Hanhsharah 02:47, February 23, 2010 (UTC)
The Imperial Flag of the Djengid Empire
History of the Grand Djengid Empire and Its Rulers
705 – 1412 CT
The political, military and cultural design that would become the Grand Djengid Empire was initiated in the early weeks of spring of the year 705 of the Common Times. It was set in motion by a man of unquestionably humble origins, from a poor region of a forgotten realm. Yet this man would rise from his modest beginnings to found and create one of the greatest empires of known history.
Teyour the Great (The Founding)
Teyour Upaushin was the third son of Kayadh Palipat, a lower level vassal (emir) of the Merkhan of the Ogodid imperial domain; he was born to the emir in 660 CT. Kayadh was the native leader of a group of people called the Djengids, longtime servants and accomplices of the Ogodids. At the age of seven, the young prince lost his father to the Ogodid barbarians, who promptly exiled the boy’s family to the harsh wilderness of the Great Desert to the east. Somewhere between 670 and 680 CT, the young Teyour became head of the family in exile. He accomplished this after murdering his two older brothers. By 685 though, we do know that young Teyour was also the head of a small clan of outsiders (called Vokhurs) that roamed the wastes of the Great Desert, raiding and pillaging wherever they could to survive. We also know that at around 690, Teyour’s Vokhurs were pacified by a substantial sum of money from the Merkhan and that the young leader himself was employed by the Ogodid lord as a bondsman. It is from here, that we see Teyour’s rapid rise in power and prestige over the next decade.
In 692, the Farqadin, a vicious group of tribal confederations, invaded Ogodid territory from the south. The Merkhan sent Teyour to deal with these murderous bandits (likely assuming that the young commander would be killed and thus no longer a rival). However, Teyour was victorious over the Farqadin and was later praised by the Ogodid people and his native Djengids. Fearing his growing power and popularity, the Merkhan tried to have Teyour killed, but the young prince fled and gathered support from the tribes. Soon after, he defeated the Merkhan in battle and the old Ogodid lord fled back into his own lands. Teyour went on to unify his native Djengid people and later conquer the Ogodid nation.
Immediately after his conquest of the Ogodids and the deposition of the Merkhan, Teyour was proclaimed Teyour Idu-Bawakh, Teyour the Great. Simultaneously, he was proclaimed: Shakhan (or supreme ruler) of the Djengids and Ogodids. When Teyour the Great was crowned Shakhan in 705, the Grand Djengid Empire was born. The great Shakhan later made the Djengids the greatest power in the east, when he conquered such lands as: the Sawadhi Sultanate, the Daryusha Farqadin Empire, the great Tarascan provinces, the Nemadian coast and the city of Fars, and the Yurgan steppe between the Sea of Yaz and the Tulian lands.
Teyour conquered and subjugated more land and people than any other one man in history. His legacy would survive for over seven-hundred years after his death in 721.
The Golden Age
What is known as the Djengid Golden Age technically began at around 769 CT, with the beginning of the reign of Feruuq the Just, although some argue that it began long before, with the beginning of Teyour the Great’s reign in 705, sixty-four years earlier. But all historians agree that the Djengid Golden Age was the height of Djengid culture and political accomplishment worldwide.
The Golden Age truly began, as I have said, with the momentous reign of Feruuq the Just, which began in 769 CT. At the start of his sixteen-year rule, Feruuq was already a reformist leader: he moved the imperial capital from Tarascus to the provincial city of Pahlvash and began an enormous building project using Kyazantian building styles, he was the first Sukhoshan Shakhan; his support of the Sukhoshan order allowed the sect to rise in popularity during his reign and in his fifth year, while Pahlvash was being refurbished, he wrote the Djengid Codex.
