Kingdom of Tylis in 218 B.C.

Kingdom of Tylis — Spring 218 BC · Gauls of the Thracian Hills.

The Kingdom of Tylis — a state of Celtic Gauls planted in eastern Thrace, in the hill-country south of the Haemus and along the upper Tonzos. These are the kinsmen of the Galatians: in the great Celtic wandering that struck the sanctuary of Delphi in 279 BC, one part of the horde crossed into Asia and became the Gauls of Anatolia, while another, captivated by the rich land about Byzantium, stayed in Thrace. Under their king Comontorios they conquered the Thracians and raised their seat at Tylis, and for two generations they have lorded it over the natives and squeezed the Greek city of Byzantium for an ever-rising tribute — up to eighty talents a year — for safe passage of the Pontic trade. That exaction drove Byzantium to levy its own toll on the strait, and so lit the war of 220 BC. In 218 the throne is held by Cavarus, last of the line — a philhellene who guards the commerce of the Greeks even as he taxes it; a Celtic warrior kingdom adrift among Thracians and Thracian foes, its days already numbered.

While the great kings wrestle over Asia and the Aegean, a fragment of the Celtic terror still holds eastern Thrace. The Gauls of Tylis are the brothers of the Galatians — the part of the Delphic horde that never crossed to Asia but settled instead beneath the Haemus, conquered the Thracians, and made a kingdom of plunder. Their chief prey is Byzantium: from the first attacks of Comontorios the city bought them off with gold, until at last it was bound to a yearly tribute of eighty talents for leave to live in peace. It was to meet that crushing exaction that the Byzantines began to tax the ships passing into the Pontus — and so brought on the war of 220 BC over the Bosphorus tolls. In 218 the king is Cavarus, a Gaul grown cultured and Greek-loving, who lately came down to Byzantium itself to broker the peace that ended that war. Yet the kingdom is brittle: the subject Thracians chafe under their foreign masters, and within a few years they will rise and sweep the Gauls of Tylis away.