advantage of their concentration to push for extensions of their rights, privileges and power.
Further councils would be called later in Taniel’s reign in 1469, 1475 and most importantly of all in the aftermath of victory over the Arabs in 1486. This final assembling of the Majlis had been called with a very specific purpose in mind. While Taniel had sired two sons, both had died without issue while the King had no male siblings of his own. With Taniel now deep into his sixties and in worsening health, he hoped to avoid the sort of bloody war of succession that had followed the end of the House of Qatwa. Taniel supported the candidacy of his nephew, the young King Stefanos of Egypt, had hoped to smooth his path to power by securing the consent of the Majlis. Naturally, a foreign monarch, and a Catholic no less, was a disturbing prospect for many in the Assyrian elite and the assembly was deeply divided. Although respect for the old King won a majority over, the Majlis failed to reach clear agreement – with a recalcitrant Syrian faction favouring the claim of one Mihail Andali, a member of the minor nobility with a distant connection to Qatwa blood through one of the daughters of the fourteenth century King Nechunya I.
When Taniel died in the spring of 1486, bringing to an end the shortlived Armenian dynasty, the issue of his succession remained unresolved and conflict unavoidable.