The Codex was an extensive system of laws that Feruuq and his close ministers drew up during the winter of 774 while the city building project was in hibernation. With the Codex, Feruuq stabilized the empire with extensive laws and acts. By 779, the Codex had effectively been forced on all inhabitants of the empire. Opposition to the Codex was stomped out during the first decade of its establishment. Although no original manuscript of the Djengid Codex survives to this day (most were likely destroyed in the Great Fire of Pahlvash in 1233), at least one copy is believed to have endured. The supposed copy is known as the Ezfash Documents, and today resides at the State Museum in Pahlvash.
The death of Feruuq in 785 was a blow to the stability of the Djengid dominion, which fell into a short decline during the reign of his first son, Uwuad. The empire’s short period of decline at this time was due to Uwuad’s poor management of his father’s new system of laws. He ignored his father’s old advisors and attempted to run everything as he saw fit. His brief reign of seven years was brought to an abrupt end due to gangrene contracted during a hunt in 792.
Uwuad was succeeded by his brother, Quradhush, a favorite at court. Quradhush was a maverick emperor in his day, and in large part a continuer of his father’s subversive policies. His reign began in 792 and went until 833, he ruled for 41 years, making his reign the longest in Djengid history. He was also the second of the Sukhoshan Djengid rulers, the first being his father. Other reforms include: the changing of the imperial language and chief business speech from Uriang to Xsayarsan, and the abolition of the old imperial title of Shakhan in favor of the Xsayarsan title, Hanhsharah (or high/holy emperor). Both of these political movements were to enmesh Xsayarsan culture with his own Djengid, within his lifetime, this would take place.
Original Djengid culture became a rarity at best in the empire by 800. This was due, in large part, to the actions of Qizar Pasah. Qizar was an Xsayarsan noble of pure Xsayarsan blood, meaning his family went all the way back to the old Zafaid Empire before the Sarasian takeover; in 788, Uwuad made him Atafazar or “great minister” of the empire. When Uwuad died in 792, it was Qizar that arranged for the popularity of Quradhush to land him on the imperial throne. The friendship between Qizar and Quradhush would be a lasting politically reciprocal agreement between the two men for many years.
Quradhush’s main goal in life was to make the Djengid people and culture the dominant political and cultural force in the world. He planned to make that so in a series of far-reaching military campaigns throughout the world. First, he would march on the Yurgan khanates of the north, between the Sea of Yaz and the Tulians even farther north.
The Yurgans had been conquered under Teyour the Great and his son, Kawadi-Maluk by 721. Teyour died that year, leaving his son as Shakhan to complete the invasion. Even though the Yurgans had been under Djengid hegemony for almost seventy years, they regained a large degree of autonomy during the debacle that was Uwuad’s reign. Quradhush planned to place these steppe barbarians under his control once and for all. Although a difficult and arduous campaign into the far north, the great Yurgan revolt of 794 was put down in a little over three years, and effectively was ended by early 798. But Quradhush’s movements in the far north attracted attention from the Tulian principalities, which began pirate incursions into Djengid territory by the beginning of 799.
The Tulians were a Tulchan people who presumably migrated east following the mighty Selgu and Mutzur rivers. By the early 600s, they had established several city-states around the Selgu River and the Great East Sea. Due to their mastery of the waterways and sea travel, the Tulians became great traders along the northern coast of the Great East Sea, which also led to them becoming the dominant pirating force in those waters. Quradhush invaded the small Tulian fiefdoms in 799, immediately cutting their line to the sea with a massive fleet set out from Irra. By 801, he had efficiently sacked and destroyed the major cities of the region and was converging on the last of the Tulian resistance. In 802 he destroyed the Kingdom of Potzk, the last great Tulian city-state.
With the Tulians neutralized the Yurgans put-down and the empire in a state of steep financial augmentation, Quradhush intended to return home to Pahlvash. But his extensive campaigns in the north had angered a great number of other nations, including the vicious Solugu khanates, the terrible Mazar chiefdoms and the wicked Black Katai kingdoms. All were now poised to launch themselves upon the tired and war-beaten armies of the Djengid Empire.
