Slavonia 920-928 : The Bans Alliance

April 920.

The Khanate of Hrvastka has fallen under the blows of the Magyars, leaving behind it the Banates of Slavonia, Hrvatska and Bosna, and a streak of smaller polities : Gyòr and Somogy in the North, Knin, Cetina, Omis and Hvar in the South. It made little doubt that the territories in the North would soon fall to the Magyars. The question was, to each of us Bans, how to escape their fate ?

The alternatives were either to go on on one's own, trying to grab territories in the process, submitting to the Kíraly before being invaded, or swearing fealty to a powerful neighbour. To the West, the Kingdoms of Burgundy, Lotharingia, Bavaria and Germany were good candidates, but their incessant rivalries made their help uncertain. To the East, the Roman Empire was the strongest of the candidates, but they were far away, and Orthodox. To the North, the Czechs had a powerful Tribe, and they were Slavs, but I doubted their capacity to face the Horde.
I decided to temporize before deciding.

In April 921, I had subdued Kadram of Gyòr, an old rival from the Khanate's time, plundered his lands, vainquished his troops, emprisonned his family. In May 922, I had given back to my former liege, Bihor who now styled himself King, a tribe of the Avar in the Somogy plains.
By that time, the Czechs had lost a war against the Magyars and Gyòr was a new addition to Bavaria. My options grew fewer.

Natalija was sent to the Eastern King of the Khazars, the bane that had made the Magyars invade the Pannonian Plain in the first place, and secured an alliance from them, at the expense of her wedding to a yil-tawar of his, Barjik.
I also sent my little brother Dujam, who was meek and a bit clueless, to meet the daughter of my good friend Domagoj of Bosna. Promises of a future mareiage were made. Same with Ulfo, one of the twins, sent to my cousin Zvonimir to get to know his eldest daughter Antonija, 9.

I secured the whole of Somogy as vassal the next Autumn with the help of Zvonimir of Croatia, killing the old Count Zavis in battle.
I also installed an old woman from the Somogy at the head of the County of Cetina for the sole purpose of depriving the family of Besar Hrvatinic, who had ordered the murder of my father.

In 925, a small war I had started against an offshoot of the Magyarország degenerated when the Kíraly died, which made the child I had been attacking the new Kíraly of all the Magyars. They'd been brothers and I had overlooked that fact. In front of the Horde, i had to demand a shaming peace and to send my allies back home.

Back at home, my friend Domagoj had died eating too much, leaving his banate parted between Branimir II, with most of it, and Ljudevit, with the richer country of the Rama river. I immediately declared war on Ljudevit, to install my brother Dujam on the throne of Bosna, through his wife, big sister to the two brothers. Instead of calling my allies, this time i hired the Rus' Band. I also formed an alliance with Branimir II and helped Zvonimir of Croatia subdue Knin and Bribir.
I was still allied to Zvonimir when he had to defend Usora from the Strategos of the Serbs. In 927, we finally managed to beat the Greeks around Srebnik, and again in 928 in Usora and Debrc. There were many dead soldiers from Ionia, from Athens and Serbia on the field, and all were put to flight in front of me.

Slavonia 907-920 : Twilight of the Khan

September 907.

The whole of Hrvastka had been bled dry. Castimir, my personal chaplain and doctor, still held the head of my armies as an old man, using a special chair to ride his horse, and holding on to his sword by his one valid hand.

There was not a village whose men in age of fighting hadn't been killed or wounded in one of the battles against the Magyars or the Czechs. But the Khanate, now confined to the Western bank of the Danube in Pannonia, had survived. The Khan had allied himself with the King of Lombardia, who happened to be at that time a Frankish grandson to one King of Lotharingia, from the faraway Brabant, who was not a descendant of Charlemagne, as had been all the Frankish kings of Lombardia and Bavaria before. In this alliance, the Frankish knights came to blow with the Magyars horsemen for the first time in History.
The wars were not over yet, but thanks in no small part to Venetians troops, the local Hungarian potentates had seen their ambitions frustrated and their armies sent packing home.

