Assuming he dies then having killed off his brothers and with only a 3 year old son you could well see a change of dynasty after a period of bloody war for the throne. As Butch says some interesting time ahead for China. Which could lure the Turkish Khanate to look for gains on the common border and the Korean nations to have more success.
Alternate History Vivat Stilicho!
- Thread starter Circle of Willis
- Start date
Or even Turkish dynasty on throne.If mongols and manchur could do that,why not turks?
Which,of course,would still lead to China fighting other turk states - but,as long as they remain united...Eftal and ERE as allies?
561-564: An empire, long united...
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
561 was a year in which the Roman world’s attention, temporarily freed from conflict with the Avars and Turks, was fixed on Africa, where they had just entered negotiations with the migrating Garamantes. Aemilian, Aretion and Amêzyan hammered out the terms of a Garamantian federate agreement which would appease all three parties: the Garamantes would be settled in the Limes Tripolitanus, augmenting and dwelling alongside the existing Romano-Moorish garrisons there, and would be granted port access in both empires’ territories at Berenice[1] in the east and Thubactis[2] in the west. For his part, Amêzyan pledged to send one of his sons to Rome and the other to Constantinople as hostages; to fight against bandits, Donatists and any more of his own people who might threaten the Roman frontier; to support both empires when called upon; and to maintain neutrality in the case of any inter-Roman hostilities.
Aside from dealing with the Garamantians, the Romans also had cause for concern with other African peoples living further to the south. The Patriarchate of Carthage was especially concerned by reports borne by trans-Saharan merchants that Donatist missionaries were making headway with the Aethiopian peoples[3] beyond the Atlas Mountains, and soon after peace was reached with Amêzyan Patriarch Maurus successfully advocated for the departure of two missions to try to bring the orthodox Christian teachings to the Aethiopians. One would travel through the Limes Tripolitanus and the old homeland of the Garamantes, who would be their first target for conversion; the other had the far more unenviable task of slipping through Hoggar, to reach the distant oasis towns past it and even further beyond if they can.
The mission to and through the Garamantians proved a great success, for many among the pagans perceived the collapse of their agricultural system and the pressures of the ensuing droughts & migrations to be a sign that Gurzil[4] and their other gods had failed or abandoned them. Although Amêzyan himself did not accept baptism at this point, as a nominal Roman subject he did nothing to hinder the missionaries while they were converting his subjects en masse. The furthest-ranging of the missionaries, Egrilius, followed the footsteps of the Augustan-era explorers Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus to eventually end up on the shores of the ‘Lake of Hippopotamus’, which the Kanuri locals called Lake Chad[5]. The western mission was considerably less lucky: of the thirteen missionaries Maurus sent, the Hoggari martyred twelve and spiked their heads at strategic points along their own side of the Atlas Mountains to taunt their hated Ephesian enemies. Only one, Lucas of Thysdrus[6], made it past the Donatists, so it was unto this sole survivor that old Maurus entrusted his hopes of converting the westernmost Aethiopians as he lay in his deathbed.
Romano-Punic missionaries in the court of Amêzyan, who had newly established himself in the Limes Tripolitanus
As for the Eastern Romans, they too viewed events on their southern flank with increasing concern. The Blemmyes were taking up arms against their nominal overlords, the joint Nubian monarchs Hoase and Epimachosi. Aksum did not openly intervene, per the generally conflict-averse foreign policy being pursued by the Baccinbaxaba Tewodros and his mother Cheren, but the opportunity to weaken their strongest remaining regional rival was too good for Cheren to pass up and she persuaded her son to allow the Blemmyes to use northeastern Ethiopia as both a shelter from the Nubians and a recruiting ground. Blemmye warriors crossed through Aksumite territory to assail southern Nubia with increasing frequency while the Aksumite army protected them from Nubian reprisals, and near the year’s end Queen Epimachosi traveled to Constantinople to personally appeal to Anthemius for assistance in suppressing the insurgents or at least in pressuring the Aksumites to stop aiding them.
Further to the east, the Turks’ peaceful split threatened to become significantly less peaceful when Issik and Illig clashed over control over the Silk Road. The lucrative oases of the Tarim were a bone of contention between the brothers, and war was averted only by the diplomatic efforts of their shamans and wives, who managed to get them to split control of the cities by geography: the Northern Turks would attain suzerainty over the cities closest to them – Turfan (formerly Gaochang), Karashahr, and Kucha – while the Southern Turks secured Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar within their sphere of influence. The sore point was Aksu, whose ownership the Khagans ultimately agreed to settle by a duel between their champions that summer. Illig’s man slew Issik’s, much to the latter’s disappointment, and while he was bound by honor to cede Aksu to the Southern Turks (for now) he made no secret of how much he resented his big brother for the loss.
Fortunately for Issik, developments in China would soon provide him with a less fratricidal outlet for his anger. Barely a year after defeating his brothers, Emperor Xiaowen of China was poisoned by Luo Huiqi, a general who had previously served Prince Chao and initially refused to kowtow before him: as it so happened this general’s son had been Chao’s ill-fated bodyguard, killed in the same melee that claimed his master’s life, and Xiaowen unwisely insisted not only on compelling the older man to serve him lunch after his surrender but also on bringing up said son to his face. After experiencing the first symptoms of poisoning and lying down to rest, the emperor never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead by the physician summoned to treat him almost immediately after reaching Changshan, his only ‘comfort’ in death being the knowledge that his killer had to commit suicide by the very same poison to get at him.
The sudden demise of Emperor Xiaowen threw China, still in turmoil from his fratricidal civil war and his father's last-minute defeat at the hands of the Turks, into a new period of violent upheaval
Xiaowen’s road to power required the short-lived emperor to ensure that he was the last one standing out of Emperor Xuan’s sons; worse still, he was survived only by a single, underage son of his own. No sooner had this toddler been enthroned as Emperor Aiping did the Chen court begin to spiral into murderous factionalism as the Empress Dowager Gou contended with the court eunuchs and her late husband’s ministers for control, compounded by a drought induced by the chilly conditions of 561 which threw several prefectures into famine. Whispers, then furious shouts that the Chen had lost the Mandate of Heaven rapidly echoed across China and by the year’s end, rebellions had broken out against their shaken authority in the north and west, with Chengdu and Yecheng being the largest cities to fall almost immediately into the hands of (respectively) the peasant insurgent Fei Gong and the rebellious general Wang Ye, the latter of whom had recruited the late Luo Huiqi’s nephew Luo Honghuan to fight for him. Issik naturally took advantage of the situation to begin intensifying his raids into northern China and probing the situation to determine how much deeper he could push into the crumbling Middle Kingdom.
562 brought good news to the Western Romans from distant Aethiopia, though by then Patriarch Maurus was no longer alive to hear it and had since been succeeded by Samaritanus. Late in the year, Lucas of Thysdrus re-established contact with the Carthaginian Patriarchate through a convert who also happened to be part of a northbound caravan, and informed them of not only his survival but also his travels, failures and successes. According to Lucas, he had been driven away from the Berber trading hubs of Taghazza and Aoudaghost, where Donatist missionaries had turned the people against him and orthodoxy, but managed to find safety in the gold-mining town of Kumbi, seat of the Wagadu[7] tribe: their king, the ‘Kaya Maghan’ or ‘lord of the gold’, gave him permission to stay and preach to his people[8]. It was his hope that Christianity of the right-believing sort would flower in the hearts of the ebon-skinned indigenes, and from there spread to the Berbers to the north – or else that a Christian Wagadu kingdom could help squeeze the heretics from Aoudaghost to Hoggar between themselves and the Western Empire.
Depiction of the Kaya Maghan who welcomed Lucas of Thysdrus, and with him Ephesian Christianity, into the lands of the Wagadu – and with luck, the rest of West Africa from there
This news was most welcome to Patriarch Samaritanus and Emperor Romanus, who needed it even more after events earlier in the year. In the early summer of 562, tensions between his Carantanian and Ostrogoth federates nearly boiled over after a riot in Tarsatica, sparked by Ostrogoth traders who complained that their Slavic counterparts were undercutting them, killed 17. The Ostrogoths resented the Carantanians for settling in lands which were formerly theirs and acquiring sea & market access at Tarsatica, which they still officially controlled as part of their new allotted territories; meanwhile, the Slavs perceived this incident to be an unprovoked assault on their people and Duke Ljudevit retaliated by harrying several Ostrogoth border villages with his warriors, killing an Amaling kinsman in the process. King Viderichus believed this to be a good excuse for him to go and teach his new neighbors a harsh lesson and promptly invaded Carantania with 6,000 men.
Ljudevit answered the incursion by amassing a 5,000-strong force of his own, and warfare between the two peoples seemed imminent until Romanus personally intervened. Frederica had tried to intercede on behalf of her nephew, arguing that the Slavs had brought this mess on their own heads and that Romanus should leave them to fight it out (with the expectation that her more numerous and better-equipped people would prevail): but her august husband would have none of it, and was further supported by Aemilian (who had taken the side of his traditional Bavarian allies in earlier arguments between them and the Carantanians, but saw Ljudevit as a useful ally against the Greens in this case). The emperor landed at Tarsatica with 2,000 heavy horsemen and enough gold to bribe the rival kings into standing down before they could engage in more than a few preliminary skirmishes, averting a proper war among his easternmost federates for the time being, but noted with concern that imposing a more permanent peace settlement would be necessary in the future: he could hardly have his vassals fighting each other when they were on campaign against the Avars.
A Carantanian warband attacking an Ostrogoth fort in the Julian Alps, weeks before Romanus stopped their fighting from spiraling out of control
To the southeast, Anthemius placed extra levies on Aksumite merchants traveling through Eastern Roman lands in a bid to pressure Cheren into cutting Aksum’s support for the rebel Blemmyes. Cheren and Tewodros retaliated by reducing the amount of spices they would allow to reach Roman markets, driving the already steep price of that luxurious good further upward. While this trade war raged between the two larger empires, in Nubia itself King Hoase scored several bloody victories over the Blemmyes, but every time the vanquished party would just retreat to and recover in Aksumite territory. Not even the Nubians’ sack and burning of the Blemmye capital of Kalabsha[9] in December ended the revolt, as the Blemmye leadership had already fled into Aksum and continued to wage war from under the protection of the Baccinbaxaba.
Anthemius gained an additional threat to worry about in mid-summer, for the Mazdakites began raiding into Roman Mesopotamia and the lands of his vassal in Padishkhwargar at that time. They did so under the neglectful eye of Illig, who was content to let these Buddhist fanatics harass the Eastern Romans in preparation for their inevitable next round of hostilities while he personally continued to consolidate his rule and build up his forces deeper in the Persian heartland. In turn the Eastern Roman Emperor authorized the Daylamites and Lakhmids to launch reprisals against the western borderlands of the Southern Turkic Khaganate, while also moving legions back out of Egypt (now that the Garamantian issue had been settled and his troubles with Aksum appeared unlikely to escalate into open bloodshed) to reinforce his easternmost frontier and ordering Vologases to increase recruitment efforts in Mesopotamia.
A Daylamite noble horseman from Padishkhwargar, of the sort that Anthemius counted on to combat Mazdakite raiders from the Zagros Mountains
Meanwhile on the other end of the Silk Road, China’s internal situation continued to destabilize. The rebels in the north and west of the country were increasingly joined by a rash of smaller uprisings in the southeast, of which the most successful was in the mountains of Fujian. The rebel chief Huang Huo, a descendant of both Han Chinese settlers and the Shanyue indigenes of the hilly region, ambushed and decisively routed a 20,000-strong suppression force in the Wuyi Mountains this spring, after which he proclaimed himself ‘King of Min’ and besieged the provincial capital of Changle[10]. This defeat exacerbated infighting in the Chen court as all involved sought to pin the blame on their enemies and that in turn delayed them from sending relief to the unprepared city, dooming it to fall to the Min army shortly before 562’s end.
The loyal general Mao Yan brought young Emperor Aiping some relief by blunting the eastward advance of Fei Gong in the combined land-and-river Battle of Xiling Gorge, but the Chen dynasty’s failure to decisively stop or even contain the other rebellions encouraged even more such risings against them all over the country. Worst of all, Wang Ye now felt sufficiently emboldened to proclaim himself Emperor Wu of Qi in the northeast: the first of several new imperial claimants who directly challenged the Chen’s rule over all China. Fei Gong – clearly undeterred by his recent defeat – followed a few weeks later, declaring himself Emperor Gao of Shu in November. It now certainly seemed as though the century of peace and power which the Chen had afforded China was at an end, as the terminal stage of the dynastic cycle came to assert itself.
563 was a mercifully peaceful year for the Roman world after the tensions and troubles of 562. Besides continuing to steadily make preparations for a future war with the Avars, the Western Empire was primarily concerned with its proselytization efforts in Britain and West Africa this year. Gregory, the newly installed Bishop of Eburacum (as the Romans still called Eoforwic), happily reported to the Papacy that Ephesian Christianity was spreading like a wildfire among the pagan Anglo-Saxons this year, especially in the north; in the south its spread was blunted by the persistence of the Pelagian heresy, which also found converts among the South Angles, but unlike the British creed it enjoyed the royal patronage of Eadric to push it forward. Pope Pelagius, who had recently succeeded the late Pope Paschal and was not unaware of the irony that a man with his name should preside over the (re)Christianization of northern Britain, reportedly remarked ‘non Angli, sed angeli’[11] at the news.
Eadric Raedwaldssunu, King of the North Angles, with Western Roman missionaries in the fortress of Bamburgh
East of Rome, the Hunas were about to make central India a much less peaceful place. 563 was the year in which Baghayash initiated his southern adventures, hoping that he would be able to match the deeds of his illustrious forefathers Khingila and Akhshunwar by conquering all India as they had done to Persia. His northwestern border secured by the peace deals struck with the Turks and Belisarius, the Samrat assembled an army of 40,000 at Gwalior after the monsoon season and led it through the Vindhya Mountains against his first opponent in this direction, the Vishnukundinas[12] – a century-and-a-half old dynasty which was still recovering from a recent war of succession. Initially sacking several towns with little effective resistance, Baghayash met the first major Vishnukundina pushback head-on near the village of Achalpur late in the year.
The Vishnukundina king Deva Varma had nearly twice the Samrat’s numbers, but the Indian army was inexperienced and decidedly obsolete compared to the immensely battle-hardened Hunas: they even still fielded a corps of rathas (chariots) instead of proper horse-riding cavalry. Consequently, the Battle of Achalpur ended in a resounding victory for the Hunas. The Eftal and Indian halves of their army managed to work in synergy under Baghayash’s leadership, allowing them to rout the Vishnukundina host in a double-envelopment after crushing their chariots – 2,000 Indian soldiers were killed in the battle, and ten times as many in the pursuit of their routing ranks. Deva Varma was able to limp back to his strongholds in the southeast, but most of Maharashtra rapidly submitted to the Hunas following this severe defeat.
Further east, China’s woes continued unabated. The so-called Emperor Wu crossed the Yellow River, having consolidated his control over the North China Plain, and threatened fortresses on the Huai by autumn. General Mao’s rear was threatened by another major uprising around Yucheng, which soon came under the leadership of the bandit chief Hao Jue: after capturing Yucheng in a daring night attack, in which he personally led a small party to scale the walls and open the gate immediately prior to signaling the start of the assault, this brigand declared himself Emperor Wucheng of Later Han. As if that weren’t bad enough, the success of the Kingdom of Min in resisting Chen efforts to crack down soon threw most of southern China into anarchy: the indigenous landowner Pham Van Liên proclaimed the independence of a new kingdom in Jiaozhi (to which the Chinese promptly gave an old name, Nanyue) while the general Zhao Wei proclaimed himself Emperor Shang of Later Liang in the rest of the Lingnan region[13], and the governor Qiao Dai similarly declared himself Emperor Yang of Chu in Changsha.
Before this avalanche of disasters, and with their army crippled by innumerable defeats & desertions, Empress Dowager Gou and her cohorts had little option but to pull back and try to consolidate the Chen dynasty’s position in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, around their capital of Jiankang. Mao joined fellow pro-Chen generals Cang Jin and Pan Pi in holding back Qi armies as they tried to cross the Huai in winter, buying Gou time to stabilize her position as her son’s regent and the Chen as a whole a longer lease on life. Despite their short-term survival however, the Chen’s authority over most of China had disintegrated and their road to restoring it was a long and winding one, if they even had the strength to walk across its cobblestones. Thus, 563 could rightly be said to be the dawn of China’s Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms period…
As China continued to spiral into anarchy, powerful regional warlords from both highborn and common or even criminal backgrounds proclaimed themselves Emperor in direct challenge to the fading Chen. Above, Hao Jue is being 'crowned' Emperor Wucheng ('martial and successful') of the Later Han dynasty by his bandit and peasant followers
China’s turmoil brought great opportunity for its neighbors. Since his raids went largely unopposed and it became obvious that the Chen dynasty’s hold on the Middle Kingdom was rapidly collapsing, Issik Khagan launched a major invasion of northern China in September, putting him on a direct collision course with the Qi. The Korean kingdoms, meanwhile, decided this was a good time to settle old scores: Baekje and Goguryeo both attacked Silla in hopes of recovering the territories they had previously lost. Baekje also appealed to the Yamato across the ocean for aid, and the Great King Heijō was happy to answer. He appointed Kose no Muruya, the main Shintoist magnate who had previously led opposition to his attempts at centralizing the Yamato polity, in charge of an expeditionary force which was to sail to Baekje’s aid near the end of the year…while also quietly seeking to reconcile with Muruya’s uneasy Buddhist peer and rival, Yamanoue no Ishikawa, in his absence.
564 brought with it a new cause for celebration in the Occident: the Caesar Constans and his wife Verina had their first son, Florianus, late in the spring of this year. Though normally a frugal man, Romanus welcomed his first grandson into the world by sponsoring a round of lavish games in the Circus Maximus, culminating in a spectacular chariot race featuring all four of the colored teams using six-horse chariots and tens of thousands of solidii in prizes. To the emperor’s own dismay, although he had placed equally considerable bets on the Red and White teams traditionally sponsored by the Stilichians, both were left in the dust of the Blues and the Greens after getting tangled into an equally spectacular crash; leaving the Red racer dead and the White crippled. Meanwhile the Blues went on to prevail over the Greens in a nail-biting finish, thrilling Aemilian (who had bet a year’s salary on their victory) while frustrating Augusta Frederica and Viderichus.
The Reds and Whites get into a catastrophic crash (also known as a 'naufragia', or 'shipwreck'), to the great irritation of their imperial sponsor and the excitement of Blue and Green fans
Elsewhere in Western Europe, the Anglo-Saxons went to war against an opponent that the Roman observers in their midst did not expect. While Æþelric remained in a state of watchful peace with regard to the Romano-Britons, focusing instead on entrenching his people’s settlements and spreading the Gospel across South Anglia for now, Eadric led the North Angles to war against the Picts, who had been raiding his northern frontier with increasing intensity in the years since they partitioned their father’s kingdom. In what the Picts and Gaels would call the Battle of Camlann[14], the North Angles engaged a large Pictish warband of 2,500 just north of the Antonine Wall’s ruins with a similarly-sized army of their own and prevailed: the undisciplined but ferocious woad-painted Pictish infantry drew their English counterparts into wild woodland and overcame them there, but then made the mistake of chasing them into an open field, whereupon the North Angle king stabilized the situation with his household reserve and committed his cavalry to a devastating flanking attack against the disordered and lightly-equipped Picts. Eadric personally sought out and killed Drest VI, the rival Pictish king, in a duel celebrated by English bards from Edinburgh to Lincylene[15].
