Second Empire of Trabzon (1983: Doomsday)

The Second Empire of Trabzon is an unrecognized state unilaterally established in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland by Altan Sahin, a former army officer active during the vicious border war which swiftly erupted in the Caucasus following the Doomsday catastrophe. An aging Sahin has functioned as the region's de facto monarch since 1983. His little fiefdom originally claimed unofficial descent from the former Empire of Trebizond, a medieval Byzantine polity, although Trabzon remains a thoroughly Turkish state. It has been supported by Georgia, Armenia, and other Wasteland factions as an aggressive buffer zone against post-Doomsday's expanding Turkish Sultanate.

Pre-Doomsday
Trabzon, historically known as Trapezus and Trebizond, formed the basis of several states in its long history and was the capital city of the so-called "Empire of Trebizond" between 1204 and 1461. Geographically, the first empire never enveloped more than the southern coast of the Black Sea. Its demographic legacy, however, endured for several centuries following a Turkish annexation in 1461 and a substantial number of Greek Orthodox inhabitants remained in the area until the early 20th century.

Trabzon was the site of several clashes between Russia and the declining Ottoman Empire during World War I, and was occupied by Moscow until 1917. Around this time, the city's Greek inhabitants began pushing strongly for the creation of their own Hellenic state, a move initially backed by the leading Allied Powers. A republican flag, bearing the one-headed eagle of Trebizond's Great Komnenus, was even hoisted. However, this proposal collapsed in the face of Turkish opposition and Trabzon rejoined Istanbul in 1923.

Doomsday
In 1983, Doomsday came suddenly for the Republic of Turkey and enacted a crippling toll. Due to Turkish proximity to the Soviet Union and their NATO status, Ankara and Istanbul, among other sites, were prime targets for Moscow's wrath. In the wake of the resulting nuclear barrage, a desperate border war erupted around the Caucasus region as NATO forces quickly mobilized to halt any anticipated conventional strikes by Soviet units operating from Georgia, Armenia, or Azerbaijan.

With some difficulty, the conflict was eventually shifted into Georgian territory, but mass desertion, a breakdown in basic communications, and severe logistics problems continued to plague both sides. Mutinies by officers even at the command level were not uncommon; one especially prominent example was Altan Sahin, a brigadier general with Turkey's 11th Corps. Deeming the tactical situation untenable and protesting the redeployment of his mechanized battalions into a contaminated disputed zone near Patnos, he achieved notoriety for placing several immediate superiors under arrest and effectively nullifying the 11th Corps as a cohesive formation.

Taking what units would follow him, Sahin withdrew from the Soviet front towards Trabzon, which he occupied shortly after the morning of November 3. Due to the confusion which had already overtaken the city, local Gendarmerie and security forces welcomed Sahin's assistance in restoring order. Nevertheless, the garrison at Trabzon Air Base, which had played a significant role in the Caucasus campaign, refused to accept this illegal authority and stood to arms. They eventually yielded after two hours, fearing that their opponents would deny landing to returning military aircraft.

Establishment of the Empire
With Brigadier Sahin presiding as unofficial commissioner, a more rigorous degree of martial law was swiftly applied to Trabzon and expanded into the surrounding districts. One account maintains that during the month over 153 refugees in one district alone were shot for breaking curfew regulations. Looters were similarly killed in public, including fourteen suspected 'bandits' found in possession of police weapons. Attempts by air base personnel to reestablish contact with Turkey's provisional government at Konya were halted; records salvaged from this period indicate that official radio and telephone contact with Trabzon ceased by November 10. Emergency broadcasts, such as reiterations of the infamous Toplama Order, were also forcibly silenced around the same time.

Heavy-handed initiatives to check panic ran their course well in 1984. At this point Trabzon's new leadership had recognized that they would continue to face enemies and Konya supporters among the population and even among the army. Radical Islamists who believed Doomsday to be the final judgment of Allah also posed a significant (though probably exaggerated) threat; soldiers worked to undermine such elements by disarming the civilians en masse. Meanwhile, rule by Sahin had became arbitrary. His administration issued decrees which granted security forces nearly unlimited powers of arrest and confinement to deal with 'anarchists', 'subversives', or others who threatened order. Acts of violence were used to eliminate those believed to be enemies, in particular, suspect members of Trabzon's existing civil service.

This purge inevitably led to a deterioration of local government, especially at the policy level. Senior civilian officials were removed from their posts, and others who were out of suspicion assumed low profiles. Military personnel loyal to Sahin were given the responsibility of managing ministries and departments. Such punitive and pre-emptive acts only induced a general climate of apprehension among the population, but they did succeed in creating precisely the order desired. Next to Konya, Patnos, and other key post-Doomsday centers, Trabzon proved a comparatively uncommon model of urban tranquility.

