Part XLVI: The War of the Second Holy League (1521-1522)
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Part XLVI: The War of the Second Holy League (1521-1522)
As King Julius of Hungary and his allies streamed across the Ottoman Empire’s northern and western frontiers, it seemed as if that venerable dynasty was facing its deathblow. The once-proud state had been devastated by years of civil war, attacks from the east and west, and its coffers and barracks lay fallow. The grand vizier couldn’t muster more than a few thousand men to defend his realm, and its final demise seemed inevitable as hordes of invaders streamed towards the City of the World’s Desire. However, with his back against the wall and little left to lose, Ebülhayr Paşa would use every resource available to him, pulling out all the stops he could to take as many of the Crusaders down with him as he could.
The Ottoman Empire in Europe could be divided into three rough geographic regions, a fact which the Crusaders had taken into account. The Bulgarian plains, stretching across the Danube banks north of the Balkan Mountains, were thinly populated thanks to several decades of constant back-and-forth raiding and the losses of the Second Ottoman Civil War and thus provided a direct route towards the capital that could only be easily halted by the mountains themselves. Further south, the plains of Thrake were the heartland of the Ottoman state and could only be accessed through the passes north and west, and thus could be fairly easily defended. And, of course, the west was dominated by mountains and river valleys that in some ways resembled the rough countries of the Caucasus. Of course, this latter region still played host to a number of independent-minded Vlach bands and hundreds of Turkish brigands and highwaymen who had been forced out of their homes by Ebülhayr Paşa’s purges. The plan, as outlined by the members of the League in the weeks leading up to the invasion, was fairly simple. Julius and Bogdan the Blind would attack into Bulgaria, quickly securing the Danube basin and pushing southwards to the mountains, where they would fight through to the mountains, which they would hold and secure as a launching point for an offensive the next year. Meanwhile, the Albanians and Moreotes would invade the west, hopefully making common cause with the Turkish hold-outs and the Vlachs of the region against the Sublime Porte. If everything went according to plan, then by the end of the year they would have pushed to the eastern edge of the Rhodopes and secured everything west of there, possibly including Salonika as well. As soon as the war began, the Hungarian and Moreote fleets would strike into the Aegean[1], clearing it of Ottoman ships, while the Moldovans would perform a similar strike against Ottoman fleets in the Black Sea, possibly with Trapezuntine help if it could be secured. The goal of this naval offensive was to cut the supply lines between Europe and Asia, which would significantly reduce the amount of food and men the Sublime Porte could raise to fight in the former region and lengthen the time it took to move men from the east into the west. If everything went off without a hitch, a Crusader army would be sitting in Constantinople by the autumn of 1522. It was understandably believed that the Ottomans would be unable to muster enough of an army to pose a serious threat to any of the armies, as they were exhausted from the civil war and what men remained under arms were scattered across the Ottoman realm.
The Ottoman plan was far less well-defined. Ebülhayr Paşa had been caught flat-footed by the Crusader attack, and was left scrambling to muster a response. As Julius and his confederates had suspected, the Ottoman army was in shambles after the civil war, and there were less than 10,000 men scattered across the entirety of the Empire, many of them engaged in struggle against Turkish diehards[2] in the remote and difficult-to-fight-in areas. Even worse, the Ottomans were teetering on bankruptcy because of the loss of tax revenues, so he couldn’t exactly just hire mercenaries to make up for it. The plan which the grand vizier created was panic-driven and uninspiring, but it might be enough to keep his state afloat. His plan was to abandon most of the Bulgarian plains, bar only a few hardened fortresses which could be used to slow down the Crusader advance. The Ottomans would fight on in the west, using the ridges and valleys of the Lower Balkans as defensive bulwarks against the Albanians and the Moreotes, who he (rightfully) saw as the weak links in the alliance against him. While the Crusaders were being slowed down there, he would scrape together as many men as he could by whatever means possible--conscription and rushed training, the ‘borrowing’ of mamluks, taking loans from any available source to raise mercenaries--to meet them on the field of battle. He had little faith in this plan, but he was driven by desperation and a belief that God would stand with him against the infidels. Of course, God helps those who help themselves, so he knew he would have to make the best of a bad situation to receive the favor of the divine. As such, he swallowed his pride and several decades of diplomatic fiascos and wrote to one of his coreligionists….
