715 had a grim dawn in the Holy Roman Empire, as Constantine VI had to grapple with the demand of the Africans for the extirpation of the Jews in that region as punishment for the elders of Lepcés Magna having joined forces with the Muslims. The Emperor deemed it unjust to kill or enslave all African Jews for the crimes of a few, and ordered his son Aloysius to put a stop to the pogroms which had begun to explode in African cities before they spiraled out of control (causing considerable friction with the vengeful King Yusténu of Africa, then still returning from the mountains of Hoggar, who would have welcomed the opportunity to annihilate those he now considered not only hereditary deicides but also subversive traitors and personal foes of his family), but conceded that he could no longer trust the African Jewry to not betray Roman cities to the enemy. Especially pertinent was Gradzéanu of Yunéga’s argument that since the last of the Galilean Jews were expelled by his father and mother, Roman and Christian Arab forces in Palaestina have not had to worry with Jewish betrayal there, as had befallen the Eastern
Augustus Constantine IV. News that
Dux Cassiodorus had been killed in an ambush by ragged Donatist partisans while returning to Roman Africa, much as a scorpion might reflexively sting its killer with its last breath, further soured the Romans’ mood despite not having anything to do with the Jews.
Ultimately, to appease the vengeful Yusténu (to whom he felt he also owed a debt for apparently finally ridding orthodox Christendom of the Donatist pestilence) and more firmly secure Holy Roman control over the southwestern coast of the Mediterranean, Constantine authorized the expulsion of Jews from the African kingdom, though not their extermination nor their mass enslavement (the courses of action preferred by the enraged Africans). Many ended up in Italy, southern Gaul and even Germania (though they conspicuously avoided Hispania, where the Visigoths were known to despise them even when they were still on friendlier terms with the Africans), flocking to the capital of the Aloysians and its environs in hope of starting a new life while anything they couldn’t carry with them was seized by the Africans (the economic downturn which resulted was a price Yusténu gladly accepted both for his revenge and to rid his realm of what he perceived to be an intransigent religious & security threat). A not-insignificant number of Jews also opted to leave the Holy Roman Empire altogether for either the Hashemite Caliphate or especially Khazaria, the only one of the three great Western Eurasian powers to not have either persecuted or betrayed them to date.
The Jews of Carthage leaving for, hopefully, more secure & tolerant shores
With that unpleasant business concluded, the Council of Miletus could begin in earnest. Arguments over the legitimacy of the filioque seemingly dominated the proceedings over 715 and the next several years, being the highest-profile and most obviously divisive issue brought to the table at this stage. The Roman and Carthaginian bishops were in favor, arguing that a bevy of Church Fathers from Cyril of Alexandria to the Latin Fathers whose traditions they followed most closely found that the Bible supported the notion that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son while their Greek counterparts were still struggling to describe the relationship between the Son and the Spirit. Meanwhile the bishops of the oriental Patriarchates insisted that the double procession of the Holy Spirit was not sound doctrine supported by the New Testament, and that the Nicene Creed’s original text must therefore remain absolutely unaltered.
While the dispute over the filioque sucked up most of the air in the basilica of Miletus, Constantine was getting work done on more practical matters in-between the most notable debates. After months of additional (though at the time largely overlooked) debate between his supporters among the Roman episcopacy and those of a strictly Italy-centric outlook he prevailed upon Pope Vitalian, the successor of the Pope Sergius who had crowned him ten years prior, and the bishops of the Roman See in general to extend the dignity of ‘cardinal’ – originally reserved for the priests of the Eternal City’s own parishes and the bishops of the seven suburbicarian dioceses (Ostia, Velletri, Porto, Albano, Tusculo, Palestrina and Sabina, as they were now called in the common speech of the Italians) – to a number of esteemed bishops from outside Italy (including one each from the Christian federate kingdoms within Rome’s jurisdiction: the Burgundians, Franks, Lombards, Thuringians, Alemanni, Bavarians and Carantanians).
