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Addendum: Religious Map, 952
The religious map of Eastern Europe, 952:

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By the time that I invaded Byzantium, Ruthenia was almost entirely Ash'ari, as you can see. There were some Kabarite provinces to the east and some Slavic provinces to the north, but we were mostly religiously unified. The Asatru blob to the north is the Norse kingdom of Holmgarðr (Novgorod), and the big Slavic blob is tribal Poland. (Poland often rivals or exceeds Ruthenia in military strength, well into the 11th century.)

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Hmm, I think Constantinople fell a few hundred years too early but that is a good way to one-up the Ottomans!

Yeah, I really threw the timeline out of whack--but I learned from my last AAR that the Byzantines will go bananas in this game unless you go after them early.

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!

It's true! Vasilko is one of the greats. And I too am disappointed with the Basileus--with cowardice like that, he was practically begging us to take his city away from them.

Quite an impressive feat, I wonder if the West will react to the fall of the second Rome?

I'll get into that in my last Vasilko update, but the short version is, it ain't pretty.

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?

There is more to his story, that's all I'll say. And yes, I find the 'cultural conversion' mechanic to be dark too! In CK2 it was more random but it has the air of natural cultural evolution; here I don't know how you could read what happens except as violent purges. And while we're at it, maybe I shouldn't think too hard about what the religious conversion mechanics would look like on the ground.
 
Tsar Vasilko of Ruthenia

Born: 904
Reigned: 925 - 972


Part 3: The Tsar in Winter

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The fall of Constantinople and the purge of Greek-speaking Christians from Frakiya sparked great alarm in Christendom. Wealthy Christian refugees booked passage to Greece or Italy, bringing tales of terror with them. In Venice, Rome, and Athens Tsar Vasiko was burned in effigy. Muslims living in Christian lands were subject to violent reprisals, while a spurious tale about Jews opening the gates to Constantinople sparked pogroms in Frankish and German lands. In the fall of 955, the Greek Orthodox residents remaining in Thessalonica gathered an army some ten thousand strong and launched a rebellion against Tsar Vasilko

In this fervid atmosphere, Pope Callistus called for a Second Crusade to claim Jerusalem for the Catholic faithful. It was an understandable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. There was much outrage at the Muslim barbarians of Ruthenia, much pathos found in the degradation of the great churchs of Constantinople, much awe and horror. However, the Catholic loss of the First Crusade had led many to doubt whether a second would be successful, and on this score, Vasilko’s great victory was discouraging to the Anglo Saxon and Frankish lords who might otherwise have declared their support.

So when the Second Crusade started, many of the Catholic forces were already demoralized. It would later be calculated that there were thirty thousand crusaders as compared to forty-five thousand Muslim defenders, striking evidence that Callistus had struggled to attract support. Beyond that, the Muslims were led by the aged Caliph Nasraddin again with Tsar Vasilko operating as his most prominent supporter, just as they had thirty years before, and the two were by now a well oiled machine. (Pope Callistus had hoped that the Greek revolt would distract Vasilko for longer, but the inexperienced rebels were caught out in Kalliopolis in early 956 and their army routed.) A series of savage victories in Palestine in the fall of 957 shattered the crusader armies and left them fleeing in all directions, further encouraging demoralized Catholics to withdraw from what seemed to be a fool’s errand.

The Second Crusade ended in ignominious surrender by the Catholics on October 21, 958, less than two years after it began. Far from avenging Christian losses, Pope Callistus had simply set off another round of bitter recriminations and despair.

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Victory in the Second Crusade led to a period of reflection for Tsar Vasilko. He had had a successful reign by any reckoning, triumphing over long time rivals like Khazaria and the Byzantines. In the eyes of Dar al-Islam, he was a renowned mujahid who had helped lead the defense of Palestine against the Christians not once but twice. His daughter Yefrosinia was now junior wife to Caliph Nasraddin, and the alliance between Tsar and Caliph could claim forty thousand warriors between them. Christians feared and despised him, many claiming that he was enthralled by the spirit of anti-Christ; this was its own sort of tribute.

Vasilko was also by now in late middle age, and his mind was on his legacy. He confided with intimates that he wished only that Allah would permit him one last great task. He had never lost his grandfather’s vision of a powerful Russian trading empire, and if Ruthenia was to secure its mastery of the Dnieper river trade all the way to the Baltic there was one obvious target: Garðaríki, in the north.

In Garðaríki, the descendants of King Rurik had fallen to a Norse rival, King Bengt Ivaring, but the king and their people still worshipped the old gods of Odin and Thor and still sacrificed Christians and Muslims at their Great Blots. The Norse sneered at the Ruthenian kings as soft-handed greenlanders, who had forsaken their gods and their culture to kneel before the caliphs far to the south. Vasilko had no memory of his family’s Norse origins; to him, the old gods were an embarrassment and a sign of backwardness. On September 2, 964, he declared a holy war for the kingdom of Garðaríki to cleanse the lands of the Rus’ of the Asatru faith.

