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 Post subject: The West
PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 3:42 pm 
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The Rise of the Sheel Kingdom

In the 4th and into the 5th centuries the Sheel Kingdom was the pivotal power of the Western world, spanning an area from J'li'lu, the loose confederacy of small thallasocracies and the borderlands of Ayst to the south to the Yodotai and Senpet Empires to the north, and neighbouring the maritime nations of Merenae and Thrane across the littoral seas to the west. Their Hanif ancestry and cultural similarities awarded them an uneasy peace with the Yodotai, whose Second Great Crusade moved northward and lost impetus in the war of attrition with the northern tribes of Niask who were receiving support from Thrane. Sheel kings used well that strategic relief to expand militarily and commercially to the south, pulling the J'li'lu island kingdom of Anisrana into its orbit and securing near-monopoly on the maritime trade with the Burning Sands as far as Ivory Kingdoms, called the Spice Route. The volume of the eastern trade passed through the Anisranese hub of Cinnamon Port while the Sheel were developing their own twin one - Gateway to the West.

However, even there actual commerce was conducted by allied merchants who depended on Sheel protection as rigid social system of the kingdom disadvantaged the emergence of a merchant class alongside the nobility. The aristocrats kept close control over both plantatory latifundia and silver mining. The returns and revenues from trade strengthened the lavish lifestyles of the upper classes, their ability to dominate public life and sustain elite heavy military, both infantry and cavalry, that safeguarded volatile borders. So when the Moto rode into Sheel hinterlands, they were not parlayed with but treated from the position of strength like any other greedy savages, and met on the field of battle a force armoured much heavier than them. While the encounters mostly ended with stalemates thanks to Moto horse archers who were able to outmanoeuvre the Sheel and avoid decisive clashes while progressing across Sheel territory, it made news across the Western world and was closely followed by those who envied Sheel power and its control of the Spice Route.

Merenae and Thrane

In the early 5th century Thrane and Merenae emerged as two prime rivals of the Sheel Kingdom in the maritime domain. Their joint desire to break Sheel monopoly over the eastern trade helped them end their war of succession that had taken a better part of the 4th century and had helped their continental neighbour rise uncontested. However, they did have a technological headway because of advancement in military technologies, a legacy of the prior conflict. Their naval battles when king Diego of Merenae had repeatedly tried to put himself on the Thranish throne had spurred rapid developments in shipbuilding and navigation, alongside mastering of gunsmithing. However, there were differences in approach between both maritime kingdoms. In the first decades of the 5th century Thranish kings and queens got involved in the northern wars with the Yodotai because of their ancestral ties to the chiefdoms of Niask Yodotai Empire was fighting to annex, so their policy in the southern seas was mostly that of disruption and buccaneering. They did issue letters of marque to their seamen, taxing their loot in return in order to finance their war effort. In that time Garen Hawthorne emerged as the most notorious privateer in the service of the Thranish Crown while preying on the Spire Route. His black banner and motto, Sic Parvis Magna, became widely recognised.

The kings of Merenae were more ambitious. They sought to replace the Sheel as the masters of the eastern trade. They cultivated ties with minor southern ports of J'li'lu like Aqahba where merchant communities begrudged exclusive Anisranese position. Yet, even with firearms and early artillery developed by Espada Cornejo for king Diego the century before they lacked the manpower to counter continental dominance of the Sheel, and none of their tacit commercial allies in the region was willing to offer them a direct foothold. Both the Thranish and the Merenaese tried to raid Anisrana but were repelled by Sheel garrisons or forced to retreat by continental reinforcements before even thinking about taking its famed Palace of Spice and Silver in its capital of Raksiraka. The Sheel went as far as sending troops to the Ivory Kingdoms to deny a third party access and to secure vital entrepôts from ugly civil wars of the Ivindi. So when the Moto demonstrated they could challenge the Sheel in their coastal rimlands, many saw opportunity.

The Ki-Rin enter the West

When the Moto and the Ide reached J'li'lu in 438, they were eventually sought out by Shereid ibn Shihan of Aqahba, a close if unofficial associate of the Cornejo family, who negotiated their hiring to protect the city from raids of the Aysti nomads. This was not the real motive, as the rainy season soon began and the Ki-Rin remained idle in the city, partaking in joys of life. For Shereid and the Cornejos, Ide knowledge of the oriental world was even more precious than their military prowess. He convinced their daimyo Sunosa to head a delegation to Merenae on his ships. However, the small flotilla that set sail in 439 was ambushed on high seas by Hawthorne flying the pirate banner. The largest vessel carrying Sunosa was boarded by Garen's cut-throats and a bloodbath ensued. The desperate Moto archery volleys from the other ships proved no match for the Thranish gunfire, and eventually Shereid commanded his ships to disengage, against Ki-Rin's protests. Hawthorne did not pursue them as his loot was more than sufficient: he claimed the Ide part of the Blessed Mirror and many of the writings from the long travels of the Ki-Rin. While the Rokugani characters were gibberish to him at that time, there were many drawings in Ide notes, along maps of the continent that clearly showed the mythical Rokugan bordering a great ocean to the east.

