On the way, the armed regiments in the rest of the country also pounced viciously, as if they were not Armenians at all, and there was no friendship between the stars and the people. Some of them blocked www.biquge.info the road and snatched the horses, some of them lay in ambush in the dense forests and bushes to shoot cold arrows, and the Saliki department was constantly attacked, and the cavalry suffered heavy casualties, losing more than 100 people, and 300 horses with them, and the horseless cavalry ran behind before retreating in embarrassment......

After the war, all the villages that contributed were given gifts of money and food, and at the same time 200 victorious Red Hand cavalry quickly surrounded a village of armed regiments that had not been helped, and then an infantry detachment of the Red Hand Brigade also came in a whirlwind after receiving the news—after the other party had yielded, twenty men were drawn from the village, all of whom were taken to the head of the village, and all of them were condemned for the sin of not entering—and from then on, the Armenians of the entire eastern valley were all frightened and stubbornly held the village.

In addition, Salikhi, who had retreated to the castle of Marash, was furious, and he was ready to gather and invite other like-minded nobles to organize an army of 4,000 to 5,000 to sweep Gawain's territory east of the city of Vanka, but the fact was that most of the Armenian nobles were holding on to the area around Ravodera, facing each other's army across the mountain, and they wanted to go to the rescue of Samosata, but they could not break through the clever deployment of the shrewd Lord of Antioch, and naturally did not have the strength to respond to Saliki's military campaign.

At this time, Pope Urban, who was on his sickbed in Rome, actually sent a letter, although in the content he believed that the military attack on the Ruben Kingdom of Lesser Armenia by the lords of the previous pilgrims, such as Gawain and Bohemond, was an act of "excesses", but the Pope angrily lashed out at the "Greater Armenian Empire" for colluding with the Danishmund Turks, saying that "this is simply a deal with the devil, I really can't think of a reason to do so", and urged the Apostolic Church in Armenia to play its role, Let the firefighters reconcile as soon as possible, otherwise the Pope may retract his previous promise of a "brotherly state".

After receiving the Pope's letter, Bohemond, who had the moral banner, was very energetic, and he appointed Count Hartmann to command all the Frankish soldiers, and led Prince Sven and the servant armies of various nationalities to surround the city of Samosata, and set up a "five-pole cannon" imitating Gao Wenfang (Bohemond did not learn the technique of the Great Plani Cannon), and bombarded the city wall day and night.

And Gawain was also unceremonious: "Since the bandit Saliki from Marash is not coming, then we will take the initiative." "At the end of February, Gawain personally took the northern camp of the city of Vanka, concentrated the strength of two brigades and all the cavalry, and attacked the Marash region in a separate way, when the Armenian elite were concentrated on the Samosata line, and the rear was relatively empty: as a result, Gawain's men and horses galloped wantonly, and Saliki came to the rescue with the only cavalry, only to be broken by the spear array of the Red Hand Brigade one after another, and had to hide in Marashburg to defend himself.

So Gawain's army rushed in, still according to the previous tactics against Prince Reuben, the infantry surrounded the point to help, the cavalry quickly rushed forward and plundered, and within fifteen days burned and plundered dozens of market towns and villages, robbed tens of thousands of people, thousands of cattle and countless grains, and even robbed the Armenian hives in the village house (Princess Anna later declared in her diary, "I have heard that the girls of the Ani people like to use beehives as a dowry, They also pass it on to their daughters as an inheritance when they die, so I wonder why not let these hives be the dowry of the Seleucian and Cilician girls? It also cultivates the virtue of their labor, but beehive farming is not yet prevalent here, so let the invincible army bring it back from the mountains of Marash. ”）。

In this way, more than half of the agricultural elite in the Marash and Tubersena regions was destroyed, and it also seriously affected the spring planting of the following year, which provoked the Pak Ade father and son on the Samosata front almost to go crazy, and the letters for help sent to Merrick were like snowflakes.

Merrick did make a great effort, he gathered a full 20,000 men in Meritane, and at this moment began to move south, first looking for Gawain for a decisive battle, but when he advanced to the streets of Marash, Gawain's foot cavalry had already withdrawn most of them, and retreated to the fortress of Vanka, leaving only a scorched earth of ruins.

The Great Emir of Danishmund, who had no choice but to continue southward and confront Bohemond across the valley, both sides were looking for opportunities and opportunities to break the enemy, and time was slowly passing.

Gawain, who had ended the fighting, ordered the Gimagis Brigade and the Defender Brigade to remain in the vicinity of Vanka City to rest and garrison, "The whole army is under the responsibility of Branas and Gregor, and if they are to defend it, they will take care of it themselves, and the attack must be approved by me." Then, declaring that the camp in Vanka had "successfully completed the establishment of a new order and the removal of the recalcitrant duty, and could be successfully abolished," he took the Red Hand Brigade and the entire Red Hand Cavalry Company to the Château de Tronzak, where the mountains and the plains meet.

But in Tronzak, Gawain was not idle, and his vision and skill had been put on a very important part: the iron ore problem here.

Iron is the most abundant element on the earth, and it is also the most useful element, it occupies more than one-third of the earth's mass, and it is extremely versatile, and agricultural tools, weapons and many engineering components are inseparable from it. However, although iron is abundant, it is not evenly distributed, and to some extent it has the "squeamishness" of precious metals, which is often distributed in areas of intense crustal and magmatic activity (similar to copper and gold), and the most important distribution area of iron ore in Asia Minor is located at the junction of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, which is also a valley, basin and earthquake-prone zone.

Fort Tranzac is located at the top of a semicircular basin on the border of mountains and rivers, and although Gawain remembers that time the reserves were by no means as large as those of Mélitane, it also had several good mines and deposits.

In short, according to Gawain's estimates, the supply of 20,000 troops and hundreds of thousands of equipment is still barely able to cope, "as long as we can be self-sufficient in iron, then we can save a lot of money, and we don't have to ask Geliki anymore. Arslan had bought iron ingots, not to mention that his current situation was also shaky. Inside the castle, Gawain ambitiously stated the iron mine plan to the little sunfish and the two heraldic officers, "We can't get Meritene for the time being, so let's do it here at Tronzak!" No matter what, in a year or even two years, I want to see our own products forged by fire. (To be continued.) )