Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 623 Why did the Emir brag about his history as a valet to the Sultan?

After landing in Syria, the two corps assembled for the first time. The corps commanders, including Tuohuan in the rear, also rushed over.

They arrived in Damascus, and the local dignitaries rushed to welcome them. Just like before, there were continuous banquets, and everyone enjoyed a great meal.

A few days later, Hafez, the Mamluk leader of Syria, also came in person. He said that he was half a host, so he had to invite guests as well, and thus the process of holding a banquet began again.

Guo Kang complained to Tuo Huan and the others that he had been eating so much recently that he was almost fed up. Since getting married, he had been having all kinds of banquets. Now Theodora was complaining that he had gained weight and said that his belly was growing faster than hers. He was now wondering if he should control his appetite.

But Tuohuan said that it is better to eat a little more fat. He had never been to the battlefield before, so he just sat in the capital, so he naturally didn't think anything of it. If you really go to war, you will know that insufficient supplies and excessive physical exertion are normal, and people will lose weight quickly. Everyone complains that they don't have enough food stored, so who would think they eat too much? Can you really listen to the inexplicable words a woman says?

Guo Kang really had no experience in this area, so he agreed.

At the banquet, everyone was still eating and drinking, and it was very lively. Several leaders also exchanged pleasantries, got to know each other, and took advantage of the alcohol to build relationships.

Hafez is a tall middle-aged man with a handsome face, wearing a common local robe and a well-groomed beard. In Egypt, the Sheikh and others have been accusing him of not being able to manage soldiers at all, and that he was only promoted to his current position because he was a pedophile for the previous Sultan.

Considering the popular customs here, this statement seems to be possible... Even the enemies only accused him of being incapable of the task, not saying that a pedophile cannot be promoted to an official position. People don't even hide their history of being a close attendant to the previous Sultan, and even take the initiative to brag about it to show that they are respected. After all, there are many such things in the Mamluks of Egypt.

Of course, Guo Kang had no idea whether it was true or not. Although this custom did exist here, it was not easy to ask directly...

At the banquet, everyone was quite happy. Before, although they promised to provide help, the locals didn't know whether the Romans would really send troops, and how many troops would be sent. Now, Tuohuan came here in person, which means that this place has been listed as an important strategic direction by Dadu. Whether it is the local Mamluk soldiers, merchants or citizens, they can obviously get a lot of benefits from it.

Their area is not large, but the situation is very complicated. Syria is located in the western part of the Fertile Crescent and is a relatively rich region. It is connected to Asia Minor in the north, adjacent to the two rivers in the east, and to Egypt in the south. It is located on the main transportation route between several large blocks. Its geographical location is very important, and trade has always been prosperous.

Of course, this kind of transportation route is definitely a "battlefield for military strategists", and war is inevitable. The forces in Greece and Asia Minor always want to move eastward, and the Persians have always wanted to expand westward. The forces in the Egyptian region have been moving northward from Syria since ancient times. The name Damascus has already appeared in the inscription of Ramses II. At that time, the Egyptians came here and competed with the Hittites in Asia Minor.

Later, with the development of the times, sufficiently powerful forces emerged in other non-traditional directions and joined the melee, making the situation even more chaotic.

The forces in the southern Russian steppes and the Caucasus are generally getting stronger. However, the Persian mainland is getting weaker. Both the Arab Empire government and the Persian local warlords are increasingly unable to defend the border areas from Khorasan to Azerbaijan. If the defense line there is leaking, it will also have a lot of impact here.

Since the Eastern Roman Empire invited the Western Turks to help in the war, the steppe people have found a new route to the south. Others will run all the way from as far away as Central Asia along the mountains. From northern Persia to the Caucasus and then to Asia Minor, large and small mountainous areas are connected to each other, becoming a good hiding place for these many Kipchak and Turkmen tribes. Whenever there is an opportunity, they will leave the mountains and come to invade and plunder.

On the other hand, the influence of the sea is also growing. For a long time before, the sea was relatively peaceful. But after the decline of the Romans' maritime power, the Mediterranean became a no-man's land, but people didn't go far at the moment. When the navigation technology developed and the routes became more mature, even distant overseas countries could get involved.

During the Third Crusade, the English army set out from their homeland, bypassed the Iberian Peninsula, passed through Marseille and Sicily, and arrived in Syria. Although they did not achieve the expected results in the end, this incident has shown that the sea transport line can support the main force of a kingdom to carry out such a somewhat counterintuitive and "crossing the country to despise the distant" action.

Even Guo Kang and his men did not march by land this time, as Basil II did when he went to Syria. On the one hand, the strategic environment and even the natural environment of Asia Minor were not as good as before, and on the other hand, today's sea transportation was already sufficient to provide a cheaper and more convenient way.

These new "sea peoples" are more aggressive and resilient than their predecessors. This failure will not make them give up. Instead, as navigation technology continues to develop, this part of the force will become stronger and stronger. If there is no other interference, they will indeed succeed in the future, and eventually they will even defeat several other traditional forces and become the dominant force in Syria and even the entire Eastern Mediterranean.

However, for the time being, this trend is not very significant, and most of the current ones are still at the level of pirates. Of course, this is enough to make the local area even more chaotic. It is better to say that the entire history of this place is a history of being beaten back and forth by surrounding forces.

Perhaps for this reason, unlike the stereotyped "Arab world", the ethnicities and religions here are quite complex. In addition to the local Syrians, Turkmen, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs from the south all have influence here, big or small - and it's hard to say whether the Syrians themselves are Arabs.