At sea, the Crusaders were victorious against the Ottomans on a scale that no-one had dared to imagine. Ebülhayr Paşa had sent much of the Ottoman fleet down the coast of the Aegeean to sealift men and supplies from his territories around Smyrne, but had done so just before word of the putting out of large fleets from Moldova and Nafplion reached him. While he desperately tried to recall this armada, they continued to lumber down the coast. The Moreotes and Hungarians quickly caught word of this embarking from sympathetic islanders and they, along with several dozen Hospitaller ships who were glad to have helped in the struggle against the infidels, vectored onto the Ottoman armada. At the Battle of the Aignoussa Strait in late February, the Turkish fleet was caught off-guard and utterly destroyed. As the ships passed between the Aignoussa Islands between Khios and the mainland, a Hungarian fleet appeared in their rear, driving them forward with thunderous cannons. The naval paşa broke off several of his warships to defend against this attack, denuding the rest of the fleet just in time for the Moreote and Hospitaller fleets to appear at the front of the formation. With their forces split, the Turkish transports were ravaged by the combined arms of the Orthodox and the Catholics, with some twenty-seven being sunk, eleven captured and six driven aground on the islands, whence their crews were promptly slaughtered by the islanders or died of thirst some time later. The allies, in comparison, lost only four Hungarian galleys[3], two Moreote galleys, a Moreote galleass and no Hospitaller ships, effectively crippling the Ottoman fleet. The crusaders would then be able to blockade the coasts of the Ottoman Empire to further cripple their economy and ability to move troops. The Moldovans won a smaller battle in the Black Sea quite handily a few weeks later, confining the Ottomans to the Sea of Marmora alone.
Meanwhile, on land, the Crusaders were making swift advances against the forces of the Sublime Porte. The Moldovans had a great deal of experience in forcing crossings of the Danube thanks to their years of raiding against the infidels, and as such were able to secure a half-dozen bridgeheads and fording points across the Great River within a few weeks of the invasion beginning. As such, the commander of the 3,000-strong force of light cavalry and skirmishers that the vizier had sent to delay the advance of the enemy into Bulgaria, Alexandros Paşa, turned his attention against the Moldovans. The Ottoman force attacked and successfully defeated the Moldovan force at Kamaka (OTL Oryahovo), driving them back into the river, but this would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. While Alexandros Paşa and his men were busy fighting off the Moldovans, they failed to notice or stop the large Serbo-Hungarian army--some 25,000 men under Julius himself--emerging onto the plains from the west. Julius fell upon the Ottoman army like a bolt from on high, routing the Ottomans with heavy casualties and capturing the Paşa himself. With the chief force sent to stop him completely annihilated, Julius and Bogdan would spend the following weeks securing the Bulgarian plains and the passes across the Balkan Range. The Danube essentially acted as a tether, carrying in addition to its usual trading barges the chain of boats that kept the Moldovan and Serbo-Hungarian force fed and stocked. The greatest impact of this was that it allowed the Crusaders to remain free from the pillaging and looting that usually defined military campaigns of this period, which greatly endeared them to the local Bulgarians and gave them a leg up over the Turks. By these manners, the entirety of the Bulgarian plain had been secured within a few months. By the end of July, Julius sat on the northern end of the Gabrovo Pass, mulling over an offensive into Thrake itself.