These incardinated provincials would each be assigned a titular church in Rome, thereby giving them a say in the election of future Popes and enlarging the stake of the Ephesians of Gaul, Germania, etc. as well as the autonomous federates in what had up until then been a thoroughly Italian-dominated Holy See. Constantine believed this would serve as a compromise solution that both reduced the resentment of the provincial Roman Ephesians and federate subjects while also not taking away so much influence from the Italian prelates as to enrage them. Above all the
Augustus hoped this measure (and the open-ended possibility of adding to the original cardinals as the faith spread among the barbaric peoples) would take all talk of splitting a Northern European ‘Treverian See’ away from Rome off the table, as he respected the legacy of Saint Peter too much to want to have to potentially go through with such a decision and thought the number seven auspicious & fitting for the number of Ephesian sees besides.
The new Cardinals could be immediately distinguished from lesser prelates by their vestments of scarlet silk, symbolizing their willingness to die for the faith
While the Romans were trying to sort out their internal issues peacefully over a church council before said issues ballooned to interminable proportions, Islam did not seem likely to enjoy such luxury. The Caliph Abdullah thought he could relax after finally bringing his Abbasid relatives to heel, while the Alids had been weakened by infighting as well as an unforeseen and unrelated conflict with the Indo-Romans; he had nothing to do with that particular war, but found it a welcome development anyway. He scarcely got to relax in the Egyptian-built
hammam[1] of the Qasr al-Qasimi (‘Qasimi Palace’), the lavish Hashemite residential complex in Kufa whose construction had begun under Qasim ibn Muhammad, before new internal problems began to emerge immediately after the Peace of Erevan – Kharijite forces were rearing their heads, and this time, they could argue much more persuasively that the Banu Hashim had become decadent disappointments to their ancestor the Prophet & thereby ought to be replaced.
The first signs of trouble were attacks on Hashemite officials, beginning with the fatal stabbing of the
wali of Basra by a self-proclaimed
mujahid of the Kharijites (who had leaped from a rooftop onto the governor as the latter inspected a district of Basra to accomplish his deed, and gladly accepted his own death immediately afterward at the hands of said governor’s stunned guards) and escalating to an assassination attempt on Abdullah himself. Before 715 was half out, a rebel of the Banu Taghlib tribe named Maslamah ibn Yusuf had attracted a zealous following in the Najd, who acclaimed him as a better man than Abdullah ibn Abd al-Rahman and the true Caliph in an austere ceremony at Diriyah. Many disillusioned Hashemite garrisons in the area defected to his side, such that his influence soon extended as far as Taif near the Haramayn[2], and he made his presence known by slaughtering caravans of pilgrims seeking to venerate the first Caliph (for they believed such practices to be tantamount to idolatry).
By the year’s end, Ibn Yusuf was no longer alone in rebelling against the authority of the Hashemite Caliphate. Additional
Khawarij (by this time no longer referring to a specific ideology, but rather anyone who rejected Hashemite authority) had taken up arms in parts of Arabic Syria, Yaman, Persia (especially Persia in fact, where Abdullah’s displacement of their former Abbasid leaders and compromises with the local Persians alienated those Arabs who had already settled in that land) and even his central power-base of Mesopotamia. The Caliph himself no longer dared leave his palace after facing additional assassination attempts every time he exited its gates; he frantically named Nusrat al-Din the first true ‘Grand Vizier’ with emergency power to do anything they had to to suppress these uprisings at any cost, and also wrote to his Alid cousins (whose bloodying he had ironically been all but celebrating not long ago) offering them support to not only entrench their presence in al-Hind but also resume their expansion against the Hunas. If Abdullah’s contention with his own kin was the First Fitna, then there can be no doubt that all these rebellions put together amounted to a Second Fitna, disjointed though they might have been. It was unfortunate for the Romans that they had just been quite bloodied themselves in the newly-concluded war and opened a new church council, for this would otherwise have been a good opportunity to take even more land back from the Caliphate.
