668-671: Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, Part I
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668 saw the Romans’ attention taken up by a new foe: the Bulgars, who had been steadily pushing through the sparsely populated and barely defended northernmost territories of the Avars throughout 667 and now neared the Danube. Having crippled and (for now) tamed the Avars in the previous year, Aloysius set out to confront these newcomers on the latter’s territory rather than risk having them further despoil the newly recovered and already-devastated Roman lands in Moesia & Thrace. After the Bulgar khan Bezmer audaciously demanded a large financial payment and the right to settle in Thrace (which would have immediately brought them into conflict with the Thracian Slavs), Aloysius broke off negotiations early in the summer and moved to engage his horde north of the long-deserted town of Histriopolis[1], near the mouth of the Danube.
The Romans deployed their forces behind those of their new Avar allies, supposedly because Aloysius believed the latter would be better suited to skirmishing with the horse-archers and mounted skirmishers of the Bulgars but really mostly because he did not trust them as far as he could throw them. In any case, Bayan Khagan’s greatly bloodied and diminished troops still managed to put up a passable fight, after which they retired through gaps in the legionary lines and the Romans stepped forward to finish the battle. After failing to break the Roman lines head-on, Bezmer tried to lure Aloysius’ forces out and throw them into disarray with feigned retreats, but the Emperor was wise to this strategy after spending years battling the Avars and retaliated at long range with his remaining artillery. In the end it was the Bulgars who would quit the field, dispirited and in disarray, after Bezmer Khan himself was impaled by a carroballista bolt, ending the Battle of Histriopolis in a Roman victory.
Bezmer Khan leading the Bulgar cavalry in their attempt to break through Aloysius' infantry lines outside Histriopolis
Aloysius pursued the Bulgars to their fortified encampment at Ongal in the Danube delta, but there he desisted from finishing them off, though his nephew and Rotholandus’ son Iudicallus (‘Judicaël’ in his native Armoric) had boldly volunteered to lead the assault on their stockades. Instead the Emperor reopened talks with Bezmer’s son and successor Grod, both to avoid the likely heavy death toll from storming the Bulgars’ fortified home and to try to gain a new ally after all the bloodshed of the past few years and the departure of all of his non-federate allies following the successful relief of Constantinople. Grod in turn agreed to sign a federate agreement with the Romans and to give up his sons as hostages in exchange for a new homeland under imperial protection. In a sign that his wife and the Eastern Roman court at Constantinople still commanded a degree of autonomy, the Augustus had to talk Helena into granting the Bulgars settlement rights in Cilicia – which, on top of not having been reconquered by Rome yet, had long been devastated and depopulated by Heshana’s repeated invasions back when it formed part of the Anatolian frontier with his expanded Turkic empire.
While the Romans secured a new ally, the severely exsanguinated and divided Turks on the other side of the Hellespont continued to crumble before the onslaught of the Arabs and their own internal fissures. The Caliph Qasim resolved to deal with Bögü, a younger son of Heshana, and secure Mesopotamia for Islam while sending Talhah ibn Talib to overcome the Syrian resistance being led by the warlord Külüg, a more distant relation of the ruling Tegreg clan. The old Caliph proceeded to lead his 20,000-strong army to victory over the diminished Turkic remnants in upper Mesopotamia at Daquqa, Karkha and most decisively Hdatta: at this final battle in the fall, also known as the Battle of the Upper Zab, the Muslims used their numerical advantage to cross the eponymous river at an undefended ford and outflank Bögü’s prepared positions along the riverbank. Bögü himself was killed and what remained of his army destroyed in the battle which followed, and his widow and subordinates submitted Arbela to Islamic rule without a fight soon afterward, bringing all of Mesopotamia under Islamic rule.
Talhah had a slightly more difficult challenge ahead of him in Syria, not so much because of Külüg himself but rather on account of there already being a multi-sided conflict there, which he could not win simply by eliminating the largest player in the Turks. ‘God’s Lance’ actually brought Külüg down well before the end of 668, dealing him one major defeat at the Battle of Sura in May and then a second, fatal one in the mountains northeast of Damascus itself: as had been the case at the Upper Zab, the Muslims unexpectedly overcame the defenders’ terrain advantage (this time with the help of locals who resented the abusive taxation and capricious tyranny of the Turks) to wipe their foes out in their camp. The Arabs founded on the site of their victory a new town which they named ‘Maaloula’[2], ‘entrance’, for from there they would soon enter Damascus itself peaceably.
However, Külüg’s demise delivered to Islam only northern Syria, and even there they were not wholly untroubled. Most of the cities previously occupied by the forces of Külüg did submit in a hurry, exhausted by the violent conquests of Heshana and then being further taxed and having their populations drafted to fight in his continuous campaign against the Eastern Romans: in particular non-Ephesian Christians welcomed the Muslims as liberators and safeguards not only against the Turks, who they had originally hailed for freeing them from Roman persecution but then come to resent for their harsh rule, but also against a potential return of the Romans. Ghassanid Arab remnants in the countryside continued to resist in the name of their Empress Helena and her new husband Aloysius however, and the collapse of Turkic authority plunged Palaestina into an open free-for-all pitting the Jews, the Samaritans and those Christian insurgents under Abel who had managed to survive up to this point against one another.
After many decades of increasingly restless peace, the forces of Islam burst forth from Arabia in a great conquering wave toward the end of the 660s. Qasim's prudence had timed their onslaught well, coinciding with the rapid decline of the Southern Turkic Khaganate following Heshana's defeat beneath the walls of Constantinople
Beyond the eastern bounds of the former Southern Turkic Khaganate, where Tegreg loyalists sought to keep the underage Doulan Qaghan afloat in Qom and other warlords were establishing themselves in Khorasan & the Iranian Plateau, the Indo-Romans had begun to expand into the Tarim Basin. Hippostratus proved himself no less canny and resourceful than his father and grandfather, managing an intrepid crossing of the Tian Shan Mountains with an army to intimidate King Amrätodane of Kashgar into accepting his authority – and then treating with the latter as a friend, and agreeing to help him fight his ongoing war with Kentarske of Khotan to the southeast. By the end of 668 Hippostratus would have defeated the latter and compelled him to recognize Indo-Roman suzerainty as well, surpassing even the wildest dreams of his progenitor’s overlord Sabbatius and projecting his authority into the western half of the Tarim Basin.
Come 669, the Romans did not cross the Hellespont until Aloysius was sure he had impregnated Helena with a son, so they instead remained around Constantinople for several months. Despite the popularization of jokes that (based on the combination of Helena’s beauty with her aloof and melancholic demeanor) the Emperor had married an ice sculpture, his Empress’ normally-taut belly once again began to swell in the summer. Only then did Aloysius lead his army, newly reinforced by around 20,000 Bulgars, onto Lampsacus and against the Turkic remnants still fighting amongst themselves in the hills and mountains of Anatolia. The delay incidentally worked to the Romans’ favor, for not only did Constantinople still have enough rations stockpiled (originally intended to feed its people through the Turkic siege) to feed the imperial army encamped around it, but it also gave the Turks themselves the mistaken notion that they had enough time to fight among themselves and defeat their nearest rivals before the Romans arrived on the other side of the straits.