In 908, I promised my Natalija to the teenage Ban of Croatia, Zvonimir son of Besar. It was a bet on the future as the wedding would be held eight years afterwards, but I needed support at the court.

[as Braslav III]
My father was murdered on the orders of the Ban of Bosna before he could murder him. I took charge of the Banate of Slavonia on the 25 March of 908. My brothers hated me, because my father had instituted the elective banate. I gave the seat of Zagorje to the eldest Vid, and betrothed the youngest, Dujam, to a daughter of the old, weak, and proud Svatopluk of Morava.
I assembled an army right away to be able to arrest the treacherous Mayor of Gradec. This was quickly dealt with, and, as Khan Täbär tried to defend the coastal town of Rijeka from the Venetians, I could ally with both the Ban of Croatia and the Ban of Bosna.

In 911, Khan Täbär was deposed for his child brother Bihor, who was more a Slav now than an Avar. The Venetian left without a conquest but came back the next year. By then, Hrvatska could assemble a much more powerful army and, after a lull, could crush the Merchants at the battle of Somogyvár in April 914, occupy the City on the Lagoon while repulsing yet another Magyar invasion from Fejér.
I promised my slow little brother Ratimir who was just back from Venetian gaols, to a daughter of the previous King of the Magyars, who had converted en masse not long before. With this, i could make an ally out of the Savage Horde instead of an endless plunderer (1).
I myself married my long-time fiancee, Dubravka, by the day she turned 14. I was 27. She got pregnant that same year, and the twins Besar and Ulfo were born on March 9, 915. In the same year, I looked into marrying my sister, Natalija, whose betrothal to Zvonimir Ban of Croatia had been broken by him. Among the suitors were the King of Alba, the King of Western Francia, the King of Northumberland, the King of Navarra, a King of the Georgians, another of the Northmen, and the young king of Lotharingia. I sent her to the latter, and the family's fate was once more intertwined with those of the Heirs of Charlemagne.

In a glorious moment, Zvonimir of Croatia and I went to war against the nasty Ban of Usora, while my best friend the Ban of Bosna was attacking Usora from the South. We cornered and defeated the Usoran several times without even trying, and I chased after the Count of Certina who had, I'm sure, had a hand in my father's murder. Unfortunately, I was attending business at the Khan's yourt, and I couldn't kill the bastard.

A new enemy emerged in late 917, in the person of Kyprinos, a Greek that had replaced the Serbian strategoi as ruler of the Serbs (for the Basileus). He was a good leader of troops and had so many of them he could have swallowed Hrvatska without skipping a beat. We lost battle upon battle, losing a rich county in the process. But for the first time, an army of Croats had fought and conquered on the coast of Asia.
Then the Magyars attacked us again. And again, it was impossible to stop the tidal wave of their horde. My mother, my wife and three children, my youngest brother and my surviving sister all went prisoners of the Király of the Magyars. Along with them Khan Bihor and much of his court.
In this unfortune, the Khanate of Hrvastka was dissolved.

Each Ban was, again, the master of his own destiny.

Notes :

1. the Alliance would break down in October of the same year, when Ratimir decided to take a walk in the night rain, wearing only his belt.

Bonus :

Resisting conversion and fighting the Pagan Magyars can prove sexy.

Slavonia, 893-905 : Braslav's consolidation

[as Braslav II's]

In November 893, a faux pas of  my rival, Branimir of Bosnia, who had taken the seat of Zagreb from my defeated grandfather's hands, allowed me to chastise the culprit, taking for occasion a war on him by the Khan about his possession of a southern land. While the Khan was busy occupying and plundering the Ban's (1) main possessions, I had to hire mercenaries from the Rus' (2) to get the main job done, which cost me a lot of money. In the meantime, our Khan, Tuniq Khunzakhal, converted to the Christian faith and changed its crest to the chequered one most associated with Croatia.