However, the English had barely begun to establish outposts north of the Bodotria[16] when they faced a renewed threat from the Britonnic holdout in Alcluyd. Wasting no time, the irrepressible Eadric swept southward to meet the invaders head-on in the Pentland Hills (as the Angles called those hills which the men of Alcluyd called ‘Pen Llan’) in the last days of summer, kicking them out of his kingdom and pursuing them into theirs. He went on to sack Guovan[17] and threaten Alt Clut itself, but the Britons’ formidable Roman-era fortifications and increasingly heavy snowfall compelled him to negotiate a settlement at this point rather than try to finish the Britons off once and for all. Consequently Alcluyd would recognize the suzerainty of the North Angles, pay tribute, and further submit to the marriage of their princess Ceinwyn to Eadric’s son and heir Eadwine.
Far off to the east, while tensions and tit-for-that raids continued to ratchet up between the Eastern Romans and Southern Turks, the Hunas were making continued progress through India. Baghayash did not let up on his attacks against the Vishnukundinas, pursuing them all the way to their capital of Amarapura[18] and terrorizing all those in his path into rapid submission if he didn’t simply burn their towns down and massacre or enslave them. Shortly after coming under siege in May, Deva Varma attempted an ill-advised night-time sally against the Huna forces and was utterly defeated, after which Baghayash chased the remaining Indians back into Amarapura and sacked it.
Huna power now extended as far as Andhra, but this did not satisfy Baghayash. His next objective would be Karnataka, presently divided between the Kadamba dynasty of Banavasi; the Chalukyas of Badami; and the Gangas of Talakadu, the only ardent Jains among the three. These Carnatic kingdoms were alarmed by the speed with which the Hunas had crushed the Vishnukundinas, however long-in-the-tooth the latter power might have been, and set aside their old grievances against one another so as to form an alliance against the Samrat’s designs. Their combined armies managed to fight Baghayash to a standstill in the Battle of Raichur that December, forcing the Hunas to retreat for the time being, but Baghayash’s ambitions were not deterred in the slightest and he swore he would return in a few years’ time to try to bring Karnataka to heel once more.
The Carnatic kingdoms did much better than their Vishnukundina neighbors in resisting the southward offensive of the Hunas, but Baghayash survived his defeat at their hands near Raichur and swore revenge
Over in China, the Northern Turks moved rapidly against the Qi, who in turn had to let up on their southward offensives against the Huai in order to respond effectively. Issik Khagan killed Emperor Wu and vanquished his army in the Battle of Jinyang[19] that May, but a complete collapse of the Qi state and the fall of the North China Plain in its entirety to the Tegregs was averted by Luo Honghuan, who rallied his master’s shattered forces to repel the Turkic advance at Baozhou[20] three months later. The only one of Wu’s sons to survive the disaster at Jinyang was briefly enthroned as Emperor Wenxuan of Qi, but did not long survive his wounds; after he died of said injuries a month later, Honghuan – having married his sister, Princess Yuan, with his assent during his brief reign – took control of the Qi remnants as Emperor Xiaojing and continued the struggle against the Northern Turks.
These affairs gave the Chen some breathing room, but otherwise bore little relevance to the goings-on in central and southern China. With the Chen nearly eliminated, the various rebel factions began to fight amongst themselves: Chu and Shu came to blows over the Middle Yangtze, while Min invaded Later Liang-controlled Guangdong. The Shu were further battered by Qiang tribes descending from the great mountains of the west to invade their territories in the summer, around the same time that the Bai and Yi tribes of the southwest revolted against their rule under the leadership of the chieftain Meng Shelong, giving the Chu a major advantage in their struggle. The Chen loyalists in Jiankang could not immediately take advantage of these inter-rebel conflicts, as they had to rebuild their devastated and dispirited army after having just barely fended off the Qi in the previous year. As for the remaining major rebels, the Viet kingdom and Later Han were content to isolate themselves from the fighting, with the latter continuing to observe the Qi-Turkic and Chu-Shu wars in search of opportunities to expand their territory.
Large-scale conflict was beginning to rear its head in the New World, as well. Óengus and Amalgaid had expanded their kingdoms, attracting their share of settlers from Ireland (mostly additional young warriors looking to make a name for themselves, and more of these flocked to the banner of Óengus rather than the better-established and more native-friendly one of Amalgaid) and subordinating additional native Wildermen, over the past few years. By this point however, the friction between their statelets was beginning to reach a boiling point: Amalgaid did not approve of Óengus’ men fishing and hunting on his territory, and furthermore felt that Óengus should acknowledge him as the High King of the Blessed Isle on account of him having arrived first, while Óengus in turn thought any such claim on Amalgaid’s part must be a bad joke because even though his kingdom was founded later, it was by far the larger and more populous of the two.
Thus the latter king decided to dispense with the formalities and launch an outright attack on the former in June of 564, thinking to claim control over all of the Irish on the Insula Benedicta by right of might. At first he caught Amalgaid off-guard with the strength and ferocity of his assault, burning several of the Northern Irish camps and presenting numerous families of settlers under Amalgaid’s rule with the choice of whether to either accept his own or die beneath the sword. Wildermen friendly to Amalgaid were treated even more harshly, typically being enslaved or killed if they didn't manage to flee ahead of Óengus' advance. But before he could reach Amalgaid’s capital at Termonn (as the town which sprang up near the site of Brendan’s monastery came to be called), old Brendan himself rode forth to urge that both parties sheathe their swords and enter a ceasefire, for there was more than enough land and plenty for everyone on the Blessed Isle to enjoy and no reason but pride was justifying their shedding of each other’s Christian blood. Apparently Óengus still respected Brendan enough to listen, and agree to a ceasefire: but he continued to insist that Amalgaid should acknowledge him as over-king, and the other Irish prince decided he would rather use the ceasefire to call up his Wilderman allies (Ataninnuaq chief among them) and reorganize his forces for a counterattack rather than bow down before his rival.
Gaelic warriors of Óengus' warband
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[1] Benghazi.
[2] Misrata.
[3] The ‘Aethiopia’ of the Romans refers to all of Africa beyond the Maghreb and Upper Egypt.
[4] An ancient Berber war god, equated to Saturn/Cronus by the Romans. He was depicted as a bull or a horned man in Berber idols.
[5] Roman expeditions did indeed reach Lake Chad in the time of Augustus, having previously passed through the Tibesti Mountains and the Garamantian kingdom (then at the height of its splendor) to get there. The lake would have been much larger in Roman times than it is today.
[6] El Djem.
[7] ‘Ouagadou’ in Soninke, these are the founders of the future Ghana Empire.
[8] Koumbi Saleh.
[9] Near Aswan.
[10] Fuzhou.
[11] ‘Not Angles, but angels’ – a pun historically attributed to Saint Gregory the Great, the Pope who initiated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, upon encountering Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market of Rome.
[12] Established in present-day Andhra Pradesh around 420, the Vishnukundinas were historically rivals of the Vakatakas for control of the northern Deccan and survived until the early 7th century.
[13] Now known as the Liangguang region, this area is roughly comprised of modern Guangdong and Guangxi.
[14] Camelon.
[15] The Old English name for Lincoln.
[16] The Firth of Forth.
[17] Govan.
[18] Amaravati.
[19] Taiyuan.
[20] Baoding.
Aside from dealing with the Garamantians, the Romans also had cause for concern with other African peoples living further to the south. The Patriarchate of Carthage was especially concerned by reports borne by trans-Saharan merchants that Donatist missionaries were making headway with the Aethiopian peoples[3] beyond the Atlas Mountains, and soon after peace was reached with Amêzyan Patriarch Maurus successfully advocated for the departure of two missions to try to bring the orthodox Christian teachings to the Aethiopians. One would travel through the Limes Tripolitanus and the old homeland of the Garamantes, who would be their first target for conversion; the other had the far more unenviable task of slipping through Hoggar, to reach the distant oasis towns past it and even further beyond if they can.
The mission to and through the Garamantians proved a great success, for many among the pagans perceived the collapse of their agricultural system and the pressures of the ensuing droughts & migrations to be a sign that Gurzil[4] and their other gods had failed or abandoned them. Although Amêzyan himself did not accept baptism at this point, as a nominal Roman subject he did nothing to hinder the missionaries while they were converting his subjects en masse. The furthest-ranging of the missionaries, Egrilius, followed the footsteps of the Augustan-era explorers Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus to eventually end up on the shores of the ‘Lake of Hippopotamus’, which the Kanuri locals called Lake Chad[5]. The western mission was considerably less lucky: of the thirteen missionaries Maurus sent, the Hoggari martyred twelve and spiked their heads at strategic points along their own side of the Atlas Mountains to taunt their hated Ephesian enemies. Only one, Lucas of Thysdrus[6], made it past the Donatists, so it was unto this sole survivor that old Maurus entrusted his hopes of converting the westernmost Aethiopians as he lay in his deathbed.
Romano-Punic missionaries in the court of Amêzyan, who had newly established himself in the Limes Tripolitanus
As for the Eastern Romans, they too viewed events on their southern flank with increasing concern. The Blemmyes were taking up arms against their nominal overlords, the joint Nubian monarchs Hoase and Epimachosi. Aksum did not openly intervene, per the generally conflict-averse foreign policy being pursued by the Baccinbaxaba Tewodros and his mother Cheren, but the opportunity to weaken their strongest remaining regional rival was too good for Cheren to pass up and she persuaded her son to allow the Blemmyes to use northeastern Ethiopia as both a shelter from the Nubians and a recruiting ground. Blemmye warriors crossed through Aksumite territory to assail southern Nubia with increasing frequency while the Aksumite army protected them from Nubian reprisals, and near the year’s end Queen Epimachosi traveled to Constantinople to personally appeal to Anthemius for assistance in suppressing the insurgents or at least in pressuring the Aksumites to stop aiding them.
Further to the east, the Turks’ peaceful split threatened to become significantly less peaceful when Issik and Illig clashed over control over the Silk Road. The lucrative oases of the Tarim were a bone of contention between the brothers, and war was averted only by the diplomatic efforts of their shamans and wives, who managed to get them to split control of the cities by geography: the Northern Turks would attain suzerainty over the cities closest to them – Turfan (formerly Gaochang), Karashahr, and Kucha – while the Southern Turks secured Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar within their sphere of influence. The sore point was Aksu, whose ownership the Khagans ultimately agreed to settle by a duel between their champions that summer. Illig’s man slew Issik’s, much to the latter’s disappointment, and while he was bound by honor to cede Aksu to the Southern Turks (for now) he made no secret of how much he resented his big brother for the loss.
Fortunately for Issik, developments in China would soon provide him with a less fratricidal outlet for his anger. Barely a year after defeating his brothers, Emperor Xiaowen of China was poisoned by Luo Huiqi, a general who had previously served Prince Chao and initially refused to kowtow before him: as it so happened this general’s son had been Chao’s ill-fated bodyguard, killed in the same melee that claimed his master’s life, and Xiaowen unwisely insisted not only on compelling the older man to serve him lunch after his surrender but also on bringing up said son to his face. After experiencing the first symptoms of poisoning and lying down to rest, the emperor never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead by the physician summoned to treat him almost immediately after reaching Changshan, his only ‘comfort’ in death being the knowledge that his killer had to commit suicide by the very same poison to get at him.
The sudden demise of Emperor Xiaowen threw China, still in turmoil from his fratricidal civil war and his father's last-minute defeat at the hands of the Turks, into a new period of violent upheaval
Xiaowen’s road to power required the short-lived emperor to ensure that he was the last one standing out of Emperor Xuan’s sons; worse still, he was survived only by a single, underage son of his own. No sooner had this toddler been enthroned as Emperor Aiping did the Chen court begin to spiral into murderous factionalism as the Empress Dowager Gou contended with the court eunuchs and her late husband’s ministers for control, compounded by a drought induced by the chilly conditions of 561 which threw several prefectures into famine. Whispers, then furious shouts that the Chen had lost the Mandate of Heaven rapidly echoed across China and by the year’s end, rebellions had broken out against their shaken authority in the north and west, with Chengdu and Yecheng being the largest cities to fall almost immediately into the hands of (respectively) the peasant insurgent Fei Gong and the rebellious general Wang Ye, the latter of whom had recruited the late Luo Huiqi’s nephew Luo Honghuan to fight for him. Issik naturally took advantage of the situation to begin intensifying his raids into northern China and probing the situation to determine how much deeper he could push into the crumbling Middle Kingdom.
562 brought good news to the Western Romans from distant Aethiopia, though by then Patriarch Maurus was no longer alive to hear it and had since been succeeded by Samaritanus. Late in the year, Lucas of Thysdrus re-established contact with the Carthaginian Patriarchate through a convert who also happened to be part of a northbound caravan, and informed them of not only his survival but also his travels, failures and successes. According to Lucas, he had been driven away from the Berber trading hubs of Taghazza and Aoudaghost, where Donatist missionaries had turned the people against him and orthodoxy, but managed to find safety in the gold-mining town of Kumbi, seat of the Wagadu[7] tribe: their king, the ‘Kaya Maghan’ or ‘lord of the gold’, gave him permission to stay and preach to his people[8]. It was his hope that Christianity of the right-believing sort would flower in the hearts of the ebon-skinned indigenes, and from there spread to the Berbers to the north – or else that a Christian Wagadu kingdom could help squeeze the heretics from Aoudaghost to Hoggar between themselves and the Western Empire.
Depiction of the Kaya Maghan who welcomed Lucas of Thysdrus, and with him Ephesian Christianity, into the lands of the Wagadu – and with luck, the rest of West Africa from there
This news was most welcome to Patriarch Samaritanus and Emperor Romanus, who needed it even more after events earlier in the year. In the early summer of 562, tensions between his Carantanian and Ostrogoth federates nearly boiled over after a riot in Tarsatica, sparked by Ostrogoth traders who complained that their Slavic counterparts were undercutting them, killed 17. The Ostrogoths resented the Carantanians for settling in lands which were formerly theirs and acquiring sea & market access at Tarsatica, which they still officially controlled as part of their new allotted territories; meanwhile, the Slavs perceived this incident to be an unprovoked assault on their people and Duke Ljudevit retaliated by harrying several Ostrogoth border villages with his warriors, killing an Amaling kinsman in the process. King Viderichus believed this to be a good excuse for him to go and teach his new neighbors a harsh lesson and promptly invaded Carantania with 6,000 men.
Ljudevit answered the incursion by amassing a 5,000-strong force of his own, and warfare between the two peoples seemed imminent until Romanus personally intervened. Frederica had tried to intercede on behalf of her nephew, arguing that the Slavs had brought this mess on their own heads and that Romanus should leave them to fight it out (with the expectation that her more numerous and better-equipped people would prevail): but her august husband would have none of it, and was further supported by Aemilian (who had taken the side of his traditional Bavarian allies in earlier arguments between them and the Carantanians, but saw Ljudevit as a useful ally against the Greens in this case). The emperor landed at Tarsatica with 2,000 heavy horsemen and enough gold to bribe the rival kings into standing down before they could engage in more than a few preliminary skirmishes, averting a proper war among his easternmost federates for the time being, but noted with concern that imposing a more permanent peace settlement would be necessary in the future: he could hardly have his vassals fighting each other when they were on campaign against the Avars.
A Carantanian warband attacking an Ostrogoth fort in the Julian Alps, weeks before Romanus stopped their fighting from spiraling out of control
To the southeast, Anthemius placed extra levies on Aksumite merchants traveling through Eastern Roman lands in a bid to pressure Cheren into cutting Aksum’s support for the rebel Blemmyes. Cheren and Tewodros retaliated by reducing the amount of spices they would allow to reach Roman markets, driving the already steep price of that luxurious good further upward. While this trade war raged between the two larger empires, in Nubia itself King Hoase scored several bloody victories over the Blemmyes, but every time the vanquished party would just retreat to and recover in Aksumite territory. Not even the Nubians’ sack and burning of the Blemmye capital of Kalabsha[9] in December ended the revolt, as the Blemmye leadership had already fled into Aksum and continued to wage war from under the protection of the Baccinbaxaba.
Anthemius gained an additional threat to worry about in mid-summer, for the Mazdakites began raiding into Roman Mesopotamia and the lands of his vassal in Padishkhwargar at that time. They did so under the neglectful eye of Illig, who was content to let these Buddhist fanatics harass the Eastern Romans in preparation for their inevitable next round of hostilities while he personally continued to consolidate his rule and build up his forces deeper in the Persian heartland. In turn the Eastern Roman Emperor authorized the Daylamites and Lakhmids to launch reprisals against the western borderlands of the Southern Turkic Khaganate, while also moving legions back out of Egypt (now that the Garamantian issue had been settled and his troubles with Aksum appeared unlikely to escalate into open bloodshed) to reinforce his easternmost frontier and ordering Vologases to increase recruitment efforts in Mesopotamia.
A Daylamite noble horseman from Padishkhwargar, of the sort that Anthemius counted on to combat Mazdakite raiders from the Zagros Mountains
Meanwhile on the other end of the Silk Road, China’s internal situation continued to destabilize. The rebels in the north and west of the country were increasingly joined by a rash of smaller uprisings in the southeast, of which the most successful was in the mountains of Fujian. The rebel chief Huang Huo, a descendant of both Han Chinese settlers and the Shanyue indigenes of the hilly region, ambushed and decisively routed a 20,000-strong suppression force in the Wuyi Mountains this spring, after which he proclaimed himself ‘King of Min’ and besieged the provincial capital of Changle[10]. This defeat exacerbated infighting in the Chen court as all involved sought to pin the blame on their enemies and that in turn delayed them from sending relief to the unprepared city, dooming it to fall to the Min army shortly before 562’s end.
The loyal general Mao Yan brought young Emperor Aiping some relief by blunting the eastward advance of Fei Gong in the combined land-and-river Battle of Xiling Gorge, but the Chen dynasty’s failure to decisively stop or even contain the other rebellions encouraged even more such risings against them all over the country. Worst of all, Wang Ye now felt sufficiently emboldened to proclaim himself Emperor Wu of Qi in the northeast: the first of several new imperial claimants who directly challenged the Chen’s rule over all China. Fei Gong – clearly undeterred by his recent defeat – followed a few weeks later, declaring himself Emperor Gao of Shu in November. It now certainly seemed as though the century of peace and power which the Chen had afforded China was at an end, as the terminal stage of the dynastic cycle came to assert itself.
