Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Guest Post: Napoleon Insulted

This post first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

Prelude:
"A quarrel arose between a Georgian servant named Sadegh Gorji and the valet Khodadad-e Esfahani. They raised their voices to such a pitch that the shah became angry and ordered both to be executed. Sadeq Khan-e Shaghaghi, a prominent emir, interceded on their behalf, but was not listened to. The shah, however, ordered their execution to be postponed until Saturday, as this happened to be the evening of Friday (the Islamic holy day), and ordered them back to their duties in the royal pavilion, unfettered and unchained, awaiting their execution the next day. From experience, however, they knew that the King would keep to what he had ordered, and, having no hope, they turned to boldness. When the shah was sleeping, they were joined by the valet Abbas-e Mazandarani, who was in the plot with them, and the three invaded the royal pavilion and with dagger and knife murdered the shah " ~ Hasan-e Fasa'i's' Farsnama-ye Naseri

In 1807, Emperor of France Napoleon Bonaparte sought an alliance in the East with a strong military partner for his coming war with Tsar Alexander I. In retrospect, that risky endeavour was to prove an even more disasterous choice for L'Empereur than conquering Russia.

The potential French ally was Persia. Eunuch monarch Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar had comprehensively defeated the Russians time and time again in both Georgia and northern Persia. However, he had begun to fear their resurgence under Alexander the Blessed, who had something of a Messiah Complex. In fact, Alexander was already planning for a Persian Expedition once he defeated the French Empire. Armed with modern guns and artillery, the Russians were an ever-present threat. Turning to the Ottoman Turks for an alliance threatened not only his domination of the Shia World but his security in the Near East.

Qajar's lasting ambition was to add Azerbaijan and the Caucasus region to his dominion. At sixty-five, having ruled for thirteen glorious years, he was beginning to hear the whispers of immortality. Of course, he had no biological successor, so his vision of future history was solely about his own personal legacy. Consequently, he entertained the French offer because of the opportunity to destroy the Russian state once and for all. On this basis, he invited Napoleon to his palace in Tehran.

Driven by expedience rather than friendship, Napoleon certainly wanted the Persians to open another front on Russia's southern borders, namely the Caucasus region. Forced to travel incognito, Napoleon arrived in late May, already nearly a month after what could have been arranged in a more midway event, such as Finckstein Palace. Napoleon was in a bad enough mood, and miscommunications of protocol only made things worse. The Shah, who had a notoriously short fuse, took great offence at the implied suggestion that he would be a junior partner in the conquest of Tsarist Russia. As a man that had executed servants merely for raising their voices, the punishment was swift and brutal. Repeating the mistreatment he himself had suffered at Astarabad, Qajar had his guards castrate Napoleon and cast him out of Persia.

The Shad was transformed from unreliable negotiating partner to sworn enemy. Napoleon forgot all about conquering Russia and made it his destiny to conquer Persia and be crowned emperor in the palace in Tehran. But the Shah's armies were an even more formidable force than he had reckoned with. The Franco-Persian War would last for years and result in the deaths of both arrogant men. A lasting consequence of that conflict would be that Ottoman Turkey and Tsarist Russia put aside their differences over the Danubian Principalities. This was a significant development because the Russo-Turkish Alliance would have profound long-term consequences for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Author's Note:

In reality, the Shah was assassinated in 1797 on his way to combat the Russians in Georgia for a third campaign. Ten years later, his successor Fath Ali Shah of Qajar Persia formed a Franco-Persian alliance with the French Empire of Napoleon I against Russia and Great Britain between 1807 and 1809.

Provine's Addendum:

Napoleon was distracted by the Peninsular War in the west and the War of the Fifth Coalition in the east, but by 1810, he was in proper position to begin his invasion of the Middle East. A tenuous alliance with the Ottoman Empire guaranteed his passage with a tremendous invasion of some 400,000 soldiers. Just as in his campaign in the Middle East over a decade before, however, the military action fell apart with an impossibly long supply line and British interference. The British Navy harassed French shipping in the Mediterranean while diplomats turned the Ottomans against Napoleon. Napoleon refused to retreat despite attacks from all sides that devastated Persia until both the shah and the emperor were killed.

Britain helped negotiate the peace along the Danube with Russia that would last for decades. The Ottomans attempted to rebuild their influence, but their empire declined with rebellion in the Balkans. Russia and Britain competed for dominance in Persia as the region rebuilt (advancing what would be our TL's Great Game by two decades). Russia could not compete at sea, so upon the invention of rail travel, Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II invested heavily in railroad construction to link the empire together by allowing serfs to earn their liberation. Russia became a major player in the Far East, expanding into its Alaskan territory and defeating Japanese incursion into Asia in 1905.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Site Meter