I had a fourth child, a boy named Ratimir, in the winter of 894.

Branimir was still holding Serbia. I had to strike at the dragon's head by bringing war to his lands, head to head, accompanied by my Russian mercenaries and the Khan's whole army of Avars, White Croats (3), and Moravians. We flatly beat them, took Zagreb back, and then I could even snatch another victory over a fleeing Branimir in neighbouring Merania (4). By October 895, I was back in my castle meditating on my empty coffers.

After the war, Dizeng, then natural candidate to be elected in case of the Khan's demise, had fell out of favor. My lot, as one of of the Khan's chiefs (a yil-tawar (1) in his khanate and his personal cup-bearer), went to his eldest surviving son, Baghatur, already disfigured by age 18. His elder brother, Çorpan, had died at 13 from an infected wound, and the next brother, Täbär, was horribly scarred too (I eventually had to switch my patronage to this one, and he was the one to get the crown).

To prepare for my war against Branimir to get Zagreb back, I had to build alliances. I betrothed my eldest daughter, Zvonimira, to the Khan's nearest-aged boy, Okhsi. I also betrothed my second-born boy, Vid, to the eldest daughter of the Avar yil-tawar of Balaton (the banate my grandfather had been looking to control), which was called Somogyország in Turkic (5). Finally, i betrothed my heir, Braslav, to the twin sister of the 12 years old markgraf (1) of Verona, Otgotz Unruochinger, who was my cousin by my mother Judith.

Then, in late 895, I could go to war .

In December 896, this war was interrupted after my ally, Organ of Somogyország, had joined Branimir in the Khan's war against a southern neighbour, as both were bound by oaths to join under their lord's banner. I had to wait for the end of this short set of operations to resume the hostilities on the Ban of Bosnia, but as Organ was weaker now, and Branimir stronger, I recruited the Rus' mercenaries again. The whole thing was wrapped up in November 98 and i gave the county of Zagreb to my elder Braslav. If he, for whatever reason, would lose the -elective- seat of Slavonia, he would still hold counties.

In 900, the Khan, freshly converted, declared war on the Basileus (1), Leon VI, to liberate Serbia from his Orthodox overlords. It was ill-advised, as Leon VI had retaken a whole lot of territory to the Varangian invaders from the Rus', who had had control over much of the old Bulgarian Empire since 881. He was powerful, well-armed, and without an enemy.
The Khan was thoroughly defeated in less than a year, and during this period of rout, the Khanate had to suffer attacks of the Magyars, wanting to grab all the counties in the East of Hrvatska (6), and of the Czechs, willing to conquer the northern tip of the Khanate along the Danube (it was snatched the next year by the Magyar King Árpád).
I had to recruit the Rus' Band again, with which I managed to edge a bigger Magyar army, and then waited for my liege to come to my rescue as soon as my coffers couldn't pay the Varangians anymore.
We were slaughtered left and right, the Khanate got pillaged and quartered for years, and in 905, Hrvatska had lost all of its possessions East of the Danube, but for a small part of White Croatia. It also lost its old Khan Tuzniq, who met his fate on the field. We barely kept Vukovo (7), my own Easternmost possession and my capital county, thanks to a chance alliance with the Venetians.

In 895 :

In 905 :

But I, Braslav the Hunter, was a captain of the young Khan, the leader of the strongest faction in the khanate, and the ally of both the young Khan, and the Ban of Croatia, great-grandson of the Domagoj who founded the short-lived Kingdom of Croatia thirty years before.