563 was a mercifully peaceful year for the Roman world after the tensions and troubles of 562. Besides continuing to steadily make preparations for a future war with the Avars, the Western Empire was primarily concerned with its proselytization efforts in Britain and West Africa this year. Gregory, the newly installed Bishop of Eburacum (as the Romans still called Eoforwic), happily reported to the Papacy that Ephesian Christianity was spreading like a wildfire among the pagan Anglo-Saxons this year, especially in the north; in the south its spread was blunted by the persistence of the Pelagian heresy, which also found converts among the South Angles, but unlike the British creed it enjoyed the royal patronage of Eadric to push it forward. Pope Pelagius, who had recently succeeded the late Pope Paschal and was not unaware of the irony that a man with his name should preside over the (re)Christianization of northern Britain, reportedly remarked ‘non Angli, sed angeli’[11] at the news.
Eadric Raedwaldssunu, King of the North Angles, with Western Roman missionaries in the fortress of Bamburgh
East of Rome, the Hunas were about to make central India a much less peaceful place. 563 was the year in which Baghayash initiated his southern adventures, hoping that he would be able to match the deeds of his illustrious forefathers Khingila and Akhshunwar by conquering all India as they had done to Persia. His northwestern border secured by the peace deals struck with the Turks and Belisarius, the Samrat assembled an army of 40,000 at Gwalior after the monsoon season and led it through the Vindhya Mountains against his first opponent in this direction, the Vishnukundinas[12] – a century-and-a-half old dynasty which was still recovering from a recent war of succession. Initially sacking several towns with little effective resistance, Baghayash met the first major Vishnukundina pushback head-on near the village of Achalpur late in the year.
The Vishnukundina king Deva Varma had nearly twice the Samrat’s numbers, but the Indian army was inexperienced and decidedly obsolete compared to the immensely battle-hardened Hunas: they even still fielded a corps of rathas (chariots) instead of proper horse-riding cavalry. Consequently, the Battle of Achalpur ended in a resounding victory for the Hunas. The Eftal and Indian halves of their army managed to work in synergy under Baghayash’s leadership, allowing them to rout the Vishnukundina host in a double-envelopment after crushing their chariots – 2,000 Indian soldiers were killed in the battle, and ten times as many in the pursuit of their routing ranks. Deva Varma was able to limp back to his strongholds in the southeast, but most of Maharashtra rapidly submitted to the Hunas following this severe defeat.
Further east, China’s woes continued unabated. The so-called Emperor Wu crossed the Yellow River, having consolidated his control over the North China Plain, and threatened fortresses on the Huai by autumn. General Mao’s rear was threatened by another major uprising around Yucheng, which soon came under the leadership of the bandit chief Hao Jue: after capturing Yucheng in a daring night attack, in which he personally led a small party to scale the walls and open the gate immediately prior to signaling the start of the assault, this brigand declared himself Emperor Wucheng of Later Han. As if that weren’t bad enough, the success of the Kingdom of Min in resisting Chen efforts to crack down soon threw most of southern China into anarchy: the indigenous landowner Pham Van Liên proclaimed the independence of a new kingdom in Jiaozhi (to which the Chinese promptly gave an old name, Nanyue) while the general Zhao Wei proclaimed himself Emperor Shang of Later Liang in the rest of the Lingnan region[13], and the governor Qiao Dai similarly declared himself Emperor Yang of Chu in Changsha.
Before this avalanche of disasters, and with their army crippled by innumerable defeats & desertions, Empress Dowager Gou and her cohorts had little option but to pull back and try to consolidate the Chen dynasty’s position in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, around their capital of Jiankang. Mao joined fellow pro-Chen generals Cang Jin and Pan Pi in holding back Qi armies as they tried to cross the Huai in winter, buying Gou time to stabilize her position as her son’s regent and the Chen as a whole a longer lease on life. Despite their short-term survival however, the Chen’s authority over most of China had disintegrated and their road to restoring it was a long and winding one, if they even had the strength to walk across its cobblestones. Thus, 563 could rightly be said to be the dawn of China’s Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms period…
As China continued to spiral into anarchy, powerful regional warlords from both highborn and common or even criminal backgrounds proclaimed themselves Emperor in direct challenge to the fading Chen. Above, Hao Jue is being 'crowned' Emperor Wucheng ('martial and successful') of the Later Han dynasty by his bandit and peasant followers
China’s turmoil brought great opportunity for its neighbors. Since his raids went largely unopposed and it became obvious that the Chen dynasty’s hold on the Middle Kingdom was rapidly collapsing, Issik Khagan launched a major invasion of northern China in September, putting him on a direct collision course with the Qi. The Korean kingdoms, meanwhile, decided this was a good time to settle old scores: Baekje and Goguryeo both attacked Silla in hopes of recovering the territories they had previously lost. Baekje also appealed to the Yamato across the ocean for aid, and the Great King Heijō was happy to answer. He appointed Kose no Muruya, the main Shintoist magnate who had previously led opposition to his attempts at centralizing the Yamato polity, in charge of an expeditionary force which was to sail to Baekje’s aid near the end of the year…while also quietly seeking to reconcile with Muruya’s uneasy Buddhist peer and rival, Yamanoue no Ishikawa, in his absence.
564 brought with it a new cause for celebration in the Occident: the Caesar Constans and his wife Verina had their first son, Florianus, late in the spring of this year. Though normally a frugal man, Romanus welcomed his first grandson into the world by sponsoring a round of lavish games in the Circus Maximus, culminating in a spectacular chariot race featuring all four of the colored teams using six-horse chariots and tens of thousands of solidii in prizes. To the emperor’s own dismay, although he had placed equally considerable bets on the Red and White teams traditionally sponsored by the Stilichians, both were left in the dust of the Blues and the Greens after getting tangled into an equally spectacular crash; leaving the Red racer dead and the White crippled. Meanwhile the Blues went on to prevail over the Greens in a nail-biting finish, thrilling Aemilian (who had bet a year’s salary on their victory) while frustrating Augusta Frederica and Viderichus.
The Reds and Whites get into a catastrophic crash (also known as a 'naufragia', or 'shipwreck'), to the great irritation of their imperial sponsor and the excitement of Blue and Green fans
Elsewhere in Western Europe, the Anglo-Saxons went to war against an opponent that the Roman observers in their midst did not expect. While Æþelric remained in a state of watchful peace with regard to the Romano-Britons, focusing instead on entrenching his people’s settlements and spreading the Gospel across South Anglia for now, Eadric led the North Angles to war against the Picts, who had been raiding his northern frontier with increasing intensity in the years since they partitioned their father’s kingdom. In what the Picts and Gaels would call the Battle of Camlann[14], the North Angles engaged a large Pictish warband of 2,500 just north of the Antonine Wall’s ruins with a similarly-sized army of their own and prevailed: the undisciplined but ferocious woad-painted Pictish infantry drew their English counterparts into wild woodland and overcame them there, but then made the mistake of chasing them into an open field, whereupon the North Angle king stabilized the situation with his household reserve and committed his cavalry to a devastating flanking attack against the disordered and lightly-equipped Picts. Eadric personally sought out and killed Drest VI, the rival Pictish king, in a duel celebrated by English bards from Edinburgh to Lincylene[15].
However, the English had barely begun to establish outposts north of the Bodotria[16] when they faced a renewed threat from the Britonnic holdout in Alcluyd. Wasting no time, the irrepressible Eadric swept southward to meet the invaders head-on in the Pentland Hills (as the Angles called those hills which the men of Alcluyd called ‘Pen Llan’) in the last days of summer, kicking them out of his kingdom and pursuing them into theirs. He went on to sack Guovan[17] and threaten Alt Clut itself, but the Britons’ formidable Roman-era fortifications and increasingly heavy snowfall compelled him to negotiate a settlement at this point rather than try to finish the Britons off once and for all. Consequently Alcluyd would recognize the suzerainty of the North Angles, pay tribute, and further submit to the marriage of their princess Ceinwyn to Eadric’s son and heir Eadwine.
Far off to the east, while tensions and tit-for-that raids continued to ratchet up between the Eastern Romans and Southern Turks, the Hunas were making continued progress through India. Baghayash did not let up on his attacks against the Vishnukundinas, pursuing them all the way to their capital of Amarapura[18] and terrorizing all those in his path into rapid submission if he didn’t simply burn their towns down and massacre or enslave them. Shortly after coming under siege in May, Deva Varma attempted an ill-advised night-time sally against the Huna forces and was utterly defeated, after which Baghayash chased the remaining Indians back into Amarapura and sacked it.
Huna power now extended as far as Andhra, but this did not satisfy Baghayash. His next objective would be Karnataka, presently divided between the Kadamba dynasty of Banavasi; the Chalukyas of Badami; and the Gangas of Talakadu, the only ardent Jains among the three. These Carnatic kingdoms were alarmed by the speed with which the Hunas had crushed the Vishnukundinas, however long-in-the-tooth the latter power might have been, and set aside their old grievances against one another so as to form an alliance against the Samrat’s designs. Their combined armies managed to fight Baghayash to a standstill in the Battle of Raichur that December, forcing the Hunas to retreat for the time being, but Baghayash’s ambitions were not deterred in the slightest and he swore he would return in a few years’ time to try to bring Karnataka to heel once more.
The Carnatic kingdoms did much better than their Vishnukundina neighbors in resisting the southward offensive of the Hunas, but Baghayash survived his defeat at their hands near Raichur and swore revenge
Over in China, the Northern Turks moved rapidly against the Qi, who in turn had to let up on their southward offensives against the Huai in order to respond effectively. Issik Khagan killed Emperor Wu and vanquished his army in the Battle of Jinyang[19] that May, but a complete collapse of the Qi state and the fall of the North China Plain in its entirety to the Tegregs was averted by Luo Honghuan, who rallied his master’s shattered forces to repel the Turkic advance at Baozhou[20] three months later. The only one of Wu’s sons to survive the disaster at Jinyang was briefly enthroned as Emperor Wenxuan of Qi, but did not long survive his wounds; after he died of said injuries a month later, Honghuan – having married his sister, Princess Yuan, with his assent during his brief reign – took control of the Qi remnants as Emperor Xiaojing and continued the struggle against the Northern Turks.
These affairs gave the Chen some breathing room, but otherwise bore little relevance to the goings-on in central and southern China. With the Chen nearly eliminated, the various rebel factions began to fight amongst themselves: Chu and Shu came to blows over the Middle Yangtze, while Min invaded Later Liang-controlled Guangdong. The Shu were further battered by Qiang tribes descending from the great mountains of the west to invade their territories in the summer, around the same time that the Bai and Yi tribes of the southwest revolted against their rule under the leadership of the chieftain Meng Shelong, giving the Chu a major advantage in their struggle. The Chen loyalists in Jiankang could not immediately take advantage of these inter-rebel conflicts, as they had to rebuild their devastated and dispirited army after having just barely fended off the Qi in the previous year. As for the remaining major rebels, the Viet kingdom and Later Han were content to isolate themselves from the fighting, with the latter continuing to observe the Qi-Turkic and Chu-Shu wars in search of opportunities to expand their territory.
Large-scale conflict was beginning to rear its head in the New World, as well. Óengus and Amalgaid had expanded their kingdoms, attracting their share of settlers from Ireland (mostly additional young warriors looking to make a name for themselves, and more of these flocked to the banner of Óengus rather than the better-established and more native-friendly one of Amalgaid) and subordinating additional native Wildermen, over the past few years. By this point however, the friction between their statelets was beginning to reach a boiling point: Amalgaid did not approve of Óengus’ men fishing and hunting on his territory, and furthermore felt that Óengus should acknowledge him as the High King of the Blessed Isle on account of him having arrived first, while Óengus in turn thought any such claim on Amalgaid’s part must be a bad joke because even though his kingdom was founded later, it was by far the larger and more populous of the two.
Thus the latter king decided to dispense with the formalities and launch an outright attack on the former in June of 564, thinking to claim control over all of the Irish on the Insula Benedicta by right of might. At first he caught Amalgaid off-guard with the strength and ferocity of his assault, burning several of the Northern Irish camps and presenting numerous families of settlers under Amalgaid’s rule with the choice of whether to either accept his own or die beneath the sword. Wildermen friendly to Amalgaid were treated even more harshly, typically being enslaved or killed if they didn't manage to flee ahead of Óengus' advance. But before he could reach Amalgaid’s capital at Termonn (as the town which sprang up near the site of Brendan’s monastery came to be called), old Brendan himself rode forth to urge that both parties sheathe their swords and enter a ceasefire, for there was more than enough land and plenty for everyone on the Blessed Isle to enjoy and no reason but pride was justifying their shedding of each other’s Christian blood. Apparently Óengus still respected Brendan enough to listen, and agree to a ceasefire: but he continued to insist that Amalgaid should acknowledge him as over-king, and the other Irish prince decided he would rather use the ceasefire to call up his Wilderman allies (Ataninnuaq chief among them) and reorganize his forces for a counterattack rather than bow down before his rival.
Gaelic warriors of Óengus' warband
====================================================================================
[1] Benghazi.
[2] Misrata.
[3] The ‘Aethiopia’ of the Romans refers to all of Africa beyond the Maghreb and Upper Egypt.
[4] An ancient Berber war god, equated to Saturn/Cronus by the Romans. He was depicted as a bull or a horned man in Berber idols.
[5] Roman expeditions did indeed reach Lake Chad in the time of Augustus, having previously passed through the Tibesti Mountains and the Garamantian kingdom (then at the height of its splendor) to get there. The lake would have been much larger in Roman times than it is today.
[6] El Djem.
[7] ‘Ouagadou’ in Soninke, these are the founders of the future Ghana Empire.
[8] Koumbi Saleh.
[9] Near Aswan.
[10] Fuzhou.
[11] ‘Not Angles, but angels’ – a pun historically attributed to Saint Gregory the Great, the Pope who initiated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, upon encountering Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market of Rome.
[12] Established in present-day Andhra Pradesh around 420, the Vishnukundinas were historically rivals of the Vakatakas for control of the northern Deccan and survived until the early 7th century.
[13] Now known as the Liangguang region, this area is roughly comprised of modern Guangdong and Guangxi.
[14] Camelon.
[15] The Old English name for Lincoln.
[16] The Firth of Forth.
[17] Govan.
[18] Amaravati.
[19] Taiyuan.
[20] Baoding.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Ah yes, the times when lake Chad could still be called lake GigaChad. I suspect the current round of the interesting times that China found itself in, will be a welcome spring of inspiration for TTL Koei.
Eftals are trying to conqer rest of India,turks picking falling China - no major wars with ERE.
Which means,Avars are fucked,and if both ERE and WRE attack them,their existence would be much shorter then OTL.
Or...They would go East and create slavic state with them as elites.
Funny thing - that is what polish gentry belived from 13th century,but with Sarmatian as leaders./And could be even partially true,50% of our population have R1a Y-DNA/
Ostrogots need some reward for lost lands - why not Gotland island ? in 563 nobody important hold it,it was once hold by Goths,WRE had fleet capable to do so,Baltic sea is easy to navigate - AND THEY COULD GET AMBER.From prussians,who in OTL never united,even massacred by Teutonic Knights.
Why not let Ostrogoths conqer them ?
Bitish are fucked,just like picts.Aksumites wait dor better occasion/as they should - attacking ERE when they do not fight Eftals/turks/both is stupid/,and Garmantians become good romans.
And - first war in North America between white men.When other nations join? britons should run there,and saxons have fleets,too.
Which means,Avars are fucked,and if both ERE and WRE attack them,their existence would be much shorter then OTL.
Or...They would go East and create slavic state with them as elites.
Funny thing - that is what polish gentry belived from 13th century,but with Sarmatian as leaders./And could be even partially true,50% of our population have R1a Y-DNA/
Ostrogots need some reward for lost lands - why not Gotland island ? in 563 nobody important hold it,it was once hold by Goths,WRE had fleet capable to do so,Baltic sea is easy to navigate - AND THEY COULD GET AMBER.From prussians,who in OTL never united,even massacred by Teutonic Knights.
Why not let Ostrogoths conqer them ?
Bitish are fucked,just like picts.Aksumites wait dor better occasion/as they should - attacking ERE when they do not fight Eftals/turks/both is stupid/,and Garmantians become good romans.
And - first war in North America between white men.When other nations join? britons should run there,and saxons have fleets,too.
565-567: ...must divide
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
565’s arrival brought with it the renewed Turkic attack on the eastern Roman Empire which Anthemius had been anticipating for some time. Illig Khagan crossed into Roman territory in March with 25,000 men, relying on the Mazdakites to secure his northern flank against Armenian and Daylamite counterattacks. Vologases had done what he could to build up Eastern Roman forces in Mesopotamia over the past two years, but his best was not enough: he and his Lakhmid auxiliaries were still overcome by the Turks’ stampeding lancers and horse-archers at the Battle of Jalula[1] on April 1 and beat a hasty retreat to Babylon soon after. The situation clearly required Anthemius to lead a response, which the emperor did starting in May – marching from Antioch on down the Euphrates with 20,000 men, he arrived to relieve the besieged Prince of Mesopotamia in July and chased Illig back to Ctesiphon, where he defeated the Turkic Khagan in a furious battle outside the city that dramatically pitted his cataphracts against the latter’s heavy lancers.
While the Eastern Augustus and the Khagan were duking it out in Mesopotamia, the aged Belisarius fought his last battles in defense of Roman Paropamisus. Illig had sent 12,000 men under his Sogdian general Gurak to eliminate this isolated Roman exclave, but Belisarius whittled down the invading force in the mountain passes and valleys of Paropamisus with the aid of Varshasb & his other tribal allies before annihilating its remnants and killing Gurak before his capital of Kophen on May 15. The great general and Duke of the Furthest East passed away exactly a month after achieving this final victory at the age of 65, after which he was immediately succeeded in the latter capacity by his son (and Anthemius’ cousin) Porphyrus. While manifestly not his father’s equal, the totality of Belisarius’ last victory and the Turks’ greater focus on Mesopotamia fortunately meant that Porphyrus’ comparatively limited martial ability would not be tested overmuch, yet.
Belisarius bids farewell to his family in Kophen before departing on what would turn out to be his last campaign
Anthemius having to redirect his attention against the Turks also meant that he had to hurriedly make amends with Cheren and Tewodros to the south. Both sides mutually agreed to lower tariffs to their previous level and to get trade flowing through the Red Sea again, and the Aksumites agreed to stop supporting Blemmye rebels against the Romans’ Nubian ally. However, in return Hoase of Nubia had to grant amnesty to the Blemmyes, to accept Aksumite ‘aid’ in rebuilding their towns and fortresses, and to tolerate the marriage of their king Tophêna to Tewodros’ sister Magdala, with the thinly veiled promise that Aksum would still have his back the next time the Blemmyes caused trouble. Regardless of the inevitable troubles this settlement would inflict on the region, Anthemius had achieved his short-term priorities in the south – preventing the Nubian crisis from escalating and resuming trade with India through Aksumite waters – and would not spare Nubia any further thought until he had dealt with Illig.