Quradhush reevaluated his position and instead decided not to return to Pahlvash. Instead he drew upon his resources at the front (however little) and made a counter-offensive against the tribes. He burned the pastures, diverted the rivers to flood, slaughtered the wild animals and was merciless to captured prisoners. His terror tactics and total war strategy handed him victory after victory against the numerically superior tribal armies. The Solugu surrendered in 806 and their allies the Red Mazar followed suit soon after in 807. The last tribal alliance set against Quradhush was the White Katai tribe, who fell in 809. With the fall of the White Katai, the Djengid Empire was the sovereign over every land between the plains of east Marka and the Great Desert.
Quradhush was now the most powerful ruler in the world, reigning over the greatest empire the world had ever seen. But the voracious emperor was not satisfied with a fifth of the world at his command. In late 809, he drew up a plan to conquer the powers of Tulchaira and rule the entire continent.
By 810, the man now called “Quradhush the Glorious” was marching on the great city of Kyazan, old capitol of the now bereft Kyazantian Empire. Two days before New Year, the city was taken and the Kyazantian domain was assimilated into the Djengid hegemony. Next, Quradhush moved to bring his lands in the north together with his new holdings in Sarna, thus bringing Djengid territory all the way around the Sea of Yaz.
By the end of 812, all of Sarna and the eastern regions of Tulchaira were under the rule of the unstoppable Djengids. Fear of Djengid dominance throughout all of Tulchaira enticed the Markan Empire, a middle Tulchairan state to attack the Djengids from the west. The Markans were a devoutly religious people that followed Aldirism; a violent religion that sought to destroy other beliefs believed as daemonic, the Sukhoshan doctrine was believed as such by the Aldirists. The remainder of Quradhush’s campaign on the Tulchairan continent would be occupied with his constant wars with the Markans and their allies.
In 816, Quradhush laid siege to the Markan capitol, Hohsburg. This was as far west as the Djengid’s would ever come with their empire. The siege of Hohsburg was the culmination of Quradhush’s great westward campaign. Although he failed to take the entire continent, he did extend Djengid and Sukhoshan culture farther than any before him and any since.
Hohsburg was the height of Quradhush’s popularity with the military, as he had led them to victory after victory over their Aldirist enemies. But after his defeat by the Markans at their greatest stronghold, his fame gradually began to decline throughout the military and the empire. Over the next three years, the Djengids would suffer several defeats by the Markans, who would drive them back to Sarna by 819. Quradhush secured his possessions in the west with the Great Treaty of Tirof, but the Djengids would never reach farther than when the glorious emperor led them to the walls of Hohsburg.
Quradhush returned to Pahlvash with a greatly diminished popularity among the common people of the empire. In 824, he retired from government life and stayed largely within the palace complex of Pahlvash, leaving the politics to his son, Duud-Sharh and the Atafazar, old Qizar Pasah. When he died in 833, he left the largest and most powerful state in the world to its fate. He had married his thirty-five daughters to various princes and lords of both the empire and other states, and fathered over seventy-five children. He had over two-hundred grandchildren one of these was the Hanhsharah Feruuq II. He ruled for forty-one years and died at the unprecedented age of eighty-eight.
At the death of Quradhush the Glorious, the empire began to very slowly decline. Under the next few generations, the power of the Djengids was maintained across the globe. But under Feruuq IV, their might began to wane. After a brutal suppression of the Sarasian peoples, the emperor Ordhan II was assassinated by dissident nationalists and the empire fell into chaos, thus ending the first and greatest dynasty of the Grand Djengid Empire.
The First Descent
Following the murder of Ordhan II, the empire nearly fell apart. The outer provinces threatened to break away, the regional lords fought each other for resources and land, religious rifts began to form between various factions and the imperial government lost more and more central authority. This went on for about a year until a relative of Ordhan II, named Uzked, rallied the imperial army and staged a brutal purge of the capitol and the regional lords. Within two years, he reestablished imperial authority and a Hanhsharah was back on the throne.