Notes :

1. a duke. For game purposes, territories and their respective lords are tiered into Baronies, Counties, Duchies, Kingdoms and Empires, with an immediate hierarchy between them (ie a County includes several Baronies and so on). Depending on their nature and culture, however, these territories and lords are named along a series a titles : Mayors, Lord Mayors, Heads of Family, Thanes, Rì, Basileus, etc. The Turkic term equivalent to Duke, in-game, is yil-tawar. The equivalent South-Slavic term, in-game, is ban. In East-Germanic, a Duke is a marksgraf, 'a marquess'. Any Greek Emperor is a Basileus. Of course, the similarity between the concepts and terms is not historically valid, as is the strict hierarchy.

2. many Vikings had gone East to settle in former Baltic, Slavian and Bulgar territories, and formed kingdoms there. They were known to the Byzantines as the Varangians. The Rus', one of these kingdoms centered around Kiev, was to grow into Russia.

3. White Croats were Croats who didn't take part in the migration to the Southern lands, present-day Croatia, but stayed with the Poles, the Moravians and the Ruthenians. Their land lied to the North of the Pannonian Plain.

4. in-game Istria. Its historical extent remains unknown, although it was necessarily a Slav land along the Adriatic coast.

5. the game is a bit flawed, in that it changes the names of provinces according to their lords' cultures ; but these names remain in a limited list of names these provinces were historically known by ; that is to say that as 'Balaton' was a Slavic name which corresponded to its (in-game) Carantanian lord, it switched to the Hungarian name when it came under the (in-game) domination of an Avar lord, although Avars and Magyars most likely didn't speak the same Turkic language ; name-given entities and cultural/ethnic affiliations are not quite simple among the horse-lords of the Steppe.

6. 'Hrvastka' is simply 'Croatia' in Croatian. The game tries to use culture-specific names for locations. However, I prefer to use 'Croatia', on its own, for the present-day country, and 'Hrvastka' for the -changing- polity in the game.

7. the game has got to name locations, and with a limited set of names, even when these names were not chronologically or geographically sound. The county of Vukova is not historical, it's only the game-area around the city of Vukovo, present-day Vukovar. The city itself was first mentioned only some five hundred years after the current game-date.

Bonus :

The game is full of tragic stories. Here's Queen Heilka's family, with the fate of the dead in a ribbon under their face (a bit on the right) :

- his father, died a prisoner (probably murdered there)

- her three brothers died in battle, at ages 17, 19 and 19, in five years' time. All four were Kings of Lombardia or Bavaria one after the other.

Also, doggo happened.

Orsay setting the sun right

This happened last night. Mom called me at 5:20 to tell me there was a beautiful sunset. I didn't wait for it to redden because I was thinking it would sink too fast behind le Bois du Roi, which is where Audrey and Christophe live.
It's not rétouché at all. The mobile pictures I took at the same time where shitty, blurring the sky in a white-hot molten metal blob. I should put some effort in the direct-to-PC pics I'm taking, like rebalancing and shit, but this is beautiful enough raw.

Slavonia 867-893 : Under the Avars' yoke

Yeah so today in History,

The young Croatian Kingdom (est. 874 by Domagoj, Ban of Croatia, right befire submitting Slavonia into vassality) was under the threat of two eastern, turkic superpowers : the old Avar Khanate, which had settled in the northeastern edge of the Pannonian Plain since Roman times, and were trying to keep in check the migration of Slavs into their dominion, and the young Magyar horde, which had decided to migrate westwards after being roughed by their Khazar overlords.

So when the Magyars swept through the lands of the Slavs around the Avars, it seemed Croatia wouldn't stand in the path. Suprisingly, the Magyars contended themselves with one northern province, and it was the Avars that declared war and subjugated King Domagoj's heir.
This is how I, the Ban of Balaton to the North of me and the Ban of Croatia to the South, became all subjects to the Avar Khanate, who soon enough settled [ie in-game, it became a regular country and not a horde) to be the Khanate of Hrvatska (Croatia).
After this point, it was just a matter of time before the Magyar eventually came round to conquering one by one the eastern provinces of the Khanate, which is to say the region where the Avars used to prosper before the whole affair.