In China, the flames of war burned ever brighter. The Shu managed to defend their capital of Chengdu from the attacks of Chu, the Bai-Yi confederates and the Qiang, but lost considerable territory to both over the course of 565. In particular, the Bai and Yi tribes were able to carve out the Kingdom of Yi for themselves under Meng Shelong’s able leadership, centered around Dali; while the Qiang who overran the Qinling Mountains and parts of western Ba-Shu[2] established for themselves the ‘Kingdom of Qin’ with its capital at Lizhou[3], acclaiming their great war-chief Ma Jian (as the Chinese called him, his Qiang name was Manu) their first king. Their relatives, the Di, soon followed in their footsteps by striking north against both the Later Han and the Turks, establishing a ‘Kingdom of Chouchi’ on the upper reaches of the Han River.
This Di attack distracted Issik Khagan from continuing to pursue hostilities against the Qi, giving their own Emperor Xiaojing valuable time to recover and regain his state’s footing while the Turks were busy fending off the latest interlopers from the south. The outcome of that war was not in doubt, given the disparity in strength between the Di and the Northern Turks; but in the months it took Issik to crush Chouchi, whose remnants quickly submitted to the Qiang-Qin for protection, Xiaojing was able to raise new armies, repair the fortifications of his cities and recapture Jinyang from the Tegregs. When Issik returned to attack Jinyang once more in December, he was put to flight by a determined Qi defense, and Xiaojing entered talks with Emperor Wucheng of Later Han to form an anti-Tegreg alliance immediately afterward.
In southeastern China hostilities broke out between the Kingdom of Min and Emperor Shang of Later Liang, as the latter sought to impose his authority over the former on the road to Jiankang. But the scrappy mountain-men of Fujian derailed his ambitions, ambushing and delivering the Later Liang forces a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Nanxi Creek in their territory’s southwestern reaches, and then pursuing the foe into their own lands. By the year’s end Huang Huo had conquered Liang territories down and east of the length of the Ting River, terminating at the fishing towns of Tuojiang[4] and Yi’an[5], and elevated himself from merely being ‘King of Min’ to King of Minyue. Huo’s triumph solidified the last of the ‘Four Kingdoms’ of the ‘Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms’ period: his own Minyue now avoided the fate of the short-lived Chouchi to join Pham Van Liên’s Nanyue, Meng Shelong’s Yi and Ma Jian’s Qin.
The Min army marching to war under Huang Huo. They are notably much more ragged and lightly-equipped compared to their Liang adversaries, not that they will allow this to stop them from prevailing
On the other side of the planet, as it became apparent that the Northern Irish kingdom on the Insula Benedicta was not about to knuckle under the demands of their Southern Irish cousins, Amalgaid broke the truce before Óengus could. He launched a surprise attack on Óengus’ camp with a large force, comprised of both Gaels and Wilderman allies; most of the latter still did not have iron weapons, as Amalgaid was wary of giving away too many iron spears and axes to Ataninnuaq’s people, but they gave the Northern Irish forces an important numerical advantage as well as by revealing an unprotected woodland path which the Southern Irish remained unaware of. In the chaotic, fire-lit night engagement which followed, Amalgaid was victorious and slew Óengus in single combat (rather unfairly, as his surprise had been so total than Óengus had to face his well-armed and mailed self in undergarments and wielding a chair) in addition to 70 of his warriors.
Now it was Óengus’ son Ólchobar who was on the back foot, and Amalgaid ruthlessly pursued him back down the eastern coast to his seat at Tríonóid[6]. But once more Brendan intervened before one Irish king could finish off the other, and negotiated a settlement in which Ólchobar would acknowledge Amalgaid as his overlord. Amalgaid’s elevation to High King of the Blessed Isle was not welcome news back in much of Ireland outside of his home in Munster, being especially poorly-received in the court of the court of the King of Tara and High King of Ireland Eógan mac Muiredaig who perceived this proclamation as a challenge; however, given the distances between the Emerald and Blessed Isles, there was little he and the other Uí Néill could do about it beyond forbidding those under their authority from traveling west. More importantly, as the chief counselor to the new High King in the Far West (in both spiritual and temporal matters) and the one man who was still universally respected among both the New World Irish and the Wildermen as a peacemaker, Brendan found himself becoming the power behind Amalgaid’s throne whether he liked it or not.
Amalgaid, visibly aged since he first set foot on the Blessed Isle, now High King of the Irish across the Atlantic
566 brought two important pieces of good news to the Western Augustus. Firstly, his heir sired another child, a daughter who was baptized as Maria. Secondly, his Balkan archenemy Qilian Khagan died of old age at winter’s end. Qilian’s own son Fúliánchóu (or simply ‘Fulian Khagan’ to the Romans) did not enjoy a smooth ascent to the Avar throne; several of the Turkic tribes within their confederacy seized the chance to rise up against Rouran domination and try to take the helm themselves. Romanus could not believe his luck at first, and waited a few months to see if one side would quickly overwhelm the other; when this did not happen, with the Rouran and rebel Turks shedding each other’s blood in several inconclusive battles across Pannonia and Dacia instead, he resolved to strike in the summer.
Unfortunately, the Eastern Romans’ distraction with the latest Turkic attack prevented them from immediately collaborating with their Western counterparts against the Avars. But then, with the Avars divided and his army fully built up to his desired specifications in the years since their nearly-disastrous first expedition, Romanus may not have needed their help to achieve a victory anyway. Starting in May, Aemilian and the Caesar Constans crossed into Avar-held Illyria at the head of a great host of 30,000, half-Roman and half comprised of various federates; of these the largest contributors were the Franks, Bavarians and Carantanians, for Viderichus’ Ostrogoths had been greatly reduced in number by their past defeats at Avar hands. The Ostrogoth king himself retained a command position over the 3,000-man contingent he did manage to contribute to this army, although he had to first swear an oath not to disobey Aemilian’s commands or turn his blade against his allies – especially not the Carantanians with whom he had nearly come to blows just two years prior.
Aemilian and Constans first met and scored a victory over the Avars (then led by Pihouba, a kinsman and loyal supporter of Fulian’s) in the Battle of Andautonia. The Romans already enjoyed a greater-than-three-to-one numerical advantage over this first Avar army, but the battle also revealed the utility of their reforms and the upgrades they had made to their equipment to be so great as to constitute overkill: the manufacturing of larger and heavier arcuballistae allowed their crossbowmen to effectively stop the Avar charge dead in its tracks before falling into danger of being overrun, after which the Caesar led their massed heavy caballarii in a furious counter-charge of their own to mop up the bloodied and disordered opposition. Pihouba himself was unhorsed and killed in the fracas, and what remained of the Avar presence on the field was annihilated soon after while their Sclaveni infantry – far from deciding to get involved in what was now an obviously one-sided massacre – stood by and surrendered as the Roman legions advanced upon them.
One of the lessons the Western Romans took away from their new army's first outing against the Avars was that the older arcuballistae they were using was too light to stop an Avar charge outside of short range, something they have since rectified in the lead-up to this latest renewal of the conflict
The Sclaveni leader Radimir hoped that by not helping the Avars and yielding before costing the Romans any more lives, he would be able to achieve similar terms of vassalage as Ljudevit had. These were granted by Romanus at Constans’ suggestion (by which he butted heads with his mother and cousin) and the Slavic chief was promised a principality centered on the newly-reconquered Andautonia: the Romans identified their new allies as the ‘Horites’ whom Paulus Orosius had written about early in the fifth century, itself a Latinized translation of their true name – the Hrvati, or Croats, who had ‘White Croat’ kindred living in the Carpathians along the northern edges of the Avar domain[7]. To keep the Ostrogoths on-board, Romanus promised Viderichus further monetary compensation and the restoration of territories along the Dalmatian coast in the event of a Roman victory. Their numbers augmented by these Horites, the Western Romans used the Savus to anchor their northern flank for now and advanced further east with due caution, clearing Siscia and much of the western Dinarides by the time snow fell.
While the Western Romans were fighting to retake as much of Illyricum from the Avars as they could, Anthemius continued to not only fight in defense of his own eastern frontier but also to begin his own incursion into territories previously lost to the Southern Turks: truly after a number of reverses in the last 15 years, the middle of this decade was beginning to prove quite fruitful for both Roman Empires. After maneuvering and skirmishing against one another throughout the spring, the Eastern Romans decisively expelled Illig Khagan from Mesopotamia in the Battle of Dastagird in June of 566; there the Turkic cavalry managed to overcome their Roman counterparts after drawing them out of formation with a feint retreat, only to fall into a trap of the Romans’ own where they were felled by Anthemius’ infantry and Vologases’ archers by the thousand.
The Southern Turks fell back into the mountains of Media, where Anthemius wisely desisted from pursuing them. Instead, he turned his attention to Khuzestan and Meshan, which he invaded in late July. His first attempt to besiege Susa was thwarted by Turkic counterattacks from the east and south, while his Armenian and Daylamite allies were tied up in the Zagros Mountains by Illig’s own Mazdakite allies just as the latter had planned. The necessity of a tactical retreat back into Mesopotamia did not dissuade him, and after turning around to smite the Turks once more on the eastern edges of the Mesopotamian Marshes in the first week of September he resumed his offensive into Khuzestan. By the end of 566, the Eastern Augustus had placed Susa back under siege and detached his Arab federates to sail and ride a ways down the Choaspes[8] and Coprates[9] Rivers, so that they might guard his southern flank against another potential Turkic assault from out of Meshan.
Heavy Romano-Persian horse-archers clashing with the Southern Turks on the muddy edge of the Mesopotamian Marshes
Far to the east, Illig’s brother too was having a difficult time. Issik now had to contend with the Qi-Han alliance, which threatened to drive him out of northern China. Emperor Wucheng of Later Han struck first, trying to trap his army south of the Nanshan Range[10] shortly after they crushed the Di of Chouchi. In this he was ultimately unsuccessful, as his troops were unable to construct the fortifications necessary to effectively obstruct the larger Turkic horde’s routes of retreat before they broke through his lines, but battling through those mountains was not an easy feat for the largely mounted Turks and they sustained significant losses (both in terms of manpower and time) before they managed to fight their way back northward.
Issik and his men found no safety even after escaping Han territory, however, for now Emperor Xiaojing of Qi was moving quickly to attack them before they could recover from their struggles against the Later Han. Understanding that Wucheng was reorganizing his forces for a second attack, he resolved to hasten northeastward and engage the Qi on the confluence of the Wei and Yellow Rivers, in hopes of catching them before they could finish crossing past the town of Weinan. In this the Khagan was nearly successful: on June 26 his vanguard arrived at the crossings while only part of the Qi army had made it over the Yellow River, just as he had hoped, and he launched an immediate attack which devastated this forward element of the Chinese troops, killing thousands and driving the rest back over the Yellow River in a bloody rout.
However, Emperor Xiaojing did not give up and continued to press his troops into an attack over the bridges and fords surrounding Weinan. The Tegregs used their mobility to quickly secure each of these crossings and repel the bottle-necked Qi time and again as the day wore on, but late in the afternoon the Later Han army finally arrived and attacked them from behind. The tide turned against the Turks as the Sun began to set, as Issik did not have the numbers to both hold the crossings and fend off Wucheng’s assault. Ultimately he was able to escape northward, crossing the Wei River before the Han and Qi could stomp his army flat between their own, but lost 12,000 men in the chaos – nearly half of his remaining field army. These losses made it impossible for him to hold his conquests beyond Jincheng[11], and over the rest of the year the Qi-Han alliance continuously pushed the Turks almost all the way back to the Hexi Corridor.
Contemporary Chinese depiction of the Battle of Weinan
In the south of China, following the many reverses which plagued his dynasty in recent years Emperor Gao of Shu was overthrown and killed following a brief civil war with his dissatisfied subordinates, of whom the most successful – Zhang Gongyan – proclaimed himself Emperor Zhi of Cheng atop his former master’s corpse. He went on to successfully defend Chengdu against an opportunistic Chu attack, ensuring his own survival and securing the Cheng’s place as the seventh of the Eight Dynasties who lent their name to this era in Chinese history. Meanwhile the Chen took the opportunity presented by Qi’s focus on fending off the Turks to attack them from the southeast starting late in the year, with the faithful and capable Mao Yan in command.
To the northeast, the war in the Korean peninsula was winding down. Battered by Goguryeo attacks from the north and a combined Baekje-Yamato onslaught from the south and west, Silla had to sue for peace and yield much of its previously-gained territory to the two, who promptly began to fight over the spoils. Ultimately the Baekje and Yamato achieved a major victory over the Goguryeo at the Battle of Hanseong, allowing the former to secure the Han and Imjin River valleys and establish itself as the dominant Korean kingdom for now.
However, the Japanese commander Kose no Muruya could hardly look forward to a hero’s welcome on the other side of the Straits of Tsushima; his overlord Heijō had solidified an alliance between his rival, Yamanoue no Ishikawa, and the Yamato dynasty itself. Together they had moved to denounce him as an overambitious traitor looking to create a kingdom of his own across the sea and to dispossess & purge his kindred & allies back home while he was fighting in the latter’s name in Korea, an unforgivable affront to his honor. Consequently, as the year wound down towards its end Kose prepared to sail back to Japan with his army, hellbent on avenging this disgrace and not only retaking what his family had lost but ideally also crushing the Yamanoue clan utterly and making the Kose into the premier peers among the Yamato.
Kose no Muruya and his officers planning their return to the islands of the Yamato
567 initially went well for the Western Romans, who continued to face limited and scattered opposition as they advanced throughout Dalmatia and towards Moesia. The Avars remained primarily concerned with their internal tensions all this time and by the start of summer, Aemilian and Constans felt sufficiently comfortable to divide their troops: Aemilian would focus on mopping up resistance in the north while Constans swept southward to clear Macedonia and Greece. Aemilian also tried to get the Gepids to revert their allegiance, but was stymied by the fact that Fulian Khagan had the foresight to keep King Gesimund’s heir Remismund hostage at his court: the father’s decision to keep faith with the Avars was one the magister militum considered unfortunate and understandable in light of this, but he would not allow such sentiment to keep him from retaking the ruins of Sirmium and crushing the Gepids.
However, things began to change in mid-summer. Fulian finally crushed his enemies in a bloody battle on the Pannonian plains east of Aquincum in June, and could now turn his full attention to dealing with the Romans. Near the end of the month he descended on Aemilian’s army as it besieged Singidunum; his own host was battered from the battles of the recent civil war, but he partially replenished his ranks by offering amnesty to the surviving Turkic tribesmen who would fight for him (and gave them the ‘place of honor’ in his front lines against the Romans) and by compelling the Gepids to lend him all of their remaining strength. The Western Romans were forced to retreat back over the Savus under Avar harassment, and to call for aid from their fellows in the south – who by this time had taken Diocleia and Scodra, and were clearing out the recently-established Slavic strongholds in Epirus & Aetolia on their way to Athens.
By the time Constans returned to the north with 8,000 men, Aemilian had been pushed away from the lower banks of the Savus and was preparing to make his stand outside of a surrendered Sclaveni settlement south of that river’s confluence with the Drinus[11], which the locals and his Slavic allies called ‘Bijeljina’ in Slavonic. The battle which followed pitted 22,000 Western Romans against 25,000 Avars, and was much harder-fought than previous engagements against Fulian’s kin and generals. At the battle’s climax, the Avars managed to temporarily scatter the Roman cavalry after a furious clash; however they lost sight of their foes and took some time to sack the Roman camp in a breach of discipline, allowing the caballarii to regroup and rout them in a counterattack before relieving the infantry under Aemilian, who were being hard-pressed by the Gepid and Sclaveni infantry in Avar employ; the fighting between the Carantanians and Horites on one hand, and the various Sclaveni still in Avar service on the other, was particularly vicious. Such was the chaos and closeness of the fighting that initially it had been reported (by men who had fled the attack on the Roman camp) that the Avars had actually triumphed and possibly killed the Caesar, while Constans needed a few days to disprove the reports of his demise.
Radimir and the Horites at camp on the morning of the Battle of Bijeljina, or as their new Roman overlords called it, the Battle of the Drinus
The Western Romans pursued their adversaries back over the Savus and took Sirmium once more after it had been previously taken back by the Avars in Aemilian’s first retreat. However, Fulian had managed to preserve the better part of his forces and turned to fight the Romans once more near Bassianae toward the end of summer. He caught Aemilian & Constans off-guard by eschewing the usual order of things – having his horse-archers skirmish with the Roman bowmen and crossbowmen before committing to a more serious attack – and instead launching an immediate charge at the head of his lancers, scattering the Roman skirmish lines before they were repulsed by the infantry legions and Frankish federates. Although Aemilian maintained discipline and prevented the Romans from chasing the retreating Avar cavalry into a probable trap, this just gave Fulian time to regroup, after which harassment and flanking maneuvers by the more numerous Avar riders eventually forced the Romans to withdraw from the field. 567 ended with the battle-lines drawn from Sirmium to Larissa, and although the Western Romans still held a clear advantage (to the extent that Constans was able to return to Rome and spend the winter with his family without incident), the war could hardly be said to be over yet.
As for the Eastern Empire, they finally succeeded in starving out the defenders of Susa this spring, advancing Roman control back into parts of Khuzestan. Illig Khagan had not been idle while Anthemius was receiving the Susan garrison’s surrender however, instead steadily rebuilding his strength further to the east. Not long after the Eastern Romans crossed the Coprates at Andamaska[12], the Tegregs raced back into Khuzestan to engage them at Gundeshapur, where Illig had previously painstakingly restored as much of the old Persian academy (devastated by the Hephthalites’ wars with the Sassanids and later Sabbatius) as he could.
The Battle of Gundeshapur went poorly for Anthemius, whose cavalry was defeated and put to flight early in the clash after their commander, the Lakhmid prince al-Qays was killed by a Turkic arrow. Unlike the Avars the Stilichians had faced far to the west, the Turks remained focused on assailing the Eastern Roman infantry still on the field, and a disaster was averted only by the strength of Roman discipline and the Emperor’s determined leadership. Eventually the Ghassanid and Roman cavalry rallied and returned to attack the Turks from behind as they surrounded the Roman infantry, allowing Anthemius and his men to begin cutting their way out of the trap.
From Gundeshapur the Romans fell back to Andamaska, where they used the bridge over the Copratus to fend off the Tegreg pursuit, and Vologases was sent back to Babylon to recover from the serious injuries he had incurred over the previous battles. The Eastern Augustus offered to negotiate at this point, hoping to shift the Romano-Turkic border at least marginally in his favor, but was rebuffed by Illig. His victory at Gundeshapur had encouraged the Khagan to settle for nothing less than the status quo antebellum, and he was well aware that losing a war he had started (even if the only territorial losses were small) would gravely undermine his standing with both his Turkic and Persian subjects, so he determined that the war would have to continue until he recovered Susa at the very least.
Contemporary Babylonian art depicting Vologases moments before being struck on the head by a Turkic heavy cavalryman. Note that the Turk is wearing a Persian-style helmet, complete with aventail: a sign of early Persianization among the Southern Turks
Further still to the east, Issik Khagan too was finding his second wind. It certainly helped that over the winter, the Chinese offensive against him stalled as the Qi and Later Han began to fall out over the spoils of their earlier victories and were unable to draw up a mutually-satisfactory division of the territories they’d just retaken from him. The Qi were further distracted by Mao Yan’s attack from Chen territory, which crossed the Huai in February and threatened to cut Shandong off from the rest of his domains by April. It was then that the Northern Turks sprang their counterattack through the Hexi Corridor, obliterating the ramshackle and poorly-coordinated defenses which the allies had set up on the Corridor’s eastern end and were as fraught with infighting as the rest of their empires were.