You see, while the Crusaders were making excellent time in the north, the Albanians and the Moreotes were doing anything but. Both Andronikos and Jozë had hoped that the local irregulars would aid them in their drive against Constantinople, but in truth they did anything but. The Turkish bandits of the western mountains had concluded that while Ebülhayr Paşa hated them and would try to kill them all, the infidels would try to do the same thing and, even worse, try to force them to adopt their heathen faith. As such, many of the Turks and Turkmen had taken up arms against both groups, dramatically slowing the advance of allied forces in the west. Andronikos was forced to contend with constant harassment against his supply lines as he pushed northwards into Thessalia, which forced him to split off large sections of his army to fend off these raiders. Jozë, meanwhile, switched tack entirely and struck directly against the Turkish bandits as well as the Ottoman garrisons of the region itself, using the excellent mobility of his light horsemen and highlander infantry to cordon off regions of the frontier and beat them down, which would, after several months, allow him to clear a path through the border zone into the Ottoman heartland. Because of these delays, the western allies were completely out of position by midsummer, the Moreotes having failed to even reach the Giannitsa swamps west of Salonika, which was their goal for the end of May, while the Albanians had yet to reach the Axios Valley, which was also their goal.
With the western allies utterly failing to hold up their end of the plan, Julius was left to contemplate a strike against Constantinople itself. After all, the Ottomans were quite weak as was, seemingly having devoted all of their forces to holding the western mountains against the Albanians and the Moreotes. If he trusted the plan, then it was entirely possible his weaker allies could be defeated piecemeal, which would allow the forces of the false prophet to turn their full forces to him, making it a much tougher fight than it would be otherwise. He should strike now while the opportunity was available to him and there was nothing between him and the City of the World’s Desire, not wait until the opportunity to achieve the dream of so many kings passed from him. Bogdan was unwilling, feeling that they should wait for the certainty of victory, which Julius considered to be foolhardy at best. The road before them was open! And so, in August 1521, Julius crossed the mountains with his army, bound for the City of Constantine itself.
However, the king had made one fatal miscalculation: There was in fact an Ottoman army present in Thrake, a comparatively small force of 11,000 that Ebülhayr Paşa had scraped together from conscripts, mercenaries and garrison forces. He had managed to secure loans from a number of Armenian banking houses, and with this he had hired several thousand Turkmen from Anatolia to supplement the small force of native troops that he had raised. This was no great army, but it was still an army and a somewhat coherent one that could, under the right circumstances, pose a threat to the Hungarian invasion force. Ebülhayr Paşa was a cagey son-of-a-bitch, and as he anxiously followed the progression of Julius and his army into Thrake, he knew that he had an opportunity for a long-odds victory if he played his cards right. The future of Islam in Europe was riding on the outcome of this campaign, and he was determined to stand strong.
As Julius advanced deep into Thrake, he met surprisingly little resistance. As he advanced, the militias and raiding forces that he had been expecting vanished in full retreat, universally yielding the field of battle to the Crusaders. Across the mountains now, the Hungarians didn’t even try to keep up the Danube supply chain, instead pillaging as they went. This both weakened their own ability to resupply and angered the locals, which led to a revival of the Greek self-defense militias of the civil war, who now fought alongside the Sublime Porte to drive out their coreligionists. Julius was taking minor but constant losses from these raiders, which he effectively ignored in favor of a constant advance. He could smell blood in the water, he wasn’t going to give up now when he was so close to victory. By the time he had reached Edirne, his men were exhausted and considerably fewer in number, as well as surrounded by several hundred angry riders who were determined to achieve revenge for their ruined homes, but he paid this no mind. When word reached him that Ebülhayr Paşa and an army were gathered at Ergenoupoli[4] (OTL Uzunkopru), he decided to engage and try to crush the Ottoman army in hopes that he could advance to and winter before or within the walls of Constantinople.
After several days of maneuvering, the Hungarian and the Greco-Ottoman army met along a ridge line several dozen miles north of Ergenoupoli, with Ebülhayr Paşa holding the defensive position atop the ridge. He knew his force was fragile, and was hoping that the Hungarians would exhaust themselves on uphill charges against his somewhat fortified position, after which they could be ground down by the Turkmen and by the Greek irregulars. Julius, meanwhile, hoped to pin down the Ottoman forces atop the ridge with his center and right, then circle around with his overloaded left to pin them down and crush them[5]. The night before the battle, both armies were comforted by their respective clergy, urging valor to them all.