The diminished embassy nevertheless reached Merenae, now headed by the Moto heir Hulagu, aided by minor Ide diplomats and Suio linguists. They were received in the court of king Felipe with full honours and hosted in the Cornejo estates by Espada's great-great-grandson, Teodoro, who had masterminded their invitation. But none of these appealed to the fuming Moto and violence over trifles was prevented mostly by Ide presence. To save the endeavour, in a dire move Teodoro catered to the Moto grudge and blamed Sunosa's death on Shereid's treachery. Only after the man was executed and the Moto promised aid in retribution against the Shihanites of Aqahba did the Ki-Rin delegation start to open up for discussions and negotiations.

It was still a matter of months, but as the Ki-Rin gradually warmed up to the Merenaese, a tentative alliance was forged. The Ki-Rin eventually shared their knowledge of the world and of Rokugan in particular with the Cornejo and in exchange were taught to use firearms and were supplied with several vessels and crews carrying muskets, artillery and their munitions. As they returned to Aqahba with the Merenaese in 440 Hulagu informed his father Ariq, the Tarkhan of the Moto, of the treachery of the city's masters. The reckoning started at night. Until morning, the merchant houses of Aqahba were either wiped out or crawling at Ariq's feet. Having spent his anger on conquering the city from within, the Tarkhan was at a loss on how to proceed. He held council with the Ide and his Merenaese allies and decided to do what his kin hadn't tried before. To found a nucleus of a Ki-Rin polity in the Burning Sands. By 442 the territory of the emerging Tarkhanate swiftly expanded into the tribal territories of Ayst as Ariq was accepting fealty from a couple dozens of tribal chieftains, fuelled by Moto charismatic strength and Ide skills in diplomacy and administration.

Meanwhile, the Thranish fleet under Hawthorne and the Merenaese one under Cornejo were already sailing westward across the great ocean in a bid to discover a maritime route to Rokugan. They had both convinced their respective kings with the recently acquired maps about the merits of the oft-debated theory in the West that their world is a globe. While they temporarily called a truce when meeting one another on a lone archipelago roughly halfway on their way to the Emerald Empire, their entente unravelled within two years in Rokugan. In the end, while the Thranish were defeated and routed in the Battle of White Stag, the Merenaese would establish regular trade with Rokugan. In 442 Teodoro Cornejo was sailing home accompanied by Agasha Kasuga. They arrived in Merenae when the preparations of both King Felipe and Tarkhan Ariq for inevitable war with the Sheel were already in full swing.

The War with the Sheel

For two years the dysfunctions of Sheel aristocratic politics did not allow to formulate an adequate response to the sudden encroachment of nomads into southern tributary zone of the Kingdom and when a robust force was finally assembled, led by king Ladislaus himself, the Tarkhanate extended not only over the sliver of J'li'lu coast with Aqahba and several minor ports, but also into the Aysti hinterlands. Still, with the danger localised, the Sheel marched to lay siege and reconquer Aqahba.

The Tarkhan's decision was to move out the cavalry into the steppe and pull the Sheel into the war of harassment and attrition, drawing them out into smaller battles, pillaging latifundia located deeper into Sheel territory stripped of adequate defence for the campaign. The allied Merenaese fleets initially commanded by Teodoro chose a similar tactics on the seas, with the aim of tearing the Spice Route apart while supporting the Ki-Rin-occupied ports from their vessels. The Sheel might was too great to count on a decisive victory to come quickly in this war. The strategy hinged on holding Aqahba.

Moto Hulagu took the task of organising the city's defences. He had been a more studious learner during his time in Merenae than his hosts had realised at that time, and when his father entrusted withstanding the siege to him, he had an idea how to do it. Aqahba was a slaver port, and Ariq did not change it upon its capture. But it was Hulagu who remade the very sense of slavery by offering all captured males a prospect of a new life as part of the Moto or the Ide if they fought for him against the Sheel. To signify his commitment to this kind of upward mobility, he wedded a manumitted daughter of a Sheel aristocrat that had been captured and enslaved in the early stages of the war and let a few slaves join his personal guard. He then allowed Merenaese advisers to drill the drafted slaves in the use of firearms and spears at the expense of a more complete training, making soldiers rather than warriors.

