Chapter 32

Notes on the History of the Grand Duchy of Upper Danubia

(more stuff that didn't make it into the novel)

Early Danubian history – Upper Danubia & Lower Danubia

Upper Danubia was the older of the two sections of the country and always was independent. The area's topography sheltered the inhabitants from invasion and for at least 3,000 years ethnic Danubians lived in the valley emptied by the Rika Chorna River. Upper Danubia was never successfully invaded, so throughout the Middle Ages the Royal Family continued to keep their court in Danube City.

Lower Danubia was a Roman border province that was occupied by ethnic Danubians after the Romans and the Huns abandoned it during the 5th Century. Lower Danubia had better farmland and trade links than the Rika Chorna valley, but was much more exposed to invasions and foreign influence because it did not have any natural protections. The 1,000-year history of Lower Danubia was much more typical for Europe during the Middle Ages: the Danubians in the area had to fight off several groups of invaders including Magyars, Slavs, and even Vikings.

The largest Danubian City during the late Middle ages was not Danbukt Mostk, but Sumy Ris, which was an important trading area and religious center. By the late 1400's, the elders of Sumy Ris hoped to eventually move the Royal Court and make their city the capitol of the Danubian Kingdom, in spite of its vulnerable location.

The reign of King Vladik and the Ottoman invasion of 1502

King Vladik was originally nicknamed "The Bastard" because his mother was a Byzantine noblewoman. She was neither Danubian nor Catholic, which offended the Bishop of Sumy Ris. To make matters worse, the independent-minded Prince Vladik ignored the influential seminary and took his religious training under the "old school" of the Danubian Church, which was considered heretical in Sumy Ris.

As for the Turks, Prince Vladik's mother was very aware of the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire because her ancestors had lost their holdings after the fall of Constantinople. She impressed on her son that he needed to learn everything he could about the Turks so that as king he would be ready to confront them should they ever invade Danubia. Under disguise, the Prince Vladik and a couple of his friends visited Belgrade and then Constantinople, and saw first-hand what he was likely to be up against after becoming king.

Upon taking the crown in 1499, King Vladik and his father's military advisors spent the first year of his reign surveying Danubia's defenses. What they saw was not encouraging at all. It was clear the southern Lords were not going to be reliable, Danubia's army was too small and primitive to face the Ottomans, and anyhow the territory of Lower Danubia was flat and completely indefensible. However, as he returned to Danube City, the difficult journey through the thick forests gave King Vladik an idea, the possibility of using the forests to his advantage in some way.

Most military historians believe that King Vladik was very right in his assessment that southern Danubia could not be defended. If the kingdom were to survive at all, the Danubian Army had to make its stand in an area where the terrain could mitigate the superior Ottoman numbers, armor, and firepower: i.e. the forests south of Danube City. Furthermore, King Vladik really did not have much motivation for preserving the power of the southern nobles and the Bishop of Sumy Ris, given that they were planning to move against him and Danube City to replace both the capitol and the Royal Family. However, he had a humanitarian concern for the people of the south and wanted to save as many of them as possible.

When the Ottomans invaded in the summer of 1502, there were two major battles in the south. The first was a defense put up by the lords of Sokukt Tok, in which the Danubians killed a lot of invading Ottoman force before being defeated. King Vladik and the elders of Sumy Ris took away two totally different lessons from the defeat. The Lords of Sumy Ris felt that the heavy casualties among the Turks meant that, with enough effort, they could be defeated after all. King Vladik knew otherwise. There were too many soldiers in the Ottoman empire and any lost troops would be replaced until the Danubians were ground down. Possibly the Ottomans could be defeated in a single battle, but then they would simply re-invade and hit the depleted Danubian Army. The trick to defeating the Ottomans was to avoid losing too many men in any particular battle, which meant avoiding a direct confrontation in open territory.