Vasilko was sixty-one as he rode forth on campaign, and many of his trusted farsan were as old or older. Chieftain Putiata was sixty-five, and the redoubtable commander Mihal Adrienescu, leader of the Russian horse, was seventy. King Bengt mocked what he called “the invasion of the greybeards”, although he changed his tune once the Garðaríki army was smashed by Mihal’s cavaly at Toropets, on July 2, 965. The victory at Toropets, which claimed a third of Bengt’s men while sending the rest fleeing in three separate directions, led to a mighty celebration by the Ruthenian army. Perhaps the victors could sense that it was the end of an era.

Precisely when Vasilko’s health began to fail him is unclear. In the ninth century, the Russians believed that a kingdom was only as strong as the king himself, and so Vasilko’s courtiers would have done their best to obscure any weakness on his part. We do know that, during the latter years of the war, the tsar was rarely to be seen among his men and his every appearance in public was heavily stage-managed. Respect for the old man ran deep, however. When Bengt Ivaring was dragged before the tsar to surrender, Vasilko’s grave dignity made a deep impression. Only a few discerning observers noted that the tsar had not been permitted to speak or walk.

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After his return to Kiev in 867, it was soon an open secret: Vasilko, first Tsar of Ruthenia, had had a stroke. He could not walk without assistance and he was barely able to form full sentences. The struggle to speak was particularly hard for Vasilko, who always had such facility with language, and his thoughts turned morbid. He developed a strong taste for hashish in these last years. Prince Dyre, the heir apparent, hoped to keep his father mollified while he consolidated his rule in Kiev.

All was not well within Kiev. It had been Vasilko’s preference to smooth over, and even ignore divisions within his family, but few others had the ability to do so. While Vasilko floated above the fray, the court at Kiev had fallen into factional division over the fraught question of the succession. Prince Dyre was the eldest and presumed heir, but his mother Golbahar was one of Vasilko’s junior wives descended from a minor Mashriqi clan. Vasilko’s senior wife, Duha, hailed from the more prestigious clan Ghazi, and she favored her own son, Count Matfei of Serres. The tsar had shown little interest in Matfei, however, so Duha took matters into her own hands.

It is hard to know now who actually made the first move. Did Prince Dyre attempt the poisoning of the tsaritsa as a preemptive strike? Did Tsaritsa Duha go first by sending assassins to waylay the prince on his way from Kiev to Cherkassy? What is known is that, during the final years of Vasilko’s reign, courtiers needed to declare allegiance, for Duha or Dyre, or else face the wrath of both factions. The court spymaster, Predslava Bryachislavich, was particularly notorious for favoring first one side and then the other, as she played the court against itself for her own, entirely unknown purposes. The bloodshed spiraled out of control while the tsar’s health slowly declined. It is quite possible that he knew nothing of it.

Vasilko breathed his last on March 1, 972. The court announced that the Tsar had passed peacefully in his sleep the night before, but rumors persisted that Prince Dyre had smothered him with a pillow--to prevent his infirm father from changing the succession at the last minute. The story is impossible to verify, of course, but it reflects Dyre’s dark reputation and provides a taste of the bloodshed to come. The glories of Tsar Vasilko’s conquests were over, and the nightmare of Tsar Dyre Grozny had only just begun.

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Well that's hardly reassuring. Is Dyre going to be the next Ivan the Terrible? And that's a weird sight indeed! most of Russia having converted to islam

Also silly pope, the greatest city in Christendom has fallen right at his doorstep and his first response is to retake jerusalem? priorities man!
 
Dyre the Terrible… Bloodshed aplenty… The nightmare to come…

None of this is particularly filling me with great optimism. I’m sure it will be a great read, but still – dark times on the horizon.
 
Well, that's a bummer. Rus won't know what hit her. Surely this is bad news. Then again Ivan Grozny heralded a new and improved time after his death, so....
 
Vasilko was truly a great conqueror. Such a man often leaves a great void to fill, and the struggle for the succession is a sign of things to come.

It seems like where Vasilko built on the blood of his enemies, Dyre may build on the blood of his own people...
 
One of my later rulers had a pretty silly death last night. This won't come for a little while in the AAR (I'm 100 years ahead) and it's so rules-specific that I'd need to change it to something that works narratively. But here's what happened in game:

So my guy is Vengeful/Sadistic/Ambitious. Good meaty traits for role-playing, I'm having fun executing non-believers and torturing people and getting my dread at 100. But in one war, I take a handful of Sunni Muslims of my faith and I think maybe he's not going to execute these folks. So when I can't ransom them, I free them all using the mass free button.

Only there's an issue. Vengeful/Sadistic means that my guy gets stress every time he lets somebody free. Freeing eight people at once means that he gets a lot of stress. Over 300 stress, in fact. So much that my guy--who normally has no stress because he's happily burning pagans at the stake--has a heart attack and dies right there on the spot.

Now, in hindsight do I wish that the UI had indicated that I was about to kill my character? Sure. But does it make me laugh that this Tsar died because of the stres of being too nice? Absolutely.