That dawn, on the morning of September 28, Julius deployed his forces in the pre-dawn chill, hoping to catch the Ottomans off guard with an early morning attack. As the sun split the sky, the Hungarians advanced against the Turkish host, moving quickly up the ridge. However Ebülhayr Paşa had suspected that something like this would happen and so had mustered his men even earlier, successfully catching the Hungarians by total surprise. As the Crusaders plowed into the Ottoman pike hedges, their lines soon descended into chaos. With the sun rising at the Ottoman back, their attackers were severely impaired, and so many of them began to fire wildly with their crossbows and arquebuses. Julius was among his men, rallying them and pushing them forward, where they were beginning to push through the Ottoman center as the demoralized conscripts proved unable to hold against the prime of the Black Army. Ebülhayr Paşa too joined the fray in person, knowing that the crucial moment of the battle was at hand. The air was filled with screams and gunshots and the clamor of battle, making it almost impossible to hear shouted orders, and the Crusaders struggled to see even the men beside them. Under these circumstances, it is entirely understandable that an inexperienced soldier mistook King Julius, who was riding horizontally across the breadth of his army, for an Ottoman commander. The Hungarian monarch was knocked from his saddle by a billhook and dragged under the hooves of his horse until it too was killed and fell upon him, finally killing him. With their leader dead, the Hungarians began to falter, and Ebülhayr Paşa was able to lead his own left into the weak Hungarian right and shatter it, causing them to rout. The rest of the Crusader line soon followed, and Ebülhayr Paşa ordered the horsemen to begin their pursuit. The Serbo-Hungarians would flee in all directions, but only a handful of the 15,000 men who had taken the field that day would escape back across the frontier into Christian lands.
The impacts of Ergenoupoli were immense. The Serbo-Hungarian forces withdrew from their positions south of the Balkans, eventually retreating back across the pre-war border with only a few minor areas along the frontier still holding. As soon as word of Julius’ death reached Krakow, Sigismund the Prussian, who had inherited the titles of Poland Lithuania after Jan Olbracht’s death, proclaimed himself the rightful King of Hungary, Croatia and Serbia and began making preparations for an invasion of the Pannonian lowlands the following spring. Many of the Hungarian magnates also revolted in support of him, as they believed that a distant king across the mountains would be preferable to any other potential ruler. The sudden exit of the Hungarians, who had been the lynchpin of the Second Holy League, caused the organization to crumble. Sensing an opportunity to get while the getting was good, Andronikos sued for peace with the Ottomans. Ebülhayr Paşa was more focused with events playing out elsewhere and so was willing to give up the former Despotate of Thessalia to the Moreotes, an unexpected windfall. The Moldovans, meanwhile, would negotiate with the Ottomans for territorial and commercial gains. The Ottomans were on the upswing but were still quite fragile, so Ebülhayr Paşa didn’t want to risk carrying on such a war indefinitely. The Moldovans would annex several fortresses along the banks of the Danube to secure their control of the river trade, but it was much less than what Bogdan had aspired to before the war began.
However, despite these defections, Albania stood alone against the Ottomans. Even as peace settled over most of the region, the Albanian-Ottoman Wars had just begun….
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[1] Hungary (or more accurately, Croatia) had a number of galleys that had been built up to help project power in the Aegean. Albania, in contrast, lacked ports thanks to the extensive Venetian holdings in the area, and so were constricted to wars on land.
[2] Ebülhayr Paşa had never been able to completely secure much of the frontier zone, and many of the Turkish refugees and survivors in the region had taken up the mantle of ghazi to raid against those who they considered to be heretical puppets of the decadent and incompetent Greeks. Some of them picked up the mystical Sufi orders who also opposed the Greeks, and this would be the genesis of Sufism in the Balkans for all intents and purposes.
[3] Hungary had only a few galleys with little experience, and as they were facing the actual warships they took the brunt of the losses in the battle.
[4] The town was named Ergen Kopru by the Turks, but given its majority Greek status and the pro-Greek slant of the regime in Konstantinople, it reverted to a Hellenized version after Ebülhayr Paşa’s victory.
[5] ‘Overloading’ means assigning more forces to one flank than the center and/or other flank, similar to the flank overloading that the Greek hoplites performed during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods.
