Blachernae, early October 1438
There was no leaf of paper for this meeting, the last and the smallest of the three days' councils. No clerk at the door, no names set in type, no hour struck: only a word passed to four men as the great council broke up the evening before, and a room found for them the next morning.
It was the oldest working room in the palace, low-ceilinged, its one window looking north over the city toward the water. The map board stood on its trestles as it had stood since the first autumn after the city came home, the marble weights in a row along its lower edge. A servant lit the brazier against the October chill, set down wine that no one had thought to water, and went out, and the door closed on the five of them: Constantine, Thomas, Andreas, George, and Theophilus.
Thomas had his boots up on the second chair before the door had finished shutting. Theophilus, who had the habit of arriving cold, sat as near the brazier as he could without singeing. George set his folder of reports on the table.
"The east, then," George said. "Start with what we know, before we decide anything."
"We know Orhan is dead," Thomas said.
"We do. Yakub's men ran him down above Mylasa, and his own turned on him at the end — and then Yakub buried him at Bursa with a prince's rites and hanged the men who did it."
"That tells you how he means to rule," Thomas said.
"It does." George turned a hand over.
"We should have backed Orhan harder," Constantine said. "When we had the chance. A rival in Anatolia was worth more to us than gold, and we let him fight Yakub on his own purse."
"You'd have thrown good silver after a dead man," Andreas said. "He didn't wait for us. We told him to hold; he went early, and Yakub closed on him. He rushed it. That's not on us."
George went on. "Cairo has recognized the boy Ali, with Yakub regent for him. There's a peace with Karaman now, Cairo standing guarantor. So for the first time since we broke Murad and took the city, the Ottomans have a quiet year coming: no rival prince, no war in the east, a sultan the law recognizes." He sat back. "They get to breathe."
"And a man who can breathe can stand up," Andreas said. He said it mildly, turning his cup. "We have spent two winters watching that house come apart. It is not coming apart anymore. Yakub seems a decent enough soldier, but he does not need to be a great one. He needs time, and Cairo has just handed it to him."
"Then he should not have it." Thomas took his boots down off the chair. "Every season we sit here being prudent, he spends putting that house back together."
"What about the people there," Constantine said. "Before we talk armies."
George did open the folder then, to one leaf. "Mark of Ephesus's new register, checked twice. Once through the metropolitans, once through the traders who actually go there. Inland it is thin. Fewer than twenty sees in all the interior still have a living bishop. But the coast is another matter. Nicomedia, the whole gulf, the old cities down the water, Smyrna, Mylasa among them: they are still full of Romans, still ours in everything but the tax they pay. The register says it plainly: stand an imperial army off those walls and the gates open from the inside." He closed the leaf. "Which is also the danger. Open a man's gate for you and you have made him a traitor to whoever holds it after. If we land and cannot hold, we will have marked those towns for the sword and sailed away."
"We would not be sailing away." Thomas had stood now, and gone to the board. "These are not adventures across the sea. Look." He set two fingers on the near coast, the short water between the city and the Asian shore. "Ieros Skopos is not a sermon, brother, it is a map. The sacred work is right there, close enough to row to. The faithful are waiting in those towns, they have been waiting eighty years. And you said it yourself, after the count came back: the empire is short of people. Not soldiers. People. Romans. Christians who will pay a Roman tax and raise Roman sons." He tapped the coast again. "They are sitting over there. Behind walls we can reach in a day."
"That is true." Constantine looked at the board and not at his brother. "The count was thinner than any of us wanted. And many of us in this room have roots on that side of the water."
Andreas inclined his head. "Nicomedia. My grandfather's people farmed above the gulf before the Turk came over it." He said it the way he might name a road he had marched, then moved past it. "Old history. It changes nothing on the map." A small shrug. "Those are some of the empire's core lands. Not conquests. Recoveries. There is a difference, and the men will feel it."
For a while no one ruled on anything. The brazier ticked. Theophilus had been quiet through all of it, warming his hands, and now he spoke.