The first to fall before the power of a reunited Rome were the generals-turned-warlords Chunak Tarkhan, Tishrat Tarkhan and Tuhun Tarkhan, who had been fighting over western and northwestern Anatolia. Aloysius crushed Chunak and destroyed his fragment of the shattered Turkic army at the Battle of Nicaea, and although Tishrat and Tuhun reconciled to present a united front against the returning Romans following their rival’s defeat, it was too little and far too late – the Romans defeated them as well at the Battle of Cyme[3]. The Bulgars almost immediately began to earn their keep, playing a significant role in these early battles as both a missile screen and a decisive additional heavy cavalry advantage for the Romans. These victories added Bithynia, the Troad and Ionia back to the Roman Empire by the start of autumn, but Aloysius was not done. The forceful and energetic Augustus proceeded further into the Anatolian hinterland, defeating a fourth Tarkhan named Niri first at Thyatira[4] and then again at Dorylaeum, where he took advantage of his far greater numbers to divide his army and envelop the Turks on the plain outside the town.
As winter descended and his wife’s pregnancy progressed, the Emperor swept into the mountains of Isauria to rout the few remaining Turks there and re-secure the allegiance of the Isaurian hill chieftains who had revolted against Helena after she arranged the assassination of their countryman Tryphon, promising them lenient treatment in exchange for hostages and military contributions – and annihilating a force of 2,000 Isaurians who tried to treacherously ambush him after seemingly accepting his offer to negotiate terms for their reintegration in the Battle of Sagalassos that November, then stacking their heads into a mound, to demonstrate the alternative should they insist on continuing in rebellion against Rome. With these triumphs Aloysius recovered the western half of the Diocese of Pontus as well as the entirety of the Diocese of Asia by the end of 669.
A Frankish spearman, a Croat cavalryman and an Isaurian scout (newly welcomed back into the Roman fold) of Aloysius' army as it marches through the forests and hills of western Anatolia
Not to be outdone by the Romans, the forces of Islam were also on the move and expanding their Caliph’s authority throughout the fragmented and exhausted lands of the Southern Turkic Khaganate. Qasim sought to lay down the foundations for a new capital at Kufa, from where he could oversee the fertile and much more heavily populated lands of Mesopotamia with greater ease than from his original seats at Mecca & Medina, so he sent his three oldest sons Abd al-Rahman, Al-Abbas and Ali to subjugate Persia in his stead. Abd al-Rahman and Al-Abbas stormed into the Zagros Mountains in the spring; by 669’s end the former was storming towards Qom, though he was delayed by the fierce resistance of the Buddhist Mazdakites who still fearlessly manned their fortresses despite their own heavy losses in Heshana’s failed wars, while the latter had already extended Islamic power as far as Isfahan. Ali meanwhile took an easier route than his older brothers, sweeping through Meshan and Khuzestan to eventually reach Shiraz by the end of the year.
Talhah meanwhile continued to expand Dar al-Islam’s reach west- and south-ward. From Damascus he acquired the Caliph’s permission to begin directing the migration of Arabs from overpopulated Arabia to the newly acquired ‘al-Sham’ (as they called Syria). Much like the Banu Hashim themselves many of these Islamic tribes claimed descent from Qays ibn ‘Aylan, a descendant of Adnan (himself a mythical descendant of Ishmael), as opposed to the Christian Arabs already in the region who largely claimed descent from Qahtan, the first Yemenite Arab, and whose ancestors migrated from the far southern reaches of Arabia in Sabaean times – for which reason they were reckoned as the ‘Yamani’, Yemenites, in Islamic records. Exactly as Talhah intended, the migratory Qaysites proceeded to do most of the fighting against the Christian Yamani who still stood against him in a bid to drive the latter (weakened by decades of warfare with the Turks) from their long-held ancestral lands.
Leaving the Qaysites to secure northern al-Sham for him, Talhah next rode into Palaestina. He smote the Jews and Samaritans alike at the Battles of Capernaum and Samaria, respectively, but then accepted their submission and directed their elders to send tribute and hostages to his master the Caliph. The Ephesian Christians under Abel were a different story, as they refused to surrender even after being driven from Jerusalem (which they had briefly retaken amid the collapse of Turkic power in the region) and suffering a further defeat atop Tel Lachish west of the holy city. On the other hand non-Ephesian Christians, especially those of a Monophysite disposition, generally welcomed Islamic rule as their brethren in Mesopotamia did.
The Arabs take Jerusalem from Abel's Christian Palestinian forces, who had themselves only just wrested the city from the crumbling Turks a short while before
A prisoner informed Talhah that they were unafraid to fight and die, for news had reached them of a Roman resurgence which had broken the Turks in the first place and the imminent return of the legions. When Talhah reported this development to Qasim, the Caliph scoffed and declared that ‘never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler’[5] – apparently under the belief that the Eastern Romans were still a separate entity apart from their Western Roman cousins, and that Helena was their official ruler rather than Aloysius – and instructed him to leave enough troops behind to control the lingering insurgency before proceeding into Egypt. This Talhah did, and by 669’s end he was standing at the doorway into Egypt at Gaza & Raphia[6].
On the other side of the Earth, the European settlers had begun to expand their footholds into the newly-christened continent of Aloysiana. In the north the Romano-British had explored a ways down and around the Saint Pelagius, and now sought to establish two additional outposts to oversee their allies among the Wildermen & deepen trade relationships with them: one to the north which they named Guínon[7] (‘white’, doubtless after the heavy snowfall common to the region) and one to the south, at a confluence with another river they’d named after Saint Alban, dubbed simply Trés-Rivères[8] after the three channels formed at the mouth of the Saint Alban where it joined the Saint Pelagius. Every summer, when the Wildermen came to fish and forage at these sites, the Britons would trade for high-quality furs with them.
The New World Irish meanwhile settled additional villages and trading posts around the region which Liberius had taken to calling ‘Nova Hibernia’[9] (‘New Ireland’) in his correspondence, while the aforementioned abbot himself was sending armed scouts accompanied by Wilderman guides further inland from Cois Fharraighe to chart the interior. It took the largest of these parties half the year to make it to what their guides called ‘Glooscap’s Bay’[11] after their benevolent dust-born god (but which the Irish named Bá na Fortúin, ‘Bay of Good Luck’), and a similar amount of time to get word back to Liberius; the same was true of a secondary exploring party which had gone west and uncovered a headland at the entrance of the Bay of Good Luck, which they named Rinn Dearg[12] (‘Red Cape’) after the copper deposits there. These discoveries helped Liberius draw a more accurate map of the region his Irish cohorts were settling, and find ideal sites to direct new settlers to in the future.