On the interior side, during all this chaos, Ban Braslav I died, and his grandson Braslav II inherited after a short regency. Braslav II had been shortly betrothed to a Burgundian princess, then to a Lombardian Princess, Heilka, while his grandfather had his sights turned to the West.
Now that he had been Croatian, then Avar, then Avar-Croatian, and had had to defend his title against plots in his own surroundings, Braslav II decided to focus on his Pannonian ambitions, for which Queen Heilka was of little interest. As his grandfather had sequestrated two daughters from Slavomir, the Pannonian chief of Tolna, immediately to the North of his own capital of Vukovo, he schemed to have his queen murdered to be able to marry Slavomir's elder daughter, Brzieczislawa, who was of a deceitful nature like himself, while offering the younger sister Przybislawa to a young vassal, Baron Dragan.
The scheme seemed even better off when the queen, along with her two children, was abducted by revolting Christians (the Avars follow the old Turkic faith, centered on their god Tengri) who couldn't bear the pagan yoke.
They were not the only ones, eventually, as all the former vassals of the Croatian King rose in rebellion against the Khan. I chose not too, counting on the Avar might to slaughter my fellow Croats, who had been wiped out easily in the first place. They turned out to be many more than i thought, and the victory of the Khan (and my hundred warriors) held to a strategic error by the rebels. They soon submitted and all went back to feebly resisting the Magyar multitude snagging territory after territory.
In the aftermath of one of the invasions, the chiefdom of Tolna had passed to another lineage and Brzieczislawa's claim seemed a lot less promising. Meanwhile, Queen Heilka had born a third child to Braslav, and he resolved to drop his scheming, and go on living with her. It was the year of the Lord 893.

The poem uncalled for

I know you don't like poetry, but i've been writing a little again, recently. A very little. It's part of Rural-me, i guess, or more probably i consciously want to write poetry again and it sips down into my mind.
And i know how out-of-place and irrelevant, and quite ridiculous poetry can be, especially when you don't particularly like it. It's awkward. Socially and intellectually awkward nowadays to hear, or even worst to be told poetry.
But i want to share it with you. Needless to say, nobody ever reads any of it. But i've got to open up, i guess, and i can't think of anyone i would love to being read than you. Of course, i would like for you to like it, too, but i know it can't be force-fed to one's senses, much less forced-fed to their liking.
So instead of sending it as a message, that you'd have to go through to some extent, i've made it a post. You can read it whole, in chunks, over the course of several decades, or not at all.

I don't have a title yet. I don't like titles much.

Odeur du soleil à deux heures, et qui danse.
Lumière du café dans l'air, et qui danse,
Qui baigne le salon de bois et de velours,
Qui baigne mon souci du calme de l'enfance.
Avec eux je suis à nouveau en vacances,
Ces après-midis où il n'y avait pas cours,
Où il n'y avait rien à faire d'autre que vaguement somnoler
Et écouter la télé ronronner avec mémé.
Ça c'est à moi, c'est en moi, c'est à moi,
C'est comme la choucoute le soir quand il fait froid,
Ce n'est pas quelque chose dont on peut être fier,
C'est un lit de confort imprimé dans les nerfs.
C'est la bière qui attend le gars qui vient de loin,
Souvenir de famille qui fait sourire en coin ;
C'est la lumière du jour quand on s'est levé tôt,
L'éclat jaune du verre qui adoucit le soir,
Le toucher de la pluie sur la laine d'agneau,
Le nuage de cannelle qui vient du samovar ;
C'est le bois et le cuir et le frais et le chaud.
Odeur de ses cheveux quand il est un peu tard,
Lumière d'une bougie dans l'œil du corniaud,
Le craquement discret quand t'attrapes ta guitare.
Il n'y a rien à décrire qui tienne en peu de mots,
Mais étrange, étranger, familier, et idiot.