Lord knows how I'll do it in the AAR, but I had to tell the real story here.
 
  • 4Haha
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What a fantastically absurd death. Wonderful slice of CK in action.
 
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Vasilko was a mighty warlord.

Ruthenia now rules the Queen of Cities...

Unfortunately, it seems as if a civil war is nearing...
 
Tsar Dyre II Grozny of Ruthenia, 972 - 1000
Tsar Dyre II Grozny of Ruthenia

Born: 929
Reigned: 972 - 1000


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I want to give a shout out to loyal blog commenter Alscon, who writes his own delightful medieval history blog The Right Hand Of The Karlings. Alscon reminded me of the classic Russian saying, Vasil'ko stroil na krovi svoikh vragov, a Dayr stroil na krovi svoyego naroda: “Vasilko built on the blood of his enemies, while Dyre built on the blood of his own people.” I’ve always been fond of that saying. It tells you immediately why Vasilko I is remembered with pride by the Russians while Dyre II is seen as a villain. But to my mind, it also tells us something else: Dyre’s villainy didn’t come from nowhere. All of his most infamous tricks, he learned in his father’s service.

Vasilko rode with his sons to war against the Byzantines in 949, and each son was given a task in accordance with their gifts. Gallant young Matfei led the farsan into battle, while careful Sviatpolk was to administer Tsargrad after the conquest. Dyre was given an equally crucial task: it was he who led the great Russification of Frakiya through terror, subterfuge, and exemplary violence. While Vasilko rode back to Kiev in triumph bringing the spoils of an ancient capital, Dyre was marshalling his informants and leg-breakers to terrorize the Greek-speakers into leaving. Tsar Vasilko surely instructed Dyre to do as much, but the great man found it politic to pretend that he ‘disapproved’ of young Dyre’s ‘excesses.’ He never disapproved enough to order Dyre home, just enough to mollify those with weak stomachs.

Nor was that the only thing that Vasilko disapproved of. Prince Dyre was cunning, introspective and secretive, all qualities that his father found alien. Dyre did not have the charm or the gravitas that a tsar should have, nor was he beloved by the people. Tsar Vasilko would occasionally drop hints that he was thinking of naming another to serve as his heir, and Tsaritsa Duha--the senior wife--saw the opportunity to push her own son’s claim. Matfei was a leader more in the vein of Vasilko and his predecessors: a gallant warrior. Vasilko permitted this uncertainty to remain for the final two decades of his reign, leaving it to Dyre himself to defend his inheritance through guile and assassination. Or so the prince saw it.

Whether Dyre had his father murdered or not, we will never know. We do know that Dyre came to power already notorious as a savage participant in court intrigue, with an affinity for the darker arts of torture, blackmail and assassination. As the bells rang in Kiev to proclaim the death of Vasilko, Tsaritsa Duha and her immediate supporters were fleeing the city in a longship. Duha stayed for a time in Tsargrad under the protection of King Sviatpolk, but soon enough she was on the move again to the Maghreb, to the home of her father and brothers. Clearly she had realized that Ruthenia would not be safe for her.

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For a time, Tsar Dyre defied expectations by aping--however awkwardly--the magnanimity of his father. He was, to all appearances, genuinely happy. He had claimed the ultimate prize that he long sought, and watched as his most determined enemies fled before him. He was also, unlikely as it may sound, in love. He had a new mistress, a common crofter’s daughter named Agafya, and could often be seen indiscreetly mooning over her. Most infamously, the high-spirited tsar pushed his sister, the Chieftess Marina, into a water trough at a wrestling match in the winter of 976. This behavior was boorish and unbecoming of a tsar, and many in the ulema were appalled, but compared to what might have been it seemed almost innocent.

The tsar had an early diplomatic coup as well. The once-mighty Christian kingdom of Bulgaria had suffered a serious collapse of authority since their apex at the beginning of the tenth century. By the 970s, the former kingdom of Bulgaria was now in three parts, all ruled by feuding members of the Chrysos dynasty: Pannonia, Wallachia, and a rump Bulgaria. Tsar Dyre understood the dynamics of this internecine dynastic struggle as well as anyone, and in October 977 he shocked his courtiers by embracing the Christian King Gavril II in an alliance against his brother kings.

Things began to take a turn early the next year, following the untimely death of his own brother King Sviatpolk. Tsargrad was now in the hands of the bold King Pavel Sviatpolkovich, a daring young faris with aspirations to rule as an emperor in his own right. Pavel began immediately to agitate against his uncle. In early 978, he strode into the Tsar’s court and arrogantly demanded that Dyre grant him control over Kiev itself. Dyre sat on his throne trembling in fury but dared not respond, as Pavel could command nearly as many troops as the tsar himself. Pavel’s claim went nowhere, but the young king returned to Tsargrad and began to agitate for independence.