Maslamah ibn Yusuf and his warband of anti-Hashemite zealots roving through the sands of Arabia
Arguments over the filioque continued to dominate the Council of Miletus throughout 716, even as the Roman bishops continued to not only discuss but also begin drafting the formal drafts which would officially provide for the non-Italian cardinals they had debated since the previous year. While the Latin bishops brought up arguments made by the Cappadocian (and therefore eastern) Church Fathers to support the pro-filioque view of Saint Augustine, the Eastern bishops now argued that the canons of the Council of Ephesus forbade any alteration to the Nicene Creed whatsoever. At their most heated, the Easterners hurled accusations of the West being cowards trying to alter dogma to appease their new Germanic and Slavic believers, thought to be more understanding of the idea of double-procession; the Westerners retorted that the position of the East reeked of crypto-Arianism in advancing the position of God the Father as an entity separate from & higher than God the Son, an exchange which resulted in the Emperor’s paladins having to step in to keep both factions’ bishops from reenacting the confrontation between Saint Nicholas and Arius.
While feuding over the filioque continued unabated, Constantine sought to move things along on a different front – building a legitimate justification for the continued existence for the Emperorship outside of the context of being the ultimate military dictator of the Roman state, so that his heirs might sit the throne he now occupied for another thousand years without the slightest legal challenge. Diocletian had done much to reform the Roman constitution and governance, shedding most of the remaining pseudo-republican trappings left from the Principate era in favor of more explicitly monarchist reforms (including openly wearing a crown and mandating that his subjects prostrate themselves in his presence) – little could be done to build on this idea while the Roman world was divided and under constant siege by barbarians, or else trying to recover from the damage they and rival Roman usurpers had inflicted, but now with Rome unified and in a strong position, Constantine believed it was time to change that. Having been first raised in the Greek East under his mother, where the concept of kingship was far more acceptable than in the Roman West (to the point that the imperial title was translated as
Basileus – ‘king’ – in Greek), the
Augustus naturally was inspired to build on rather than reverse Diocletian’s reforms and fix the imperial office onto a permanently, unambiguously monarchical foundation that would stand the test of time.
The problem, of course, was that the Roman citizenry of the Latin West still retained their traditional abhorrence toward the idea of a king (
rex) ruling over them, instead valuing the republican traditions of old (no matter how badly they may have been marred and even trodden upon by the march of time, going back long before even the first Stilicho had been born). However, in this regard Constantine believed the federate kings provided him with an advantage. The Teutons who ruled large parts of said West as autonomous subjects of the Empire were not strangers to the concept of being ruled by monarchs, often claiming divine descent to justify their kingship (legendary origins which they retained even after converting to Christianity), and while many had picked up Roman customs such as the (Ephesian) Christian religion and local Romance languages/dialects over the centuries, an overt sentimental attachment to republicanism was not one of those – they had even proven helpful in smacking down rebellions by the ‘proper’ Romans of Italy against the Stilichians and his own father.
Long had the Roman understanding of government been divided between the Western Latins' attachment to their republican past and the Greek East's support for absolutism (or as the former might disparagingly call it, 'oriental despotism'). The sixth Constantine believed the Teutons held the key to a compromise position that could reconcile these diverse positions & peoples, he just had to articulate it both theologically and within the confines of existing Roman institutions (such as the Senate)
They did however reject the notion of an
absolutist monarchy, the
leges barbarorum (Germanic laws) which they strove to reconcile with Roman civil law as part of their assimilation into
Romanitas constantly allowing for popular assemblies (the Thing) and the entrenchment of rights & privileges which an autocrat could never lawfully tread upon. This Constantine accepted as part of his paternal heritage, for like his father he had taken from the Aetas Turbida crisis which had crippled the Stilichians the lesson that a sovereign should, in fact, remember he was mortal and fallible, and not rush headlong to tread upon and steal from his subjects – better to live long as a monarch with some limitations (which of course he intended to be as loose and easy to bear as possible) than to die in a hurry as an autocrat. Among the new dynasty, he was the first to really conceptualize the vision of the Roman emperorship which the Aloysians would work to establish: neither the quasi-republicanism of the Principate which the Latins still looked back upon wistfully, nor the unlimited divinely-sanctioned autocracy favored by the Greeks, but a sort of midpoint in a Europe-spanning federal monarchy justified by divine right and yet working within constraints that required it to maintain a respectful, law-and-custom-bound relationship with its vassals & subjects inspired by the Teutons.