Since the Chen were directly threatening the core of his lands and the residence of his family, Emperor Xiaojing of Qi decided to throw everything he had at them in the hope of rapidly overpowering them and to ‘magnanimously’ concede his various claims in northwest China to the Later Han, who now had the unenviable task of facing down the Turks with almost no Qi support as their ally pulled nearly all of their troops eastward to fend off Mao Yan. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in the Han experiencing severe reverses over the course of 567 and Issik overrunning even Jincheng[13] on the Yellow River before Emperor Wucheng and his generals were able to stabilize the situation. Their (increasingly strictly nominal) Qi allies outflanked the Chen to score a major victory at Dezhou in August, but this brought them no actual relief as Xiaojing decided he’d rather take the chance to finish off the Chen (and in so doing fully avenge his uncle and cousin) rather than lend the Han a hand.
Bereft of aid from Qi, these Later Han troops have decided to retreat to a safer position rather than defend the Hexi Corridor in the face of a major Northern Turkic counterattack
Across the sea, Kose no Muruya returned to the lands of the Yamato with his army behind him and vengeance on his mind, having first passed through friendly Tsushima to resupply. After tricking the royalist forces into thinking he would land at Shimonoseki using a fake fleet comprised of commandeered Tsushiman fishing boats and captured Silla vessels which the Baekje freely gave up as part of his share of the plunder, the rebel army made an unopposed landing in Izumo instead. The denizens of that western province were among the last to fall under Yamato rule, and the Kibi clan which governed them were certainly not predisposed to ceding any more authority to the centralist Heijō, so they too joined Kose’s rebellion.
Kose proceeded to tear a bloody swath across western Honshu on his way to Asuka, where Heijō had entrenched himself and built a new wall around his palace over the last two years, while Yamanoue no Ishikawa and the larger royal army set out from Shimonoseki to pursue him. By the year’s end he had besieged the Great King of the Yamato in Asuka, but was himself being besieged by Yamanoue’s royalists, who were still more numerous than his own army even in spite of the Kibi joining him. Kose attempted to secretly appeal to the other magnates in Yamanoue’s army to join him and even the odds or even undo the royalist cause altogether, while Yamanoue in turn correctly feared that at least some of his fellow royalists may be less firm in their allegiance to Heijō (ironically, at least some of them were Heijō’s original supporters in his first civil war and were miffed that Yamanoue – once their opponent in said conflict – now enjoyed the Great King’s favor) and increasingly considered mounting an assault on Kose’s camp before they could decide to break away.
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[1] Jalawla.
[2] Sichuan.
[3] Guangyuan.
[4] Shantou.
[5] Chaozhou.
[6] Trinity, Newfoundland.
[7] Croats or at least proto-Croats seem to have lived near the Sea of Azov since the 2nd-3rd centuries AD, when Bosporan Greeks from Tanais recorded their presence under the name ‘Horoáthos’ in the Tanais Tablets. They were originally counted among the Antae and among those pushed westward by the initial advance of the Avars; some Croats migrated as far as Dalmatia, becoming known as the ‘Red Croats’, while other ‘White Croats’ may have lingered in a territory ranging from Galicia to eastern Bohemia.
[8] The Karkheh River.
[9] The Dez River.
[10] Now the Qinling Mountains.
[11] The River Drina.
[12] Andimeshk.
[13] Lanzhou.
While the Eastern Augustus and the Khagan were duking it out in Mesopotamia, the aged Belisarius fought his last battles in defense of Roman Paropamisus. Illig had sent 12,000 men under his Sogdian general Gurak to eliminate this isolated Roman exclave, but Belisarius whittled down the invading force in the mountain passes and valleys of Paropamisus with the aid of Varshasb & his other tribal allies before annihilating its remnants and killing Gurak before his capital of Kophen on May 15. The great general and Duke of the Furthest East passed away exactly a month after achieving this final victory at the age of 65, after which he was immediately succeeded in the latter capacity by his son (and Anthemius’ cousin) Porphyrus. While manifestly not his father’s equal, the totality of Belisarius’ last victory and the Turks’ greater focus on Mesopotamia fortunately meant that Porphyrus’ comparatively limited martial ability would not be tested overmuch, yet.
Belisarius bids farewell to his family in Kophen before departing on what would turn out to be his last campaign
Anthemius having to redirect his attention against the Turks also meant that he had to hurriedly make amends with Cheren and Tewodros to the south. Both sides mutually agreed to lower tariffs to their previous level and to get trade flowing through the Red Sea again, and the Aksumites agreed to stop supporting Blemmye rebels against the Romans’ Nubian ally. However, in return Hoase of Nubia had to grant amnesty to the Blemmyes, to accept Aksumite ‘aid’ in rebuilding their towns and fortresses, and to tolerate the marriage of their king Tophêna to Tewodros’ sister Magdala, with the thinly veiled promise that Aksum would still have his back the next time the Blemmyes caused trouble. Regardless of the inevitable troubles this settlement would inflict on the region, Anthemius had achieved his short-term priorities in the south – preventing the Nubian crisis from escalating and resuming trade with India through Aksumite waters – and would not spare Nubia any further thought until he had dealt with Illig.
In China, the flames of war burned ever brighter. The Shu managed to defend their capital of Chengdu from the attacks of Chu, the Bai-Yi confederates and the Qiang, but lost considerable territory to both over the course of 565. In particular, the Bai and Yi tribes were able to carve out the Kingdom of Yi for themselves under Meng Shelong’s able leadership, centered around Dali; while the Qiang who overran the Qinling Mountains and parts of western Ba-Shu[2] established for themselves the ‘Kingdom of Qin’ with its capital at Lizhou[3], acclaiming their great war-chief Ma Jian (as the Chinese called him, his Qiang name was Manu) their first king. Their relatives, the Di, soon followed in their footsteps by striking north against both the Later Han and the Turks, establishing a ‘Kingdom of Chouchi’ on the upper reaches of the Han River.
This Di attack distracted Issik Khagan from continuing to pursue hostilities against the Qi, giving their own Emperor Xiaojing valuable time to recover and regain his state’s footing while the Turks were busy fending off the latest interlopers from the south. The outcome of that war was not in doubt, given the disparity in strength between the Di and the Northern Turks; but in the months it took Issik to crush Chouchi, whose remnants quickly submitted to the Qiang-Qin for protection, Xiaojing was able to raise new armies, repair the fortifications of his cities and recapture Jinyang from the Tegregs. When Issik returned to attack Jinyang once more in December, he was put to flight by a determined Qi defense, and Xiaojing entered talks with Emperor Wucheng of Later Han to form an anti-Tegreg alliance immediately afterward.
In southeastern China hostilities broke out between the Kingdom of Min and Emperor Shang of Later Liang, as the latter sought to impose his authority over the former on the road to Jiankang. But the scrappy mountain-men of Fujian derailed his ambitions, ambushing and delivering the Later Liang forces a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Nanxi Creek in their territory’s southwestern reaches, and then pursuing the foe into their own lands. By the year’s end Huang Huo had conquered Liang territories down and east of the length of the Ting River, terminating at the fishing towns of Tuojiang[4] and Yi’an[5], and elevated himself from merely being ‘King of Min’ to King of Minyue. Huo’s triumph solidified the last of the ‘Four Kingdoms’ of the ‘Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms’ period: his own Minyue now avoided the fate of the short-lived Chouchi to join Pham Van Liên’s Nanyue, Meng Shelong’s Yi and Ma Jian’s Qin.
The Min army marching to war under Huang Huo. They are notably much more ragged and lightly-equipped compared to their Liang adversaries, not that they will allow this to stop them from prevailing
On the other side of the planet, as it became apparent that the Northern Irish kingdom on the Insula Benedicta was not about to knuckle under the demands of their Southern Irish cousins, Amalgaid broke the truce before Óengus could. He launched a surprise attack on Óengus’ camp with a large force, comprised of both Gaels and Wilderman allies; most of the latter still did not have iron weapons, as Amalgaid was wary of giving away too many iron spears and axes to Ataninnuaq’s people, but they gave the Northern Irish forces an important numerical advantage as well as by revealing an unprotected woodland path which the Southern Irish remained unaware of. In the chaotic, fire-lit night engagement which followed, Amalgaid was victorious and slew Óengus in single combat (rather unfairly, as his surprise had been so total than Óengus had to face his well-armed and mailed self in undergarments and wielding a chair) in addition to 70 of his warriors.
Now it was Óengus’ son Ólchobar who was on the back foot, and Amalgaid ruthlessly pursued him back down the eastern coast to his seat at Tríonóid[6]. But once more Brendan intervened before one Irish king could finish off the other, and negotiated a settlement in which Ólchobar would acknowledge Amalgaid as his overlord. Amalgaid’s elevation to High King of the Blessed Isle was not welcome news back in much of Ireland outside of his home in Munster, being especially poorly-received in the court of the court of the King of Tara and High King of Ireland Eógan mac Muiredaig who perceived this proclamation as a challenge; however, given the distances between the Emerald and Blessed Isles, there was little he and the other Uí Néill could do about it beyond forbidding those under their authority from traveling west. More importantly, as the chief counselor to the new High King in the Far West (in both spiritual and temporal matters) and the one man who was still universally respected among both the New World Irish and the Wildermen as a peacemaker, Brendan found himself becoming the power behind Amalgaid’s throne whether he liked it or not.
Amalgaid, visibly aged since he first set foot on the Blessed Isle, now High King of the Irish across the Atlantic
566 brought two important pieces of good news to the Western Augustus. Firstly, his heir sired another child, a daughter who was baptized as Maria. Secondly, his Balkan archenemy Qilian Khagan died of old age at winter’s end. Qilian’s own son Fúliánchóu (or simply ‘Fulian Khagan’ to the Romans) did not enjoy a smooth ascent to the Avar throne; several of the Turkic tribes within their confederacy seized the chance to rise up against Rouran domination and try to take the helm themselves. Romanus could not believe his luck at first, and waited a few months to see if one side would quickly overwhelm the other; when this did not happen, with the Rouran and rebel Turks shedding each other’s blood in several inconclusive battles across Pannonia and Dacia instead, he resolved to strike in the summer.
Unfortunately, the Eastern Romans’ distraction with the latest Turkic attack prevented them from immediately collaborating with their Western counterparts against the Avars. But then, with the Avars divided and his army fully built up to his desired specifications in the years since their nearly-disastrous first expedition, Romanus may not have needed their help to achieve a victory anyway. Starting in May, Aemilian and the Caesar Constans crossed into Avar-held Illyria at the head of a great host of 30,000, half-Roman and half comprised of various federates; of these the largest contributors were the Franks, Bavarians and Carantanians, for Viderichus’ Ostrogoths had been greatly reduced in number by their past defeats at Avar hands. The Ostrogoth king himself retained a command position over the 3,000-man contingent he did manage to contribute to this army, although he had to first swear an oath not to disobey Aemilian’s commands or turn his blade against his allies – especially not the Carantanians with whom he had nearly come to blows just two years prior.
Aemilian and Constans first met and scored a victory over the Avars (then led by Pihouba, a kinsman and loyal supporter of Fulian’s) in the Battle of Andautonia. The Romans already enjoyed a greater-than-three-to-one numerical advantage over this first Avar army, but the battle also revealed the utility of their reforms and the upgrades they had made to their equipment to be so great as to constitute overkill: the manufacturing of larger and heavier arcuballistae allowed their crossbowmen to effectively stop the Avar charge dead in its tracks before falling into danger of being overrun, after which the Caesar led their massed heavy caballarii in a furious counter-charge of their own to mop up the bloodied and disordered opposition. Pihouba himself was unhorsed and killed in the fracas, and what remained of the Avar presence on the field was annihilated soon after while their Sclaveni infantry – far from deciding to get involved in what was now an obviously one-sided massacre – stood by and surrendered as the Roman legions advanced upon them.
One of the lessons the Western Romans took away from their new army's first outing against the Avars was that the older arcuballistae they were using was too light to stop an Avar charge outside of short range, something they have since rectified in the lead-up to this latest renewal of the conflict
The Sclaveni leader Radimir hoped that by not helping the Avars and yielding before costing the Romans any more lives, he would be able to achieve similar terms of vassalage as Ljudevit had. These were granted by Romanus at Constans’ suggestion (by which he butted heads with his mother and cousin) and the Slavic chief was promised a principality centered on the newly-reconquered Andautonia: the Romans identified their new allies as the ‘Horites’ whom Paulus Orosius had written about early in the fifth century, itself a Latinized translation of their true name – the Hrvati, or Croats, who had ‘White Croat’ kindred living in the Carpathians along the northern edges of the Avar domain[7]. To keep the Ostrogoths on-board, Romanus promised Viderichus further monetary compensation and the restoration of territories along the Dalmatian coast in the event of a Roman victory. Their numbers augmented by these Horites, the Western Romans used the Savus to anchor their northern flank for now and advanced further east with due caution, clearing Siscia and much of the western Dinarides by the time snow fell.
While the Western Romans were fighting to retake as much of Illyricum from the Avars as they could, Anthemius continued to not only fight in defense of his own eastern frontier but also to begin his own incursion into territories previously lost to the Southern Turks: truly after a number of reverses in the last 15 years, the middle of this decade was beginning to prove quite fruitful for both Roman Empires. After maneuvering and skirmishing against one another throughout the spring, the Eastern Romans decisively expelled Illig Khagan from Mesopotamia in the Battle of Dastagird in June of 566; there the Turkic cavalry managed to overcome their Roman counterparts after drawing them out of formation with a feint retreat, only to fall into a trap of the Romans’ own where they were felled by Anthemius’ infantry and Vologases’ archers by the thousand.
The Southern Turks fell back into the mountains of Media, where Anthemius wisely desisted from pursuing them. Instead, he turned his attention to Khuzestan and Meshan, which he invaded in late July. His first attempt to besiege Susa was thwarted by Turkic counterattacks from the east and south, while his Armenian and Daylamite allies were tied up in the Zagros Mountains by Illig’s own Mazdakite allies just as the latter had planned. The necessity of a tactical retreat back into Mesopotamia did not dissuade him, and after turning around to smite the Turks once more on the eastern edges of the Mesopotamian Marshes in the first week of September he resumed his offensive into Khuzestan. By the end of 566, the Eastern Augustus had placed Susa back under siege and detached his Arab federates to sail and ride a ways down the Choaspes[8] and Coprates[9] Rivers, so that they might guard his southern flank against another potential Turkic assault from out of Meshan.
Heavy Romano-Persian horse-archers clashing with the Southern Turks on the muddy edge of the Mesopotamian Marshes
Far to the east, Illig’s brother too was having a difficult time. Issik now had to contend with the Qi-Han alliance, which threatened to drive him out of northern China. Emperor Wucheng of Later Han struck first, trying to trap his army south of the Nanshan Range[10] shortly after they crushed the Di of Chouchi. In this he was ultimately unsuccessful, as his troops were unable to construct the fortifications necessary to effectively obstruct the larger Turkic horde’s routes of retreat before they broke through his lines, but battling through those mountains was not an easy feat for the largely mounted Turks and they sustained significant losses (both in terms of manpower and time) before they managed to fight their way back northward.
Issik and his men found no safety even after escaping Han territory, however, for now Emperor Xiaojing of Qi was moving quickly to attack them before they could recover from their struggles against the Later Han. Understanding that Wucheng was reorganizing his forces for a second attack, he resolved to hasten northeastward and engage the Qi on the confluence of the Wei and Yellow Rivers, in hopes of catching them before they could finish crossing past the town of Weinan. In this the Khagan was nearly successful: on June 26 his vanguard arrived at the crossings while only part of the Qi army had made it over the Yellow River, just as he had hoped, and he launched an immediate attack which devastated this forward element of the Chinese troops, killing thousands and driving the rest back over the Yellow River in a bloody rout.
However, Emperor Xiaojing did not give up and continued to press his troops into an attack over the bridges and fords surrounding Weinan. The Tegregs used their mobility to quickly secure each of these crossings and repel the bottle-necked Qi time and again as the day wore on, but late in the afternoon the Later Han army finally arrived and attacked them from behind. The tide turned against the Turks as the Sun began to set, as Issik did not have the numbers to both hold the crossings and fend off Wucheng’s assault. Ultimately he was able to escape northward, crossing the Wei River before the Han and Qi could stomp his army flat between their own, but lost 12,000 men in the chaos – nearly half of his remaining field army. These losses made it impossible for him to hold his conquests beyond Jincheng[11], and over the rest of the year the Qi-Han alliance continuously pushed the Turks almost all the way back to the Hexi Corridor.
Contemporary Chinese depiction of the Battle of Weinan
In the south of China, following the many reverses which plagued his dynasty in recent years Emperor Gao of Shu was overthrown and killed following a brief civil war with his dissatisfied subordinates, of whom the most successful – Zhang Gongyan – proclaimed himself Emperor Zhi of Cheng atop his former master’s corpse. He went on to successfully defend Chengdu against an opportunistic Chu attack, ensuring his own survival and securing the Cheng’s place as the seventh of the Eight Dynasties who lent their name to this era in Chinese history. Meanwhile the Chen took the opportunity presented by Qi’s focus on fending off the Turks to attack them from the southeast starting late in the year, with the faithful and capable Mao Yan in command.
To the northeast, the war in the Korean peninsula was winding down. Battered by Goguryeo attacks from the north and a combined Baekje-Yamato onslaught from the south and west, Silla had to sue for peace and yield much of its previously-gained territory to the two, who promptly began to fight over the spoils. Ultimately the Baekje and Yamato achieved a major victory over the Goguryeo at the Battle of Hanseong, allowing the former to secure the Han and Imjin River valleys and establish itself as the dominant Korean kingdom for now.
However, the Japanese commander Kose no Muruya could hardly look forward to a hero’s welcome on the other side of the Straits of Tsushima; his overlord Heijō had solidified an alliance between his rival, Yamanoue no Ishikawa, and the Yamato dynasty itself. Together they had moved to denounce him as an overambitious traitor looking to create a kingdom of his own across the sea and to dispossess & purge his kindred & allies back home while he was fighting in the latter’s name in Korea, an unforgivable affront to his honor. Consequently, as the year wound down towards its end Kose prepared to sail back to Japan with his army, hellbent on avenging this disgrace and not only retaking what his family had lost but ideally also crushing the Yamanoue clan utterly and making the Kose into the premier peers among the Yamato.
Kose no Muruya and his officers planning their return to the islands of the Yamato
567 initially went well for the Western Romans, who continued to face limited and scattered opposition as they advanced throughout Dalmatia and towards Moesia. The Avars remained primarily concerned with their internal tensions all this time and by the start of summer, Aemilian and Constans felt sufficiently comfortable to divide their troops: Aemilian would focus on mopping up resistance in the north while Constans swept southward to clear Macedonia and Greece. Aemilian also tried to get the Gepids to revert their allegiance, but was stymied by the fact that Fulian Khagan had the foresight to keep King Gesimund’s heir Remismund hostage at his court: the father’s decision to keep faith with the Avars was one the magister militum considered unfortunate and understandable in light of this, but he would not allow such sentiment to keep him from retaking the ruins of Sirmium and crushing the Gepids.