As King Julius of Hungary and his allies streamed across the Ottoman Empire’s northern and western frontiers, it seemed as if that venerable dynasty was facing its deathblow. The once-proud state had been devastated by years of civil war, attacks from the east and west, and its coffers and barracks lay fallow. The grand vizier couldn’t muster more than a few thousand men to defend his realm, and its final demise seemed inevitable as hordes of invaders streamed towards the City of the World’s Desire. However, with his back against the wall and little left to lose, Ebülhayr Paşa would use every resource available to him, pulling out all the stops he could to take as many of the Crusaders down with him as he could.
The Ottoman Empire in Europe could be divided into three rough geographic regions, a fact which the Crusaders had taken into account. The Bulgarian plains, stretching across the Danube banks north of the Balkan Mountains, were thinly populated thanks to several decades of constant back-and-forth raiding and the losses of the Second Ottoman Civil War and thus provided a direct route towards the capital that could only be easily halted by the mountains themselves. Further south, the plains of Thrake were the heartland of the Ottoman state and could only be accessed through the passes north and west, and thus could be fairly easily defended. And, of course, the west was dominated by mountains and river valleys that in some ways resembled the rough countries of the Caucasus. Of course, this latter region still played host to a number of independent-minded Vlach bands and hundreds of Turkish brigands and highwaymen who had been forced out of their homes by Ebülhayr Paşa’s purges. The plan, as outlined by the members of the League in the weeks leading up to the invasion, was fairly simple. Julius and Bogdan the Blind would attack into Bulgaria, quickly securing the Danube basin and pushing southwards to the mountains, where they would fight through to the mountains, which they would hold and secure as a launching point for an offensive the next year. Meanwhile, the Albanians and Moreotes would invade the west, hopefully making common cause with the Turkish hold-outs and the Vlachs of the region against the Sublime Porte. If everything went according to plan, then by the end of the year they would have pushed to the eastern edge of the Rhodopes and secured everything west of there, possibly including Salonika as well. As soon as the war began, the Hungarian and Moreote fleets would strike into the Aegean[1], clearing it of Ottoman ships, while the Moldovans would perform a similar strike against Ottoman fleets in the Black Sea, possibly with Trapezuntine help if it could be secured. The goal of this naval offensive was to cut the supply lines between Europe and Asia, which would significantly reduce the amount of food and men the Sublime Porte could raise to fight in the former region and lengthen the time it took to move men from the east into the west. If everything went off without a hitch, a Crusader army would be sitting in Constantinople by the autumn of 1522. It was understandably believed that the Ottomans would be unable to muster enough of an army to pose a serious threat to any of the armies, as they were exhausted from the civil war and what men remained under arms were scattered across the Ottoman realm.
The Ottoman plan was far less well-defined. Ebülhayr Paşa had been caught flat-footed by the Crusader attack, and was left scrambling to muster a response. As Julius and his confederates had suspected, the Ottoman army was in shambles after the civil war, and there were less than 10,000 men scattered across the entirety of the Empire, many of them engaged in struggle against Turkish diehards[2] in the remote and difficult-to-fight-in areas. Even worse, the Ottomans were teetering on bankruptcy because of the loss of tax revenues, so he couldn’t exactly just hire mercenaries to make up for it. The plan which the grand vizier created was panic-driven and uninspiring, but it might be enough to keep his state afloat. His plan was to abandon most of the Bulgarian plains, bar only a few hardened fortresses which could be used to slow down the Crusader advance. The Ottomans would fight on in the west, using the ridges and valleys of the Lower Balkans as defensive bulwarks against the Albanians and the Moreotes, who he (rightfully) saw as the weak links in the alliance against him. While the Crusaders were being slowed down there, he would scrape together as many men as he could by whatever means possible--conscription and rushed training, the ‘borrowing’ of mamluks, taking loans from any available source to raise mercenaries--to meet them on the field of battle. He had little faith in this plan, but he was driven by desperation and a belief that God would stand with him against the infidels. Of course, God helps those who help themselves, so he knew he would have to make the best of a bad situation to receive the favor of the divine. As such, he swallowed his pride and several decades of diplomatic fiascos and wrote to one of his coreligionists….