The blatant challenge to Dyre’s authority set his mind racing. The young king would have not acted without allies. Had not his old enemy, the Tsaritsa Duha, spent a considerable amount of time ensconced at the Svyashchennyy dvorets (Sacred Palace) of Tsargrad with young Pavel? Surely this Pavel was nothing more than her cats’ paw, and his challenge a sign that her intrigues against him had not ended. And if Pavel was her agent, who else might be? The tsaritsa had been well-liked in Kiev, once upon a time.

Dyre’s paranoia perversely made it easier for him to accept the weakness of his position vis-a-vis his vassal king in Tsargrad. If Pavel had fallen under the sway of a sinister woman, then it was easier to justify, at least psychologically, responding to his effrontery with a campaign of flattery. The young Pavel was to be wooed away from Duha’s imagined influence, and after a time he would even be married to one of the tsar’s own daughters to secure an alliance. However, even as Dyre was making peace with his nephew he was planning a purge of Duha’s agents--real or imagined--in Kiev itself.

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The first victims of Dyre’s internal purges were lowborn, servants who worked for the tsaritsa or who were believed to be sympathetic to her. Dyre would quietly determine who should be seized, but his mistress Agafya would see to the rest. She received the reports and marshalled the leg-breakers and assassins on her lover’s behalf. A servant would simply, without warning, be dragged down to a dank cell and Agafya would inform the tsar that they awaited the torturer’s blade. Dyre would attend to such things personally: he got no pleasure from inflicting pain, but he put great stock in his own ability to discern truth from falsehood.

Of course, the primary function of torture is to tell the torturer what they want to hear, and indeed in these long grueling sessions Dyre learned (or rather, ‘learned’) that these minor servants were simply the cat’s paw of far more powerful figures. First, suspicion fell on Chieftess Marina, she of the water trough. Dyre’s victims told him that she was gathering an army of Khazar riders, or that she had paid assassins to kill Sviatpolk in service to the Basileus, or perhaps that she had been in the pay of Pope Callistus. Each story was more unlikely than the last, but they sufficed to convince Dyre that his sister needed to go.

Agafya hired a team of highwaymen to waylay the Chieftess on a ride outside of Kiev. Marina and her party were attacked as they were setting up camp for the evening, and a pitched battle soon ensued between the bandits and Marina’s guards. In the fracas, Marina was killed by a stray arrow--or so her guards believed. Tsar Dyre led the court in a thin facsimile of mourning for his hated sister, but his mind was elsewhere. By then Agafya had learned of a more urgent matter.

The Tsaritsa Darya Esfandyardukht of House Tahirid had traveled to Kiev from Transoxiana when she was but sixteen, to marry the prince of Ruthenia and cement the great alliance that secured the conquest of Tsargrad. Only after her wedding had she learned, to her horror, what kind of man she had married. Dyre was cold and forbidding in her presence, repeatedly humiliating her and the other wives while lavishing attention on a series of mistresses, of which Agafya was only the last. His cruelties in the torture chamber were nearly matched in the marital bed, and soon Darya began to fear for her life.

In self-defense, Tsaritsa Darya sought the protection of certain conservative members of the ulema, who disdained this tsar who flouted the laws of Allah. They soon decided that there would be no safety or justice until Dyre was dead, and began to plot the murder of the tsar. The Scholars’ Plot, as it would later be called, stood little chance of success. Darya lacked her husband’s cunning, and the clerics had little experience in palace intrigue. In January, 983, Agafya discovered the plot and Dyre was immediately informed.

As fate would have it, the Tsaritsa Darya had recently become with child. Dyre, uncharacteristically, was slow to act on his wife’s treachery, and as he pondered what to do next the tsaritsa became more and more infirm by the latest in a series of difficult pregnancies. As she was forced to take to her bed, the tsar found it easy to deny her access to her favored scholars (who would themselves being to disappear one by one). On July 6, Darya went into labor. The tsar abruptly appeared by her birthing bed, which was not his practice, with a pair of women that he described as midwives. Shortly thereafter, Tsar Dyre emerged cradling his infant daughter Praxida in his arms; he announced grimly that the tsaritsa had died in childbirth.

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While court intrigue had taken a grim turn in Kiev, to the outside world Dyre was very much his father’s son. With the Bulgarian kings in disarray, Dyre launched a series of wars aimed at uniting his holdings in Russia and Thessalonica. First, he claimed Moldavian lands that had fallen to the Bulgars a century before: the mountain province of Suceava and the coastal duchy of Bugeac. On May 9, 985, however, he launched a war against his father’s great rival the Byzantines, hoping to claim their Bulgarian holdings in Phillipopolis. The treacherous Gavril II rode forth with the Ruthenians against his fellow Christians.

Byzantium was by 985 a pale shadow of what it had been. Shorn of its richest lands, the empire could command perhaps six thousand men to Dyre’s ten thousand. The remaining territory was split into three parts: the Bulgarian holdings in Phillipopolis, where Basileus Isaias held his capital at Rhodopes; the lands of Hellas and Epirus on the Adriatic, and the remaining lands in Anatolia. This compounded Dyre’s numerical advantage.