However, things began to change in mid-summer. Fulian finally crushed his enemies in a bloody battle on the Pannonian plains east of Aquincum in June, and could now turn his full attention to dealing with the Romans. Near the end of the month he descended on Aemilian’s army as it besieged Singidunum; his own host was battered from the battles of the recent civil war, but he partially replenished his ranks by offering amnesty to the surviving Turkic tribesmen who would fight for him (and gave them the ‘place of honor’ in his front lines against the Romans) and by compelling the Gepids to lend him all of their remaining strength. The Western Romans were forced to retreat back over the Savus under Avar harassment, and to call for aid from their fellows in the south – who by this time had taken Diocleia and Scodra, and were clearing out the recently-established Slavic strongholds in Epirus & Aetolia on their way to Athens.
By the time Constans returned to the north with 8,000 men, Aemilian had been pushed away from the lower banks of the Savus and was preparing to make his stand outside of a surrendered Sclaveni settlement south of that river’s confluence with the Drinus[11], which the locals and his Slavic allies called ‘Bijeljina’ in Slavonic. The battle which followed pitted 22,000 Western Romans against 25,000 Avars, and was much harder-fought than previous engagements against Fulian’s kin and generals. At the battle’s climax, the Avars managed to temporarily scatter the Roman cavalry after a furious clash; however they lost sight of their foes and took some time to sack the Roman camp in a breach of discipline, allowing the caballarii to regroup and rout them in a counterattack before relieving the infantry under Aemilian, who were being hard-pressed by the Gepid and Sclaveni infantry in Avar employ; the fighting between the Carantanians and Horites on one hand, and the various Sclaveni still in Avar service on the other, was particularly vicious. Such was the chaos and closeness of the fighting that initially it had been reported (by men who had fled the attack on the Roman camp) that the Avars had actually triumphed and possibly killed the Caesar, while Constans needed a few days to disprove the reports of his demise.
Radimir and the Horites at camp on the morning of the Battle of Bijeljina, or as their new Roman overlords called it, the Battle of the Drinus
The Western Romans pursued their adversaries back over the Savus and took Sirmium once more after it had been previously taken back by the Avars in Aemilian’s first retreat. However, Fulian had managed to preserve the better part of his forces and turned to fight the Romans once more near Bassianae toward the end of summer. He caught Aemilian & Constans off-guard by eschewing the usual order of things – having his horse-archers skirmish with the Roman bowmen and crossbowmen before committing to a more serious attack – and instead launching an immediate charge at the head of his lancers, scattering the Roman skirmish lines before they were repulsed by the infantry legions and Frankish federates. Although Aemilian maintained discipline and prevented the Romans from chasing the retreating Avar cavalry into a probable trap, this just gave Fulian time to regroup, after which harassment and flanking maneuvers by the more numerous Avar riders eventually forced the Romans to withdraw from the field. 567 ended with the battle-lines drawn from Sirmium to Larissa, and although the Western Romans still held a clear advantage (to the extent that Constans was able to return to Rome and spend the winter with his family without incident), the war could hardly be said to be over yet.
As for the Eastern Empire, they finally succeeded in starving out the defenders of Susa this spring, advancing Roman control back into parts of Khuzestan. Illig Khagan had not been idle while Anthemius was receiving the Susan garrison’s surrender however, instead steadily rebuilding his strength further to the east. Not long after the Eastern Romans crossed the Coprates at Andamaska[12], the Tegregs raced back into Khuzestan to engage them at Gundeshapur, where Illig had previously painstakingly restored as much of the old Persian academy (devastated by the Hephthalites’ wars with the Sassanids and later Sabbatius) as he could.
The Battle of Gundeshapur went poorly for Anthemius, whose cavalry was defeated and put to flight early in the clash after their commander, the Lakhmid prince al-Qays was killed by a Turkic arrow. Unlike the Avars the Stilichians had faced far to the west, the Turks remained focused on assailing the Eastern Roman infantry still on the field, and a disaster was averted only by the strength of Roman discipline and the Emperor’s determined leadership. Eventually the Ghassanid and Roman cavalry rallied and returned to attack the Turks from behind as they surrounded the Roman infantry, allowing Anthemius and his men to begin cutting their way out of the trap.
From Gundeshapur the Romans fell back to Andamaska, where they used the bridge over the Copratus to fend off the Tegreg pursuit, and Vologases was sent back to Babylon to recover from the serious injuries he had incurred over the previous battles. The Eastern Augustus offered to negotiate at this point, hoping to shift the Romano-Turkic border at least marginally in his favor, but was rebuffed by Illig. His victory at Gundeshapur had encouraged the Khagan to settle for nothing less than the status quo antebellum, and he was well aware that losing a war he had started (even if the only territorial losses were small) would gravely undermine his standing with both his Turkic and Persian subjects, so he determined that the war would have to continue until he recovered Susa at the very least.
Contemporary Babylonian art depicting Vologases moments before being struck on the head by a Turkic heavy cavalryman. Note that the Turk is wearing a Persian-style helmet, complete with aventail: a sign of early Persianization among the Southern Turks
Further still to the east, Issik Khagan too was finding his second wind. It certainly helped that over the winter, the Chinese offensive against him stalled as the Qi and Later Han began to fall out over the spoils of their earlier victories and were unable to draw up a mutually-satisfactory division of the territories they’d just retaken from him. The Qi were further distracted by Mao Yan’s attack from Chen territory, which crossed the Huai in February and threatened to cut Shandong off from the rest of his domains by April. It was then that the Northern Turks sprang their counterattack through the Hexi Corridor, obliterating the ramshackle and poorly-coordinated defenses which the allies had set up on the Corridor’s eastern end and were as fraught with infighting as the rest of their empires were.
Since the Chen were directly threatening the core of his lands and the residence of his family, Emperor Xiaojing of Qi decided to throw everything he had at them in the hope of rapidly overpowering them and to ‘magnanimously’ concede his various claims in northwest China to the Later Han, who now had the unenviable task of facing down the Turks with almost no Qi support as their ally pulled nearly all of their troops eastward to fend off Mao Yan. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in the Han experiencing severe reverses over the course of 567 and Issik overrunning even Jincheng[13] on the Yellow River before Emperor Wucheng and his generals were able to stabilize the situation. Their (increasingly strictly nominal) Qi allies outflanked the Chen to score a major victory at Dezhou in August, but this brought them no actual relief as Xiaojing decided he’d rather take the chance to finish off the Chen (and in so doing fully avenge his uncle and cousin) rather than lend the Han a hand.
Bereft of aid from Qi, these Later Han troops have decided to retreat to a safer position rather than defend the Hexi Corridor in the face of a major Northern Turkic counterattack
Across the sea, Kose no Muruya returned to the lands of the Yamato with his army behind him and vengeance on his mind, having first passed through friendly Tsushima to resupply. After tricking the royalist forces into thinking he would land at Shimonoseki using a fake fleet comprised of commandeered Tsushiman fishing boats and captured Silla vessels which the Baekje freely gave up as part of his share of the plunder, the rebel army made an unopposed landing in Izumo instead. The denizens of that western province were among the last to fall under Yamato rule, and the Kibi clan which governed them were certainly not predisposed to ceding any more authority to the centralist Heijō, so they too joined Kose’s rebellion.
Kose proceeded to tear a bloody swath across western Honshu on his way to Asuka, where Heijō had entrenched himself and built a new wall around his palace over the last two years, while Yamanoue no Ishikawa and the larger royal army set out from Shimonoseki to pursue him. By the year’s end he had besieged the Great King of the Yamato in Asuka, but was himself being besieged by Yamanoue’s royalists, who were still more numerous than his own army even in spite of the Kibi joining him. Kose attempted to secretly appeal to the other magnates in Yamanoue’s army to join him and even the odds or even undo the royalist cause altogether, while Yamanoue in turn correctly feared that at least some of his fellow royalists may be less firm in their allegiance to Heijō (ironically, at least some of them were Heijō’s original supporters in his first civil war and were miffed that Yamanoue – once their opponent in said conflict – now enjoyed the Great King’s favor) and increasingly considered mounting an assault on Kose’s camp before they could decide to break away.
====================================================================================
[1] Jalawla.
[2] Sichuan.
[3] Guangyuan.
[4] Shantou.
[5] Chaozhou.
[6] Trinity, Newfoundland.
[7] Croats or at least proto-Croats seem to have lived near the Sea of Azov since the 2nd-3rd centuries AD, when Bosporan Greeks from Tanais recorded their presence under the name ‘Horoáthos’ in the Tanais Tablets. They were originally counted among the Antae and among those pushed westward by the initial advance of the Avars; some Croats migrated as far as Dalmatia, becoming known as the ‘Red Croats’, while other ‘White Croats’ may have lingered in a territory ranging from Galicia to eastern Bohemia.
[8] The Karkheh River.
[9] The Dez River.
[10] Now the Qinling Mountains.
[11] The River Drina.
[12] Andimeshk.
[13] Lanzhou.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Good to see the WRE striking back at Avars and holding their own after the Avar civil war had ended. With greater ability to replenish the losses continuation of war favours them somewhat, albeit draining the state coffers, I doubt they will be able to fully defeat the Avars, so best case is positive border change and more Sclaveni foederati, thus chipping away at Avar strength, until they can start a new war, with ERE support.
I'm sure his mother used this opportunity for more scheming against Aemilian.
A hell of a lot going on and the western empire having success against the Avars while the eastern one holds onto their rather over-extended claims in the east with a fair slice of luck.
Chaos in China. Any chance of a map please to give a clearer idea of who's where? At least at the moment as it sounds very volatile.
Rather hope Kose wins in the Japanese civil war although that could make for some interesting changes in Japan.
Things fairly quiet elsewhere other than Amalgaid's success against his rival, which could however leave him isolated if the Irish high king manages to limit new settlers to his kingdom. Which might give a chance for the locals to recover their position somewhat. Especially if they can gain some access to Irish technology.
Chaos in China. Any chance of a map please to give a clearer idea of who's where? At least at the moment as it sounds very volatile.
Rather hope Kose wins in the Japanese civil war although that could make for some interesting changes in Japan.
Things fairly quiet elsewhere other than Amalgaid's success against his rival, which could however leave him isolated if the Irish high king manages to limit new settlers to his kingdom. Which might give a chance for the locals to recover their position somewhat. Especially if they can gain some access to Irish technology.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Regarding the situation in China, I can say this much: a map will indeed be Coming Soon™, almost certainly in one of the next few updates. I just have to get to the rise of the 8th dynasty first, so that it can truly be called a map of the 'Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms' period.
568-570: Blunted lances
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Constans returned to the front early in 568, having not only impregnated his wife for the third time in the winter months (as a result their second son, Otho, would be born in August of this year) but also met with his parents. The Caesar’s mother put him up to the task of trying to persuade his august father to replace Aemilian with his father-in-law Carpilio (at the time an infantry commander in the army of Aemilian & Constans), but they were bluntly rebuffed: Romanus remembered all too well what happened the last time he took this sort of advice and switched out his primary field commanders mid-war, no matter that unlike Frederica’s past sycophants, Carpilio was a man of both proven competence and loyalty.
At first, the Caesar had no reason to suspect that Aemilian had learned of his mother’s machinations upon returning to their field headquarters at Sirmium, where the magister militum hailed and feasted with him in an entirely friendly manner before resuming campaigning once the unusually heavy spring rains had let up. However, in the Battle of Singidunum which followed in May, Carpilio was killed and the two infantry legions he was directing sustained heavy casualties when Aemilian inexplicably ordered the rest of the Roman line to fall back, leaving them exposed to an Avar-Gepid onslaught. The battle itself ended in a Western Roman victory after Constans overcame the Avar cavalry, allowing Aemilian to push back against the Avar infantry and retake control of the ruined Singidunum, but the Caesar’s suspicions were inflamed by the manner in which his father-in-law died.
Mutual suspicions aside, both men were able to continue working together throughout the rest of 568 – when it came to defending lands which they had already taken back. Notably the Western Romans did not push past the Dravus into Pannonia or east of Singidunum into Avar-held Moesia, instead fighting purely defensive battles at Aelia Mursa[1] and Acumincum[2] to hold the line against Avar probing attacks. Ostensibly the joint commanders of the Roman host were united on assuming a defensive posture, well aware of the dangers of recklessly overextending themselves from the last round with the Avars, but visiting messengers from Rome brought back an impression of heightened – though always subtle – tensions at their luncheons and suppers, and whispered to the aging emperor that his son & generalissimo might both be too concerned that the other would set them up to die to take further bold action. For his part, Fulian Khagan was happy to seize the opportunity to rebuild the Avar forces in peace.
Aemilian, Constans and an attendant on a hunt, as the former two struggle to reconcile with one another
To the east, Vologases died of his injuries soon after arriving in Babylon, despite the best efforts of his physicians: a hard loss for his imperial cousin, made even more-so because his son Zamasphes (as his Persian name, Djamasp, was rendered in Greek and Latin) was a completely inexperienced leader who had just barely reached manhood in the previous year. Worse still for the emperor, Illig Khagan led the Turks onward to engage the Eastern Romans at Andamaska again in April, having gathered reinforcements from the Zagros Mountains for a decisive blow aimed at Susa. This time Anthemius ceded the crossing, as he lacked the strength to hold it and was awaiting reinforcements from the west.
Anthemius continued to pull back into Mesopotamia as the full size of Illig’s host was revealed to him by his scouts and eventually his own eyes, leaving a 2,000-strong garrison to defend Susa against nearly 30,000 Tegregs. For his part, Illig was aware that his adversary was amassing reinforcements with which to relieve the siege and take Khuzestan back for the Roman Empire, so he planned a night-time assault to retake the city before Anthemius could press him so. On the evening of May 8, some of the Khagan’s men identified a poorly-guarded section of Susa’s walls and brought this to his attention: consequently he committed to an immediate attack on the city and particularly at that spot, which he would lead personally. In the resulting battle the Turks prevailed, annihilating the Roman garrison over five hours of fighting across the walls and streets of Susa, but Illig himself was badly injured after being shoved off the wall by a legionary: he regained consciousness after two days (during which his uncontrolled troops sacked the city, contrary to his intentions) and had broken both legs, an arm and several ribs from the fall.
While Illig remained bedridden as a result of his severe wounds, the Romans went back on the offensive. Anthemius met the Turkic army at Bayan[3] in August, his own army having been reinforced to a more respectable 24,000 by contingents from Thrace, Egypt and the Kartvelian kingdoms in the meantime, and prevailed against them there. The recently rain-soaked marshland which comprised the battlefield hindered the more heavily-armed Romans, to be sure, but crucially it also neutralized the Turks’ cavalry advantage, while the fierce eastward winds softened the sting of their arrows. The Persian officer whom the Khagan had appointed to command his army, Hormuzan, nevertheless managed to put up a stiff fight but was eventually killed at the climax of the fighting – abandoned by the Turkic contingent whose tarkhan he had a rivalry with – sealing his side’s fate. By the end of the year the Southern Turks had been pushed into full retreat and Anthemius had besieged Illig in Susa, at which point the maimed Khagan finally decided to sue for terms.
Illig Khagan's Persian physicians visibly aghast at the extent of his injuries, and surprised that he is even still alive after such a fall
In China, as the Chen’s element of surprise wore off and ever-larger numbers of Qi soldiers flooded back to the east, the Qi made headway in not only stopping the Chen forces but actively pushing them back toward the Huai River throughout the spring and summer. Emperor Xiaojing secured a critical advantage over his adversaries by killing Mao Yan, by far the most capable general still left to the Chen court, in the dramatic Battle of Lake Hongze in July: the 15,000-strong Chen army was trapped by 40,000 Qi troops against the lake’s northern shore while trying to retreat back over the Huai, and considering the situation to be hopeless, Mao bravely challenged Xiaojing to a duel rather than surrender. He put up enough of a fight to earn the rival emperor’s respect and an honorable funeral at the latter’s expense, but the same could not be said of the various Chen officers and lesser kinsmen captured after his demise, who were summarily executed while their soldiers were given the choice to either join the Qi or die as well.
While the Qi began to besiege Jiankang towards the year’s end, the situation south of the Yangtze was also beginning to heat up. Embarrassed by his earlier defeat at the hands of the Minyue, Emperor Shang of Later Liang sent a second army to thrash them and managed to recapture most of eastern Guang Province[4] from Huang Huo, but once again ran into trouble once he tried to pursue the Minyue army into their mountainous homeland. As Shang’s forces were increasingly worn down by Minyue ambushes and raids in Fujian, Emperor Yang of Chu launched an opportunistic attack against his northern flank (not dissimilar to how he’d taken advantage of Shu’s troubles to assail that neighbor previously), leaving the Liang stuck between a rock and a hard place as 568 drew to a close.
In Honshu, Yamanoue no Ishikawa launched his assault on Kose no Muruya’s rebels under the cover of a mid-February snowstorm. The ferocious winds and poor visibility brought on by the inclement weather hindered the large royal army almost as much as it did the defenders, and only when the snowfall briefly abated did the garrison of Asuka see the signal fire which Yamanoue had set to tell them when to sally forth through the capital’s gates. In the confused fighting, Yamanoue and Kose stumbled across each other and engaged in a duel, one noted to have been a vicious and desperate struggle even in the most romantic retellings.
At the end of their clash, Yamanoue apparently won by slicing his opponent’s stomach open with his warabitetō[5], only to slip in the mud, snow and Kose’s innards and fall; at which point the still-living Kose managed to stab him to death with a dagger before also expiring. Word of their leaders’ mutually fatal fight demoralized both armies but excited Heijō, for the Great King thought himself rid of two of his most troublesome magnates in a single evening. Playing the part of a magnanimous sovereign, he called for a truce to clear the field, collect the bodies (including those of Kose and Yamanoue) so that they could be returned to their families, and not only offered the rebels amnesty if they would just go home but even promised that he would return the Kose clan’s estates to them out of respect for their mighty patriarch. Despite this entire chain of events having started because of Heijō’s dishonorable actions towards the Kose clan, his leaderless and dispirited lieutenants believed it was a good idea to take the Great King at his word, perhaps thinking he spoke truly when he lamented the extent of the bloodshed around Asuka and how he wished they could’ve avoided all that.
Yamanoue no Ishikawa, attired in gilded armor, issues his final orders to the other royalist generals at the dawn of the Battle of Asuka, 568. In his left hand, he holds the warabitetō which he will use to fatally wound his adversary Kose no Muruya hours later
The Avars launched their counterattack early in March of 569, hitting the Western Romans from Sirmium to Thessalonica before the winter frost and snow had fully cleared away. Fulian Khagan’s plan was to use the greater mobility of his primarily-mounted forces to isolate the Romans in the towns and forts where they had garrisoned themselves, then bring in his masses of Gepid and Slavic infantry to defeat the Romans in detail. However Aemilian and Constans’ unwillingness to overextend and disperse their forces across many small forts or villages, instead keeping the troops they had detached to secure their (re)conquests relatively concentrated in or around major sites such as Singidunum and Dyrrhachium, greatly blunted the efficacy of this strategy.