The Irish on the shores of the Bay of Good Fortune
670 was another year full of good news for the Romans, who sorely needed it after the defeats and civil wars of the past several decades. Come the spring, Aloysius renewed his offensive against the Turkic warlords in Anatolia, driving the forces of Chebi Tarkhan across the Cappadocian plateau and those of Inel Tarkhan back eastward along the Pontic coast. While campaigning in the summer, the Augustus also received word that his Augusta had finally given birth to a son, thereby securing the line of succession and hopefully ensuring that Aloysian rule over the reunified Roman Empire would last longer than a generation: although Aloysius had wanted to name his newborn heir after himself, per his agreement with Helena she had the right to name their secondborn, and she chose to have the new Caesar of all Rome baptized as Constantine after her own father and twin brother. Per the preexisting plans of his father and the grandfather he would never meet, almost immediately after his birth the young Constantine was betrothed to Maria of Arelate – daughter of the last Stilichian emperor Theodosius IV and now ten years his senior – to tie up that particular loose end and ensure no ambitious claimant could use her hand in marriage as a weapon against the Aloysians.
In any case, the Emperor celebrated the birth of a purple-born heir by scoring yet another victory over the Turks in the Battle of Potamía[13], where Grod’s Bulgars hunted down Chebi Tarkhan as the latter attempted to flee the battlefield and brought his head back to the victorious Augustus. After receiving the submission of the remaining Turks in Cappadocia who had yet to die or flee and achieving a similarly bloodless victory over the hugely outnumbered and dispirited garrison at Trebizond in the fall, Aloysius detached thousands of troops from his main army to allow his wife’s Georgian and Armenian vassals to retake their homelands, while moving to secure Cilicia with the Bulgars to whom they had promised the region. By the end of 670, he was settling the Bulgar civilians in their prize while Mithranes of Georgia had scoured the Lazica region of the remaining Turkic presence there and Arsaber of Armenia had re-established his court at the hilltop fortress of Ani. Stilicho had proposed that he and the African army be sent back to Leptis Magna so they could push into Egypt and unite with the main Roman host at Jerusalem after the latter marched through Syria & Palaestina, but Aloysius rejected this strategy due to having recently had to disperse yet more of his men into the Caucasian kingdoms.
Grod of the newly-established 'Cilician Bulgaria' departing from Aloysius' council chambers, federate contract in hand, to settle his people in the land which the Augustus and Augusta had promised him
Events to the south would rapidly complicate the Romans’ plans for the reconquest of the Levant. By this point the forces of Islam were making steady progress throughout western Persia, where the Caliph’s heir Abd al-Rahman finally managed to push past the Mazdakites and lay siege to the Turkic capital at Qom; as a precaution, young Doulan Qaghan had fled from his great-grandfather’s seat with a small escort and headed to Khorasan, where he was put off by the chilly reception given to him by the other warlords and soon moved even further north into the lands of the Khazars. As his oldest sons alternately cut their own paths through the lingering Turkic warlords and received the submission of Persia’s cities, Qasim sent his fourth son Abd al-Fattah north to add the land he called ‘Arminiya’ to the Islamic fold.
As the Roman-backed Arsaber was fighting to re-establish the Mamikonian kingdom there, this immediately created an obvious source of tension between the older empire and the young upstart on its southern border. Even before 670 had ended, detachments of Armenian soldiers and freedom-fighters had begun to engage in skirmishes with the advancing Arabs of Abd al-Fattah between Lakes Van and Urmia. Aloysius dispatched envoys toward the still-under-construction city of Kufa, both to determine the strength of this new potential enemy and to try to avert further violence. It was not so much that he feared the power of Islam (indeed Aloysius was normally an irrepressible and warlike spirit, who eagerly sought out new foes to defeat for glory’s sake), but that he was also concerned about the Khazars who Mithranes reported were looming large over his northeastern border along the Caucasus, with whom he had entered negotiations as well – even Aloysius Gloriosus knew he would be in deep trouble if he had to fight a new two-front war against both the Arabs to the south and these Khazars to the north.
Down in Gaza, Talhah ibn Talib did not have to immediately worry about this new enemy emerging to his north, and instead devoted his full attention to the conquest of Egypt. There yet another grandson of Heshana, Turghar Tarkhan, had established himself in Memphis (a city already largely abandoned by the Romans, which made it perfect for the settlement of his Turkic followers and heretical Copts from the countryside) and proclaimed he would now bear the title of Khan in his own right, supported by the Monophysites whom he allowed to run roughshod over their former Ephesian neighbors and persecutors. Talhah threw open the gateway into Egypt by first bloodlessly seizing Rhinococura[14] and then defeating a combined Turkic-Coptic host in the Battle of Pelusium, so that by high summer he was already in Egypt proper. He defeated Turghar’s forces yet again at Phelbes[15] in July, but could neither immediately overcome Memphis’ defenses (even in their dilapidated state) nor cross onto the western bank of the Nile before 670’s end.
The Hashemite army on the verge of taking Phelbes, Egypt
Far east of Rome, the Indo-Romans continued to do their part to bring the torch of Romanitas into the Tarim Basin. After taking some time to consolidate his hold over Kashgar and Khotan in the western reaches of the Tarim Basin, Hippostratus next campaigned to secure the submission of Kucha, Karashahr and Qarqan[16] to the east and southeast. Having only recently begun to recover from the devastating Turkic and Chinese incursions of the past centuries, these oasis-kingdoms could offer little resistance against the Indo-Roman army, whose Sogdian and Paropamisadae core was not only backed by the meager forces their new Tocharian vassals could offer but also a diverse array of mercenaries ranging from Turkic horse-archers to Persian lancers to Indian longbowmen and even a few war elephants.
Hippostratus was not the only king trying to expand his reach into this critical central juncture of the Silk Road, though. Emperor Renzong of the Later Han had passed away, and his successor Hao Xianggui – better remembered as Emperor Mingzong, the ‘Bright Ancestor’ – was eager to expand Chinese power even further west. A 35,000-strong Chinese expeditionary force, including a large contingent of mounted Tegreg auxiliaries, pushed past their one-time Karluk allies to restore the Dragon Throne’s hold over Dunhuang and Anxi. By the year’s end, the expeditionary commander Ren Xiaofeng stood at the Jade Gate through which the Chinese traditionally passed into the southeastern Tarim Basin, unknowingly setting up a confrontation between himself and Hippostratus of the Indo-Romans in the near future.
The first half of 671 was taken up by the ongoing negotiations between the Romans, Khazars and Muslims. Aloysius was unable to reach an agreement with Caliph Qasim and his sons, who sought to occupy almost the entirety of Syria save Antioch and its environs, three-quarters of ‘Arminiya’ (including the lands around the other two ‘Armenian seas’, Lakes Sevan and Van, but excepting a sliver of territory in the northwest around Ani which they were prepared to concede to Arsaber) and eastern Georgia – the idea of making such extensive concessions was, of course, unacceptable to the Emperor. That said, Aloysius did manage to strike a deal with Kundaç Khagan, the incumbent Qağan of the Khazars: he persuaded Helena to set up a match between her eldest daughter Irene to Kundaç’s own son Kundaçiq, although Helena in turn insisted that the two should not be formally wed for some years yet on account of the bride still being well underage. The Romans also acknowledged Khazar gains in the Caucasus, including western Abasgia (centered around Pityus[17], though Georgia was set to retain Sebastopolis[18] and the nearby fortress of Anakopia).