Since he was presiding over a church council at the moment, Constantine decided to first try to articulate this theory from a religious angle, Ephesian Christianity being the theological element for the foundation of said intended position. Theologians in his employ led by Clémente (Lat.: ‘Clementius’) de Dornomage[3], aided by sympathetic prelates, began to draft additional theories to justify his plans from within the context of the Emperor already being the head of the Christian Church, as had been accepted since the days of the first Constantine four hundred years ago: if the Pope – acknowledged universally by Ephesians from England to Mesopotamia as the
primus inter pares among the Heptarchs – was Saint Peter’s successor, and each of the Heptarchic Sees claimed to be the successors to another Apostle, then could it not be argued their overall head in the
Augustus Imperator was the successor to Christ? Not in the sense that he was the Messiah come again, heavens no, but in the sense that he was an earthly regent for the King of Kings until he should come again at the end of days, and leading Christ's Church as Constantine I had done was one of his key responsibilities. Existing Roman governmental terminology was used as a framework so as to avoid, at any point, actually referring to the Emperor as a king: rather, as the Popes had been referred to as the
Vicarius Christi (‘Vicar of Christ’), so too should the Emperor be thought of as a sort of ‘Prefect of the Earth’ – referring to the position of Praetorian prefect, the second-highest civil official to whom the provincial vicars answered but who in turn still answered to the Roman sovereigns, much as said sovereign would still answer to God.
Acknowledging Jesus Christ as the heavenly Rex Gloriae and himself as but the former's earthly regent/prefect was instrumental to Constantine VI's attempt to institutionalize the imperial office as a kingly one while also shutting the door permanently on him or future Aloysians ever calling themselves 'kings' to appease Italian sensibilities
While Constantine was continuing to quietly work on his reforms against the backdrop of the Council of Miletus, Abdullah cowered within the Qasr al-Qasimi in an effort to not die as the flames of discontent threatened to burn down everything the past three generations of Hashemites had built up. It fell to Nusrat al-Din to restore order to the Caliphate instead: he started with the capital of Kufa, where within a bloody fortnight he and his
ghilman had ruthlessly suppressed rioting and silenced dissent against his master, after which he moved out against the numerous but disunited rebels following a scattered assortment of self-proclaimed Caliphs in other parts of the Caliphate. In the first months of 716, Al-Din frantically crisscrossed Mesopotamia to put down the Kharijite uprisings of Jabir ibn Uways (operating out of Tikrit, north of Kufa), Muzaffar ad-Din (operating out of Basra, southeast of the capital) and Shaiban ibn Shaiban (operating out of al-Qarqisiyah, as the Arabs referred to the former Roman Circesium).
It was a testament to the general’s skill at arms, even when fighting other Muslims rather than foreign enemies, that he managed to put each revolt down with great speed & ferocity before they could link their forces together. With the closest threats to Kufa eliminated, Al-Din next marched into Syria and chastised the rebellious Qaysite tribes settled there – who were among the angriest at their latest failure to gain any ground in Syria & Palaestina against Constantine VI – with support from Amr al-Ansari, who had managed to retain his position in Egypt despite demonstrated incompetence in the Second Siege of Lepcés Magna by virtue of his loyalty to the Banu Hashim in this trying time. At the same time, he also had to direct operations to keep the especially brutal and fanatically anti-Hashemite rebellion of Maslamah ibn Yusuf away from the holy cities, and in general contain the damage they were doing. Such turbulence did not only affect Muslims, of course – those Jews who thought to flee Roman Africa for Dar al-Islam mostly decided they should just continue on toward Khazaria instead than risk leaping from Yusténu’s frying pan into the fires of
fitna.
In his capacity as Grand Vizier, Al-Din also cultivated ever-deeper ties with the Persian nobility and agreed to help them try to revive their social class’s fortunes in exchange for their full cooperation against the rebels in Fars: including the appointment of certain Persian nobles who had accepted Islam to gubernatorial offices in that part of the Caliphate. This policy of bringing converted non-Arabs into high civil & military office (where they were collectively referred to as the
Mawali or ‘servants’, singl.