"May I be the unwelcome voice, as is apparently my office." A dry murmur from Thomas. "I am not against this. I want to be clear, because what I am about to say will sound against it. The treasury has never been healthier. And we have spent like men possessed: the buildings, the academy, the harbor, the mines, the Italians, the ships, the legions. I signed every line of it gladly. It all pays. That is the point." A short pause. "We are rebuilding the empire, and it is working. One more year of this, every coin into furnaces and hulls and trained men, and what we cross the water with the year after is twice next summer's army, out of surplus, not out of hope. So I do not say slow down. I say pour harder. Just not into a war. Not yet."
"And the first thing that dies the day we vote for war," he added, "is the Tachis Ippos. Promised north three years running. Postponed three years running. It will go again. A campaign eats exactly the silver that line needs. It always does."
"It always does," Constantine agreed, almost amused. "You have buried that poor network in every budget."
"Because it is the easiest thing to cut, but my point stands. One more year. Build. Then cross twice as strong."
"In that year," Thomas said, "Yakub finishes his walls, gets his peace ratified, and has a Cairo qadi blessing his every breath. You are asking us to let him grow strong so that we can be tidy about the bookkeeping."
"I am asking us not to spend the strongest position the empire has held in a century on a hurry."
George spoke before Thomas could answer. "Theophilus is right to be cautious. But my reason is different from his." He went to the board, to the wider east. "It's what the neighbors do. Suppose we move on Yakub. Karaman has just made peace with him under Cairo's seal. Do they sit still while we dismember the man Cairo just recognized? And Amasya, by Trebizond's own reckoning, is sharpening for a war of its own out east. We do not know which way any of them jumps. The clean answer is to find out before we sail, not after. We should send to Karaman and to Amasya both, quietly, and offer an understanding — we have no quarrel with you, stay out of this and you keep your peace. Better to spend a winter on envoys than a summer discovering we have three enemies instead of one."
"Send the envoys," Constantine said. "That much we do regardless of the rest. George, draft them. And see that Trebizond gets what we promised when the spring opens the sea. They should not find us slow."
Thomas was shaking his head, but not at the envoys. "Karaman will not fight us. Listen. We broke Murad. We broke the army that held all of this, end to end, and what is left in Anatolia now is the pieces. Yakub's people, Amasya's, Karaman's — every one of them is smaller than the host we already beat, and we are not the army that beat it. Next year we will have two legions and three times the guns we fielded then. If Karaman is foolish enough to march, we will hand them what we handed Murad, and the loot will help pay for the next leg." He looked round the table. "I am not saying it to be bold. We are not the weak ones in this anymore, and we keep speaking as if we still are."
"He's not wrong," Andreas said. "I'd say it with less relish, but he's not wrong. The strength has shifted our way."A glance at Thomas that took the edge off. "But two legions is the part we should be honest about. I cannot have the second legion ready to march by spring. Mustering, kitting, drilling it into something that will hold a line under fire is summer's work, not winter's. And I will not strip the garrisons to do it faster. We hollowed out the garrisons once; I would rather be a season late than do it again." He turned his cup. "If recruitment holds through the winter the way it ran this autumn, we will not have to. But that is an if."
"We could ask Serbia," Thomas said. "Katarina's father would send men. He owes us that and more."
"Ask my dear father-in-law for men and you know exactly what comes back," Constantine said. "First the men, then the letters. One asking for cannon, the next for more cannon, the one after that for muskets, and then the wars of his own he will need those men to fight. Grain we can ask him for. Not soldiers."
Theophilus set his cup down with a small, deliberate click, and looked straight at Constantine. "Your wife is with child in the spring. You marched within months of Zoe being born, last time. Are we now planning for you to ride off to Anatolia a few months after this one comes?"
The room went quieter. Constantine did not answer at once.
"No," he said finally. "That is not a thing I will do." He said it without heat; it was plainly true, and plainly something he had not let himself look at until Theophilus put it on the table. "Whatever we decide, it does not have me crossing the water in April with a newborn behind me."