In addition, there are actually quite a few Christians in this area. There have always been Armenian and Orthodox Church organizations in the area, and the proportion is not low. After the Crusades, even the Catholic Church began to operate here, and it was not destroyed along with the successive defeats of the Crusader states, but survived as well. Until now, they have their own forces. Guo Kang estimated that this was also due to geographical reasons.

Although it is a major transportation route and is also known as the Fertile Crescent, it is not a plain, but mostly mountains and deserts. From the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea, there is a large area of ​​arid desert, which is difficult to survive. At the same time, there is actually only a very narrow flat land along the Mediterranean coast, followed by continuous mountains from north to south, extending all the way to the Red Sea.

The area where it is convenient to grow crops is not large. However, the areas where it can be grown are indeed fertile, so it has been producing wheat and various other crops, and it was once a granary. However, the complex terrain also provides convenience for defense and evasion. Therefore, this group of forces may have survived here.

Invaders of all sizes have been attacking this place since the days of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Various tribes would come to attack from time to time, but the most capable tribes would try to settle down and even become defenders, helping the locals fight against newer batches of marauding tribes.

The neighboring great empires have always wanted to establish rule here, but no one has been able to absorb and integrate these local forces. Until now, even hundreds of years later, as far as Guo Kang knows, the actual managers here are still the many local nobles. Not to mention the Eastern-style county rule, even the extremely loose local management state of Rome is difficult to maintain for a long time.

The city of Damascus today was not conquered in the past. In fact, since the fall of the White Caliphate, there have been some independent or semi-independent small dynasties here.

The reason why they surrendered to Rome was because Timur's army was approaching. The people in the city estimated that if he attacked, they would be robbed and massacred, so they urgently contacted the Purple Tent Khanate and attached themselves to them. With the help of the Khanate's face, they paid a "sponsorship fee" and finally sent Timur away.

After that, although the Timurid family withdrew their power to the east, the chaos here did not stop. The Turkmen in the mountains took advantage of this power vacuum to develop. Two years ago, Kara Yusuf of the Black Sheep Dynasty led his army southward, destroyed the Jalayirid Dynasty entrenched in Baghdad, and controlled most of the Mesopotamian region.

Even if we don't mention their traditional grievances with other countries, just looking at the geography, they will either go west to Syria or east to Persia. Since Shah Rukh in the east is not easy to deal with, several attempts have not yielded any results. Since last year, the Black Sheep Dynasty has been building momentum, threatening to launch a holy war to attack Syria and other areas that belong to Rome, expel pagans, and occupy the Holy Land of Jerusalem. In this way, they call on the Turkmen tribes and states in Asia Minor to support themselves; they also seize a moral advantage and increase pressure on the Timurid Khanate to intervene.

Hearing that their fellow believers were going to fight a holy war again, the local Muslim sects immediately became nervous and wrote to the court, hoping to strengthen prevention. The elders and mullahs stationed in Dadu also quickly wrote documents and waited for news from the east so that they could go to the gate of the palace to cry. On the other hand, they were also constantly trying to see if they could dissuade Hafez and let his troops leave later to take care of the safety of their hometown first.

Of course, unless they come up with more, this kind of persuasion will definitely be of no use.

The Mamluk regime was a very special organization, almost entirely composed of foreign military personnel. In this era, countries composed of military nobles were very common, for example, most of the barbarian countries in Europe had this structure. The nobles intermarried with each other, and in terms of blood, language, and culture, they were in a different society from their subjects, almost like two different worlds.

However, this is only a theoretical situation after all. Even if the European nobles ruled a place for a long time, they would definitely establish various connections with the local people. Especially the grassroots nobles, they had a lot of interactions with the people.

The Mamluks were much more extreme in this regard. They really insisted on introducing fresh blood from outside for hundreds of years, and tried their best to prevent local people from participating. Even the Mamluks' own sons could not become new Mamluks, but had to buy new people from slaves to cut off the possibility of hereditary succession and maintain the combat effectiveness of the army.

The current Mamluk regime is called the Burji Dynasty. This is not the name of a family or a territory. Burji means "tower", referring to a military camp of the Mamluks near Cairo.

As the name suggests, the "Towers" have nothing to do with the locals. They don't need the locals to welcome them, nor do they care that they are hated by the locals. As long as they can maintain organizational and military suppression and force the locals to continue paying, that's enough.

Is the Syrian region headed by Damascus important to Hafez? Of course it is. The Mamluks did not defeat Timur, so this area became the territory of Rome in name. But the Romans would not provoke these local tyrants too much. In fact, Hafez himself was the local governor of Rome. The cities south of Antioch and the fertile countryside in the middle had to leave a part of the tribute to him as protection fee. The prosperous business here was also an important source of his income.

With this support, he was able to purchase enough high-quality slaves from the Chersk and Turkmen in the Caucasus, expand his military power, and participate in the internal struggle for hegemony among the Mamluks even when the Purple Horde expanded and the Mongolian and Cuman slave trade declined.

But on the other hand, what they gave him was just money. Now he had the opportunity to fight back to Egypt, and Egypt was definitely richer than Syria. The strategic environment there was also much more comfortable than here. He no longer had to guard against the Black Sheep Dynasty and other Turkmen forces that were eyeing him from both sides, and he could also stay away from the Roman suzerain and relax a little.

In his opinion, this operation has a very high chance of success - otherwise, he would not have urged the court to send troops every day. As long as it succeeds, he will have made too much money, and Syria will not matter. He even thought darkly that if the Black Sheep Dynasty could really enter Damascus or even Beirut Port and cut off Syria, it would be even more difficult for the Romans to control him. This is actually a good thing.

So, although everyone was very enthusiastic at the banquet and toasted each other, there were actually quite a few differences between the locals and Hafez.

(End of this chapter)