In late 1985, Altan Sahin gave his first personal address to the city residents at Trabzon's Hagia Sophia church. He extended the existing state of emergency, but also gave vent to his doubts about the survival of the Turkish republic. An aide actually read the subsequent proclamation which bluntly declared independence with the simple words "there are no compromises available". This actually changed relatively little; Turkish flags continued to be hoisted until 1987, when Sahin announced his intention to become Emperor and started constructing a palace for himself at the old Trebizond Castle.

Rise to prominence
Trabzon itself, always an underdeveloped region, was in relatively poor shape following Doomsday. Peasants found themselves forced to share homes with the countless refugees which began to crowd the countryside. In some areas, anarchy persisted. Military bureaucrats who handled administrative tasks and maintained the civil infrastructure were mostly occupying ransacked offices with few chairs, desks, typewriters, or paper. Due to a marked decline in the circulation of existing currency, black markets thrived and inflation skyrocketed. Sahin responded by fixing prices and using his resources to maintain an artificial rate. In an attempt to promote agriculture and stave off starvation, he also exempted those producing cash crops from reaping the meager sums determined by officially depressed prices.

With his establishment of a monarchy in 1987, Sahin, normally a frugal individual, reveled in unprecedented extravagance. The cost of his new residence, added to his absurd coronation, devastated Trabzon's fragile finances. A year later he announced more publicly funded celebrations to commemorate the coronation, and his subordinates mutinied. The conspirators, despite seizing the airport and a municipal radio station, were crushed after some initial skirmishing, and their loyalists were pursued into other districts with relentless determination. Contingents of Sahin's forces captured Sinop, where a provincial warlord had granted two treacherous officers sanctuary, while others raided further south, stealing property and destroying the livelihood of many refugee communities. This, in turn, sparked a small series of scaled wars between the command at Trabzon and their independent neighbors in what had become known as the Eastern Turkish Wasteland.

As Wasteland fiefs and smaller states were subsumed by Sahin, he found himself saddled with the reluctant role of maintaining order in provinces which had been largely without effective government since Doomsday and lacked capable authority. Perhaps this gave rise to his subsequent preoccupation with 'pacifying' chaotic Eastern Turkey, thusly presenting himself as a benevolent conqueror; the fearsome conventional military capability at his disposal gave him the perfect instrument to further this cause.

An expedition first launched in 1991 failed miserably to invade and crush the neighboring New Erzurum, a state established as a Doomsday refugee community that had formed an allied confederation which stalled Altan's advance. Refusing to give up, however, he would not withdraw his troops and managed to overrun small settlements to the north and southwest of the territory. While the war raged, the Second Empire of Trabzon also managed to conquer some of its weaker neighbors. Due to the high level of violence in the regions of Eastern Turkey, no single nation was able to arise in the area as it descended into chaos.

In 1992, most of the Turkish states agreed to leave each other in peace and prosper, but Trabzon was constantly a scene of horrific bloodshed as the Second Empire of Trabzon left the earth scorched in its smoking tracks and remained on the offensive. The violence began to spread when the Second Empire of Trabzon launched an attempted invasion of the neighboring Republic of Greater Patnos, cutting its way through the rival states around it to do so, under the orders of Emperor Altan, who wished to seize control over the southern wasteland. The Trabzon troops marched across the Patnos border and encamped, where they met stiff resistance upon attempting to advance. After ravaging the local countryside, the armies retreated back towards Trabzon. This invasion, although a failure, would spark major hostilities between the empire and the republic. For years to come, Greater Patnos would be the emperor's greatest rival in Eastern Turkey.

In 1993, the Republic of Hatay invaded the Second Empire of Trabzon's southwestern territories around New Erzurum in an attempt to restore some form of order to the region. The Eastern Turkish state of Elazig, alarmed by the growth of Trabzon's power and the growing proximity of the empire to their territory, joined Hatay in the invasion. But it was doomed to failure as the Hatayans had grossly underestimated the strength of Trabzon's imperial defense force. Other states, such as Kurdistan, had before attempted to interfere in the zone of warring states, now known as the Eastern Turkish Wasteland, and had also failed. Although the Hatayan expedition managed to gain some ground, they were soon suffering heavy losses when Emperor Altan ordered a round-the-clock bombardment of their positions. Bloody fighting raged until late in the year, when the Hatayans and their Elazig allies made a last-ditch attempt to assault the Trabzon-controlled town of Divrigi. They were faced with an impossible task as they attacked the heavily fortified city. The militarily disciplined Imperial Legion marched out to defend the town and massacred the Hatayan forces, ending the ill-fated invasion. Having failed in their mission, the surviving stragglers retreated out of the wasteland. Without support from the Republic of Hatay, Elazig was also forced to withdraw its troops.