After the battle south of Sokukt Tok, the lower classes were in full panic and there was a lot of chaos in anticipation of the pending invasion. Responding to the threat, King Vladik and his small army rode south, putting themselves in danger by going beyond Sokukt Tok. Their purpose was not to confront the Turks on open land where they faced certain defeat, but instead to organize a massive evacuation of the entire southern half of the Danubian Kingdom and move the residents to the comparative safety of the north. King Vladik simply told the locals: "get out of here. Go north." The tenants and villagers were more than happy to join their King and flee northward, as were many lower caste knights who knew anything about Ottoman warfare.

The southern landowners were furious that their king was telling their subjects to abandon the area. When they tried to stop the evacuation, there was a brief civil war that pitted the King's Army, lower caste knights, and the peasants against the southern nobles, a fight the nobles quickly lost. Under the leadership of the King, the lower classes revolted against the landlords, burnt their property, and continued fleeing northward. A lot of southern peasants volunteered to join the king's army, which he employed to destroy everything that could be burnt to slow the Turkish advance. During its operations in Lower Danubia, King Vladik's army did confront the Turks, but only in skirmishes designed to delay the invasion and protect evacuating peasants.

The evacuation of Lower Danubia altered the balance of power in the Kingdom and destroyed the powerful southern landowners as a social class within days. The southern landlords were left with neither land nor tenants, and thus their influence was completely eliminated.

The "Martyrs of Sumy Ris"

The southern capitol of Sumy Ris was the final holdout in Lower Danubia against both the evacuation and the invasion. King Vladik wanted to evacuate and burn the city but, unlike the rest of southern Danubia, the local residents remained loyal to the city elders and the Bishop. The Bishop excommunicated the King and everyone else fleeing the south. The residents of Sumy Ris were sure God would protect them and strike down the traitor King. King Vladik had nothing more to say; he simply announced his army leaving and that any resident who wanted to go north with him was welcome to do so. Several hundred residents defied the Bishop and left with the King, but the majority stayed. Some of the Sumy Ris men sent their families with the King's army, but stayed behind to defend the city.

The Ottoman Army surrounded Sumy Ris in early August. The remaining residents of Sumy Ris bravely defended the city and inflicted a lot of casualties on the Ottomans. Their situation was hopeless, but they fought viciously day after day, even after the Turks managed to get into the city.

The battle of Sumy Ris saved King Vladik and his retreating army, because towards the end of the evacuation the mob of fleeing peasants was so large that it was barely manageable. Most of the civilians were fleeing on foot and it took days to organize them for the march north through the woods. There was a needed stop to gather food and water before the final trek north. Had Sumy Ris not been under siege at the time, the Turks easily would have caught up to King Vladik and slaughtered everyone with him.

Even after Sumy Ris fell, the Ottomans were delayed for several weeks as they reorganized, waited for re-enforcement, and executed the surviving residents of the city. That delay allowed King Vladik to get his followers to Danube City, gather up his troops, and return south to battle the Ottomans in the forest. The Ottoman commander, elated at the rout of the Danubians so far, took his troops into the forest assuming another easy victory lay ahead in Danube City. At that point the advantage shifted to King Vladik, because his army was still completely intact and he was able to battle the invaders in a location that was totally advantageous to the defenders. The Turkish firearms and siege cannons were useless in the forest. When the fall rains started the invading army was trapped, unable to either advance or retreat. Throughout the fall there was a brutal prolonged battle in which the Danubians killed the invaders at their leisure. The surviving Ottomans managed to break out of the forest in November and return to their encampment in Sumy Ris, but they had to leave behind all of their equipment.

The defenders of Sumy Ris became martyrs and national heroes. There is no doubt whatsoever that King Vladik had miscalculated how long the final phase of the evacuation of the south would take, and the only thing that saved him from that mistake was extra time granted to him by the siege. There was no doubt that had the residents of Sumy Ris evacuated with the king instead of making a last stand in their city, he would not have had the needed time to get everyone safely to Danube City and time to organize his defense in the forest.