Mawla) in exchange for support against the various rebellions rocking the Hashemites’ casbah was also extended to the Ethiopians in Habasha, and its intra-Arab equivalent to the Yamani tribes who had previously been treated with disfavor and only granted limited concessions under Hashemite rule (on account of so many of their Qaysite rivals, previously favored by the Banu Hashim who were themselves a Qaysite clan, now becoming some of the most determined rebels against Abdullah). Whether by design – perhaps inspired by the sight of the Romans’ numerous multiethnic federates working remarkably well with their overlord and one another to bring that enemy empire victories on several fronts – or simply by accident & necessity, Nusrat al-Din thus took enormous steps to transform the Hashemite Caliphate into an empire more inclusive of its various subjects.
Nusrat al-Din found himself having to continue bringing together Muslims from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds to prop up the Banu Hashim, making his time of prominence a transformative one for Islam whether by his own design (logical, since he was not an Arab himself) or sheer accident
Constantine’s formulation of a permanent monarchist basis for the Emperorship continued throughout 717, as did the public arguments over the filioque – although those had cooled down somewhat this year compared to the previous one, as the
Augustus‘ insistence on calm, discipline and an avoidance of childish embarrassments among the bishops of the Church was heeded. It was in 717 that Clémente of Dornomage and his cohorts began to articulate the conciliar canon explicitly tying the Augustinian concept of
Civitas Dei – the ‘City of God’ – to the imperial office. Devised by the African saint in the wake of Stilicho’s early victories over myriad Roman and barbarian foes in the first decades of the fifth century, this doctrine visualized the Christian Church in general as the spiritual ‘City of God’, protected by the ‘Earthly City’ – imperfect but strong and right-believing worldly rulers doing their best to protect the faithful from evil, as the Stilichians were in his lifetime – against the ‘City of the Devil’, which is to say heretics, unbelievers and dangerous threats of all stripes menacing the Church both physically and spiritually, and which would only be extinguished when Jesus returns on the Day of Judgment and the pure Kingdom of God comes to be[4]. The usefulness of this doctrine in relation to Constantine’s plan to claim the mantle of Christ’s regent and ‘Prefect of the Earth’ was obvious.
While the Emperor remained at Miletus to oversee the ongoing church council, his bloodline was further extended this year with the birth of another grandson in Trévere, baptized as John. And speaking of the Aloysian bloodline, efforts to find a legendary origin for it – one rooted in Judeo-Christian backgrounds and grander than any of the godly origins ascribed to the royal bloodlines ruling over their various Germanic federates, so as to rival the Hashemites’ descent from he who they called the ‘last Messenger of God’ – were underway as of this year: the kingly house of the ancient Chamavi Franks to which the Aloysians belonged already claimed descent from Tyr/Tiwaz, the Teutons’ one-handed god of war and especially honorable combat, but this was considered insufficient for Constantine’s undertaking. Clémente’s companion Fost (Lat.: ‘Faustus’) de Léodece[5] speculated that the imperial house was actually descended from Jesus by way of a secret marriage to Mary Magdalene, but this suggestion was immediately dismissed by Constantine, who found it blasphemous; claiming descent from one of Christ’s brothers (the
Adelphoi) as advocated by Gallen (Lat.: 'Gallienus') de Feresne[6] seemed a more promising idea instead, especially since at least one (Saint Jude Thaddeus) was known to have descendants as late as the reign of Hadrian, although that brought into question just how said brothers were related to Jesus. The Eastern bishops were of the position that they were stepbrothers born of a previous marriage of Joseph’s, while the Western bishops favoring the idea that they were actually the sons of Mary of Clopas and thus Christ’s cousins. Fost’s own writings on the subject remained scant and obscure, resurfacing many centuries later as a minor historical curiosity and fodder for conspiracy theories about a ‘Jesus bloodline’.