Due to the failure of this expedition and the weakness of their militaries, most of Turkey's surrounding nations refused to attempt to expand into the Second Empire of Trabzon or even anywhere in the wasteland. But the war had taken its toll on Trabzon as well. In repelling the invasion, the imperial army had sustained heavy losses, particularly in the ranks of the Imperial Legion. The emperor soon found himself unable to entirely replace his losses or spare any reinforcements to send to the southern front, and was forced to abandon Divrigi and the surrounding regions. More than anything the war had showed him that he was not unstoppable. The Battle of Divrigi was soon revealed to have a massive impact on the imperial war effort, checking the Second Empire of Trabzon's advances beyond New Erzurum.

The Hatayan invasion of 1993 had also caught Emperor Altan off guard and he vowed to build up his military. Although satisfied with his land defenses, the emperor soon discovered he would not be able to defend against a serious amphibious assault from the Black Sea. Panicked at the notion of an invasion by water, Altan ordered the construction of Naval defenses and obstacles. On the Trabzon coastal defenses, Sahin fortified strategic points with machine gun posts, barbed wire fences, operational control towers, and searchlights.

By 1998, Altan saw his situation for expansion in New Erzurum was hopeless. Before, the community had survived peacefully, but was now a desolate warzone of intense violence. Some of the empire's troops gained victories in New Erzurum, such as the Imperial Legion, which was feared by soldier and citizen alike for their ruthless tactics. Shortly afterwards, however, the poorly equipped and outnumbered defenders still managed to slowly drive the Imperial Legion back across the border into Trabzon-controlled territory. Despite this costly defeat for his army, Altan was undaunted. For years to come, he would wage ceaseless war against his neighbors, finally overwhelming some but never being able to conquer others.

The looming Sultanate
Beginning in 2000, the revived central Sultanate of Turkey began expanding into the eastern frontier, intending to eventually put the Eastern Turkish Wasteland under control once and for all. Slowly, it was able to conquer several smaller warlord states along the western fringes of the zone, but was rebuffed by the Second Empire of Trabzon. Border clashes began by late 2001, including a full-pitched battle when the Sultanate armies marched into the nominal empire's northwestern borders, clashing with the 22nd Imperial Infantry and Trabzon militia. Turkish tanks were repelled by Trabzon anti-tank guns, and the oncoming Sultanate forces were thrown into disarray, soon having been beaten back by imperial machine-gunners. Emperor Altan took this as a declaration of war. He refused to consider negotiations with the Turkish Sultanate and strengthened his defenses for war. The Second Empire of Trabzon would fight alone, even until the very end. Watching the chaos that engulfed the Eastern Wasteland, the Turkish government quickly set out to establish a series of alliances with the minor states in the region to gain some allies in the wars against the larger states and break up the weaker confederations for conquest.

In 2002, the Sultanate of Turkey launched the 'Doğu Fethini', or Eastern Conquest, as a military campaign to conquer the Eastern Wasteland. A surprise attack had soon caught the southern State of Elazigi off guard and they were defeated within six months by government troops. The first part of the wasteland was now in the Sultanate's hands.

However, the Second Empire of Trabzon was a far more powerful state than Elazigi and more organized and central. It was also in less danger of invasion, due to its formidable military force. As a result, Emperor Altan was able to survive the longest, of all the Eastern Turkish states in the wasteland zone.

The next step for the eventual conquest of Trabzon was for the Sultanate slowly began to penetrate the confines of the Wasteland towards Sahin's domain. Through arms and trade deals, they secured the support of several smaller states, whom they used as proxies against others. Thanks to assistance from the Sultanate, some of these small states were successful against their larger, and sometimes more powerful, neighbors.

By the spring of 2005, the Sultanate had established strategic alliances with several warlords as part of a divide and conquer strategy. These new alliances shattered the existing coalitions in the area as many were lured by the power and stability of the Sultanate. In the beginning, the Sultanate primarily shipped arms to its new allies in the Wasteland. Armed with Sultanate weaponry and ammunition, several of the warlords were able to conquer their weaker neighbors or harrass their more powerful ones. In the meantime, the Sultanate has begun constructing roads and railways towards the allied warlords to be able to penetrate the mountains that surrounded the area towards Sahin's domain. The Second Empire of Trabzon currently remains the Turkish Sultanate's most fearsome enemy; many of the Turkish people fear that perhaps conflict between the two nations will grow and have a significant drain on resources.