At sea, the Crusaders were victorious against the Ottomans on a scale that no-one had dared to imagine. Ebülhayr Paşa had sent much of the Ottoman fleet down the coast of the Aegeean to sealift men and supplies from his territories around Smyrne, but had done so just before word of the putting out of large fleets from Moldova and Nafplion reached him. While he desperately tried to recall this armada, they continued to lumber down the coast. The Moreotes and Hungarians quickly caught word of this embarking from sympathetic islanders and they, along with several dozen Hospitaller ships who were glad to have helped in the struggle against the infidels, vectored onto the Ottoman armada. At the Battle of the Aignoussa Strait in late February, the Turkish fleet was caught off-guard and utterly destroyed. As the ships passed between the Aignoussa Islands between Khios and the mainland, a Hungarian fleet appeared in their rear, driving them forward with thunderous cannons. The naval paşa broke off several of his warships to defend against this attack, denuding the rest of the fleet just in time for the Moreote and Hospitaller fleets to appear at the front of the formation. With their forces split, the Turkish transports were ravaged by the combined arms of the Orthodox and the Catholics, with some twenty-seven being sunk, eleven captured and six driven aground on the islands, whence their crews were promptly slaughtered by the islanders or died of thirst some time later. The allies, in comparison, lost only four Hungarian galleys[3], two Moreote galleys, a Moreote galleass and no Hospitaller ships, effectively crippling the Ottoman fleet. The crusaders would then be able to blockade the coasts of the Ottoman Empire to further cripple their economy and ability to move troops. The Moldovans won a smaller battle in the Black Sea quite handily a few weeks later, confining the Ottomans to the Sea of Marmora alone.
Meanwhile, on land, the Crusaders were making swift advances against the forces of the Sublime Porte. The Moldovans had a great deal of experience in forcing crossings of the Danube thanks to their years of raiding against the infidels, and as such were able to secure a half-dozen bridgeheads and fording points across the Great River within a few weeks of the invasion beginning. As such, the commander of the 3,000-strong force of light cavalry and skirmishers that the vizier had sent to delay the advance of the enemy into Bulgaria, Alexandros Paşa, turned his attention against the Moldovans. The Ottoman force attacked and successfully defeated the Moldovan force at Kamaka (OTL Oryahovo), driving them back into the river, but this would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. While Alexandros Paşa and his men were busy fighting off the Moldovans, they failed to notice or stop the large Serbo-Hungarian army--some 25,000 men under Julius himself--emerging onto the plains from the west. Julius fell upon the Ottoman army like a bolt from on high, routing the Ottomans with heavy casualties and capturing the Paşa himself. With the chief force sent to stop him completely annihilated, Julius and Bogdan would spend the following weeks securing the Bulgarian plains and the passes across the Balkan Range. The Danube essentially acted as a tether, carrying in addition to its usual trading barges the chain of boats that kept the Moldovan and Serbo-Hungarian force fed and stocked. The greatest impact of this was that it allowed the Crusaders to remain free from the pillaging and looting that usually defined military campaigns of this period, which greatly endeared them to the local Bulgarians and gave them a leg up over the Turks. By these manners, the entirety of the Bulgarian plain had been secured within a few months. By the end of July, Julius sat on the northern end of the Gabrovo Pass, mulling over an offensive into Thrake itself.
