the vassal throne up for grabs when he died. Its new occupant
immediately repudiated all links with Hatti, and led his kingdom in
rebellion against it, apparently with some sort of support, or
promise of support, from the king of Ahhiyawa.^4
This was another major crisis in the making, and Tudhaliya
responded to it at the earliest possible opportunity. It was perhaps
in the same context as his Lukka campaign(s) that the king
marched deep into Arzawan territory, inflicted a crushing defeat on
the rebel forces, capturing the upstart king and his family and
deporting them to Hattusa, along with many prisoners and 500
teams of horse. He rounded off his operations in the region by
installing on the kingdom’s throne a member of the legitimate
ruling family, and no doubt resecuring his allegiance to the Hittite
crown.
But how sure could the king be that there would be no further
outbreaks of rebellion in his western states as soon he led his troops
back home? Especially while Ahhiyawa remained an active and
menacing presence in the region. Any attempts Hattusili,
Tudhaliya’s father, may have made to win Ahhiyawan cooperation
in maintaining stability in the region had obviously failed.
So Ahhiyawa remained one of Hatti’s chief problems. And would
continue to be so at least as long as it had a base, Milawata, on the
Anatolian mainland.
It’s time now for some more speculation. I start with the very
fragmentary text of a letter commonly referred to by scholars as
‘the Milawata letter’.^5 In the surviving pieces of the letter, neither
the name of the sender nor of the recipient is preserved. But we can
work out that the author was almost certainly Tudhaliya and its
recipient an important and loyal Hittite vassal ruler in western
Anatolia. The letter is so named because it records a successful
attack by the Hittite king and the letter’s recipient on the land of
Milawata. In the wake of this attack, Milawata’s boundaries were
redefined and the letter’s recipient given immediate authority over
the land. Indeed, he seems to have exercised this authority as a kind
of regional overlord whose sway extended as far north as the
kingdom of Wilusa in the region of the Classical Troad in
northwestern Anatolia.
THE EMPIRE’S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL 235