At Thasos on October 14, 985, a Byzantine army of some six thousand was defeated soundly by a Russian force nearly twice its size. One in three Greeks soldiers perished on the battlefield, and Basilesus Isaias fled in terror back to Rhodopes. There his cowardice and failure on the battlefield prompted a palace coup, leading to the ascension of Basileus Leon VII from the family of Makedon. Leon was a man of scholarly bent and unimpeachable rectitude, but he had no skill for battle and suffered much as his predecessor had. Leon’s army would lose twice more to the Russians, at Kavurskoto Kale and Ustra, while Rhodopes fell to Gavril’s Pannonians. On November 8, 989, the Basileus was forced to surrender.

On June 5, 990, it was time for Gavril II to call in the debt that he believed Dyre had incurred. Pannona was facing an invasion by the notorious Slovenian warlord, Vyšebor the Flayer of the tribal kingdom of Balaton. Gavril sent his son to request Ruthenian aid in defense of their homeland. The young Bulgar prince was invited to make his case before the tsar, and made a passionate speech about the bravery of his father’s knights and the peril that they faced. Tsar Dyre is said to have shrugged and said that he did not get involved in disputes between Christians. The alliance with Pannonia was over, its purpose served.

Dyre was, in any case, facing a bigger threat: Pope Callistus had proclaimed, in 988, the Third Crusade, this time for the Kingdom of Syria. Caliph Al-Mutawakkil dispatched emissaries to Kiev at once, intending to revive the alliance of Caliph and Tsar that had defended Dar al-Islam so successfully twice before. Dyre cared little for the sanctity of the holy land, but he saw an opportunity and took it. He asked King Pavel Sviatpolkovich to lead the Ruthenian forces in Syria, filling the young king’s head with tales of bold farsan who had heroically led the caliphate army from the front and dived headlong into battle. Pavel was not immune to such heroic fantasies, and at the great battle of Tyre, he took a grievous head wound from a crusader’s lance. The king was carried off the battlefield and died in his tent several days later. The malleable child Sviatpolk II Pavelovich took the throne at Tsargrad.

With victory in the Third Crusade assured by the end of 991, Dyre launched his great military triumph: the lightning invasion of Bulgaria proper. The conquest would be over in all of six months, when a smashing victory at Vratsa led to the capture of King Bozidar himself. Dyre reorganized his Bulgar holdings into a vassal kingdom, and named his son Iziaslav Dyrovich King of Sunni Bulgaria. Then the triumphant king returned to Kiev.

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While Dyre would never surpass his father’s accomplishments, he had attained a creditable number of conquests and victories, and an esteem among Muslims abroad that he had never achieved at home. And yet the aging tsar was falling into a deep melancholy. In his mind, none of his victories had truly mattered because he still discovered internal enemies sprouting up like weeds, and wearied of perpetually being on his guard.

The great drama of his final years, like that of his father’s, revolved around the succession. Prince Alexei had once been one of his father’s loyal enforcers. His application of the torturer’s arts were so lusty that prisoners often died too soon, before they could affirm the tsar’s latest notions. Soon enough he was sidelined, and so the prince applied his arts to others that had not attracted his father’s attention: peasants, or beggars, or traveling bards. The sheer glee that the prince displayed was enough to concern the court that he might be even worse than his father. And this was before Alexei began to opine that Dyre had been on the throne too long, and might best serve Ruthenia via a quiet retirement.

Alexei’s subsequent death is often attributed to Dyre as well. The father was on a hunt with his retainers and loyal allies shortly before the prince’s body was discovered along with the body of a local farmer. It appeared that Alexei had struck and killed the farmer, for reasons unknown, and then was struck in turn by an unknown assailant. If it was the tsar, one can only guess at his thought process. Had he a sense that Alexei was a monster of his own creation? Was he disgusted at his son’s sadistic indulgence? Was he simply acting out of self-preservation, believing that Alexei was a rabid dog that would turn on his master? We will never know.

Whatever his reasons, the murder of Alexei seems to have taken something out of Dyre. In the final years of his life he settled into a sour and defeated mood, convinced that his reign had been for naught and his best efforts wasted. He retreated to his private quarters and would see only Agafya. When fever caught him in late November, 1000, the tsar slipped quickly and almost gratefully to his end. On December 1, 1000, Tsar Dyre II Vaslikovich, called Grozny, breathed his last.

Dyre’s savage reputation at court and his many excesses had prompted a moral crisis in Kiev, convincing many in the ulema that Russian culture was tainted and corrupt and must be purified by true religion. They looked to Dyre’s successor, his soft-spoken and pious grandson Tsar Ivan Daryovich, to lead the great cleansing of Ruthenia. So, indeed, he would--and in doing so, he would divide Dar al-Islam in two.

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Well that's hardly reassuring. Is Dyre going to be the next Ivan the Terrible? And that's a weird sight indeed! most of Russia having converted to islam

Also silly pope, the greatest city in Christendom has fallen right at his doorstep and his first response is to retake jerusalem? priorities man!

I found that strange as well; you would think that the pope would want to take back Tsargrad, but he was like a dog with a bone.