"The heroes of Sumy Ris" became part of Danubian popular lore and became larger than life, a lot like the defenders of the Alamo. Even King Vladik went along with the story that the defenders of Sumy Ris selflessly volunteered to delay the Ottomans so he and everyone else could safely get away. The truth was that the defenders of Sumy Ris opposed King Vladik and their real motivation was to save their church and the Bishop, but it was so much easier to say that they willingly gave their lives for king and country. Every year the eastern provinces hold a festival in honor of the martyrs of Sumy Ris.

During the winter and spring of 1503, King Vladik and his advisors considered options to re-capture part of Lower Danubia and allow at least some of the evacuees to return home. He settled on a plan to conduct raids against the Ottoman Army from protected bases in the Danubian forest and harass the invaders until they withdrew from the territory north of Sumy Ris. King Vladik figured that Sokukt Tok was irrevocably lost, but there was a chance of forcing the Turks to negotiate returning the northern third of Lower Danubia if they were harassed enough.

During the summer of 1503 the Danubian Army encamped just inside the forest and conducted raids against the Ottoman troops occupying Lower Danubia. A group led by King Vladik made it as far as the ruins of Sumy Ris, goading the Turkish garrison to chase the Danubians into the forest and into ambushes. Heartened by his successes, King Vladik spent the winter of 1503-1504 planning another series of raids around Sumy Ris.

In May of 1504, King Vladik's men were ready to start moving south. The group was in very high spirits and looking forward to inflicting another summer of revenge on the Turks occupying Sumy Ris. Just a couple of days before the army was ready to depart, sentries from the northern border arrived to Danube City with the news that a large army from the Holy Roman Empire had invaded Danubia and was rapidly moving towards the Danubian capitol. Instead of marching south, King Vladik and his army had to march north. The Holy Roman soldiers were caught by surprise, because they had not expected the Danubians to already be mobilized and prepared for a major battle. The Danubians ambushed and defeated a Holy Roman army much bigger than their own, using the same tactics that were successful against the Turks.

The 1504 battle ended the King's hope of retaking Sumy Ris. It was late summer by the time the northern campaign concluded and the Danubian Army was in no condition to conduct another operation that year. However, the King's real problem was that he realized that if he faced a threat from the north as well as from the south, he could not risk moving his army too far from Danube City in either direction.

King Vladik and the Judicial Reforms of 1524

Prior to the rule of King Vladik the Defender in the early 16th Century, an offender was convicted of a crime by his local village council, collared by the village blacksmith, and then became subject to the person who had accused him. Village elders who, in many cases were handpicked by the area's most important landlords, issued the conviction.

It goes without saying that such a system was vulnerable to abuses. It was common for wealthier persons to falsely accuse villagers or tenants of crimes, have them convicted and collared, and then utilize them as slaves. The abuse became worse in the late 15th Century when the custodians of convicted criminals began selling them as real slaves to neighboring countries. As the abuse became more common, the Royal Family became concerned that the country could become depopulated if too many criminals were sold abroad. There was debate within the Royal Court over how to stop the practice, but given the power of the southern landlords, nothing much could be done until 1502, the year of the first invasion from the Ottoman Empire.

Nearly all slaves and collared criminals living in Lower Danubia threw their lot in with the King and participated in the evacuation. As the southern refugees crowded the valley around Danube City, the question arose over what to do about all the collared criminals among them. The King now had his opportunity to put an end to the de facto slavery system. He simply declared that all displaced criminals were under the custody of the Crown, since it made no sense to keep them accountable to landowners that no longer had any land and to the elders of villages that no longer existed. During the brief interlude of peace following the first Turkish invasion, the King ordered all displaced criminals from the south to be rounded up and sent to live in guarded dormitories near Danube City.

With nearly half of the criminals in the country now under his control, the King's next step was to figure out which ones were wrongly convicted of crimes and order them freed. He asked the Danubian Church to assign 20 priests to interview criminals and separate innocent people from ones who had truly committed crimes. King Vladik's purpose was not entirely altruistic, because he desperately needed more soldiers for his army. Any criminal wrongly convicted and willing to fight in the impending campaign against the Holy Roman Empire would be offered freedom. When the Turks invaded a second time, the offer of freedom was extended to any displaced criminal willing to fight in the Danubian Army.