With his northern flank secured, Aloysius turned his full attention back onto the recalcitrant Muslims. In this year he contended chiefly with Abd al-Fattah, who had defeated Arsaber’s Armenians early in the year at the Battle of Archesh[19]. After re-consolidating his forces, the Augustus set out to engage Abd al-Fattah at Bagavan, immediately arresting the progress of the Arab prince’s northward offensive and causing him to flee after only a short clash out of fear at the size of the Roman army (backed, as it was, by its large Bulgar and African contingents on top of Arsaber’s and Mithranes’ much less intimidating contributions). Abd al-Fattah fled back over the Arsanias River[20] with the Romans in hot pursuit, but then had the idea of turning around to attack Aloysius (who had led the pursuit & outpaced his own army) near Manzikert[21] with a thousand-strong detachment of horsemen and camel-riders. Unfortunately for him, the 2,000-strong body of Roman cavalry protecting the Augustus was not as weary as he had expected, and they were also much more heavily equipped than his own men. The battle which followed resulted in another Islamic defeat and Abd al-Fattah’s own demise at the hands of the Roman Emperor: he had challenged Aloysius to single combat in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tables, and though both Iudicallus and Haistulf of the Lombards offered to fight in his stead, Aloysius personally accepted this challenge and prevailed within minutes.
Out of options, Abd al-Fattah ibn Qasim charged straight for Aloysius' position at the Battle of Manzikert. In turn the golden, winged Augustus was more than happy to answer his challenge, and would soon render him a very personal casualty for the House of the Prophet
Although four-fifths of Abd al-Fattah’s army had been left out of the Battle of Manzikert, the death of their commander had left them listless and demoralized, and by the end of August they had been expelled from Armenia altogether by the Romans. Qasim was not only infuriated by the killing of one of his sons but also surprised by the re-emerging power of Rome, which he thought had been spent by thirty years of defeat and retreat before the Turks. Now correctly identifying Aloysius as their leader and a more serious threat than he had first thought, the Caliph assembled new armies – one which he placed under the command of his oldest grandson, Ali ibn Abd al-Rahman, and the other led by his nephew Umar ibn Zayd – and directed them to stop the Romans, who had ended the year by beginning to cross into northern Syria. Further complicating matters for Aloysius despite his victory, the Continental Saxons grew bolder after testing Rome’s northwestern-most defenses and began to mount larger incursions into his ancestral March as well as the kingdom of the Thuringians, placing pressure upon him to wrap affairs in the east up more quickly.
Qasim also sent a missive to his top general Talhah, then still battling his way through Egypt, alerting him to the possible or even probable necessity of his return north to defend Syria in the coming months or years. Talhah in turn was motivated to hurry up and bring the fighting in Egypt to a quick end, so as to free himself up for the new task ahead. He crossed the Nile this year and inflicted further defeats on Turghar Khan’s forces at Sais, Cabasa and finally near Alexandria itself, after which the populace of that city – having already survived a previous sacking by Heshana – surrendered without a fight. Turghar himself sallied forth from Memphis but was trounced and slain by Talhah at the Battle of Heliopolis, for although he outnumbered the Arabs by almost 3:1, Talhah had eliminated him & his Turkic contingent very early on in the fighting by way of a cavalry clash, after which his Coptic troops fled or surrendered.
Turghar’s son Tarkhun fled Memphis for Nilopolis, which laid to the south between Memphis itself and Oxyrhynchus. From there, he struggled to rally the ever-increasingly-diminished Turkic presence as well as the indigenous Monophysite Copts to continue fighting against the Turks and Romans alike. Talhah for his part enforced a pragmatic governing policy as ordered by the Caliph: after pacifying a new conquest and ending disorder, he tolerated Christians of all stripes and kept taxes low on account of the vast amounts of booty which the Muslims had been able to plunder from enemy camps & corpses and cities that dared resist their onslaught, which served to greatly reduce the willingness of the locals to continue standing against the introduction of Islamic rule. It also did not help Tarkhun that Rome’s Nubian allies were pushing in from the south, while the Garamantians were doing the same from Libya in hopes of recovering their territories south and east of Cyrenaica.
The Monophysite bishop of Heliopolis, sent by Talhah ibn Talib, performs obeisance before the Caliph Qasim at his new capital of Kufa
Beyond the troubles in the Middle East, a collision between the Indo-Romans and the Chinese in Central Asia was now imminent. Hippostratus had just barely received the submission of those eastern Tarim city-states he had approached the year before when Ren Xiaofeng marched into the Basin with his army, whose numbers the Indo-Romans could barely match even after receiving military contributions from their newest vassals, and received the bloodless surrender of Cumuḍa[22] at the region’s eastern edge. Since Ren proclaimed that the Middle Kingdom was placing the entirety of the Tarim Basin back under Chinese suzerainty and even ‘invited’ Hippostratus to bow down before his Emperor, it was clear from the very beginning that there was no room for negotiation between Luoyang and Kophen, and that battle was inevitable as the Chinese set out to enforce their rule by arms where words had failed them.
Hippostratus and Ren Xiaofeng would first meet at the Battle of Miran in the southeastern sands of the Tarim, where the former’s cavalry proved victorious against the Tegreg Turks of the latter. This small skirmish was soon overshadowed by a much larger clash at Charklik to the west, where the Chinese pushed their Indo-Roman rival to retreat: however, Hippostratus successfully covered his withdrawal in a furious rearguard action and would fight another day. That other day arrived in August of 671, when Ren pursued Hippostratus to Qarqan. With the support of the petty-king of Calmadana who ruled from that city, the Indo-Romans set an ambush for the oncoming Chinese army in the dunes east of the city, and rapidly routed the Turks who were supposed to be guarding the latter’s flanks.
The Chinese were mauled in the main engagement, with Ren himself being counted among the 15,000 casualties inflicted upon them by the Indo-Romans: a worthy victory by Roman standards, and one which would have been a serious setback either to the Romans themselves or to any of the enemies they faced around the Eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Hippostratus, by Chinese standards 15,000 casualties barely amounted to slightly trimming one of the Dragon’s claws, especially for a dynasty still in its prime like the Later Han. Mingzong was mildly irritated at the news of this defeat and responded by sending 50,000 men under another general, Wang Huo, to succeed where Ren had failed.
Elite Indo-Roman soldiers of the army of Hippostratus at Qarqan, savoring what they felt to be an overwhelming victory over the Chinese
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[1] Istria, Constanța.
[2] Maaloula, Rif Dimashq.
[3] Now Namurt, near Nemrut Limanı Bay.
[4] Akhisar.
[5] Actually said by Muhammad historically, in reference to a daughter of Khosrow II (either Borandokht or Azarmidokht) briefly taking power in the Sassanid Empire in the early 630s.
[6] Rafah.
[7] Saguenay.
[8] Trois-Rivières.
