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.