Until Christ should come again and purify the Earth at the Day of Judgment, the growing theory of the 'imperial regency' justified the position of Emperor as being the imperfect, ever-besieged, but still standing wall preventing barbarians & demons from devouring the faithful on the Earth
To the east, Nusrat al-Din spent 717 defeating the Syrian rebels with a combination of force and diplomacy. After killing Marwan ibn Safwan in the Battle of Tadmur, he negotiated the surrender of and amnesty for that Kharijite’s followers in Damascus, and proved persuasive enough to recruit several thousand of them to join his army. Later at the Battle of Sughar he & Amr al-Ansari cornered & crushed the rebel host of Iyad ibn Uqba, who were massacred to the last man after responding to a final entreaty to yield with arrows. Finally, he exploited the mutual hatred & tension between the rebel ‘Caliph’ Ubaydallah ibn al-Dahhak and his chief general Abu al-Judham to get the latter to assassinate the former during the Siege of Gaza, only to then be killed by a mob of the fallen Kharijite leader’s followers, leaving the defense of the city leaderless and easy to overcome. Additionally from his saddle he prevailed upon Abdullah in Kufa to dismiss most non-Muslims from his government, instead replacing them with both Arabs and non-Arab converts, so as to appear to be restoring the purity & sanctity of the Islamic government – as well as further incentivizing conversion to Islam, offering great reward to those who did convert, and (in balancing the appointment of Qaysi/Adnanite and Yamani/Qahtanite Arabs) striving to reconcile Arabs themselves with the regime and one another regardless of tribal ties, all at once.
However, one thing Al-Din could not accomplish despite his skill at arms and in diplomacy alike was to fully snuff out the alternative schools of thought beginning to emerge as coherent alternatives to Hashemite doctrine among the various Kharijite rebellions. Two of the first of these early Islamic heresies could not be more different: in the searing sands of the Nejd Maslamah ibn Yusuf articulated his austere, violently puritanical and militant dogma on the foundation first laid down by Abd al-Wahhab 30 years before, under which it was right and just to denounce Muslims who had clearly fallen short of the standards set by their faith as
kafir (an unbeliever) and to kill them – this was what he had done and hoped to do in regard to the Banu Hashim after all – and to reject the
hadith, tainted by association with the Hashemites, in favor of acknowledging only the laws & teachings outlined in the Quran. In contrast to these ‘al-Shurat’ or ‘exchangers’ (as Maslamah’s men boasted that they gladly exchanged their mortal lives for eternal life in Heaven with their brutal deeds), a much more merciful sect called the Murji’ites (‘postponers’, in the sense that they postponed their judgment of others) was emerging among the anti-Hashemite Arabs of Persia, whose leader Zayd ibn Muawiyat proclaimed that no man had authority to judge whether another had sinned or turned apostate, and thus that it was not right to engage in
takfir (the denunciation of other Muslims as unbelievers) – that right belonged to Allah alone.
Meanwhile in Khazaria, Kundaçiq Khagan found himself spending the last few years of his reign settling the Jews exiled from Roman Africa, including those who had originally intended to settle among the Babylonian Jewry but then changed their minds due to the explosion of violence in the Hashemite Caliphate. They did not solely congregate in the capital of Atil: some were given the right to settle the sites of the ancient, long-ruined Greek ports of Hermonassa & Tanais on the shores of the Pontus Euxinus, overcoming the swampy terrain and difficult winters to revive these sites as the Khazar towns of Tamantarkhan[7] and Tana[8]. Those of a literate/numerate and mercantile disposition would help bring riches to their new home by enhancing the Khazars’ competitive edge along the middle length of the Silk Road against their Babylonian/Radhanite brethren who primarily worked for the Caliphs, and would soon enough rise in the esteem of & be rewarded with civil offices by the Khagans.
Jewish exiles building up Tamantarkhan on the northern shores of the Black Sea under Khazar protection
718 broke up the monotony of the usual clerical battles over the filioque, as well as work on the religious foundation for Constantine’s planned governmental reforms, with the arrival of a secret diplomatic mission from Britannia in Trévere. The British high king Bedur was still interested in reconciling with the Romans on the continent, if only to spare his realm a war he knew they had no chance of winning and the consequent devastation, and believed some theological accord between Pelagianism and orthodox Ephesianism would go a long way to producing that outcome. He was already trying to move things in that direction by pushing for Semi-Pelagianism; but if the Romans were to entertain any thought of peacefully reincorporating their northernmost wayward province, they had to put in some work on their end as well. After being informed of this development by his heir, Constantine allowed his partisans among the Roman bishops to begin probing the waters around those questions central to their dispute with the Pelagians – the nature of man, salvation and free will. (In response the
Augustus also briefly invited his
Caesar to Miletus so that he might confide his grand designs in the latter, trusting Aloysius would carry on his work in case he died before managing to realize all that he had planned.)