For their part, whatever misgivings the two Roman commanders had for each other were not yet at a point where they could no longer work with each other at all. Aemilian and Constans retained enough of a professional relationship to effectively coordinate a response against the Avar onslaught, managing the orderly retreat of outlying Roman garrisons toward recaptured provincial capitals and fortresses while also amassing as many legions and federates as they could around their Moesian headquarters for a major push of their own. The 1-3,000 strong cavalry detachments which Fulian had sent out to encircle Roman outposts and raid the countryside were usually too quick for the main Roman army to catch, but the same was not true of the bulk of their infantry, which the Caesar and the magister militum engaged at Bederiana[6] in late May. The Western Romans achieved a major victory there, mauling the slightly smaller Avar host and killing Gesimund of the Gepids.
Fulian recognized that now it was he whose armies were in danger of being crushed in detail by the Western Romans: in response, he lifted his siege of Thessalonica and recalled his men to his side, amassing his troops around Serdica – and the speed with which the mounted Avar parties did so, in turn, surprised the Roman generals. Following this, a number of furious, hard-fought engagements erupted across the territories of the Dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia throughout the summer and autumn. The Avars won most of the early engagements, preventing the Western Romans from getting a foothold across the Margus[7] and eventually counterattacking into Roman Moesia to take Singidunum yet again after first tricking their enemies into thinking that they were massing for an attack further south, but Aemilian and Constans succeeded in preserving an overland connection to Thessalonica and fending off follow-up Avar attacks aimed at Sirmium, Diocleia and Ulpiana.
The most dangerous Avar maneuver, a surprise combined assault on Lissus[8] in which they were aided in navigating through the nearby mountains by Sclaveni that had settled in northern Epirus and threatened to cut the Roman forces in half, was repelled in September by the audacious young captains Ferreolus and Honestus. The sons of Carpilio and Constans’ brothers-in-law, these two made a name for themselves by rallying the nearby hill-tribes of the Albanenses[9] to support their legions in achieving this major victory. Following the Battle of Lissus and early snowfall, Romanus offered to negotiate with Fulian Khagan only to fail to agree upon a settlement this year, so the Augustus instructed his generals to prepare a knock-out blow to force Fulian back to the table & secure a favorable peace in 570.
A chieftain of the Albanenses exhorts his warriors to fall in line with the Western Romans of Ferreolus & Honestus. His equipment still resembles that of his Illyrian predecessors
While the fires of war would continue to rage in the West throughout 569, the same fires were beginning to at least slightly simmer down in the East. Anthemius initially sought to rebuff Illig Khagan’s offer of peace and continue the siege of Susa, but the outbreak of rebellion among Nestorian remnants in Mesopotamia (against which the untested Prince Zamasphes was not expected to perform well) and yet another Samaritan rising in Palestine compelled the Augustus to accept the Southern Turks’ olive branch in the spring. Consequently the two sides agreed to a peace which would restore the status quo antebellum, and the Turks would pay a hefty indemnity in gold, silks and spices to compensate for having started the war in the first place: the only peace settlement which was mutually agreeable to both sides, as Anthemius sought to replenish his coffers and Illig still feared that even mild territorial losses would lead to his deposition.
Having secured peace with the Turks and recouped his financial losses from this war, Anthemius hurried back to the west. He arrived in time to assist Zamasphes, who had proven incapable of controlling the Nestorian uprising: the rebels did not have the strength to attack Babylon or any other major Mesopotamian city, but did viciously harass anyone living outside the safety of the cities’ walls and target shipments of food from the farms to the urban areas for theft or destruction, something neither Zamasphes nor Anthemius could tolerate in the greatly cooled climactic conditions of the mid-to-late sixth century. Together they were able to contain the rebellion to the Mesopotamian Marshes once more closer to the year’s end, after which Anthemius left Zamasphes with an additional 6,000 men to shore up the local suppression forces while he continued on westward to beat the Samaritans (who had used this time to carve out for themselves a territory stretching from Tiberias to Neapolis[10], and were threatening both Nazareth and Jerusalem) back down.
On the other end of the Eurasian continent, while the Qi siege of Jiankang continued, the Northern Turks continued to enjoy greater success than their Southern brethren. Issik Khagan’s forces finally recaptured Jincheng from the Later Han in the early weeks of 569’s summer, and from there pushed eastward and southward past the upper Yellow River. By August they threatened the Han capital at Luoyang, but had overextended themselves and were finally defeated before the city’s gates by Emperor Wucheng’s reserves, after which the Han pushed them back (and they themselves retreated) to the northwest. A final Han victory at Xianyang to the west compelled the Turks to hasten their withdrawal starting in October, and the year’s end found Issik barely holding both banks of the Yellow River’s upper reaches, although he still had more territory than he had started the year with.
Mounted Later Han troops pushing the Northern Turks away from Luoyang
In southern China, as Chu forces pushed through Guangxi and threatened Jinxing[11] while his own army suffered another stinging defeat outside Longyan, Emperor Shang of Later Liang reluctantly made peace with Huang Huo of Minyue. He acknowledged the latter’s control down the course of the Ting River and as far as Yi’an, but not Tuojiang, and in so doing freed up the rest of his forces for the struggle with Emperor Yang of Chu, who he drove away from Jinxing in a bloody battle in the summer. Shang also arranged an alliance with Emperor Zhi of Cheng, the rump and successor of Shu, sealed with the marriage of his heir Zhao Yingqi to one of Zhi’s daughters. Consequently, Cheng forces began to push into Chu’s western frontier in hopes of recovering some of the former Shu lands, adding to the pressure against Yang and drawing some of his forces away from the embattled Liang.
Come 570, both sides in the Roman-Avar war waited until the last of the winter snows had cleared and the spring rains abated somewhat before committing to their final battles, using that time to instead rest and call up reinforcements. That the Iazyges and Continental Saxons had by now noticed the thinning of the Western Empire’s frontier garrisons and were beginning to make more serious probing attacks against them added to the pressure on Aemilian and Constans to seek a decisive battle and end things quickly, though they could otherwise have taken their time dealing with the less numerous Avars. The Avars struck first, launching a diversionary attack on Sirmium from the north so as to draw Western Roman troops away from Singidunum and capture the latter ruined settlement with ease instead. In response, Constans persuaded Aemilian to mass their forces around Ulpiana and sweep toward Viminacium behind the Avar front line. As his scouts reported that his enemies were mustering to the south, Fulian Khagan raced to engage them before they could realize their designs.
On May 17 the 28,000-strong Avar host met the 33,000 Western Romans on a large field northwest of Ulpiana, bounded by rivers which the Sclaveni had dubbed the ‘Sitnica’ and the ‘Lab’[12]. The flat expanse which comprised the battlefield gave both sides’ cavalry – in which the Avars still had a numerical advantage, though it had been mitigated by Romanus having supplied his son with two freshly raised caballarii formations amid the rest of the Roman reinforcements – plenty of space to maneuver and fight. In the initial exchange of missiles which occurred as both sides’ infantry and heavy cavalry were forming up, the Avars’ horse-archers were evenly matched by the Moorish federates in Roman service in skill but not in number, and drove the latter back with significant losses.
However, the Avars were in for a rude shock when they gave chase and began to skirmish with the Romans’ foot-archers, including the arcuballistarii. Following the Battle of Lissus, the sons of Carpilio had suggested the provision of scuta, manufactured in the style of the earlier imperial legions’ ‘tower’ shields rather than the round ones used by today’s legionaries, to their arcuballistarii, and Constans put his weight behind their plans. While not nearly enough such shields had been produced to outfit the whole of their crossbow corps in the relatively short time since that previous battle, enough had been made and transported either by ship or by the recovered Roman roads in Dalmatia to make an impact in this clash. The improved Roman crossbows’ greater draw weight made it possible for their wielders to more closely match the range and power of the Avars’ arrows than ever before, while those fortunate enough to be supplied with scuta found their biggest weakness – a lack of armor, save the occasional helmet, and longer loading and reloading times to worry about than their adversaries – neutralized.
Though no longer in use by the Roman infantry, the old tower-shield design of the scutum was recycled as a pavise and proved a lifesaver for those crossbowmen lucky enough to be supplied with one ahead of the Battle of the Dardanian Plains
After the Avar horse-archers fell back, their ranks thinned by the losing exchange with the Roman crossbowmen, the main engagement began. Fulian had concentrated his cavalry on the left, intending to crush the Roman right head-on, while expecting the Slavic and Gepid infantry to tie down the rest of the Western Roman army long enough for him to roll them up after routing the Romans’ right wing. The Caesar accordingly massed his own horsemen into two large wedge formations and led them on a counter-charge supported by the legions, Franks and Burgundians assigned to the right wing, kicking off the most dramatic part of the Battle of the Dardanian Plain.
Twice did Fulian and Constans cross lances, and twice they were separated by the shifting tides of battle before one could decisively overcome and kill the other. They never got a chance to fight for a third time however, as their battle would be won in the center rather than on the right. While the Western Roman left successfully pushed back against the small Slavic contingent forming the Avar right, the center buckled when the Gepids and Sclaveni assaulting them were joined by Turkic heavy lancers previously held in the Avar reserve, and both Dux Ljudevit and Carpilio’s oldest son Ferreolus perished beneath their onslaught. Aemilian responded by leading the Romans’ own reserve, comprised of elite palatine legions and a detachment of Scholae from the imperial guard, into the fray, which proved sufficient to rout the Avar center. Seeing two-thirds of his army crumbling, Fulian himself withdrew soon after rather than attempt to force a foolhardy third match with the heir to the Western Roman Empire.
The survival of many of the Avar horsemen, who had fallen back in reasonably good order and would immediately go on to hinder the Roman pursuit in a series of rearguard actions, prevented the total destruction of the Khagan’s army that day. But the Battle of the Dardanian Plains was still unmistakeably the major Western Roman victory which Aemilian and Constans had sought, with the Avars losing more men – 9,000 out of 28,000, compared to about 6,000 out of 33,000 Romans – and Fulian decided to sue for peace at this point, aware that trying to continue the war not only risked even greater territorial losses but also put serious strain on his still-new and fragile hold on his father’s throne.
In their first unambiguous victory over the Avars, the Western Romans gained all the territories which they had retaken and held over the past four years: Dalmatia up to the Dravus and Drinus, the now-not-so-former province of Praevalitana, southern Dardania, northern Epirus, western Macedonia and Thessaly, creating an overland connection from Rome to Thessalonica and Athens. Avar exclaves persisted in the mountains of southern Epirus and Aetolia, comprised of Sclaveni who had dug in there and been reinforced by those among their fellows who fled the restoration of Roman rule in Macedonia and Thessaly rather than accept it. Ljudevit’s son Borut was confirmed as the new Dux of the Carantanians and rewarded with more land up to & including Aquae Iasae[13], while the Horites were settled in the rest of the Dalmatian hinterland – Radimir built a new capital for himself northwest of the ruins of Andautonia, near the new border with the Carantanians, and called it ‘Zagrab’ – and the Ostrogoths were awarded the coast and adjacent areas, as far as the remains of Ulcinium[14] and Diocleia. Macedonia and Greece, for their part, would now be populated by a mixture of Sclaveni settlers who acknowledged the rule of the Augustus and returning Greek refugees from Thessalonica and Athens.
The triumphant Horites taking a breather by the Savus, wher ethey would soon set about building their new capital, along with a Western Roman officer
Though the victory was imperfect, for besides these exclaves the Avars still dominated in Pannonia, Moesia and Macedonia beyond the Axios River, it was enough to revitalize Western Roman morale after the battering they’d been through over the past twenty years. Aemilian and Constans were treated to a joint triumph upon returning to Rome, after which the magister militum returned to the March of Arbogast to fend off the Iazyges and Saxons before they got any bolder. As for the fifty-four-year-old emperor himself, Romanus died in his sleep exactly six months after his son (who was swiftly enthroned as Constans II before the year’s end) and generalissimo had prevailed on the Dardanian Fields: but he perished with the satisfaction of knowing that though he never expected nor had he prepared to take the purple, he rose to meet the many challenges of his thirty-year reign and guided the Western Roman Empire through both the Pelusian Plague and the Avar invasions with a steadier hand than even he had thought he’d be able to muster. Indeed, though the Western Augustus was usually a nervous and tightly-wound man owing to the many pressures he was under, virtually everyone who saw him (from the Augusta Frederica to the palace servants) between May and November of 570 noted that he seemed vastly less stressed than they could remember since his coronation, as if a great weight had finally been lifted off his shoulders shortly before his death.
In the Eastern Empire, Anthemius remained busy with the Samaritans, who had been racking up such great successes in his absence that even the Galilean Jews were increasingly tempted to join them, despite their historical rivalry. The Eastern Augustus put a stop to their winning streak and scored his first big victory over the insurgents in the Battle of Mount Carmel in April, where he had driven the rebels (previously prone to harassing Christian villages and attacking churches beneath the mountain) away from the lowlands and trapped them in an old fort on the slopes of the eponymous mountain, formerly built and used by the Essenes. Since the Samaritans spurned all offers to surrender and receive an imperial pardon, the Eastern Romans put all 3,000 of the rebels within to the sword after storming their fortress.
Anthemius pressed on against the Samaritans after Mount Carmel, and employed a divide-and-conquer strategy to play upon the ancient rivalry between them and the Jews as he did so. He met some success, bribing the Galilean Jews into abandoning all thought of aiding the Samaritans by relaxing taxes upon them for a five-year period (made possible by the influx of Turkic indemnities into his treasury), distributing gifts to their elders and selling provincial bureaucratic offices in Palaestina Secunda to them at lowered prices. Consequently, when the Romans finally laid siege to the Samaritan bastion at Neapolis late in 570, they did so without any Galileans threatening their rear and had even picked up a few Jewish auxiliaries hoping to pillage Samaritan lands.
East of Rome, the Hunas were stirring again. Baghayash had spent several years quietly resting, meditating and rebuilding his forces, and felt now would be a good time to strike once more into Karnataka. In the years since his earlier defeat, the alliance of the Carnatic kingdoms had broken down, with the Kadambas coming to blows against both the Chalukya and Ganga kingdoms. The Samrat led his army against the isolated Kadambas first – their position between the northern Chalukya and southern Ganga kingdoms meant that him overrunning their lands would also split the remaining two allies apart geographically – and crushed them over the last six months in 570, while the Chalukyas and Gangas focused on grabbing as much Kadamba territory as they could in the meantime. By the year’s end, Baghayash had achieved his initial objective and was making preparations to roll the two remaining kingdoms over separately, while the Kannada kings were aware of the danger they were now in and hoped to coordinate a joint counterattack into the former core of Kadamba territory to stop the ascendant Hunas.
In China, while the Liang began to push the Chu back in the southwest and achieved a major victory in the Battle of Jinxing in June, by far these events were overshadowed by explosive developments to the east and north. Firstly, Qi forces stormed the walls of Jiankang on June 30 (assisted by traitors within the Chen ranks who were dissatisfied with Empress Dowager Gou’s regime and feared their imminent demise at Qi hands enough to try to win favor with Emperor Xiaojing of Qi) and overcame the half-starved defenders in fierce street-to-street fighting which lasted eleven hours, burning large parts of the imperial capital down in the process.
The child-emperor Aiping and his court tried to flee down the Yangtze in a prepared boat, but Empress Dowager Gou had insisted on taking so much treasure with them that said boat sank near the river’s mouth when it was unexpectedly buffeted by a storm. This disastrous turn left the Chen dynasty’s remnants very dead – and some inquisitive local brigands & fishermen very wealthy when they investigated the wreck in the days and weeks to come. After a century-long reign, the Chen dynasty was now officially no more, and the Middle Kingdom’s future would be decided by one of the other contenders which had risen across the land instead. Of those, the Qi certainly seemed the likeliest to reunify China now, and Emperor Xiaojing had the additional satisfaction of knowing that he had avenged the outrages visited upon his family by the Chen with his latest victory as well.
Emperor Xiaojing of Qi is fêted in Jiankang after taking the city from the last of the Chen dynasty, toppling the latter altogether in the process
Secondly, a major peasant uprising broke out behind Tegreg lines in July, sparked by the abuses inflicted upon the local Chinese populace of the northwestern provinces and the reality that neither the Qi (too busy with securing their hold in the east) and the Later Han (struggling to defend their own core territories) would be coming to save them sinking in. The former soldier Han Zheng rose to lead them, and was acclaimed as ‘Emperor Shenwu of Later Zhou’ by his followers immediately after liberating Liangzhou[15] and killing every Tegreg found there. The rise of Later Zhou – eighth and last of the Eight Dynasties who lent their name to this turbulent period of Chinese history – created a new headache for Issik Khagan, whose position in northwestern China was now even more unstable and vulnerable to encirclement, while further encouraging the Later Han to push the Turks even harder from the south.
While China fully realized its Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms era (though the 'Eight Dynasties' never did coexist altogether at the same time), Japan was not about to get left behind in the headlong rush into a renewed time-of-troubles. Having given his enemies a year to simmer down and think themselves safe, that he truly was going to let bygones be bygones and avoid further persecuting them, the Great King Heijō struck against the clans he deemed troublesome in the dead of 570’s winter. Two detachments of his finest and most reliable soldiers, commanded by promising officers from lesser families whose loyalty he did not doubt, fell upon the residences of the Yamanoue and the Kose both, decimating the two clans in a bloody purge.
The Great King did spare the children of these clans, including their new patriarchs: Kose no Kamatari and Yamanoue no Mahito, both under the age of ten. These were ferried back to Asuka, where Heijō treated them courteously (for a man who had just killed their parents, aunts and uncles) but never allowed them to forget that he was ultimately holding them hostage, and expected to be able to control them well into the future. He did not believe they could cause him any real trouble in the short term on account of their youth, so he would deploy the army he’d been quietly assembling at Asuka to cow the rest of the kabane into absolute obedience – as he planned to do over the next few months and years, now that he had expended the element of surprise on the largest and most obvious roadblocks to his centralist designs – and to set the Sun of the Yamato dynasty firmly above all Japan.
Heijō, the first historically attested Great King – and tyrant – of Japan
1. Western Roman Empire
2. Eastern Roman Empire
3. March of Arbogast
4. Franks
5. Burgundians
6. Alemanni
7. Bavarians
8. Thuringians
9. Lombards
10. Ostrogoths
11. Visigoths
12. Aquitani
13. Carantanians
14. Horites
15. Altava
16. Theveste
17. Romano-British
18. South Angles
19. North Angles
20. Britons of Alcluyd
21. Picts
22. Dál Riata
23. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta & Connachta
24. Frisians
25. Continental Saxons
26. Vistula Veneti
27. Antae
28. Iazyges
29. Avars
30. Gepids
31. Hoggar
32. Kumbi
33. Garamantes
34. Nubia
35. Aksum
36. Quraish & Yathrib
37. Caucasian kingdoms of Lazica, Iberia & Albania
38. Armenia
39. Padishkhwargar
40. Ghassanids
41. Lakhmids
42. Southern Turkic Khaganate
43. Northern Turkic Khaganate
44. Indo-Romans (nominally Eastern Roman subjects)
45. Tír na Beannachtaí
46. Hunas
47. Later Zhou
48. Later Han
49. Qin
50. Qi
51. Cheng
52. Chu
53. Minyue
54. Yi
55. Later Liang
56. Nanyue
57. Champa
58. Funan
59. Goguryeo
60. Southern Korean kingdoms of Baekje, Gaya & Silla
61. Yamato
62. Papar
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[1] Osijek.