The Second Empire of Trabzon is one of the only three remaining Eastern Wasteland states as of 2010, the others being the Republic of Greater Patnos New Erzurum, both enemies of the emperor. Patnos and New Erzurum have become strong allies of the Sultanate, while Trabzon remains hostile towards the others. A careful balance of power exists in the Wasteland between Turkey, Patnos, and New Erzurum versus Trabzon, Georgia, and Armenia. This balance has, so far, prevented any further open warfare to break out in the region.

Military
During the Second Empire of Trabzon's history, it had managed to become the most militarily powerful state in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. The Imperial Army of Trabzon was actually one of the most professional military forces in the whole of the wasteland states, with high standards of training and discipline. It is also a battle-tested army, fighting in the emperor's long-running expansion wars from the 1980's to the 2000's.

The Imperial Legion
The Imperial Legion in particular showed distinction during the Hatayan invasion of Trabzon, which was becoming to achieve serious military successes against the imperial forces. In just a week of battle, the Legion had inflicted a series of crushing defeats upon the Hatayan army, and further consolidated their reputation as masters of wasteland combat. The Trabzon invasion of New Erzurum also demonstrated how effective and brutal the Imperial Legion could be. During the four-year conflict, the Legion perfected a style of ruthless warfare that inflicted terrible losses on the New Erzurum coalition. Though they were feared by the opposing armies, their lack of proper map information in unfamiliar territory meant they suffered some heavy losses during the attempted occupation. During the Turkish Sultanate's recent operations against Trabzon, the Imperial Legion performed excellently, partly owing to the thorough training, iron discipline, and regimental prides, as well as to the fact that many of the troops were grizzled and hardy veterans.

Saray Guard
The Saray Guard were a garrison of highly-trained, well-armed, palace guards formed by Emperor Altan I to defend his person and residence within Trabzon. The Saray Guards' medieval assault appearance was typical of Byzantine-styled ceremonial troops trained and formed by Sahin himself. The guards fought in battle as a reserve corps, and their formidable air impressed their enemies. Each Saray Guard was uniformed in metal body breastplates, head-dress scale armor, and a non-standard steel helmet with a faceplate. This bulky protection gear provided protection in close combat, though at the expense of the mobility. Despite their outdated and conservative appearance, they were armed and equipped in modern fashion.

Government and Politics
In the Trabzon state, the emperor was the sole and absolute ruler. Officials were arranged in strict order around the emperor, and depended upon the imperial will for their ranks. There were also actual administrative jobs, but authority could be vested in individuals rather than offices. The emperor exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, thus wielding political power over the sovereign state and its subject peoples.

The empire has a powerless, solely symbolic, senate and other governmental bodies that the emperor can alter or dissolve at will. Despite effectively being an absolute monarchy, Trabzon is technically a constitutional monarchy due to the existence of a constitution and national canon of law. The Second Empire of Trabzon has also been classified as having possessed an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state. The emperor allows little room for political organisations and has outlawed many political parties and underground partisan organizations.

In 1998, the Güvenlik Polisi violently repressed protests against economic mismanagement and political oppression. Protestors had never managed to gain much ground until then, with a major food shortage and a plague threatening Trabzon. They clashed with the heavily-armored Güvenlik Polisi, who used lethal force to end the protests.

The imperial government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population. The nominal empire exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the emperor.

The inhabitants of Trabzon experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control is exerted by means of the Güvenlik Polisi, which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.

Economy
After 1998, the emperor retreated from totalitarian rule and permitted modest expansion of the private sector, allowed some foreign investment, and received needed foreign exchange. The economy was still rated as the least free in the Middle East, and all fundamental market institutions were suppressed. Private enterprises were also often co-owned or indirectly owned by the emperor.

In 2000, contact was first made between Emperor Altan and the Federation of Georgia, which bordered Trabzon to the north. Imperial scouting parties and diplomatic delegations were treated with friendliness by the Georgians, who secured arrangements for trading between the two states to help support the empire's economy, and the Georgians agreed to help the emperor as a trading partner, granting him trade rights in Georgian territory. This provided a greatly needed boost that was especially noticeable for the economic stability of Trabzon 2001-onwards.

The national currency was the Trabzon Asper, based off the Asper, a former Turkish monetary unit, and a silver coin currency, worth 1/120 of a Piastre. By 2009, skyrocketing inflation also had begun seriously impeding economic growth.