[9] Nova Scotia.
[11] The Minas Basin.
[12] Cap d’Or, Nova Scotia.
[13] Ortahisar.
[14] El Arish.
[15] Bilbeis.
[16] Qiemo.
[17] Pitsunda.
[18] Sukhumi.
[19] Erciş.
[20] Murat River.
[21] Malazgirt.
[22] Hami.
The Romans deployed their forces behind those of their new Avar allies, supposedly because Aloysius believed the latter would be better suited to skirmishing with the horse-archers and mounted skirmishers of the Bulgars but really mostly because he did not trust them as far as he could throw them. In any case, Bayan Khagan’s greatly bloodied and diminished troops still managed to put up a passable fight, after which they retired through gaps in the legionary lines and the Romans stepped forward to finish the battle. After failing to break the Roman lines head-on, Bezmer tried to lure Aloysius’ forces out and throw them into disarray with feigned retreats, but the Emperor was wise to this strategy after spending years battling the Avars and retaliated at long range with his remaining artillery. In the end it was the Bulgars who would quit the field, dispirited and in disarray, after Bezmer Khan himself was impaled by a carroballista bolt, ending the Battle of Histriopolis in a Roman victory.
Bezmer Khan leading the Bulgar cavalry in their attempt to break through Aloysius' infantry lines outside Histriopolis
Aloysius pursued the Bulgars to their fortified encampment at Ongal in the Danube delta, but there he desisted from finishing them off, though his nephew and Rotholandus’ son Iudicallus (‘Judicaël’ in his native Armoric) had boldly volunteered to lead the assault on their stockades. Instead the Emperor reopened talks with Bezmer’s son and successor Grod, both to avoid the likely heavy death toll from storming the Bulgars’ fortified home and to try to gain a new ally after all the bloodshed of the past few years and the departure of all of his non-federate allies following the successful relief of Constantinople. Grod in turn agreed to sign a federate agreement with the Romans and to give up his sons as hostages in exchange for a new homeland under imperial protection. In a sign that his wife and the Eastern Roman court at Constantinople still commanded a degree of autonomy, the Augustus had to talk Helena into granting the Bulgars settlement rights in Cilicia – which, on top of not having been reconquered by Rome yet, had long been devastated and depopulated by Heshana’s repeated invasions back when it formed part of the Anatolian frontier with his expanded Turkic empire.
While the Romans secured a new ally, the severely exsanguinated and divided Turks on the other side of the Hellespont continued to crumble before the onslaught of the Arabs and their own internal fissures. The Caliph Qasim resolved to deal with Bögü, a younger son of Heshana, and secure Mesopotamia for Islam while sending Talhah ibn Talib to overcome the Syrian resistance being led by the warlord Külüg, a more distant relation of the ruling Tegreg clan. The old Caliph proceeded to lead his 20,000-strong army to victory over the diminished Turkic remnants in upper Mesopotamia at Daquqa, Karkha and most decisively Hdatta: at this final battle in the fall, also known as the Battle of the Upper Zab, the Muslims used their numerical advantage to cross the eponymous river at an undefended ford and outflank Bögü’s prepared positions along the riverbank. Bögü himself was killed and what remained of his army destroyed in the battle which followed, and his widow and subordinates submitted Arbela to Islamic rule without a fight soon afterward, bringing all of Mesopotamia under Islamic rule.
Talhah had a slightly more difficult challenge ahead of him in Syria, not so much because of Külüg himself but rather on account of there already being a multi-sided conflict there, which he could not win simply by eliminating the largest player in the Turks. ‘God’s Lance’ actually brought Külüg down well before the end of 668, dealing him one major defeat at the Battle of Sura in May and then a second, fatal one in the mountains northeast of Damascus itself: as had been the case at the Upper Zab, the Muslims unexpectedly overcame the defenders’ terrain advantage (this time with the help of locals who resented the abusive taxation and capricious tyranny of the Turks) to wipe their foes out in their camp. The Arabs founded on the site of their victory a new town which they named ‘Maaloula’[2], ‘entrance’, for from there they would soon enter Damascus itself peaceably.
However, Külüg’s demise delivered to Islam only northern Syria, and even there they were not wholly untroubled. Most of the cities previously occupied by the forces of Külüg did submit in a hurry, exhausted by the violent conquests of Heshana and then being further taxed and having their populations drafted to fight in his continuous campaign against the Eastern Romans: in particular non-Ephesian Christians welcomed the Muslims as liberators and safeguards not only against the Turks, who they had originally hailed for freeing them from Roman persecution but then come to resent for their harsh rule, but also against a potential return of the Romans. Ghassanid Arab remnants in the countryside continued to resist in the name of their Empress Helena and her new husband Aloysius however, and the collapse of Turkic authority plunged Palaestina into an open free-for-all pitting the Jews, the Samaritans and those Christian insurgents under Abel who had managed to survive up to this point against one another.
After many decades of increasingly restless peace, the forces of Islam burst forth from Arabia in a great conquering wave toward the end of the 660s. Qasim's prudence had timed their onslaught well, coinciding with the rapid decline of the Southern Turkic Khaganate following Heshana's defeat beneath the walls of Constantinople
Beyond the eastern bounds of the former Southern Turkic Khaganate, where Tegreg loyalists sought to keep the underage Doulan Qaghan afloat in Qom and other warlords were establishing themselves in Khorasan & the Iranian Plateau, the Indo-Romans had begun to expand into the Tarim Basin. Hippostratus proved himself no less canny and resourceful than his father and grandfather, managing an intrepid crossing of the Tian Shan Mountains with an army to intimidate King Amrätodane of Kashgar into accepting his authority – and then treating with the latter as a friend, and agreeing to help him fight his ongoing war with Kentarske of Khotan to the southeast. By the end of 668 Hippostratus would have defeated the latter and compelled him to recognize Indo-Roman suzerainty as well, surpassing even the wildest dreams of his progenitor’s overlord Sabbatius and projecting his authority into the western half of the Tarim Basin.
Come 669, the Romans did not cross the Hellespont until Aloysius was sure he had impregnated Helena with a son, so they instead remained around Constantinople for several months. Despite the popularization of jokes that (based on the combination of Helena’s beauty with her aloof and melancholic demeanor) the Emperor had married an ice sculpture, his Empress’ normally-taut belly once again began to swell in the summer. Only then did Aloysius lead his army, newly reinforced by around 20,000 Bulgars, onto Lampsacus and against the Turkic remnants still fighting amongst themselves in the hills and mountains of Anatolia. The delay incidentally worked to the Romans’ favor, for not only did Constantinople still have enough rations stockpiled (originally intended to feed its people through the Turkic siege) to feed the imperial army encamped around it, but it also gave the Turks themselves the mistaken notion that they had enough time to fight among themselves and defeat their nearest rivals before the Romans arrived on the other side of the straits.