You see, while the Crusaders were making excellent time in the north, the Albanians and the Moreotes were doing anything but. Both Andronikos and Jozë had hoped that the local irregulars would aid them in their drive against Constantinople, but in truth they did anything but. The Turkish bandits of the western mountains had concluded that while Ebülhayr Paşa hated them and would try to kill them all, the infidels would try to do the same thing and, even worse, try to force them to adopt their heathen faith. As such, many of the Turks and Turkmen had taken up arms against both groups, dramatically slowing the advance of allied forces in the west. Andronikos was forced to contend with constant harassment against his supply lines as he pushed northwards into Thessalia, which forced him to split off large sections of his army to fend off these raiders. Jozë, meanwhile, switched tack entirely and struck directly against the Turkish bandits as well as the Ottoman garrisons of the region itself, using the excellent mobility of his light horsemen and highlander infantry to cordon off regions of the frontier and beat them down, which would, after several months, allow him to clear a path through the border zone into the Ottoman heartland. Because of these delays, the western allies were completely out of position by midsummer, the Moreotes having failed to even reach the Giannitsa swamps west of Salonika, which was their goal for the end of May, while the Albanians had yet to reach the Axios Valley, which was also their goal.
With the western allies utterly failing to hold up their end of the plan, Julius was left to contemplate a strike against Constantinople itself. After all, the Ottomans were quite weak as was, seemingly having devoted all of their forces to holding the western mountains against the Albanians and the Moreotes. If he trusted the plan, then it was entirely possible his weaker allies could be defeated piecemeal, which would allow the forces of the false prophet to turn their full forces to him, making it a much tougher fight than it would be otherwise. He should strike now while the opportunity was available to him and there was nothing between him and the City of the World’s Desire, not wait until the opportunity to achieve the dream of so many kings passed from him. Bogdan was unwilling, feeling that they should wait for the certainty of victory, which Julius considered to be foolhardy at best. The road before them was open! And so, in August 1521, Julius crossed the mountains with his army, bound for the City of Constantine itself.
However, the king had made one fatal miscalculation: There was in fact an Ottoman army present in Thrake, a comparatively small force of 11,000 that Ebülhayr Paşa had scraped together from conscripts, mercenaries and garrison forces. He had managed to secure loans from a number of Armenian banking houses, and with this he had hired several thousand Turkmen from Anatolia to supplement the small force of native troops that he had raised. This was no great army, but it was still an army and a somewhat coherent one that could, under the right circumstances, pose a threat to the Hungarian invasion force. Ebülhayr Paşa was a cagey son-of-a-bitch, and as he anxiously followed the progression of Julius and his army into Thrake, he knew that he had an opportunity for a long-odds victory if he played his cards right. The future of Islam in Europe was riding on the outcome of this campaign, and he was determined to stand strong.
As Julius advanced deep into Thrake, he met surprisingly little resistance. As he advanced, the militias and raiding forces that he had been expecting vanished in full retreat, universally yielding the field of battle to the Crusaders. Across the mountains now, the Hungarians didn’t even try to keep up the Danube supply chain, instead pillaging as they went. This both weakened their own ability to resupply and angered the locals, which led to a revival of the Greek self-defense militias of the civil war, who now fought alongside the Sublime Porte to drive out their coreligionists. Julius was taking minor but constant losses from these raiders, which he effectively ignored in favor of a constant advance. He could smell blood in the water, he wasn’t going to give up now when he was so close to victory. By the time he had reached Edirne, his men were exhausted and considerably fewer in number, as well as surrounded by several hundred angry riders who were determined to achieve revenge for their ruined homes, but he paid this no mind. When word reached him that Ebülhayr Paşa and an army were gathered at Ergenoupoli[4] (OTL Uzunkopru), he decided to engage and try to crush the Ottoman army in hopes that he could advance to and winter before or within the walls of Constantinople.
After several days of maneuvering, the Hungarian and the Greco-Ottoman army met along a ridge line several dozen miles north of Ergenoupoli, with Ebülhayr Paşa holding the defensive position atop the ridge. He knew his force was fragile, and was hoping that the Hungarians would exhaust themselves on uphill charges against his somewhat fortified position, after which they could be ground down by the Turkmen and by the Greek irregulars. Julius, meanwhile, hoped to pin down the Ottoman forces atop the ridge with his center and right, then circle around with his overloaded left to pin them down and crush them[5]. The night before the battle, both armies were comforted by their respective clergy, urging valor to them all.
