2 Jun 1457 - The Knights Hospitaller attack Cyprus. The Mamlukes come to their aid, but are in turn attacked by the Ottoman Empire. With Venetian aid the Mamluke fleet is destroyed and Cyprus is taken.
1 Apr 1458 - The Venetians botch their amphibious assault of Benghazi, turning an easy victory into a crushing defeat. All 5,000 Knights in Benghazi are killed.
14 Feb 1460 - All attempts at landing in Cyprus and Egypt having so far failed, victory is granted to the Knights after the Ottoman Turks overrun Damascus and allow the Knights to force the Mamlukes into a truce. The Mamlukes divert all their attention to the Turks whilst the Venetians and Knights successfully take Cyprus.
8 May 1460 - The Hungarians invade Venice whilst their troops are in Cyprus. This begins the long process of Venice's fall from grace, being picked apart by her neighbours.
19 March 1470 - The Ottoman Empire invades Moldavia with collaboration from Bohemia and help from Tunis. Moldavian soldiers and the Knights' small privateer fleet of 15 ships are all that stop the Ottomans from taking over Poland whilst Brandenburg and Poland deal with Bohemia.
15 December 1472 - After two years of fighting, the Poles and Germans finally deal with Bohemia and march south, scoring a great victory at the battle of Podolia killing 15,000 Turks. Unfortunately for them they were still outnumbered by 40,000 more Turks. The war is ultimately lost and all of Moldavia taken, the only consolation is that the Turks were stopped from entering expanding into Poland.
5 Jan 1480 -
The Knights gain their first cardinal in Cyprus. With the onset of the reformation and Lithuania converting to Orthodoxy, it would not be the last, and would herald the Knights' increasing importance in holding back the Ottoman war machine from swallowing Christendom whole.
17 Apr 1482 - Crete is annexed by the Knights.
26 Nov 1484 - The Brother of Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II is taken hostage by Privateers that looked suspiciously like the Order of Saint John, in spite of an agreement between the Sultan and the Order to not harry Ottoman shipping. The Knights grow 500 ducats richer with Hungarian patronage and fund construction of an even larger, more modern fleet.
18 May 1486 - Not feeling safe with foreign ships in the Aegean anymore, the Ottoman Sultan invades the Venetian and Genoese islands of Chios, Naxos, Euboea and Corfu. With a fleet of 17 ships the Knights gain control over the Aegean against an Ottoman fleet twice its size. A brief moment of victory was possible, but a misunderstanding of the Ottoman forces' ability to cross straits they controlled led to death and defeat. In spite of the Knights' best efforts, every single island was lost and soon only the Order's own islands stood in the Ottoman Empire's way.
14 Jun 1494 -
The Ottoman Sultan makes it his mission to conquer Rhodes. The Order desperately seeks allies and finds the Papacy willing and the Hungarians possibly willing. In the preparation for invasion the Ottomans begin expanding into Anatolia, the Caucasus and Egypt.
12 Jul 1503 - Theodoro is alongside Circassia forcibly vassalized by the Crimean Khanate.
Together the two Orthodox vassals fight and gain independence with Lithuanian support; the small enclave of Theodoro would gradually take over all of the Crimea and even dominate Circassia. The initial reaction from the Grandmaster of the Order was jubilant, as the Christians had overthrown and destroyed an Ottoman ally from within - things were surely getting better!
The Grandmaster's optimism was however, misplaced, as the Theodorans decided they did not like Catholic sailors in their midst, sparking a rivalry with the Knights that was not reciprocated. Audaciously, the Knights began launching surprise privateer raids on Constantinople and in riskier times Aleppo to cause severe economic damage to the Ottomans with what few resources the Knights had at their disposal. It would not be nearly enough to stop them, but it slowed them down.
1 Sep 1507 -
Patriotic merchants begin constructing and donating heavy warships to the Order. The Grandmaster is astonished as these ships were well outside of his own budget range, and is immensely thankful. Through a few more patriotic donations and discount purchases from the Ottoman (merchant plundering), the Order's Navy grows.
1 Feb 1511 - The Protestant Reformation begins. The Grandmaster is too busy fighting Barbary Corsairs and Sea Turks to notice. The Livonian and Teutonic Orders however do notice, and do not survive the Reformation, becoming extinct.
1 Oct 1511 - Audacious privateering has by the Knights resulted in 8% of all Ottoman merchant ships in the Aegean and Black Sea to be captured and looted by the Order.
26 Aug 1512 -
The Knights send Hungary a large gift with what little money they have, hoping to secure an alliance. The Hungarians ultimately decide against alliance, with the number of Hungarian nobles in favour and against an alliance being exactly 50/50. One of the chief concerns the Hungarians have is being pulled into a war against the Ottomans in order to defend some inconsequential islands they don't own, whilst they gambled on Poland being able to stop the Ottoman forces from expanding further.
29 Jun 1515 - The Ottoman forces do not invade Rhodes or Cyprus, instead choosing to attack the Hungarians. Even with Spanish and Austrian help the Hungarian forces are devastated; the Knights once more approach the Hungarians, this time from a position of greater strength and the smugness of being right. The Hungarians accept and the Knights join the war.