By 1520 King Vladik had successfully fought four military campaigns, but with each war the number of men available to defend the kingdom had diminished. He needed more soldiers, and realized that criminals in the custody of the country's northern landlords could provide him with a much-needed group of new military recruits. He set about creating a new legal system to justify taking control of all remaining criminals in Upper Danubia, but his effort was interrupted by yet another invasion.

King Vladik finally issued the new judicial code in 1524, which was a far-reaching set of laws that consolidated power under the Crown. Among the reforms was an edict stating that the private custody of criminals had been abolished throughout the kingdom, and that all criminals had to travel to Danube City to place themselves under the custody and protection of the King. He appointed 10 advisors to replace the 20 priests to interview the newly acquired criminals to determine guilt or innocence. Those 10 men became Upper Danubia's first Spokesmen for the Criminals. They rode with detachments of soldiers to enforce the edict, and long columns of naked, collared criminals streamed towards the capitol and King Vladik's dormitories. The edict also created the national Danubian judicial system, abolishing the right of village counsels to conduct trials and issue sentences. After 1524 the only person who had the right to issue a sentence or order a criminal collared was an authorized representative of the Crown.

By the late 1520's the Danubian government became completely unconcerned about the criminals' pasts. Worried about another invasion, King Vladik simply ordered all criminals, even recently convicted ones, to train as soldiers while Danubian scouts nervously patrolled the forests bordering the now lost provinces of Lower Danubia. The feared invasion finally came in 1531. Nearly all of the country's remaining criminals, along with the King, his heir, and 80 percent of the country's men of military age, died in the forests south of Danube City fiercely defending the kingdom. The country itself survived, but just barely. However, the legal system created by King Vladik remained in place, as did the idea of keeping all criminals under the custody of the Crown.

The dormitory system for housing criminals remained in place throughout most of the 16th and 17th Centuries, due to fears of more invasions. However, over time the government tired of having to house and feed large numbers of criminals if there was no military necessity for doing so. In 1710, the Grand Duke established the Danube City collar-zone and allowed criminals to live with their families, but under the supervision of their Spokesmen. In 1780 the dormitories finally were torn down and the stones used to construct a new Parliament building.

A Duke instead of a King

King Vladik the Defender was killed in battle in 1531, during the final and most serious invasion of the country from the south. Nearly 70 percent of King Vladik's soldiers died in a series of fierce battles as the invaders slowly made their way through the forests towards Danube City. Finally, the king's only son, together with his son-in-law, rallied the survivors of the Danubian Army for one last attack to prevent the invaders from escaping the forests and besieging Danube City. King Vladik's son was killed, and his son-in-law crippled, but the Danubians won the battle.

The nation was stricken with grief, given that King Vladik and his only son were dead. The only living heirs to the throne were the King's daughter and her wounded husband. When offered the crown the dead King's son-in-law responded:

"I will rule, if that is what you wish. However, I have no right to be called King. Our true King has died defending our people, and I will leave his throne vacant so perhaps he can watch over us from the land of the dead."

King Vladik's son-in-law took the title of Grand Duke of Upper Danubia. From that point on the Danubian Royal Family always referred to themselves as Dukes instead of Kings.

"Wood Nymphs" - 16th Century female guerilla archers

In 1531, following the six military invasions that were successfully repelled by King Vladik, the Danubian Kingdom was a very different place than it had been prior to 1499, the year he took the crown. The most obvious change was the loss of the fertile manors of Lower Danubia and the transfer of nearly half the country's population to the much less fertile Eastern Valley. Another obvious change, especially in the region surrounding Danube City, was the absence of men. King Vladik's six military campaigns had decimated the male population, leaving barely 10 percent of all men of military age still alive. Of the survivors many, including the Grand Duke, were so badly crippled from battle that they were unable to perform normal chores. The situation was so extreme that the area around Danube City became known as "The Valley of Women".