The first to fall before the power of a reunited Rome were the generals-turned-warlords Chunak Tarkhan, Tishrat Tarkhan and Tuhun Tarkhan, who had been fighting over western and northwestern Anatolia. Aloysius crushed Chunak and destroyed his fragment of the shattered Turkic army at the Battle of Nicaea, and although Tishrat and Tuhun reconciled to present a united front against the returning Romans following their rival’s defeat, it was too little and far too late – the Romans defeated them as well at the Battle of Cyme[3]. The Bulgars almost immediately began to earn their keep, playing a significant role in these early battles as both a missile screen and a decisive additional heavy cavalry advantage for the Romans. These victories added Bithynia, the Troad and Ionia back to the Roman Empire by the start of autumn, but Aloysius was not done. The forceful and energetic Augustus proceeded further into the Anatolian hinterland, defeating a fourth Tarkhan named Niri first at Thyatira[4] and then again at Dorylaeum, where he took advantage of his far greater numbers to divide his army and envelop the Turks on the plain outside the town.
As winter descended and his wife’s pregnancy progressed, the Emperor swept into the mountains of Isauria to rout the few remaining Turks there and re-secure the allegiance of the Isaurian hill chieftains who had revolted against Helena after she arranged the assassination of their countryman Tryphon, promising them lenient treatment in exchange for hostages and military contributions – and annihilating a force of 2,000 Isaurians who tried to treacherously ambush him after seemingly accepting his offer to negotiate terms for their reintegration in the Battle of Sagalassos that November, then stacking their heads into a mound, to demonstrate the alternative should they insist on continuing in rebellion against Rome. With these triumphs Aloysius recovered the western half of the Diocese of Pontus as well as the entirety of the Diocese of Asia by the end of 669.
A Frankish spearman, a Croat cavalryman and an Isaurian scout (newly welcomed back into the Roman fold) of Aloysius' army as it marches through the forests and hills of western Anatolia
Not to be outdone by the Romans, the forces of Islam were also on the move and expanding their Caliph’s authority throughout the fragmented and exhausted lands of the Southern Turkic Khaganate. Qasim sought to lay down the foundations for a new capital at Kufa, from where he could oversee the fertile and much more heavily populated lands of Mesopotamia with greater ease than from his original seats at Mecca & Medina, so he sent his three oldest sons Abd al-Rahman, Al-Abbas and Ali to subjugate Persia in his stead. Abd al-Rahman and Al-Abbas stormed into the Zagros Mountains in the spring; by 669’s end the former was storming towards Qom, though he was delayed by the fierce resistance of the Buddhist Mazdakites who still fearlessly manned their fortresses despite their own heavy losses in Heshana’s failed wars, while the latter had already extended Islamic power as far as Isfahan. Ali meanwhile took an easier route than his older brothers, sweeping through Meshan and Khuzestan to eventually reach Shiraz by the end of the year.
Talhah meanwhile continued to expand Dar al-Islam’s reach west- and south-ward. From Damascus he acquired the Caliph’s permission to begin directing the migration of Arabs from overpopulated Arabia to the newly acquired ‘al-Sham’ (as they called Syria). Much like the Banu Hashim themselves many of these Islamic tribes claimed descent from Qays ibn ‘Aylan, a descendant of Adnan (himself a mythical descendant of Ishmael), as opposed to the Christian Arabs already in the region who largely claimed descent from Qahtan, the first Yemenite Arab, and whose ancestors migrated from the far southern reaches of Arabia in Sabaean times – for which reason they were reckoned as the ‘Yamani’, Yemenites, in Islamic records. Exactly as Talhah intended, the migratory Qaysites proceeded to do most of the fighting against the Christian Yamani who still stood against him in a bid to drive the latter (weakened by decades of warfare with the Turks) from their long-held ancestral lands.
Leaving the Qaysites to secure northern al-Sham for him, Talhah next rode into Palaestina. He smote the Jews and Samaritans alike at the Battles of Capernaum and Samaria, respectively, but then accepted their submission and directed their elders to send tribute and hostages to his master the Caliph. The Ephesian Christians under Abel were a different story, as they refused to surrender even after being driven from Jerusalem (which they had briefly retaken amid the collapse of Turkic power in the region) and suffering a further defeat atop Tel Lachish west of the holy city. On the other hand non-Ephesian Christians, especially those of a Monophysite disposition, generally welcomed Islamic rule as their brethren in Mesopotamia did.
The Arabs take Jerusalem from Abel's Christian Palestinian forces, who had themselves only just wrested the city from the crumbling Turks a short while before
A prisoner informed Talhah that they were unafraid to fight and die, for news had reached them of a Roman resurgence which had broken the Turks in the first place and the imminent return of the legions. When Talhah reported this development to Qasim, the Caliph scoffed and declared that ‘never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler’[5] – apparently under the belief that the Eastern Romans were still a separate entity apart from their Western Roman cousins, and that Helena was their official ruler rather than Aloysius – and instructed him to leave enough troops behind to control the lingering insurgency before proceeding into Egypt. This Talhah did, and by 669’s end he was standing at the doorway into Egypt at Gaza & Raphia[6].
On the other side of the Earth, the European settlers had begun to expand their footholds into the newly-christened continent of Aloysiana. In the north the Romano-British had explored a ways down and around the Saint Pelagius, and now sought to establish two additional outposts to oversee their allies among the Wildermen & deepen trade relationships with them: one to the north which they named Guínon[7] (‘white’, doubtless after the heavy snowfall common to the region) and one to the south, at a confluence with another river they’d named after Saint Alban, dubbed simply Trés-Rivères[8] after the three channels formed at the mouth of the Saint Alban where it joined the Saint Pelagius. Every summer, when the Wildermen came to fish and forage at these sites, the Britons would trade for high-quality furs with them.
The New World Irish meanwhile settled additional villages and trading posts around the region which Liberius had taken to calling ‘Nova Hibernia’[9] (‘New Ireland’) in his correspondence, while the aforementioned abbot himself was sending armed scouts accompanied by Wilderman guides further inland from Cois Fharraighe to chart the interior. It took the largest of these parties half the year to make it to what their guides called ‘Glooscap’s Bay’[11] after their benevolent dust-born god (but which the Irish named Bá na Fortúin, ‘Bay of Good Luck’), and a similar amount of time to get word back to Liberius; the same was true of a secondary exploring party which had gone west and uncovered a headland at the entrance of the Bay of Good Luck, which they named Rinn Dearg[12] (‘Red Cape’) after the copper deposits there. These discoveries helped Liberius draw a more accurate map of the region his Irish cohorts were settling, and find ideal sites to direct new settlers to in the future.
The Irish on the shores of the Bay of Good Fortune
670 was another year full of good news for the Romans, who sorely needed it after the defeats and civil wars of the past several decades. Come the spring, Aloysius renewed his offensive against the Turkic warlords in Anatolia, driving the forces of Chebi Tarkhan across the Cappadocian plateau and those of Inel Tarkhan back eastward along the Pontic coast. While campaigning in the summer, the Augustus also received word that his Augusta had finally given birth to a son, thereby securing the line of succession and hopefully ensuring that Aloysian rule over the reunified Roman Empire would last longer than a generation: although Aloysius had wanted to name his newborn heir after himself, per his agreement with Helena she had the right to name their secondborn, and she chose to have the new Caesar of all Rome baptized as Constantine after her own father and twin brother. Per the preexisting plans of his father and the grandfather he would never meet, almost immediately after his birth the young Constantine was betrothed to Maria of Arelate – daughter of the last Stilichian emperor Theodosius IV and now ten years his senior – to tie up that particular loose end and ensure no ambitious claimant could use her hand in marriage as a weapon against the Aloysians.
In any case, the Emperor celebrated the birth of a purple-born heir by scoring yet another victory over the Turks in the Battle of Potamía[13], where Grod’s Bulgars hunted down Chebi Tarkhan as the latter attempted to flee the battlefield and brought his head back to the victorious Augustus. After receiving the submission of the remaining Turks in Cappadocia who had yet to die or flee and achieving a similarly bloodless victory over the hugely outnumbered and dispirited garrison at Trebizond in the fall, Aloysius detached thousands of troops from his main army to allow his wife’s Georgian and Armenian vassals to retake their homelands, while moving to secure Cilicia with the Bulgars to whom they had promised the region. By the end of 670, he was settling the Bulgar civilians in their prize while Mithranes of Georgia had scoured the Lazica region of the remaining Turkic presence there and Arsaber of Armenia had re-established his court at the hilltop fortress of Ani. Stilicho had proposed that he and the African army be sent back to Leptis Magna so they could push into Egypt and unite with the main Roman host at Jerusalem after the latter marched through Syria & Palaestina, but Aloysius rejected this strategy due to having recently had to disperse yet more of his men into the Caucasian kingdoms.
Grod of the newly-established 'Cilician Bulgaria' departing from Aloysius' council chambers, federate contract in hand, to settle his people in the land which the Augustus and Augusta had promised him
Events to the south would rapidly complicate the Romans’ plans for the reconquest of the Levant. By this point the forces of Islam were making steady progress throughout western Persia, where the Caliph’s heir Abd al-Rahman finally managed to push past the Mazdakites and lay siege to the Turkic capital at Qom; as a precaution, young Doulan Qaghan had fled from his great-grandfather’s seat with a small escort and headed to Khorasan, where he was put off by the chilly reception given to him by the other warlords and soon moved even further north into the lands of the Khazars. As his oldest sons alternately cut their own paths through the lingering Turkic warlords and received the submission of Persia’s cities, Qasim sent his fourth son Abd al-Fattah north to add the land he called ‘Arminiya’ to the Islamic fold.
As the Roman-backed Arsaber was fighting to re-establish the Mamikonian kingdom there, this immediately created an obvious source of tension between the older empire and the young upstart on its southern border. Even before 670 had ended, detachments of Armenian soldiers and freedom-fighters had begun to engage in skirmishes with the advancing Arabs of Abd al-Fattah between Lakes Van and Urmia. Aloysius dispatched envoys toward the still-under-construction city of Kufa, both to determine the strength of this new potential enemy and to try to avert further violence. It was not so much that he feared the power of Islam (indeed Aloysius was normally an irrepressible and warlike spirit, who eagerly sought out new foes to defeat for glory’s sake), but that he was also concerned about the Khazars who Mithranes reported were looming large over his northeastern border along the Caucasus, with whom he had entered negotiations as well – even Aloysius Gloriosus knew he would be in deep trouble if he had to fight a new two-front war against both the Arabs to the south and these Khazars to the north.
Down in Gaza, Talhah ibn Talib did not have to immediately worry about this new enemy emerging to his north, and instead devoted his full attention to the conquest of Egypt. There yet another grandson of Heshana, Turghar Tarkhan, had established himself in Memphis (a city already largely abandoned by the Romans, which made it perfect for the settlement of his Turkic followers and heretical Copts from the countryside) and proclaimed he would now bear the title of Khan in his own right, supported by the Monophysites whom he allowed to run roughshod over their former Ephesian neighbors and persecutors. Talhah threw open the gateway into Egypt by first bloodlessly seizing Rhinococura[14] and then defeating a combined Turkic-Coptic host in the Battle of Pelusium, so that by high summer he was already in Egypt proper. He defeated Turghar’s forces yet again at Phelbes[15] in July, but could neither immediately overcome Memphis’ defenses (even in their dilapidated state) nor cross onto the western bank of the Nile before 670’s end.
The Hashemite army on the verge of taking Phelbes, Egypt
Far east of Rome, the Indo-Romans continued to do their part to bring the torch of Romanitas into the Tarim Basin. After taking some time to consolidate his hold over Kashgar and Khotan in the western reaches of the Tarim Basin, Hippostratus next campaigned to secure the submission of Kucha, Karashahr and Qarqan[16] to the east and southeast. Having only recently begun to recover from the devastating Turkic and Chinese incursions of the past centuries, these oasis-kingdoms could offer little resistance against the Indo-Roman army, whose Sogdian and Paropamisadae core was not only backed by the meager forces their new Tocharian vassals could offer but also a diverse array of mercenaries ranging from Turkic horse-archers to Persian lancers to Indian longbowmen and even a few war elephants.
Hippostratus was not the only king trying to expand his reach into this critical central juncture of the Silk Road, though. Emperor Renzong of the Later Han had passed away, and his successor Hao Xianggui – better remembered as Emperor Mingzong, the ‘Bright Ancestor’ – was eager to expand Chinese power even further west. A 35,000-strong Chinese expeditionary force, including a large contingent of mounted Tegreg auxiliaries, pushed past their one-time Karluk allies to restore the Dragon Throne’s hold over Dunhuang and Anxi. By the year’s end, the expeditionary commander Ren Xiaofeng stood at the Jade Gate through which the Chinese traditionally passed into the southeastern Tarim Basin, unknowingly setting up a confrontation between himself and Hippostratus of the Indo-Romans in the near future.
The first half of 671 was taken up by the ongoing negotiations between the Romans, Khazars and Muslims. Aloysius was unable to reach an agreement with Caliph Qasim and his sons, who sought to occupy almost the entirety of Syria save Antioch and its environs, three-quarters of ‘Arminiya’ (including the lands around the other two ‘Armenian seas’, Lakes Sevan and Van, but excepting a sliver of territory in the northwest around Ani which they were prepared to concede to Arsaber) and eastern Georgia – the idea of making such extensive concessions was, of course, unacceptable to the Emperor. That said, Aloysius did manage to strike a deal with Kundaç Khagan, the incumbent Qağan of the Khazars: he persuaded Helena to set up a match between her eldest daughter Irene to Kundaç’s own son Kundaçiq, although Helena in turn insisted that the two should not be formally wed for some years yet on account of the bride still being well underage. The Romans also acknowledged Khazar gains in the Caucasus, including western Abasgia (centered around Pityus[17], though Georgia was set to retain Sebastopolis[18] and the nearby fortress of Anakopia).
With his northern flank secured, Aloysius turned his full attention back onto the recalcitrant Muslims. In this year he contended chiefly with Abd al-Fattah, who had defeated Arsaber’s Armenians early in the year at the Battle of Archesh[19]. After re-consolidating his forces, the Augustus set out to engage Abd al-Fattah at Bagavan, immediately arresting the progress of the Arab prince’s northward offensive and causing him to flee after only a short clash out of fear at the size of the Roman army (backed, as it was, by its large Bulgar and African contingents on top of Arsaber’s and Mithranes’ much less intimidating contributions). Abd al-Fattah fled back over the Arsanias River[20] with the Romans in hot pursuit, but then had the idea of turning around to attack Aloysius (who had led the pursuit & outpaced his own army) near Manzikert[21] with a thousand-strong detachment of horsemen and camel-riders. Unfortunately for him, the 2,000-strong body of Roman cavalry protecting the Augustus was not as weary as he had expected, and they were also much more heavily equipped than his own men. The battle which followed resulted in another Islamic defeat and Abd al-Fattah’s own demise at the hands of the Roman Emperor: he had challenged Aloysius to single combat in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tables, and though both Iudicallus and Haistulf of the Lombards offered to fight in his stead, Aloysius personally accepted this challenge and prevailed within minutes.
Out of options, Abd al-Fattah ibn Qasim charged straight for Aloysius' position at the Battle of Manzikert. In turn the golden, winged Augustus was more than happy to answer his challenge, and would soon render him a very personal casualty for the House of the Prophet
Although four-fifths of Abd al-Fattah’s army had been left out of the Battle of Manzikert, the death of their commander had left them listless and demoralized, and by the end of August they had been expelled from Armenia altogether by the Romans. Qasim was not only infuriated by the killing of one of his sons but also surprised by the re-emerging power of Rome, which he thought had been spent by thirty years of defeat and retreat before the Turks. Now correctly identifying Aloysius as their leader and a more serious threat than he had first thought, the Caliph assembled new armies – one which he placed under the command of his oldest grandson, Ali ibn Abd al-Rahman, and the other led by his nephew Umar ibn Zayd – and directed them to stop the Romans, who had ended the year by beginning to cross into northern Syria. Further complicating matters for Aloysius despite his victory, the Continental Saxons grew bolder after testing Rome’s northwestern-most defenses and began to mount larger incursions into his ancestral March as well as the kingdom of the Thuringians, placing pressure upon him to wrap affairs in the east up more quickly.
Qasim also sent a missive to his top general Talhah, then still battling his way through Egypt, alerting him to the possible or even probable necessity of his return north to defend Syria in the coming months or years. Talhah in turn was motivated to hurry up and bring the fighting in Egypt to a quick end, so as to free himself up for the new task ahead. He crossed the Nile this year and inflicted further defeats on Turghar Khan’s forces at Sais, Cabasa and finally near Alexandria itself, after which the populace of that city – having already survived a previous sacking by Heshana – surrendered without a fight. Turghar himself sallied forth from Memphis but was trounced and slain by Talhah at the Battle of Heliopolis, for although he outnumbered the Arabs by almost 3:1, Talhah had eliminated him & his Turkic contingent very early on in the fighting by way of a cavalry clash, after which his Coptic troops fled or surrendered.
Turghar’s son Tarkhun fled Memphis for Nilopolis, which laid to the south between Memphis itself and Oxyrhynchus. From there, he struggled to rally the ever-increasingly-diminished Turkic presence as well as the indigenous Monophysite Copts to continue fighting against the Turks and Romans alike. Talhah for his part enforced a pragmatic governing policy as ordered by the Caliph: after pacifying a new conquest and ending disorder, he tolerated Christians of all stripes and kept taxes low on account of the vast amounts of booty which the Muslims had been able to plunder from enemy camps & corpses and cities that dared resist their onslaught, which served to greatly reduce the willingness of the locals to continue standing against the introduction of Islamic rule. It also did not help Tarkhun that Rome’s Nubian allies were pushing in from the south, while the Garamantians were doing the same from Libya in hopes of recovering their territories south and east of Cyrenaica.
The Monophysite bishop of Heliopolis, sent by Talhah ibn Talib, performs obeisance before the Caliph Qasim at his new capital of Kufa
Beyond the troubles in the Middle East, a collision between the Indo-Romans and the Chinese in Central Asia was now imminent. Hippostratus had just barely received the submission of those eastern Tarim city-states he had approached the year before when Ren Xiaofeng marched into the Basin with his army, whose numbers the Indo-Romans could barely match even after receiving military contributions from their newest vassals, and received the bloodless surrender of Cumuḍa[22] at the region’s eastern edge. Since Ren proclaimed that the Middle Kingdom was placing the entirety of the Tarim Basin back under Chinese suzerainty and even ‘invited’ Hippostratus to bow down before his Emperor, it was clear from the very beginning that there was no room for negotiation between Luoyang and Kophen, and that battle was inevitable as the Chinese set out to enforce their rule by arms where words had failed them.
Hippostratus and Ren Xiaofeng would first meet at the Battle of Miran in the southeastern sands of the Tarim, where the former’s cavalry proved victorious against the Tegreg Turks of the latter. This small skirmish was soon overshadowed by a much larger clash at Charklik to the west, where the Chinese pushed their Indo-Roman rival to retreat: however, Hippostratus successfully covered his withdrawal in a furious rearguard action and would fight another day. That other day arrived in August of 671, when Ren pursued Hippostratus to Qarqan. With the support of the petty-king of Calmadana who ruled from that city, the Indo-Romans set an ambush for the oncoming Chinese army in the dunes east of the city, and rapidly routed the Turks who were supposed to be guarding the latter’s flanks.
The Chinese were mauled in the main engagement, with Ren himself being counted among the 15,000 casualties inflicted upon them by the Indo-Romans: a worthy victory by Roman standards, and one which would have been a serious setback either to the Romans themselves or to any of the enemies they faced around the Eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Hippostratus, by Chinese standards 15,000 casualties barely amounted to slightly trimming one of the Dragon’s claws, especially for a dynasty still in its prime like the Later Han. Mingzong was mildly irritated at the news of this defeat and responded by sending 50,000 men under another general, Wang Huo, to succeed where Ren had failed.
Elite Indo-Roman soldiers of the army of Hippostratus at Qarqan, savoring what they felt to be an overwhelming victory over the Chinese
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[1] Istria, Constanța.
[2] Maaloula, Rif Dimashq.
[3] Now Namurt, near Nemrut Limanı Bay.
[4] Akhisar.
[5] Actually said by Muhammad historically, in reference to a daughter of Khosrow II (either Borandokht or Azarmidokht) briefly taking power in the Sassanid Empire in the early 630s.
[6] Rafah.
[7] Saguenay.
[8] Trois-Rivières.
[9] Nova Scotia.
[11] The Minas Basin.
[12] Cap d’Or, Nova Scotia.
[13] Ortahisar.
[14] El Arish.
[15] Bilbeis.
[16] Qiemo.
[17] Pitsunda.
[18] Sukhumi.
[19] Erciş.
[20] Murat River.
[21] Malazgirt.
[22] Hami.