Down to the Sea


 * Down to the Sea
 * by President Chester A. Arthur
 * 5 December 2001

From Persian Mirrors

Chroniclers were unusually precise in the time of Rustum III; so we know it was unusually cool for high summer in Central Asia that day in Nukus in 173 SE [945 CE]. The ceremony was short and rather perfunctory; both Rustum III and his Turkish rival Malik had problems to deal with at home. (Rustum had the Purified Ones revolt in Khorasan to deal with; FN1 Malik had yet another wave of his Turkish brethren coming into his kingdom from the north.)

In those thirty or so minutes, though, a lot of history ended, and a lot of history began. Four Persian kings had died on the field of battle against the Turks since 50 SE [822 CE], and most of the royal treasury had been spent defending the eastern reaches of the Empire in the hundred and twenty years since.

The Turks, meanwhile, had made themselves a state. FN2 Decades of cross-border raids and counter-raids had given the various Turkish tribes the Nestorian Christianity of the Persians, a similiar social structure (the palace of the High Khan in Samarkand looked a lot like that of the King of Kings in Isfahan, though one didn't dare say so), and allowed those Turks who'd adopted the new military technology quickly enough to subdue or drive out their co-ethnic rivals, pushing them south into unhappy Bactria and the headwaters of the Indus valley.

There would be wars to come, but the long Oxonian campaign was finally over.

From He Who Controls the Spice

As Rustum pursued the "Peacock Angel Prince" through mountainous Khorasan, he was struck by something important to any king: an empty purse.

Most of Persia's blood and treasure had been spent by his grandfather and uncles fighting the Turks; Rustum III's treasury barely had enough funds to chase a glorified bandit chief and still patrol the borders of the Empire. If the Jacobite states of Syria and elsewhere ever unified to push east, the world's only Nestorian state would be in trouble indeed.

It was a measure of Rustum's desperation, then, that he agreed to a scheme by his son and heir Prince Khusro, Defender of the Faith. The merchants of Basra who controlled the Indian trade (Bactria and points south were still far too bandit-plagued to make a decent trading route, and Khan Malik had no particular urge to trade with his ancient enemy) were rich -- rich enough that they could keep the crown in business.

There was always confiscation, deeply tempting, but Khusro (something of a dreamer and mystic, there were rumors of a flirtation with Arab Sufism), persuaded his father to do something different. Something very different. The first day of 180 SE [952 CE] marked the foundation of the Trading Company of the East, popularly known as Khusro’s Company, the heir’s solution to the question of funds.

Granted a royal monopoly on sea trade with the east, with all the merchants at least theoretically a part of the Company, the TCE's first director was known simply as Abbas, an Arab veteran of the wars with the Turks and the army's paymaster during the wars.

To demonstrate the Company's power to various petty princes of India and the Spice Islands of the east, Abbas won permission to organize the First Fleet...