The question of whether men were tainted by original sin from birth rapidly proved to be no question at all to those gathered: across all seven patriarchates the position that, yes, they certainly were and thus infant baptism was critical to ensuring their soul would be saved. On salvation and free will however, there was dissension and by extension room to begin working toward reconciliation with the Pelagians. The majority of Roman bishops were willing to agree with their counterparts in the Eastern patriarchates who advocated the position of Saint John Cassian, a mystic and monastic theologian respected in both Occident and Orient, that although the process of being saved must always start with God’s grace, humans have the free will to accept or reject the divine hand of salvation. Just as a man who’s fallen overboard and has a rope thrown to him can cling to the rope and be pulled to safety, or refuse it and drown, so too is how things are according to this ‘synergistic’ position, which was not entirely incompatible with the Semi-Pelagianism advocated by Bedur’s own partisans in Britain.
Ironically, it was the Carthaginians who objected most strongly against the synergistic doctrine of salvation, instead seeking to take the Augustinian position on man’s innate depravity to its logical conclusion. In the reckoning of the African hard-liners, man’s nature was inherently depraved and corrupted thanks to the original sin of Adam & Eve, yet still it was no match for the saving grace of God; and since God orders all things, it was only logical to assume that He predestined some souls to salvation (though they still did not hold a belief in
double predestination, that is to say, the idea that God also predestined some souls to damnation), which no man could resist by will if God had decreed it for him. They were also committed to the Augustinian view that unbaptized infants were doomed to go to Hell, even if their condemnation would be extremely mild since they were not tainted by any sin save the original one – a position completely unacceptable to not only the British Pelagians, who deemed such punishment to be naked cruelty that could only have come from the mind of Satan rather than a loving God, but also the easternmost Patriarchates of the Heptarchy, where the universalist position (that all would eventually be saved and reconciled with God) had not fallen out of favor as it had elsewhere. The African rebuttal invariably was that it was prideful to do anything but accept the ineffable will of God, and that their rivals were arrogant in thinking they knew or could judge others better than God Himself, just as they themselves would be guilty of that lowest sin if they dared presume they were part of God’s elect[9].
Understanding the delicateness of the situation and the importance of the African bishops to advancing the filioque, Constantine took care to direct the council toward those areas where he thought unity was likeliest and the prospect for a favorable compromise most promising. While he pushed for the brewing discussion on soteriology to be stifled and tabled for another church council (lest it sidetrack or worse, break up the united Roman-Carthaginian front on the filioque), the Emperor led his clerical allies to understand that he wished for them to also start work on finessing a definitive Ephesian position on the ‘intermediate state’ between life and death – specifically, whether there was a place between Heaven and Hell that the likes of unbaptized infants, virtuous pagans and those believers who had died in sin but could still be purified could reside. In this endeavor his contacts among the Eastern bishops would eventually be invaluable in creating another theological bridge to his liking, just as toward 718’s end they began to sway large numbers of their brethren to the position that the ancient saints of the Occident & Orient from Cyril to Jerome to Epiphanius may have expressed their belief in the procession of the Holy Spirit in different ways, they must have shared an agreement for saints were inerrant in their faith: finally the Council of Miletus was getting somewhere on the subject of the filioque, they just had to nail down what that agreement
was, and not a moment too soon in Constantine’s estimation.
Constantine sensed the Council of Miletus was finally on track to reaching an accord over the filioque as of late 718, which was a fantastic development, for the sooner they could get that done the sooner he could get them to refocus on canonizing his theory on the imperial regency and his theologians' efforts to link the Aloysian family tree to that of Christ's adelphoi
In the east, Nusrat al-Din first mopped up remaining organized resistance in Bilad al-Sham and Islamic Filastin, no doubt thanking his lucky stars that the Khazars were still rebuilding their strength & that the Romans’ emperor was too enamored in finally getting to indulge his scholarly interests to attack again in this moment of weakness all the while. Before going off to confront the Exchangers in Arabia, he did stop at Kufa, where a few days after treating him to a lavish welcome banquet the Caliph Abdullah suddenly died. The official story was that he had just died in his sleep, but rumors lingered that his faithful right hand had him smothered with a pillow, having interpreted his command to preserve the unity of Islam and Hashemite leadership over the Ummah at all costs to also include eliminating such an obvious liability to these goals as himself – and if this were the case, then Al-Din would be proven right in such an interpretation in short order, as few mourned the third Caliph for having driven Islam to the brink of catastrophe with his folly and dreadfully misguided priorities.
Even more conveniently for the Grand Vizier, Abdullah’s son and designated successor Ibrahim died on the same night as his father. A slovenly sort who was even more of a reprobate than his father, Ibrahim had been similarly raised in the lap of luxury and was most infamous for having dared proposition at least two widows too soon after the demise of their husbands in Al-Din’s armies (thus violating the
iddah period mandated by the Quran), so that he had been judged by observers as one unfit to bear the Caliphal title in peacetime, much less during a crisis like this
fitna. His demise from choking on an especially large
kofta meatball (during which nobody seemed particularly interested in helping him) allowed Al-Din to enthrone his son (and Abdullah’s grandson), then-thirteen-year-old Hashim, as the fourth Hashemite Caliph.
A diligent and studious lad unlike his petty, overly vindictive yet also cowardly grandfather or his indolent and unwise father, Hashim demonstrated some actual promise even at his young age: Al-Din himself wondered whether the Ummah might have found their answer to Constantine VI in him. Though all that said, those same traits which gave him a shot at greatness would doubtless also lead to friction with his overmighty regent in the future, even if he thought the latter truly totally innocent of any involvement in the extremely convenient deaths of his predecessors. These troubles, however, would only really come to the surface at a later time: for now, young Hashim could do little (nor would he have been inclined to do anything even if he had the power, given the dangerous circumstances) to keep Al-Din from executing his mission to suppress all resistance to Hashemite rule wherever he found it and by whatever means he deemed best. Toward the end of 718 that meant marching into Arabia with his young nominal liege in tow, so that Hashim might observe as he repelled the Kharijite drive on Mecca & Medina in the Battle of Ta’if.
Caliph Hashim ibn Ibrahim, still underage as of the time he had to take up his grandfather's mantle. On his young shoulders rested the burden of ensuring the survival of the Hashemites and their continued leadership of the Ummah – a burden Nusrat al-Din seemed quite happy to 'help' him carry
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[1] An Arab bathhouse, originally inspired by Roman designs. In this case it would’ve had to been built with the help of Egyptian collaborators and taken inspiration from the
thermae of Alexandria, what with Egypt being the largest Roman province to have been fully seized by the forces of Islam to date.
[2] ‘Two Sanctuaries’ – a collective term for Mecca & Medina.
[3] Durnomagus – Dormagen.
[4] Historically, Augustine’s
Civitas Dei (written in the context of Rome having been sacked by the Visigoths, which didn’t happen ITL) instead conceptualized the City of God as the pure Catholic Church, existing in eternal opposition against but fated to eventually triumph over the Earthly City which represented worldly power, luxury and all who have chosen these things over God; both are the instrumental players in the universal war between God and Satan. There wasn’t a separate ‘City of the Devil’ since that was synonymous with the Earthly City in our
Civitas Dei.
[5] Leodicum – Liège.
[6] Heerlen.
[7] Taman.
[8] Rostov-on-Don.
[9] Long story short, the Carthaginian positions expressed here stray close to but hasn’t reached the level of Calvinism (total depravity of man, irresistable grace and double predestination combined with the concept of unconditional election all being concepts most often associated with Calvinism, but which were derived by Calvin out of Augustine’s teachings more than a thousand years prior).