The siege of Aqahba was a nightmare for both sides that lasted almost three years, until early 445. Other Moto-held ports fell quickly, but Hulagu's slave soldiers, supported by fire from Merenaese ships, were able to prevent most breaches and eventually repel advances with transports of slaves delivered by sea from the coastal cities that had fallen, though a large part of the city became a ruin in the process. Eventually aristocratic dissent over a protracted war that was straining coffers of Sheel nobility pulled king Ladislaus off the frontlines, and the siege was lifted for the sake of stopping Ariq's pillaging campaign inland. But it turned out to be impossible soon, because a foreign plague, brought either by the Ki-Rin or from the Aysti interior, broke out among the Sheel troops decimating them and claiming the king. While the king was dead, there wasn't a quick replacement as the delphine was too young to inherit. The regency that formed from several most influential aristocrats of the realm would like to terminate the war, but it was not something Ariq would allow, now that he was handed the initiative.

While the Moto quickly reclaimed the coast it wasn't as good a staging ground for an inland assault as it would have been before the war, and the Mamluk needed more time to be drilled and trained in order to face heavy Sheel cavalry in open field battles. Battles inland would also not benefit from Merenaese support. While neither side called for a truce, one actually emerged after Ariq had secured the southern coast. And yet, as the verdant steppe turned quieter, in 449 a joint Merenaese-Moto assault was launched on Anisrana, to a great success. The Cornejos established themselves in the Cinnamon Port, Hulagu's Mamluks took the inland Raksiraka. The Sheel hold on the Spice Route was crippled, and Empresa Mercantil founded by Teodoro Cornejo was taking over the trade with the Ivory Kingdoms, bringing a long-awaited age of prosperity to Merenae. But it was also upsetting a delicate balance among hidalgo families of Merenae, with mercantile Cornejos of La Corna quickly rising above agricultural powerhouses of the Quijanos of La Cuenca, the Almerias of Estremaviedo and the Algurias of Tartessos, also by entering an alliance with seagoing jaurerras of Aberri. Soon, Teodoro became a problem for the Crown itself, with his external allies and assets giving him great influence in the kingdom. His relations with the Emerald Empire and the resulting monopoly on luxury goods from across the ocean was breeding envy. When in 453 Ariq pushed with the offensive inland, Merenaese fleets loyal to Cornejo had an even greater liberty in commanding the seas.

The war finally ended in 460 with a 'perennial' peace between the Sheel and the Tarkhanate. For the Sheel, it was a catastrophe. The Kingdom lost a third of its territory and all southern vassals, now loyal to Ariq. The decisive moment of the war had been the Battle of Boujaj in 458 in which gunpowder infantry and cavalry of the Mamluks brought slow, heavy-armoured Sheel cavalry to its knees. That the defeat could well be attributed to the lack of experience of young king Ioannes was one of the reasons, but in the wider world the message of superiority of the military of the Tarkhanate spread like wildfire. The negotiations after Boujaj were being stalled by the Sheel aristocracy who had lost their latifundia in the war but when Ariq threatened to take the Gateway and cut off the Kingdom from the sea, they relented.

The Fall of the Cornejos

In 458 King Felipe died, and his son Enrique took the Merenaese throne. Enrique was known for his opposition to the merchant empire of the Cornejos being outside the purview of the Crown. Amid rising tensions a coalition of the Almerias and the Algurias was born to aid the Throne in reasserting the authority. The only thing that prevented them from moving against the hidalgo of La Corna was their friendship with the Tarkhan reaching back two decades. But in 460, when the Treaty of Boujaj was being signed, the Mamluks occupied the whole of Anisrana, pushing Empresa Mercantil out of the island. Teodoro miscalculated and chose to put pressure on Ariq to restore their commercial rights by blockading Anisrana. Maybe his gambit would have worked, but it was exactly the trigger his enemies at home needed. He was called to the capital city of Carceiras and when he defied the call, Enrique announced him to be the traitor of the Crown. His all assets in Merenae were seized and a bounty was put on his head. His ultimate fate remains unknown to this day, but his Empresa Mercantil was quickly captured by other houses. Enrique put a cadet line of the Cornejos, the Bregos, in charge of their land estates, Almerias moved into the Rokugani trade, Algurias - into the Spice Route.



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