That dawn, on the morning of September 28, Julius deployed his forces in the pre-dawn chill, hoping to catch the Ottomans off guard with an early morning attack. As the sun split the sky, the Hungarians advanced against the Turkish host, moving quickly up the ridge. However Ebülhayr Paşa had suspected that something like this would happen and so had mustered his men even earlier, successfully catching the Hungarians by total surprise. As the Crusaders plowed into the Ottoman pike hedges, their lines soon descended into chaos. With the sun rising at the Ottoman back, their attackers were severely impaired, and so many of them began to fire wildly with their crossbows and arquebuses. Julius was among his men, rallying them and pushing them forward, where they were beginning to push through the Ottoman center as the demoralized conscripts proved unable to hold against the prime of the Black Army. Ebülhayr Paşa too joined the fray in person, knowing that the crucial moment of the battle was at hand. The air was filled with screams and gunshots and the clamor of battle, making it almost impossible to hear shouted orders, and the Crusaders struggled to see even the men beside them. Under these circumstances, it is entirely understandable that an inexperienced soldier mistook King Julius, who was riding horizontally across the breadth of his army, for an Ottoman commander. The Hungarian monarch was knocked from his saddle by a billhook and dragged under the hooves of his horse until it too was killed and fell upon him, finally killing him. With their leader dead, the Hungarians began to falter, and Ebülhayr Paşa was able to lead his own left into the weak Hungarian right and shatter it, causing them to rout. The rest of the Crusader line soon followed, and Ebülhayr Paşa ordered the horsemen to begin their pursuit. The Serbo-Hungarians would flee in all directions, but only a handful of the 15,000 men who had taken the field that day would escape back across the frontier into Christian lands.
The impacts of Ergenoupoli were immense. The Serbo-Hungarian forces withdrew from their positions south of the Balkans, eventually retreating back across the pre-war border with only a few minor areas along the frontier still holding. As soon as word of Julius’ death reached Krakow, Sigismund the Prussian, who had inherited the titles of Poland Lithuania after Jan Olbracht’s death, proclaimed himself the rightful King of Hungary, Croatia and Serbia and began making preparations for an invasion of the Pannonian lowlands the following spring. Many of the Hungarian magnates also revolted in support of him, as they believed that a distant king across the mountains would be preferable to any other potential ruler. The sudden exit of the Hungarians, who had been the lynchpin of the Second Holy League, caused the organization to crumble. Sensing an opportunity to get while the getting was good, Andronikos sued for peace with the Ottomans. Ebülhayr Paşa was more focused with events playing out elsewhere and so was willing to give up the former Despotate of Thessalia to the Moreotes, an unexpected windfall. The Moldovans, meanwhile, would negotiate with the Ottomans for territorial and commercial gains. The Ottomans were on the upswing but were still quite fragile, so Ebülhayr Paşa didn’t want to risk carrying on such a war indefinitely. The Moldovans would annex several fortresses along the banks of the Danube to secure their control of the river trade, but it was much less than what Bogdan had aspired to before the war began.
However, despite these defections, Albania stood alone against the Ottomans. Even as peace settled over most of the region, the Albanian-Ottoman Wars had just begun….
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[1] Hungary (or more accurately, Croatia) had a number of galleys that had been built up to help project power in the Aegean. Albania, in contrast, lacked ports thanks to the extensive Venetian holdings in the area, and so were constricted to wars on land.
[2] Ebülhayr Paşa had never been able to completely secure much of the frontier zone, and many of the Turkish refugees and survivors in the region had taken up the mantle of ghazi to raid against those who they considered to be heretical puppets of the decadent and incompetent Greeks. Some of them picked up the mystical Sufi orders who also opposed the Greeks, and this would be the genesis of Sufism in the Balkans for all intents and purposes.
[3] Hungary had only a few galleys with little experience, and as they were facing the actual warships they took the brunt of the losses in the battle.
[4] The town was named Ergen Kopru by the Turks, but given its majority Greek status and the pro-Greek slant of the regime in Konstantinople, it reverted to a Hellenized version after Ebülhayr Paşa’s victory.
[5] ‘Overloading’ means assigning more forces to one flank than the center and/or other flank, similar to the flank overloading that the Greek hoplites performed during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods.