701 seemed a quiet enough start to the new century in western Eurasia. Aloysius arrived in Antioch early in the year, but found that the Hashemite Caliphate had yet to tear itself asunder like he and Helena hoped. Unwilling to commit immediately to war when the conditions had not become as favorable as originally planned for, the
Augustus instead worked closely with the local federate kings of the Caucasian and Arab kingdoms, as well as the
Kanasubigi of the Cilician Bulgars, to raise and drill additional troops – as well as recruiting some of each kingdom’s most promising fighters into the
auxilia palatina corps of his Antiochene and Thessalonican standing armies. While in the East Aloysius also took the time to suppress a new heresy emerging on the Armenian-Mesopotamian frontier with Islam, where the scars of Heshana’s rampage had not even begun to heal when the armies & raiders of Qasim and then Abd al-Rahman stormed in: so-called the ‘Aragatsians’ because they originated from the vicinity of Mount Aragats or ‘Sempadians’ because the sect was founded by a man called Smbat (translated into ‘Sempad’ by Latin chroniclers) of Agarak, they rejected Trinitarianism and believed in the Docetist teaching that the Romans and Jews had merely crucified an illusory specter of Jesus (who, as an entity of pure spirit indistinct from God, never actually died in their reckoning).
The Armenian king Gurgen, son and successor of the late Arsaber who had helped defend Constantinople against Heshana Qaghan and fought in the eastern Caucasus for the Romans, may have been inclined to ignore these heretics and focus on the bigger fish to fry to his south for the time being had they limited their theological dispute to Christological issues. However, the Sempadians were also fervent iconoclasts – Smbat taught that the Turks and Arabs had been sent by God as a punishment to chastise the Ephesian Christians for making & venerating icons – and opposed the feudal system entrenched in Armenia, where much of the nobility (the high
nakharars and lesser
ishkhans alike) and their traditional demesnes predated Roman dominance in the region, in favor of communal living and an Apostolic sharing of all possessions. They had translated these convictions into action at the turn of the century: attacking Ephesian churches around Mount Aragats, inciting peasants to revolt against or at least flee from their overlords, and sabotaging the construction of the fortress of Amberd on its slopes.
Worried that these heretics would form a fifth column in case of another war with the Muslims, Gurgen called upon his suzerain to intervene and support his ongoing efforts to track down the offending sect. Aloysius did just that by contributing troops to a manhunt for Smbat, who he personally suspected to be a Muslim spy on account of his sect’s iconoclasm and the fact that their actions aided the forces of Islam; ultimately the family Smbat was staying with was bribed into hand him over in the middle of a July night, after which he was condemned to be burned at the stake for not just treason but also willfully persisting in his heretical beliefs. Other Sempadians who were captured and recanted were allowed to live, but had to help repair the damage they had caused to Amberd and the local churches. The
Augustus believed his job was done with that, but the heresiarch’s family and close associates escaped his wrath with the aid of Armenian rivals of the ruling Mamikonian clan and – regarding Smbat himself as a martyr – resolved to pester the Romans and their local Armenian allies for so long as they still drew breath.
A party of Sempadian saboteurs are caught trying to damage the defenses of Amberd by Roman, Armenian and Ghassanid Arab troops
Caliph Abdullah meanwhile was not in a good position to make use of the Sempadians, who at this time lacked the numbers to be anything more than a nuisance to the Holy Roman Empire anyway. The great-grandson of the Prophet was more concerned with contending with his uncles, having come to increasingly regret his decision to entrench their excessive power and autonomy with each passing day. While hoping Ali would get killed by the Hunas, he turned to the long-suffering Persians (particularly what had remained of their nobility) in his search for allies against al-Abbas, who was staunchly supported by the Arab military aristocrats who’d begun settling and carving out fiefdoms for themselves in Persia under the older Hashemite prince’s aegis. Abdullah slowly began to build up support with the indigenous Persians, promising to restore them to a state resembling their former Sassanid-era glory and that he would not allow them to be eclipsed by the Arab settlers; that said, superficially he and al-Abbas did have a common enemy in the Mazdakites still holding out in the Zagros Mountains, who they jointly battled without mercy.
Ali meanwhile had returned to the front in Al-Hind and immediately went on the offensive against the Hunas, who had done what they could to rebuild their own armies and prepare in the interim. Huna forces had some success in resisting the Islamic advance toward Gujarat, as the Arabs had difficulty maneuvering in the Rann of Kutch when the monsoon season flooded its salt marshes. They were not as successful in dealing with Ali’s eastward thrust out of the Thar Desert, as the latter’s small Arab army managed to confound and defeat a larger Huna host at the Battle of Mandore; the
senapati (general) Kambujiya, one of Pravarasena’s nephews, was among the casualties, having abandoned his men to flee for the safety of the Rann only to be caught and killed by Islamic pursuers at Jabalipura[1]. Ali and his sons next surged toward Indraprastha, but before they could come into sight of the Huna capital the
Mahārājadhirāja managed to beat them back at the Battle of Khoh[2] this year, thanks in no small part to the support of the local Hindu
kshatriya clan of Bargujar. While typically reluctant to support the Hunas, the Bargujars (like many other Hindus) had come to deem the violently iconoclastic Muslims a greater evil than their slightly less destructive Buddhist overlords.
Mahārājadhirāja Pravarasena's second son Salanavira about to kill a downed enemy at the Battle of Khoh
Further still to the east, in the wake of the Srivijayans managing to fight the Later Han to a stalemate, at least one of their vassals – seeing that they were no longer invincible – thought this the right time to rise in rebellion. The nobility of northern Korea rallied to Buyeo Yung, a distant kinsman of their long-fallen royal dynasty, and proclaimed him King Hyeongbeon of a restored Baekje which would be independent of both Silla and Chinese overlordship. When King Somyeong of Silla marched to restore his authority, he was dealt a stinging defeat by the Baekje restorationists at the Battle of Jinnae-gun[3] and had to appeal for Chinese intervention. Zhongzong, who now felt vindicated in his concerns that his vassals might start to get antsy after witnessing China’s first defeat (however limited) abroad since the foundation of the Later Han and eager to remind them that his dynasty’s position was in fact still unassailable, agreed and began to amass a large expeditionary force north of the Yalu.
Come 702, while the Sempadians remained underground and licked their wounds, Aloysius busied himself with the organization of large counter-raids into the Muslim portions of Syria and the Levant. While he did not lead these attacks personally (a rarity for the Emperor, normally a bombastic dynamo who led his men from the front – most likely he considered raids like these to be a dishonorable necessity, and thus beneath him), the
Augustus did have a hand in directing and coordinating the Ghassanid, Banu Kalb and Cilician Bulgar forces which were involved in this chevauchée, as well as in selecting their targets. The larger Ghassanid-Bulgar expedition of about 5,000 struck first, sweeping southward from their forward-base at Edessa to scorch the land as far as old Emesa, now called ‘Homs’ by its new occupants, before looping westward to return to the safety of the former’s federate kingdom through the Gap of Emesa[4].
The Ghassanids were especially eager to settle scores with their rivals among the Adnanite tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu ‘Amir: while the action in this campaign primarily consisted of skirmishes, the Christian and Muslim forces did fight an actual pitched battle near the ruins of Raphanea (one of many Syrian towns destroyed by the Turks, very briefly resettled by the Romans and then abandoned again after the Arab conquest) where neither they nor the enemy Adnanites showed quarter, with nearly 800 of the latter choosing to fight to the death after it became clear that the Christians had won the day. The Banu Kalb meanwhile had launched a much more modest expedition half the size of their northern neighbor’s out of Jerusalem, primarily targeting Muslim caravans and isolated villages from Jerash (formerly Gerasa) to ancient, nearly-abandoned Petra before looping back toward southwestern Palaestina and defeating a mounted party of
guzat trying to intercept them & retake their loot at a large skirmish near Rafah (as the Arabs called Raphia).
Islamic engraving depicting combat between a Ghassanid raider and a Muslim ghazi
These raids assuredly infuriated the Muslims, who were used to being the ones doing the raiding. Abdullah authorized a large punitive expedition into Roman territory and began to amass volunteers & supplies for it, but he was reluctant to commit to an all-out war for fear that his uncle Al-Abbas might either overthrow him or use the conflict as a chance to boost the prestige of his own branch of the Hashemite family (and then overthrow him). The Caliph allocated a not-insignificant amount of resources to the expansion of his own
ghilman corps this year, lavishly outfitting a new class of mostly Turkic, Kurdish and Abyssinian slaves with heavy arms and armor in hopes of cultivating an army which would be fanatically loyal to him alone and more than capable of crushing both the Romans and his rival kindred on the field of battle.
While the Syrian frontier continued to heat up, Ali was falling back on a strategy of raids in al-Hind himself. Finding that the Hunas were too strong and well-entrenched in Gujarat and around their capital, the younger of the Caliph’s uncles sought to weaken them with a pair of great
razzias, and if possible provoke Pravarasena into recklessly coming after him onto favorable terrain. After the monsoon season passed and the great Rann of Kutch dried up in places, he and his sons tore a bloody swath toward Indraprastha and deposited six large bags of severed heads (one for each of the Hashemite princes involved) within sight of the city’s towers before retreating with as much plunder as they could carry; meanwhile his eldest son Idris led the attack on Gujarat, sacking Vardhmanpur[5] before unexpectedly moving east to avoid stiffening Indian resistance to the south and putting Dasapura[6] to the torch. These brutal and audacious attacks had the desired result, compelling Pravarasena to assemble a huge army of around 70,000 at Indraprastha at the cost of emptying many garrisons and further sapping the strength of his other frontiers’ defenses in the hope of finally putting the Islamic invasion to an end with overwhelming force in the next year.
Off in the uttermost east, Zhongzong’s army of 140,000 moved to crush the Baekje rebellion. Hyeongbeon frantically tried to stop this behemoth host on the Yalu, but with less than a fifth of their strength, he was inevitably overwhelmed and put to flight in the Battle of Uiju (which the Chinese called Yizhou), where his plan to destroy a dam and drown the Chinese army as it crossed the river was foiled by a contingent of Turkic horsemen who cut down his engineers and the detachment of infantry he’d posted to guard them. Talks to secure support from the Yamato and compel their Emperor Jomei to rebel against Chinese overlordship fell through after this debacle, leaving the men of Baekje to face their doom on their lonesome.
Spurning a Chinese offer to yielded and be treated with leniency which he suspected to be a ruse, Hyeongbeon talked most of his remaining 6,000 men into mounting a heroic but assuredly futile last stand against the insurmountable odds presented by the combined Later Han-Silla army at the Battle of Song’ak[7] in July of 702: a tenth of their number chose to surrender anyway, and the sight of their heads on the Later Han’s lances proved the truth of Hyeongbeon’s words to his remaining followers. The Korean rebel chief himself rode off to his death on the point of a Turkic mercenary’s lance, confounding all efforts to capture him despite Zhongzong offering a reward to do so – certainly not out of mercy, but so that he might be subjected to a more humiliating traitor’s death – and the orders of the Chinese commander Yuan Dan, who was himself the grandson of a Tegreg noblewoman. While many generations of independence-minded Koreans would celebrate this feat into the future, in the more practical terms of the present his defeat and the annihilation of his army spelled a definitive end to Baekje, which would be permanently annexed by Silla and never managed to rise again. Ironically, Baekje’s demise thus also definitively united the Korean peninsula under one kingdom’s banner for the first time in history.
Turkic heavy cavalry in Emperor Zhongzong's employ rapidly bearing down on Hyeongbeon's Korean rebels at the Battle of Song'ak
703 saw the Muslims launch their counter-chevauchée, numerous small raiding parties aggressively surging into the lands of the far-eastern Roman federates from the remains of Upper Mesopotamia to Palaestina and living off the land as they attacked trading caravans & undefended or lightly defended settlements, bypassed or skirted around fortifications, and avoided the inevitable response of the Roman army and its auxiliaries wherever they could. The Ghassanids and Banu Kalb requested & received permission from the
Augustus to disperse their own armies to counter the Muslim attackers, but this played right into the hands of Abdullah (or more accurately his chief strategist, the slightly older Turkic
ghulam Nusrat al-Din – Aloysius accurately assessed the new Caliph to not be his predecessors’ martial equal, but at the time was unaware of the talent of his newly promoted lieutenant). In particular, the Ghassanid king Al-Aiham II ibn Al-Harith was lured into an ambush north of Cyrrhus and killed when three Islamic raiding parties simultaneously descended on his isolated detachment.
The demise of one of his vassals compelled Aloysius to take the field himself, and understanding that he could not hope to catch the raiders with a lumbering host at its full strength, he took with him only the 2,000-strong
schola based in Antioch and five hundred additional Ghassanid, Kalb and Cilician Bulgar
auxilia palatina. The old Emperor lured the Arabs into a trap of his own, establishing a fortified camp on a hill near the headwaters of the River Eleutherus[8] with seemingly only 700 of his faithful paladins for company: unable to resist the temptation to cut the head off the Roman snake in one apparently easy blow, half a dozen
ghazi captains massed their raiders into a 3,500-strong force and descended upon Aloysius’ position on a cool August night. Of course, then the rest of his army rushed to the fray – alerted by the massive signal fire Aloysius had prepared, as the Muslims had fortunately attacked on a day with neither rain nor fog – and the Muslims were soundly defeated in the melee which followed.
Aloysius' paladins and their auxiliaries overpowering the surprised Muslims at the Battle of the Eleutherus
While the Romans and Muslims to the west continued to intensify their quasi-war, Ali was fighting a decidedly not-quasi-war’s climactic battle in the east. He pulled his armies together to face the grand host of Pravarasena, but even with all his strength and reinforcements reluctantly sent by his nephew, he had mustered a total of only some 15,000 men against the 70,000 very angry Indians descending upon him. The Muslims withdrew down the Luni River, which the Hunas thought to be a sign of cowardice before their impending doom, but in truth Ali hoped to bring to bear river-boats transporting
naphtha throwers supplied by his nephew and needed to fight the battle along the riverbanks, during the monsoon season where the river and the Rann of Kutch in general had flooded sufficiently for those boats to sail upriver, to do so.
The Battle of Balotra followed Ali’s decision to turn and face the Hunas with his riverine support finally at the ready. The Hunas’ overwhelming advantage in numbers was blunted by the terrain, turned to the Muslims’ advantage by seasonal flooding & rains, and Ali spooked Pravarasena’s war elephants with his liberal usage of fire arrows. The Islamic
naphtha-throwers added to the mounting panic in the huge but unwieldy Huna host by flinging their fiery pots at whatever Indians they could reach from the Luni either by hand or with slings, while Ali’s main body of battle-hardened and zealous warriors held their ground against one furious but disorderly Huna assault after another. Ultimately the Hunas routed in the face of a forceful Islamic counterattack, leaving some twenty thousand dead including Pravarasena himself; the
Mahārājadhirāja was thrown from his panicking elephant after an enterprising
naphtha-armed
ghulam came ashore and managed to set the great beast ablaze at the cost of his own life. Alas, old Ali did not get to enjoy his greatest triumph for long – he was wounded by two Indian arrows during the fighting and, while apparently well enough to participate in his army’s celebrations immediately after the battle (where he boasted that he finally got to kill an emperor after all), died of an infection two weeks later.
On the other side of the planet, 703 was the year in which Saint Brendan’s Monastery really began to come into its own as the primary power on Tír na Beannachtaí. In response to another round of increasingly destructive fighting between the Gaelic petty-kings who had established themselves on the island only to bring their old warlike habits from the Old World with them, the incumbent Abbot Áedán mac Ainmere – himself a former adventurer who had himself tonsured and exiled himself over the Atlantic after the rest of his
fian were wiped out in one of many meaningless skirmishes between kings back in the Emerald Isle – took to organizing both the monastery’s actual tenants and refugees from the villages torched by the kings’ warbands into a militia. He drilled the commoners and ordered the smithy to start forging spears (as well as straightening the blades of those peasants who owned scythes, thereby turning their tools into war-scythes fit for combat) where before Saint Brendan’s had only ever forged religious relics or farming implements, so that they might more effectively defend themselves. And of course, to both provide additional training and a solid fighting core to the small army he was assembling, Áedán also expended some of the monastery's wealth (indeed they were probably the single greatest repository of riches on the island) to hire adventuring
fianna as well.
An armed New World Irish peasant, one of hundreds of such rabble who decided monastic rule had to beat the endemic raiding and warfare of the Gaelic kings in the decades after any memory of co-operation against the heretical British had faded
When he took to the field, acting through captains elected by this new militia so as to avoid directly staining his own hands with blood, Abbot Áedán was able to defeat all opposition over the course of the summer & autumn and force them to the peace table by sheer weight of numbers. His militiamen comfortably outnumbered any of his opponents’ warbands, and possessed both discipline and zeal enough (as well as hope of returning to their homes without further molestation by roving ‘foragers’ and
fianna) to stand their ground in battle – their hopes were realized indeed when the good Abbot and his monks sent the feuding kings home after first compelling them to swear holy oaths to cease fighting and return whatever loot and captives they had stolen off one another’s lands. Following in the example he had just set, the monks of Saint Brendan’s took upon themselves the duty of being Tír na Beannachtaí’s peacekeepers, mediators and eventually – temporal governors in all but name.
In 704, the biggest source of ‘excitement’ for the Romans came from within. A clique of Frankish magnates dissatisfied at the power which the
Caesar Constantine wielded as Mayor of the Palace and the trust which their king Dagobert placed in him reached a boiling peak this year, for in yet more signs of deepening Aloysian influence over the ruling Merovingian branch, Dagobert agreed to betroth his and Queen Ingeltrude’s daughter Himiltrude to Constantine’s own son Aloysius Junior on top of relying almost exclusively on his advice in matters of state and ceding the responsibility of investing bishops & abbots to the incumbent Pope Sergius. Clotaire (Old Frankish/Frenkisk: ‘Chlothar’) of Bavay and Childebert of Reims, Dagobert’s kinsmen who had contended with him for the throne until Aloysius Senior arbitrated an end to the Frankish succession crisis, now returned to the pages of history as rebels against the Frankish and Roman thrones in the summer of this year, denouncing their cousin as a hopeless Roman lapdog and
roi fainéant (Gallique: ‘do-nothing king’) who was frittering away the ancient power of the House of Merovech for no good reason. They agreed that Clotaire should be king in Dagobert’s place, having a slightly closer relation to the previous king Théodebert III, but that Childebert’s son would marry his daughter and be named his heir in turn.
The rebels seemed to have the upper hand at first, apparently stealing a march on the royalist & imperialist forces to pluck Constantine from his villa in the countryside near Mantes. They soon realized it was they who had been tricked, however: the man they had seized at swordpoint turned out to be a body double, recruited on his mother’s order as part of the tightening of Constantine’s security measures in the aftermath of his suspicious brush with death years prior, and in truth the
Caesar was multiple steps ahead of them. In truth, Constantine’s own spies among Clotaire’s servants had alerted him to the rival princes’ plotting and he had spirited himself away to Trévere, while also sending his family to Rome on a pilgrimage to greet Pope Sergius. Aloysius had been kept well-informed of his son’s counter-scheme through Helena, and authorized a substantial element of the first imperial army at the capital to follow Constantine into battle once the rebels moved into the open: ten legions of infantry and four banners of cavalry, for a total of 14,000 men. Dagobert too was prepared, and taking his friend’s advice to lead troops into battle to prove that he was no less a warrior than his ancestors, assembled an army of 5,000 at his own capital of Lutèce[9].
Clotaire and Childebert sensed the danger they were in, soon to be trapped between Dagobert’s army in the south and that of Constantine bearing down upon them from the north, and scrambled to try to eliminate their enemies separately before they got crushed between the royal and imperial armies. They rushed to do battle with the smaller host of the King at Pontoise (which Constantine would have still have preferred to call by its Latin name, Pontisara) and there prevailed, having more than twice his number; Dagobert proved himself a valiant but still inexperienced leader in war, and had to retreat behind the Seine & the walls of Lutèce. However he defended those walls quite ably, often marching along them with his retinue to impress his remaining troops and personally distributing relief to his subjects as the rebels erected siegeworks around the city, and ultimately personally fighting to throw back the one assault his kinsmen were able to launch before Constantine arrived on the scene.
The negotiations between the rival parties were brief, as Constantine & Dagobert were certain in their impending victory and offered only to show leniency by way of exile to a newly-established monastery near the Frisian border if the rebel chiefs surrendered. Clotaire led a dramatic charge against the imperial army while Childebert stayed behind near Lutèce’s gates with the rearguard to hold back any attempt at a sally on Dagobert’s part. The
Caesar met Clotaire’s attack with a (considerably larger) counter-charge of his own and decisively crushed the Frankish usurper in a manner his father would be proud of, although unlike Aloysius Senior would have done, he did not actually seek out the enemy leader and cut him down in glorious single combat – instead it was one of several thousand imperial knights, Marche (Francesc for ‘Mark’) de Sablones, who relieved Clotaire of his head and would be rewarded for bringing it to Constantine (safely directing the flow of battle from the rear in the traditional Roman fashion) with promotion to the rank of count. Childebert too died fighting soon after, crushed between Dagobert’s sallying men and Constantine’s own after the rout of Clotaire’s contingent, neutralizing the primary forces of resistance to Dagobert and Constantine within Francia.
Having overwhelmed and broken the rebel cavalry in the first half-hour of battle, the imperial Roman cavalry promptly went on to roll up Clotaire's and Childebert's infantry, most of whom yielded after only token, hopeless resistance
Aloysius congratulated his son from all the way over in Antioch, where he and Helena were trying to further undermine the Caliphate ahead of turning their quasi-war with Abdullah into a real one by directly inciting Al-Abbas to revolt. Al-Abbas seemed receptive to the idea until he discovered that the courtiers advising him to rise against his nephew were actually spies on the Romans’ payroll, at which point he had them beheaded instead – while he held Abdullah in contempt, he still hated the Romans even more, both for repeatedly holding back the advances of Islam and martyring his brother Abd al-Fattah. In any case the scheme would not have borne fruit even if Al-Abbas had agreed, for the second son of Qasim died in his sleep before the year was out: he was seventy-two, and last of the great princes of the third Hashemite generation after the Prophet. That fact did balance out whatever relief Abdullah may have felt at the departure of his last troublesome uncle from this world with a profound sense of loss, and besides Al-Abbas was succeeded by his three sons Jalil, Ismail and Khalil, who had inherited their father’s antipathy toward their cousin.
In al-Hind Ali’s death was rapidly leading to a breakdown in his army’s unity of command, as his own eldest son Al-Azad was challenged for command by his own four younger brothers. The five brothers from the third Hashemite branch did manage to stay united long enough to capitalize on their father’s shattering final victory and march on Indraprastha, sacking the Huna capital after Pravarasena’s eldest son and
Mahasenapati Rudrasimha fled well ahead of their arrival & left his would-be subjects to fend for themselves. But they violently squabbled over the plunder and slaves, and exposed themselves to destruction had Islam’s lucky streak not quite run out just yet – Rudrasimha’s own brother Salanavira and several other of his kinsmen among the Eftal dynasty also rose to challenge him for the throne of the Hunas, cursing him as a craven and an incompetent unworthy of their ancestors’ legacy.
Abdullah took advantage of this disorder among his cousins to sign a treaty with Rudrasimha, who the Caliph recognized as the lawful new
Mahārājadhirāja, limiting Islamic expansion to the east at the Luni River. The sons of Ali were ordered to content themselves with feudatories carved out of their father’s conquests, a settlement which they all resented – but before they could turn their swords against their cousin or disregard whatever words he wrote on papyrus and continue pushing against the vulnerable Hunas, first they had to determine the pecking order among themselves. The Hunas, for their part, soon found that they did not just have the Muslims or one another to worry about, as the Kannada and Telugu Hindu kingdoms sensed opportunity and began mounting probing attacks against their crumbling realm’s southern flank before the end of 704 as well.
Al-Azad ibn Ali leading his brothers in sacking the Huna capital of Indraprastha after it was cravenly abandoned by Pravarasena's own heir. His triumph was fleeting however, for this would turn out to be the last time in which his younger kin were willing to heed his commands
Come 705, Aloysius lost patience with his wife’s strategy to try to undermine Islamic unity and exploit tensions between the branches of the Banu Hashim which had grown increasingly distant from one another, believing that Al-Abbas’ execution of their spies the year before was a sign that such efforts were doomed to fail. Instead, he opted for a blunt approach and decided that if they could neither cause the Muslims to start hostilities or fall into a civil war, he would start the next great war between the Romans and Arabs himself, with an eye on securing the Sinai to split Egypt apart from the rest of the Caliphate and also expanding his buffer space on the Syro-Mesopotamian frontier, on top of signing off on the Africans' request to put the resources stockpiled & troops gathered in Carthage to use in an invasion of Hoggar (from where, despite the respite won at Dimmidi in 698, Donatist raiding parties had only become ever larger and more aggressive over the last decade). However the
Augustus never got a chance to realize these designs himself – on June 30 of this year he personally participated, as he often did, in the strenuous martial games & exercises of his army (over much of a hot summer day no less) as it assembled in Antioch for the opening strike, but complained of chest pains soon after dismounting his newest warhorse. While he initially tried to laugh it off, ‘it’ soon turned out to be a fatal heart attack, and the Emperor did not survive the night; the end had come for Aloysius Gloriosus, successor of the Stilichians and reunifier of Rome, who passed away at the age of sixty-three.
The news was greeted with mourning across the Empire as it traveled westward, for in spite of Aloysius’ numerous personal failings and bitter conflict with the Roman Senate, not even the latter could deny his martial triumphs and the role he played in stitching the Occident and Orient back together after centuries of separation (and the near-fall of the East to the Turks). The planned offensive against the Caliphate in the Levant had to be suspended as the Emperor’s body was transported overland first to Constantinople, then Rome, and finally Trévere – publicly borne through the streets of each capital in solemn processions so that the citizens might respectively mourn the man who saved their city, the man who restored their empire, and the man who was to that day the greatest of their native citizens – and once returned to his hometown and primary seat of power, was sealed in a porphyry sarcophagus and definitively laid to rest in the Aloysian family mausoleum just outside the city following the funeral liturgy & a eulogy delivered by his son at Trévere’s High Cathedral[10].
Following Aloysius’ funeral, Constantine moved quickly to formally succeed his father and consolidate power as the second Aloysian
Augustus of the Holy Roman Empire. Having secured his influence in Gaul just the year before, he was hailed & uplifted on the paladins’ shields as his father’s successor by the army in Trévere, then took a south-westerly route into Italy from the capital through eastern Gaul and Arles. In Rome he was acclaimed as Emperor by the Senate on September 17, not that they had much choice in the matter, and then immediately crowned by Pope Sergius. In the first decision of his reign, Constantine had to consider whether this was sufficient – that having been acclaimed by the original Senate and crowned by the first-among-equals of the Heptarchs, he was indeed already Emperor of the Romans and scarcely needed to do all of that again – or to humor the East and their traditions by traveling to Constantinople to repeat these exact proceedings, but with the Eastern Senate and the Patriarch of the Second Rome instead. For his mother’s sake and that of imperial unity he chose the latter course, setting aside pride and the notion of the Occident’s supremacy as the cradle of both the Empire itself and its male restorer to ensure that there would be no room for resentful usurpers to rise in the Orient by receiving full Eastern recognition of his ascent to the purple on November 15.
Funeral procession of Aloysius I through the streets of Trévere, surrounding by lamenting crowds – for who else would have themselves transported in a gilded mobile mausoleum before being laid to rest in their actual mausoleum? Still, for all his enormous pride and other personal flaws, it could not be denied that Aloysius had done enough for Rome to define the entire latter half of the seventh century and, indeed, the course of middle-to-late Roman history
Even in the lands of the Caliphate Aloysius’ demise made some waves, for his passing so soon after the dawn of the new century also marked the definitive passing of the generation (unless one counts the now-Empress-Dowager Helena as an equal co-combatant alongside her husband) which had shaped the Middle Eastern borders that Roman, Arab and Khazar alike would be fighting over for centuries to come: Heshana Qaghan, Caliph Qasim ibn Muhammad (and all his sons) and Kundaç Khagan had predeceased him by years or decades already, after all. Abdullah was certainly glad that he didn’t have to deal with an immediate Roman invasion this year, for in addition to his contention with his cousins, he was trying to besiege a major Mazdakite fortress on Mount Alvand at the time of the Emperor’s death. His
ghulam proved their worth once more in this battle, a score of their mightiest and most intrepid fighters infiltrating the great redoubt through the mountain’s cave system (having to bypass or, much more rarely, silently eliminate Mazdakite guards along the way) and opening its gates to the rest of the Islamic army.
No sooner had Abdullah captured the Alvand fortress, exterminated the Buddhist die-hards holed up within and sent customary condolences to Constantinople did he have another problem to deal with: Khalil ibn Al-Abbas claimed Mount Alvand lay within the boundaries of the realm apportioned to his father and passed down to him. The Caliph was not about to give up this foothold in the Zagros, which his men had fought and died for while those of the Abbasids were of little to no help, nor would he further compromise his authority by giving in to the demand no matter the results. Said results were, of course, rebellion – Khalil claimed that his cousin was going back on the accord struck with his father (and his other uncle Ali) now that the latter was deceased. The
fitna or inter-Muslim strife, which Abdullah had struggled mightily to put off for years, had finally arrived – though the Caliph believed he was in a much better position than when his uncles first threatened him with conflict, so much so that he expected to quickly defeat his cousins and consolidate the authority of the senior Hashemites before the Romans could attack. Ironically Aloysius’ death had motivated Abdullah into taking the decision which would cause the very civil war which the former had been waiting for & Helena had tried to instigate, but which had eluded them up to this point, as the Caliph did not fear Constantine half as much as he had feared the late glorious Emperor who had repeatedly beaten or at least fought to a stalemate his own father & grandfather.
Then-Caliph Abd al-Rahman and his son & eventual successor, Abdullah (or properly Abd-'Allah) in happier times. With the preceding generation dying off around the start of the eighth century, Abdullah no longer had to contend with his uncles, but neither could he ask for their guidance if he needed it. And he most certainly would come to need it, for his contention with the rival Hashemite branches sprouting from their expanding family tree would not be the only source of issues in his reign
Further still to the east, the Alids were too busy squabbling among themselves or going on their own adventures to pay much attention to the goings-on closer to the heart of their civilization, and indeed did not learn about the outbreak of
fitna between their elder cousins until late in the year. The second and fourth sons of Ali, Abduljalil (or Abdul-Jaleel) and Hussain, had lashed out at foreign adversaries while their eldest brother Al-Azad was butting heads with their other brethren. Abduljalil invaded the Huna realm again in a blatant and uncaring contravention of the treaty Abdullah had signed with Rudrasimha, hoping to prove himself the most fit successor of his father by carving out additional Indian conquests, while Hussain turned his blade against the Indo-Romans to the north.
By the end of the year, both brothers seemed to have attained some success against their chosen opponents. Abduljalil had conquered as far as Chitrakut[11] and raided even further, pillaging down to Avantika[12], while Hussain had pushed through the Bolan Pass and devastated the city of Jaguda[13], whose majority-Buddhist populace had up till then thrived under the protection and tolerant stewardship of the Belisarians. However, their enemies had not been caught entirely off-guard (for it was fairly obvious from their previous actions that the Muslims had come to that area as conquerors and destroyers, rather than traders or even just missionaries with benign intent) – Salanavira diverted time and resources from his fratricidal conflict with Rudrasimha and the other Huna princes to prove that he was better-suited to driving away the Islamic threat than any of them, while King Zamasphes of the Indo-Romans had amassed more than 15,000 warriors at Kophen to drive Hussain from his lands.
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[1] Jalore.
[2] East of modern Jaipur.
[3] Geumsan.
[4] The Homs Gap.
[5] Wadhwan.
[6] Mandsaur.
[7] Kaesong.
[8] The Nahr al-Kabir.
[9] Lutetia.
[10] Trier’s original fourth-century cathedral, built by the first Emperor Constantine, which never would have been abandoned to ruin & decay for centuries ITL.
[11] Chittorgarh.
[12] Ujjain.
[13] Ghazni.
Happy New Year, all!
And with this new year, we're also starting the new century in earnest.