Dyre the Terrible… Bloodshed aplenty… The nightmare to come…

None of this is particularly filling me with great optimism. I’m sure it will be a great read, but still – dark times on the horizon.

Dark times indeed. Dyre's reign was bloody and brutal, and I'm afraid that things aren't going to get better quite yet.

Well, that's a bummer. Rus won't know what hit her. Surely this is bad news. Then again Ivan Grozny heralded a new and improved time after his death, so....

Certainly Ivan is going to lead Ruthenia into a new age. Improved? That's more up for deabte.

Vasilko was truly a great conqueror. Such a man often leaves a great void to fill, and the struggle for the succession is a sign of things to come.

It seems like where Vasilko built on the blood of his enemies, Dyre may build on the blood of his own people...

I really liked this comment, so I hope you don't mind that I translated it to Russian using Google translate and made it an old in-world aphorism.

What a fantastically absurd death. Wonderful slice of CK in action.

I know. It was so funny.

Vasilko was a mighty warlord.

Ruthenia now rules the Queen of Cities...

Unfortunately, it seems as if a civil war is nearing...

Not a civil war, not yet; but the internal bloodletting is far from over.
 
I suppose at least dividing the Dar al-Islam in two is better than dividing people in two.

Right?…
 
I suppose at least dividing the Dar al-Islam in two is better than dividing people in two.

Right?…

Yeah, it's going to be one of those chill religious schisms that are so common in history.
 
Yeah, it's going to be one of those chill religious schisms that are so common in history.

oh thank god. I was actually worried there for a second…

A common lesson from a number of the AARs I’ve been keeping up with seems to be that the various “conversion” mechanics available in CK3 really don’t bear thinking about for too long. Frankly I’m yet to see an account which isn’t phenomenally dark. Whenever I do get around to picking the game up, I’ll be curious to see whether this impression sticks.
 
In a few different ways, Dyre really deserved his nickname. His violent Russification, the familial purges (complete with an Uriah gambit concerning Pavel)... and also the treatment of his erstwhile ally. He was the kind of man you neither want to be the friend nor enemy of, you just want to be far away.

If Ivan wasn't described as pious, I'd expect the Russians to simply officialise their lenient version of Islam (with embracing alcoholic beverages as a prime tenet of the faith). But splitting from the Caliphal Ashari Islam is honestly long overdue for the Oskyldr.

I really liked this comment, so I hope you don't mind that I translated it to Russian using Google translate and made it an old in-world aphorism.

Not at all, on the contrary. Happy to contribute.
 
Dyre was both paranoid and treacherous.

Thankfully, he is now dead, and his conquests remain. We wouldn't want to lose the benefits of Dyre's reign, would we?

Islam being divided in two. I wonder if the Crusaders had anything to do with it? They could benefit enormously from such a thing...
 
Well, so far it seems Russia dodged the worst of it. We have still to see how Ivan works out though.
 
Tsar Ivan of Ruthenia, 1000 - 1038, Part 1
Tsar Ivan Bogolyubivyy (“the God-loving”) of Ruthenia

Born: 975
Reigned: 1000 - 1038


1. Those Who Profess the Unity of God

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In 922, the famous traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan was obliged to stop for the Eid al-Fitr festival at a small village outside of Chornobyl. Ibn Fadlan was a faqih (i.e., an expert in Islamic law and jurisprudence) as well as a diplomat for the Nasraddin caliph. This educated, courtly Arab could not have been more different from his Russian hosts. During the feast, Ibn Fadlan observed a man lift up a bowl in a ritual fashion and mutter a few words softly in Russian. This man then passed the bowl to his neighbor, who did the same, and on down the line. Ibn Fadlan asked the village ‘alim what manner of prayer these men were offering. The ‘alim responded that they were petitioning the spirits Bialobog and Chernobog for good fortune and security in the coming year. Ibn Fadlan was disgusted, writing later that the villagers were “like asses gone astray. They have no religious bonds with God, nor do they have recourse to reason.”

The vast majority of Russians in the tenth century lived in a world that accepted the existence of powerful spirits as readily as they did the boyars and the ulema and the tsar. All were powerful forces to be reckoned with and appeased. Many of their beliefs regarding these spirits dated to the pre-Islamic past and had deep roots in their shared cultural understanding. The distinction between natural and supernatural that seems so obvious to us would not have made sense to them.

Educated outsiders like ibn Fadlan often concluded that most Russians were committing the sin of shirk (polytheism). The village ‘alim would not have seen things that way, however. He would not have seen the local spirits as gods, just another set of authorities that humble villagers are obliged to respect. There were always some Russians, particularly of the clerical class, who found the remnants of the pre-Islamic paganism among the common people profoundly embarrassing, even heretical. These clerics conceived of Russia as a kingdom that was half savage and half civilized, half-pagan and half-Muslim. They proved very receptive to the al-Muwaḥḥidūn (lit., “those who profess the unity of god”; typically westernized as ‘the Almohads’).

The Almohads began as a religious movement among the Musmuda tribal confederation in the Maghreb. They were distinctive among Sunni Muslims for preaching a strict version of tawhid (the indivisible oneness of god). As a minor Sunni sect, Almohads faced persecution from a hostile Shi’a sultan, forcing many to flee for more accepting lands like Ruthenia. There they found followers among the Russian ulema, particularly in influential cities like Gdansk, Novgorod, Minsk and Kiev.

This was, at first, primarily an abstract intellectual debate. However, during the reign of Dyre II, Almohadism took on a different, altogether more political character. Pious Muslims who were horrified by Dyre’s familial purges, particularly the execution of ulema that followed the Scholars’ Plot, became convinced that the long shadow of Ruthenia’s pagan past was the cause of the present bloodshed. What Kiev needed was a true Muslim tsar, not some half-savage beast. This was dangerous stuff, to be sure, and the Almohadi clerics were used to writing their thoughts in highly abstract letters, written in Arabic so that few would be able to read them. This gave the first generations of Almohadism a distinctively elite quality, without popular support.

The popularity of this Maghrebi sect among Russian ulema might have been a minor historical footnote, were it not for one supporter in particular: Prince Ivan Daryovich. The soft-spoken young prince had habitually retreated into spiritual contemplation in order to escape the cruelties of his father and the horrors of his grandfather’s reign. His education was placed under the care of a faqih known as Ruslan of Odessa, and Ruslan’s quiet Almohadi sympathies were instilled in his student.

The murder of Prince Alexei in 997 cleared the way for Prince Ivan’s accession to the throne much sooner than anybody had expected. This was the cause of some concern: the prince seemed too otherworldly for mundane matters of state, and his talent for administration and skill at arms were both mediocre at best. And yet Ivan had a calm and reassuring nature that kept his paranoid grandfather at bay while keeping himself at one remove from the most egregious atrocities, a political dexterity that would serve him well as tsar.

After the death of Dyre, Ivan made a definitive break from his grandfather. The infamous Agafya was sent into exile with two dozen of her cronies. The tsar denounced Dyre’s crimes in an emotional monologue at court, his voice cracking as he confessed that he had not even undertaken the traditional three days of mourning for Prince Alexei out of fear of Dyre’s reaction. The admission resonated with the boyars and courtiers, many of whom were ashamed of their own complicity in the tsar’s actions. When Ivan announced at the end that he would be going on hajj to submit himself to Allah, fourteen powerful boyars clamored to accompany him.

Ivan’s remarks were sincerely felt, but they were shrewd nonetheless. For those who had debased themselves before Dyre II, the possibility of catharsis and repentance was a powerful thing. The hajj of 1002 would bind tsar and boyar together in a way that went far beyond mutual self-interest. The long journey also gave Ivan time to introduce the teachings of the Almohadi school to his court. When the hajjaji returned to Kiev in February 1003, all had become followers of the Almohads. (Only King Sviatpolk II of Thessalonica, who had stayed in Tsargrad to scheme for independence, remained loyal to the Ashari teachings.)

The unity of Ivan’s court would be sorely tested over the next two years, however, as a sudden invasion from the north threatened to stop the Almohadi restoration before it even began.

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It was the last great invasion of the Viking Age. King Hjalmar Tjudmundsson of Noregr had pledged to claim the throne of Kiev and make the soft greenland Russians kneel to him. He boasted that he would return Ruthenia to the gods of the Rurikids and the Ivarings, burning the mosques and dragging the prideful ulema to be sacrificed to Odin. The Norwegian army numbered twenty-three thousand, more than twice the size of Ruthenians, and included some of the most fearsome heroes from Sweden and Jorvik.

Word reached the tsar’s company of the invasion just as he was returning to Kiev. The reaction was grim. As doubts about Ivan’s capacity as a war-leader resurfaced, many feared the worst. Ivan alone was serene. “May Allah send winds to confuse the enemies upon the seas,” he said with a quiet smile, “and lead them on a winding chase through our fens and forests, and may he yield up their cities to our warriors. He will not abandon us just as we have humbled ourselves before Him.”

Ivan’s war plan called for the smaller Ruthenian army to use their superior knowledge of the terrain to evade Hjalmar’s forces and set sail for Noregr itself, to besiege Hjalmar’s capital and force an early end to the war. It was a bold plan, but it reminded many older warriors of the doomed raid on Rome that Halfdan had led eighty years earlier. The Ruthenian army bore the same risk: what if the Norwegian forces were able to return before the capital fell?

However, Ivan benefited from a stroke of luck--or as he interpreted it, divine intervention. A spring storm on the Baltic sea scattered the Norwegian warfleet, separating Hjalmar’s army across two hundred miles of coastline. On May 2, Russian warriors came upon an army of two thousand Danes in Weiksla and slaughtered them to a man while losing less than a hundred themselves. On July 17, the Russians found another isolated force of five thousand men in Drweca and killed one man out of every two. Local irregulars raided the Norse supply lines, so that starvation and hunger claimed thousands more Norse lives.