"Spring is closing anyway," George said, gently, into the pause. "Even leaving the child aside. The legates for Florence sail in spring — the Pope's letter sat half the summer at sea and reached us only this month; we cannot answer it before the weather opens. The first stage of the council sits next year, and our men have to be on those ships." He hesitated, then risked it. "Which makes me wonder whether the Pope might be brought to see an eastern campaign as something he would want to bless. A crusade in all but name. If we are going to Anatolia anyway —"
"No." Constantine said it without sharpness but without any give. "We do not hang this on Rome, and we do not let Rome hang anything on us. The council is one matter and Anatolia is another, and the day they become the same matter is the day we have handed the Latins a lever on both. Let the legates argue theology in Florence. The army is ours alone." George let it go.
It was Andreas who turned the talk, finally, from whether to how. He stood and went to the board, and the room came with him.
"Then put spring out of your heads, all of you, and look at the year as it actually runs." He set his hand on the near coast. "If the second legion is not march-ready until summer, then we do not waste spring grieving over it — we use it. Envoys out, as George says. The fleet works the strait and the gulf, learns the water, lands the first stores where we will want them. And we march in the back half of August, when the harvest is in and the heat is breaking." His finger moved as he spoke. "Bursa first, and the new siege pieces were cast for exactly that wall. Take Bursa and the rest looks over its shoulder. Then west to Biga, then down the coast, the cities along the water, every one of them within reach of the fleet's guns from the sea while we come at them from the land." He straightened. "I am a cautious man. Everyone at this table will tell you I am the cautious one. And I am telling you I do not see how this campaign fails, not with the guns we now have against the walls they have. A short, hard autumn campaign. We could be wintering in Smyrna."
"And Kütahya," Thomas said. "Push inland, take the throat of the country, not just the shore."
"Smyrna yes." Andreas did not commit further. "Kütahya, no. The moment we go inland we are away from the fleet and into Karaman's reach, and then the neighbors stop being a worry and start being an army on our flank."
"Andreas has the shape of it right," Constantine said. "And the shape is most of the decision." He had come to the board too now. "We keep to the water and the coast, the core, the towns that will open. We do not chase the interior, Thomas, however good it looks on the map. One bite we can hold beats two we cannot."
There was a second round of it after that, shorter and hotter: Thomas pushing the interior, Andreas holding the coast, Theophilus reminding them twice what each extra week of campaign did to the books, George worrying the envoys and the Serbian grain. Constantine let it run again, and put in little: that is fair; that is true; we can decide that in the spring. He had learned long ago that men argued their way to a decision better than they were argued into one, and that his part was mostly to know when the arguing was done.
"So." He set his cup down and they quieted. "Not spring. The spring is the child's, and the legates', and the second legion's mustering." A nod to Theophilus, who had won that much. "But not the year after, either. Theophilus, you want to build, and you are right that building pays. But every year we let the Ottomans set is a year that makes this campaign longer and dearer when we finally fight it, and we will finally fight it, there is no version of this where we share Anatolia with them forever. The cheap war is the early one." He laid his palm on the near coast. "Late August, next year, if — and I want every man here to hear the if — if recruitment holds and the legion is ready without gutting the garrisons, if the envoys come back with Karaman and Amasya sitting on their hands, if the harvest is good and the fleet has the water learned. If all of that holds, we go in the back half of next summer, by the plan Andreas has drawn, to the coast and no further. And if it does not hold, we wait, and we build, and we go the year after with everything Theophilus wants. Either way the Tachis Ippos gets built, because I am tired of hearing him mourn it." That got the laugh that closed it.
They went out by ones and twos, Thomas last, clapping his brother's shoulder on the way, already three months into a campaign that was a year from starting. Constantine stayed.
He went to the window. The city ran down toward the water in the flat early light, smoke standing up here and there from the morning fires, the walls grey rather than black now against a paling sky. And away to the south west, past the rooftops, a heavier column climbed and did not thin — the works, the furnaces that did not stop for night or feast or council, eating charcoal and breathing iron while half the city was still asleep behind it. He stood and watched the smoke a while. It was a good thing to see, at the end of a morning spent deciding how to spend it.
Author note:
The Anatolian campaign begins! The complete campaign is on Patreon: fifteen chapters ahead, with campaign maps and side stories following Jonas Gutenberg and Jacques Cœur.