27 Jul 1517 - the Knights and the Iberian Navy gain naval supremacy over the Ottoman navy. Whilst the combined Austro-Hungarian-Spanish land army repels the Ottoman army in Hungary, the Grandmaster launches devastating marine assaults that capture all of southern Greece and its most important islands, having learned from the initial disastrous defence of Euboea how to evade Ottoman armies and capture undefended outposts.
5 Jul 1518 - the war is won. The Hungarians take over much of Serbia and give 2 ducats to the Knights as thanks, dashing the Knights' hopes of gaining one of the Aegean islands.
18 Jul 1519 - having been given nothing by the Hungarians the Knights soon reached the logistical extremes of supplying their fleet, they were close to absolute breaking point.
To cope they declared war on the minor Turkish Kingdom of Karaman, the last Turkish state yet to be conquered by the Ottoman Empire.
The initial naval invasion of Karaman ends in dismal failure, resulting in the deaths of 13,000 of the Knight's soldiers without any land gained. Realizing that losing the war would actually result in total destruction, defeat was not an option.
9 Jul 1520 -
the Knights hire a single band of mercenaries to launch a daring raid on Damietta. Having no other armies at their disposal, this was life or death for the Knights; whether these expendables succeeded or not would determine the fate of the war, the fate of the Order.
24 Jul 1522 - the raid on Damietta was a success that saw half the Mamluk fleet destroyed and the other half crippled, allowing the Knights' fleet to blockade all of the Meditteranean. The Karamanese troops would cross the Ottoman lands to recapture Damietta (as the Mamluk forces were fighting in Yemen), only to find the Ottomans had canceled their military access last minute and refused to let them return home to fight. This allowed the Knights to rebuild their army and take Karaman with very little resistance.
1 Aug 1524 - Karaman is vassalized by the Knights, who demand they convert to Catholicism. During this the Ottoman forces take control of all of the lands along the Euphrates up to the border of the Persian Empire.
25 Sep 1522 - Portugal is annexed by Spain via military conquest. All that remains of Portugal are three small colonies, its Atlantic islands and its holdings in Morocco - not enough to fund more colonization and not enough to stop Tunisian aggression, effectively reducing the Portuguese Empire to irrelevance.
5 Jan 1548 - Crete becomes home to a new Cardinal.
17 Mar 1549 - Karaman declares a war for independence with support from Theodoro and Tunisia. Lacking the maritime projection capabilities and naval base needed to strike Theodoro, the Knights content themselves with destroying the Barbary corsair fleet and looting Karaman.
12 Oct 1550 - the Barbary fleet is destroyed, however its army is too large to be challenged. The Knights and her allies take a payment of 110 ducats in exchange for peace, and the Knights also take over the island of Djerba from the Tunisians.
13 Oct 1550 -
The Karamanese diplomat in Cyprus reveals that the Ottoman Empire is attacking Adana. This results in a massive doom coalition of Tunis, Theodoro, Karaman, the Knights, Venice, the Papal State, Hungary and France vs the Ottoman Empire.
23 Apr 1553 - Karaman had fallen whilst Venetians, Frenchmen and Hungarians fought the Turks in the West. The Barbary Corsairs and the Knights both could not afford to lose their soldiers as reinforcement was not a likely prospect,
so they chose instead to strike the Empire instead of help the Western allies. With often just
a day being the difference between a raiding party succeeding or being caught by an Ottoman army, the Bosphorous strait was severed and the Ottoman army trapped in Western Europe. With naval supremacy achieved, victory was certain. The Ottoman Empire would fall.
23 Dec 1554 -
With the liberation of Karaman underway and half of Anatolia occupied, the Knights were about to strike a fatal blow upon the Ottoman Empire from which there could be no recovery. That is until 70,000 Ottoman soldiers appeared from the East - soldiers who had been allowed passage by Theodoran incompetence and Circassian and Lithuanian compliance. In their effort to doom their rivals, they in turn doomed themselves. The Knights raced to capture Adana before the Turks attacked in order to force more favourable terms. They succeeded, but it was highly demoralizing to see a crushing victory turn into a Pyrrhic defeat.
Karaman was reduced to Icel and the Knights had to pay the Ottoman forces 51 ducats.This would set the trend for Theodoro, their Circassian neighbour and Lithuania royally fucking everything up. The only good thing to arise from the fires of this war was that Karaman resolved
to fight with the Knights unto the end. It seemed the end was near for them however, and so they were made a March - to make the Turks pay dearly just that little bit more to take Icel.
19 Sep 1561 - What is left of Venice completely annexed by a combined army of Austria, England, Florence and Milan. The Knights are helpless but to watch as Venice itself is besieged under the auspices of the English Royal Navy. Officially the Grandmaster would claim this was just a policy of refusing to interfere in the politics of Christians, but alas it did wound to just watch faithful allies be picked apart.
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Topic: Europa Universalis IV (Read 451577 times)