While Hjalmar was slogging through the kingdom of Novgorod, the Russian army set sail from Gdansk for Noregr. As Halfdan had before him, Ivan had his men split up into three forces to siege down Hjalmar’s land. It was a foolhardy move and one that might well had backfired, except Russian raids on Hjalmar’s forces meant that the Norwegian king did not learn that his homeland was under attack until it was far too late. By the time that intelligence did reach him, Ivan had already taken his capital and taken his sons as hostages.

On November 15, 1005, two and a half years after it began, Hjalmar Todmundsson ceased his invasion of Ruthenia and offered a cart full of gold and plunder to purchase the return of his sons. Tsar Ivan Daryovich accepted this surrender serenely. Alone among the Russian warriors, he had expected this victory all along.

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The first five years of Ivan’s rule cemented the hold of Almohadism among the Russian elite. After the death of Sviatpolk II in 1006, his son Vasily Sviatpolkovich adopted the new creed and promulgated it in his court. His conversion gave the new school of jurisprudence universal support--among the boyars. The peasantry, on the other hand, scarcely followed doctrinal arguments and saw no reason to abandon their established folk religion. Conversion of the lower classes would be fair from smooth, and religious violence was common during Ivan’s reign.

On December 17, 1009, a powerful ‘alim in Novgorod proclaimed that the Vepsian solstice feast was a pagan ritual, and any who attended would be guilty of shirk. Rumors spread quickly that the King was sending warriors to attack those who celebrated on the solstice, which sparked a revolt among the Finnic Muslims that plagued the Baltic coast for the next four years. In Bulgaria, King Iziaslav Dyrovich used the new doctrine to justify additional extractions from the dhimmi population, prompting an uprising of Avar and Bulgar Christians that outnumbered the tsar’s army itself.

Tsar Ivan would not countenance a compromise with the enemies of Allah, and so these revolts were put down with enormous bloodshed--six thousand Vepsians dead, over ten thousand Bulgars and Avars slaughtered. His harsh tactics made him deeply unpopular with the commons, and helped to fuel future revolts.

In the empire’s Russian core, a more moderate practice emerged, which a later generation might call ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Ivan may have believed that the Russian peasants stopped making offerings to local spirits and supernatural forces, but in fact they simply learned to do so discreetly. The boyars were inclined to look the other way because so many in their own household gave offerings to Bialobog and Chernobog on feast days as well. In that sense, Ivan’s great purification of Ruthenia had a limited effect.

By 1014, Ivan had reason to believe that the worst days of religious violence was behind him. The Avar, Bulgar, and Vepsian revolts had been put down savagely, and Almohadi practice was beginning to spread--at least in the major population centers. With some semblance of peace at hand, the tsar began to ponder the state of Dar al-Islam as a whole.

Kiev had been rocked by the news that the Nasraddin Caliph had been forced to submit as a vassal to a secular Yemeni adventurer, who named himself Malik al-Muazzam Taimur ibn Muhammad. Al-Muazzam was notoriously irreligious, and his subjugation of the caliph and possession of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina drew outrage across the Muslim world. Ivan began to wonder if some greater mission awaited him. Perhaps it was his calling to save Dar al-Islam from itself.

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For the record, I was 90% sure I was going to lose that war with Hjalmar; I spent a couple of hours blue-skying about how I would switch over to this new Norwegian dynasty and chart Hjalmar and his descendants for a couple of centuries. But then it turns out that I actually won.

A common lesson from a number of the AARs I’ve been keeping up with seems to be that the various “conversion” mechanics available in CK3 really don’t bear thinking about for too long. Frankly I’m yet to see an account which isn’t phenomenally dark. Whenever I do get around to picking the game up, I’ll be curious to see whether this impression sticks.

This is honestly my feeling about conversion mechanics in EU4 too, tbh. And I actually like it, because my natural instinct is to want to make my leaders the good guys, so I like whenever the game encourages me to go in another direction.

If Ivan wasn't described as pious, I'd expect the Russians to simply officialise their lenient version of Islam (with embracing alcoholic beverages as a prime tenet of the faith). But splitting from the Caliphal Ashari Islam is honestly long overdue for the Oskyldr.

Yes, I agree. At the height of our power, the alliance between the caliph and the tsar was basically unstoppable (with a combined army of over fifty thousand, easy); I wanted to mess that up just to give the Christians a chance and make the story more interesting.

Islam being divided in two. I wonder if the Crusaders had anything to do with it? They could benefit enormously from such a thing...

A very good question. And certainly I do think the Christians are going to following schisms within Islam with great interest.

I do hope you are planning a costum branch religion, that would be very intersting to see.

To be honest, I felt a little weird making up a custom version of Islam since I myself was not raised Muslim; so I decided pretty early on that I wanted to use one of the historic variants of Sunni Islam; and Almohadism had all the features that I wanted.

Well, so far it seems Russia dodged the worst of it. We have still to see how Ivan works out though.

In my opinion the worst is yet to come. Ivan's body count could easily outnumber his grandfather's.