[2] Stari Slankamen.
[3] Khorramshahr.
[4] Now better-known as Guangdong.
[5] A very early Japanese sword, predating even the tachi (which in turn preceded the famous katana).
[6] Lebane, Serbia.
[7] The Morava River.
[8] Lezhë.
[9] Early Albanians of the Komani-Kruja culture. The most popular theory for their ethnogenesis is that they were the last extant descendants of the Illyrian tribes.
[10] Nablus.
[11] Nanning.
[12] Kosovo Field.
[13] Varaždinske Toplice.
[14] Ulcinj.
[15] Wuwei.
At first, the Caesar had no reason to suspect that Aemilian had learned of his mother’s machinations upon returning to their field headquarters at Sirmium, where the magister militum hailed and feasted with him in an entirely friendly manner before resuming campaigning once the unusually heavy spring rains had let up. However, in the Battle of Singidunum which followed in May, Carpilio was killed and the two infantry legions he was directing sustained heavy casualties when Aemilian inexplicably ordered the rest of the Roman line to fall back, leaving them exposed to an Avar-Gepid onslaught. The battle itself ended in a Western Roman victory after Constans overcame the Avar cavalry, allowing Aemilian to push back against the Avar infantry and retake control of the ruined Singidunum, but the Caesar’s suspicions were inflamed by the manner in which his father-in-law died.
Mutual suspicions aside, both men were able to continue working together throughout the rest of 568 – when it came to defending lands which they had already taken back. Notably the Western Romans did not push past the Dravus into Pannonia or east of Singidunum into Avar-held Moesia, instead fighting purely defensive battles at Aelia Mursa[1] and Acumincum[2] to hold the line against Avar probing attacks. Ostensibly the joint commanders of the Roman host were united on assuming a defensive posture, well aware of the dangers of recklessly overextending themselves from the last round with the Avars, but visiting messengers from Rome brought back an impression of heightened – though always subtle – tensions at their luncheons and suppers, and whispered to the aging emperor that his son & generalissimo might both be too concerned that the other would set them up to die to take further bold action. For his part, Fulian Khagan was happy to seize the opportunity to rebuild the Avar forces in peace.
Aemilian, Constans and an attendant on a hunt, as the former two struggle to reconcile with one another
To the east, Vologases died of his injuries soon after arriving in Babylon, despite the best efforts of his physicians: a hard loss for his imperial cousin, made even more-so because his son Zamasphes (as his Persian name, Djamasp, was rendered in Greek and Latin) was a completely inexperienced leader who had just barely reached manhood in the previous year. Worse still for the emperor, Illig Khagan led the Turks onward to engage the Eastern Romans at Andamaska again in April, having gathered reinforcements from the Zagros Mountains for a decisive blow aimed at Susa. This time Anthemius ceded the crossing, as he lacked the strength to hold it and was awaiting reinforcements from the west.
Anthemius continued to pull back into Mesopotamia as the full size of Illig’s host was revealed to him by his scouts and eventually his own eyes, leaving a 2,000-strong garrison to defend Susa against nearly 30,000 Tegregs. For his part, Illig was aware that his adversary was amassing reinforcements with which to relieve the siege and take Khuzestan back for the Roman Empire, so he planned a night-time assault to retake the city before Anthemius could press him so. On the evening of May 8, some of the Khagan’s men identified a poorly-guarded section of Susa’s walls and brought this to his attention: consequently he committed to an immediate attack on the city and particularly at that spot, which he would lead personally. In the resulting battle the Turks prevailed, annihilating the Roman garrison over five hours of fighting across the walls and streets of Susa, but Illig himself was badly injured after being shoved off the wall by a legionary: he regained consciousness after two days (during which his uncontrolled troops sacked the city, contrary to his intentions) and had broken both legs, an arm and several ribs from the fall.
While Illig remained bedridden as a result of his severe wounds, the Romans went back on the offensive. Anthemius met the Turkic army at Bayan[3] in August, his own army having been reinforced to a more respectable 24,000 by contingents from Thrace, Egypt and the Kartvelian kingdoms in the meantime, and prevailed against them there. The recently rain-soaked marshland which comprised the battlefield hindered the more heavily-armed Romans, to be sure, but crucially it also neutralized the Turks’ cavalry advantage, while the fierce eastward winds softened the sting of their arrows. The Persian officer whom the Khagan had appointed to command his army, Hormuzan, nevertheless managed to put up a stiff fight but was eventually killed at the climax of the fighting – abandoned by the Turkic contingent whose tarkhan he had a rivalry with – sealing his side’s fate. By the end of the year the Southern Turks had been pushed into full retreat and Anthemius had besieged Illig in Susa, at which point the maimed Khagan finally decided to sue for terms.
Illig Khagan's Persian physicians visibly aghast at the extent of his injuries, and surprised that he is even still alive after such a fall
In China, as the Chen’s element of surprise wore off and ever-larger numbers of Qi soldiers flooded back to the east, the Qi made headway in not only stopping the Chen forces but actively pushing them back toward the Huai River throughout the spring and summer. Emperor Xiaojing secured a critical advantage over his adversaries by killing Mao Yan, by far the most capable general still left to the Chen court, in the dramatic Battle of Lake Hongze in July: the 15,000-strong Chen army was trapped by 40,000 Qi troops against the lake’s northern shore while trying to retreat back over the Huai, and considering the situation to be hopeless, Mao bravely challenged Xiaojing to a duel rather than surrender. He put up enough of a fight to earn the rival emperor’s respect and an honorable funeral at the latter’s expense, but the same could not be said of the various Chen officers and lesser kinsmen captured after his demise, who were summarily executed while their soldiers were given the choice to either join the Qi or die as well.
While the Qi began to besiege Jiankang towards the year’s end, the situation south of the Yangtze was also beginning to heat up. Embarrassed by his earlier defeat at the hands of the Minyue, Emperor Shang of Later Liang sent a second army to thrash them and managed to recapture most of eastern Guang Province[4] from Huang Huo, but once again ran into trouble once he tried to pursue the Minyue army into their mountainous homeland. As Shang’s forces were increasingly worn down by Minyue ambushes and raids in Fujian, Emperor Yang of Chu launched an opportunistic attack against his northern flank (not dissimilar to how he’d taken advantage of Shu’s troubles to assail that neighbor previously), leaving the Liang stuck between a rock and a hard place as 568 drew to a close.
In Honshu, Yamanoue no Ishikawa launched his assault on Kose no Muruya’s rebels under the cover of a mid-February snowstorm. The ferocious winds and poor visibility brought on by the inclement weather hindered the large royal army almost as much as it did the defenders, and only when the snowfall briefly abated did the garrison of Asuka see the signal fire which Yamanoue had set to tell them when to sally forth through the capital’s gates. In the confused fighting, Yamanoue and Kose stumbled across each other and engaged in a duel, one noted to have been a vicious and desperate struggle even in the most romantic retellings.
At the end of their clash, Yamanoue apparently won by slicing his opponent’s stomach open with his warabitetō[5], only to slip in the mud, snow and Kose’s innards and fall; at which point the still-living Kose managed to stab him to death with a dagger before also expiring. Word of their leaders’ mutually fatal fight demoralized both armies but excited Heijō, for the Great King thought himself rid of two of his most troublesome magnates in a single evening. Playing the part of a magnanimous sovereign, he called for a truce to clear the field, collect the bodies (including those of Kose and Yamanoue) so that they could be returned to their families, and not only offered the rebels amnesty if they would just go home but even promised that he would return the Kose clan’s estates to them out of respect for their mighty patriarch. Despite this entire chain of events having started because of Heijō’s dishonorable actions towards the Kose clan, his leaderless and dispirited lieutenants believed it was a good idea to take the Great King at his word, perhaps thinking he spoke truly when he lamented the extent of the bloodshed around Asuka and how he wished they could’ve avoided all that.
Yamanoue no Ishikawa, attired in gilded armor, issues his final orders to the other royalist generals at the dawn of the Battle of Asuka, 568. In his left hand, he holds the warabitetō which he will use to fatally wound his adversary Kose no Muruya hours later
The Avars launched their counterattack early in March of 569, hitting the Western Romans from Sirmium to Thessalonica before the winter frost and snow had fully cleared away. Fulian Khagan’s plan was to use the greater mobility of his primarily-mounted forces to isolate the Romans in the towns and forts where they had garrisoned themselves, then bring in his masses of Gepid and Slavic infantry to defeat the Romans in detail. However Aemilian and Constans’ unwillingness to overextend and disperse their forces across many small forts or villages, instead keeping the troops they had detached to secure their (re)conquests relatively concentrated in or around major sites such as Singidunum and Dyrrhachium, greatly blunted the efficacy of this strategy.
For their part, whatever misgivings the two Roman commanders had for each other were not yet at a point where they could no longer work with each other at all. Aemilian and Constans retained enough of a professional relationship to effectively coordinate a response against the Avar onslaught, managing the orderly retreat of outlying Roman garrisons toward recaptured provincial capitals and fortresses while also amassing as many legions and federates as they could around their Moesian headquarters for a major push of their own. The 1-3,000 strong cavalry detachments which Fulian had sent out to encircle Roman outposts and raid the countryside were usually too quick for the main Roman army to catch, but the same was not true of the bulk of their infantry, which the Caesar and the magister militum engaged at Bederiana[6] in late May. The Western Romans achieved a major victory there, mauling the slightly smaller Avar host and killing Gesimund of the Gepids.
Fulian recognized that now it was he whose armies were in danger of being crushed in detail by the Western Romans: in response, he lifted his siege of Thessalonica and recalled his men to his side, amassing his troops around Serdica – and the speed with which the mounted Avar parties did so, in turn, surprised the Roman generals. Following this, a number of furious, hard-fought engagements erupted across the territories of the Dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia throughout the summer and autumn. The Avars won most of the early engagements, preventing the Western Romans from getting a foothold across the Margus[7] and eventually counterattacking into Roman Moesia to take Singidunum yet again after first tricking their enemies into thinking that they were massing for an attack further south, but Aemilian and Constans succeeded in preserving an overland connection to Thessalonica and fending off follow-up Avar attacks aimed at Sirmium, Diocleia and Ulpiana.
The most dangerous Avar maneuver, a surprise combined assault on Lissus[8] in which they were aided in navigating through the nearby mountains by Sclaveni that had settled in northern Epirus and threatened to cut the Roman forces in half, was repelled in September by the audacious young captains Ferreolus and Honestus. The sons of Carpilio and Constans’ brothers-in-law, these two made a name for themselves by rallying the nearby hill-tribes of the Albanenses[9] to support their legions in achieving this major victory. Following the Battle of Lissus and early snowfall, Romanus offered to negotiate with Fulian Khagan only to fail to agree upon a settlement this year, so the Augustus instructed his generals to prepare a knock-out blow to force Fulian back to the table & secure a favorable peace in 570.
A chieftain of the Albanenses exhorts his warriors to fall in line with the Western Romans of Ferreolus & Honestus. His equipment still resembles that of his Illyrian predecessors
While the fires of war would continue to rage in the West throughout 569, the same fires were beginning to at least slightly simmer down in the East. Anthemius initially sought to rebuff Illig Khagan’s offer of peace and continue the siege of Susa, but the outbreak of rebellion among Nestorian remnants in Mesopotamia (against which the untested Prince Zamasphes was not expected to perform well) and yet another Samaritan rising in Palestine compelled the Augustus to accept the Southern Turks’ olive branch in the spring. Consequently the two sides agreed to a peace which would restore the status quo antebellum, and the Turks would pay a hefty indemnity in gold, silks and spices to compensate for having started the war in the first place: the only peace settlement which was mutually agreeable to both sides, as Anthemius sought to replenish his coffers and Illig still feared that even mild territorial losses would lead to his deposition.
Having secured peace with the Turks and recouped his financial losses from this war, Anthemius hurried back to the west. He arrived in time to assist Zamasphes, who had proven incapable of controlling the Nestorian uprising: the rebels did not have the strength to attack Babylon or any other major Mesopotamian city, but did viciously harass anyone living outside the safety of the cities’ walls and target shipments of food from the farms to the urban areas for theft or destruction, something neither Zamasphes nor Anthemius could tolerate in the greatly cooled climactic conditions of the mid-to-late sixth century. Together they were able to contain the rebellion to the Mesopotamian Marshes once more closer to the year’s end, after which Anthemius left Zamasphes with an additional 6,000 men to shore up the local suppression forces while he continued on westward to beat the Samaritans (who had used this time to carve out for themselves a territory stretching from Tiberias to Neapolis[10], and were threatening both Nazareth and Jerusalem) back down.
On the other end of the Eurasian continent, while the Qi siege of Jiankang continued, the Northern Turks continued to enjoy greater success than their Southern brethren. Issik Khagan’s forces finally recaptured Jincheng from the Later Han in the early weeks of 569’s summer, and from there pushed eastward and southward past the upper Yellow River. By August they threatened the Han capital at Luoyang, but had overextended themselves and were finally defeated before the city’s gates by Emperor Wucheng’s reserves, after which the Han pushed them back (and they themselves retreated) to the northwest. A final Han victory at Xianyang to the west compelled the Turks to hasten their withdrawal starting in October, and the year’s end found Issik barely holding both banks of the Yellow River’s upper reaches, although he still had more territory than he had started the year with.
Mounted Later Han troops pushing the Northern Turks away from Luoyang
In southern China, as Chu forces pushed through Guangxi and threatened Jinxing[11] while his own army suffered another stinging defeat outside Longyan, Emperor Shang of Later Liang reluctantly made peace with Huang Huo of Minyue. He acknowledged the latter’s control down the course of the Ting River and as far as Yi’an, but not Tuojiang, and in so doing freed up the rest of his forces for the struggle with Emperor Yang of Chu, who he drove away from Jinxing in a bloody battle in the summer. Shang also arranged an alliance with Emperor Zhi of Cheng, the rump and successor of Shu, sealed with the marriage of his heir Zhao Yingqi to one of Zhi’s daughters. Consequently, Cheng forces began to push into Chu’s western frontier in hopes of recovering some of the former Shu lands, adding to the pressure against Yang and drawing some of his forces away from the embattled Liang.
Come 570, both sides in the Roman-Avar war waited until the last of the winter snows had cleared and the spring rains abated somewhat before committing to their final battles, using that time to instead rest and call up reinforcements. That the Iazyges and Continental Saxons had by now noticed the thinning of the Western Empire’s frontier garrisons and were beginning to make more serious probing attacks against them added to the pressure on Aemilian and Constans to seek a decisive battle and end things quickly, though they could otherwise have taken their time dealing with the less numerous Avars. The Avars struck first, launching a diversionary attack on Sirmium from the north so as to draw Western Roman troops away from Singidunum and capture the latter ruined settlement with ease instead. In response, Constans persuaded Aemilian to mass their forces around Ulpiana and sweep toward Viminacium behind the Avar front line. As his scouts reported that his enemies were mustering to the south, Fulian Khagan raced to engage them before they could realize their designs.
On May 17 the 28,000-strong Avar host met the 33,000 Western Romans on a large field northwest of Ulpiana, bounded by rivers which the Sclaveni had dubbed the ‘Sitnica’ and the ‘Lab’[12]. The flat expanse which comprised the battlefield gave both sides’ cavalry – in which the Avars still had a numerical advantage, though it had been mitigated by Romanus having supplied his son with two freshly raised caballarii formations amid the rest of the Roman reinforcements – plenty of space to maneuver and fight. In the initial exchange of missiles which occurred as both sides’ infantry and heavy cavalry were forming up, the Avars’ horse-archers were evenly matched by the Moorish federates in Roman service in skill but not in number, and drove the latter back with significant losses.
However, the Avars were in for a rude shock when they gave chase and began to skirmish with the Romans’ foot-archers, including the arcuballistarii. Following the Battle of Lissus, the sons of Carpilio had suggested the provision of scuta, manufactured in the style of the earlier imperial legions’ ‘tower’ shields rather than the round ones used by today’s legionaries, to their arcuballistarii, and Constans put his weight behind their plans. While not nearly enough such shields had been produced to outfit the whole of their crossbow corps in the relatively short time since that previous battle, enough had been made and transported either by ship or by the recovered Roman roads in Dalmatia to make an impact in this clash. The improved Roman crossbows’ greater draw weight made it possible for their wielders to more closely match the range and power of the Avars’ arrows than ever before, while those fortunate enough to be supplied with scuta found their biggest weakness – a lack of armor, save the occasional helmet, and longer loading and reloading times to worry about than their adversaries – neutralized.
Though no longer in use by the Roman infantry, the old tower-shield design of the scutum was recycled as a pavise and proved a lifesaver for those crossbowmen lucky enough to be supplied with one ahead of the Battle of the Dardanian Plains
After the Avar horse-archers fell back, their ranks thinned by the losing exchange with the Roman crossbowmen, the main engagement began. Fulian had concentrated his cavalry on the left, intending to crush the Roman right head-on, while expecting the Slavic and Gepid infantry to tie down the rest of the Western Roman army long enough for him to roll them up after routing the Romans’ right wing. The Caesar accordingly massed his own horsemen into two large wedge formations and led them on a counter-charge supported by the legions, Franks and Burgundians assigned to the right wing, kicking off the most dramatic part of the Battle of the Dardanian Plain.
Twice did Fulian and Constans cross lances, and twice they were separated by the shifting tides of battle before one could decisively overcome and kill the other. They never got a chance to fight for a third time however, as their battle would be won in the center rather than on the right. While the Western Roman left successfully pushed back against the small Slavic contingent forming the Avar right, the center buckled when the Gepids and Sclaveni assaulting them were joined by Turkic heavy lancers previously held in the Avar reserve, and both Dux Ljudevit and Carpilio’s oldest son Ferreolus perished beneath their onslaught. Aemilian responded by leading the Romans’ own reserve, comprised of elite palatine legions and a detachment of Scholae from the imperial guard, into the fray, which proved sufficient to rout the Avar center. Seeing two-thirds of his army crumbling, Fulian himself withdrew soon after rather than attempt to force a foolhardy third match with the heir to the Western Roman Empire.
The survival of many of the Avar horsemen, who had fallen back in reasonably good order and would immediately go on to hinder the Roman pursuit in a series of rearguard actions, prevented the total destruction of the Khagan’s army that day. But the Battle of the Dardanian Plains was still unmistakeably the major Western Roman victory which Aemilian and Constans had sought, with the Avars losing more men – 9,000 out of 28,000, compared to about 6,000 out of 33,000 Romans – and Fulian decided to sue for peace at this point, aware that trying to continue the war not only risked even greater territorial losses but also put serious strain on his still-new and fragile hold on his father’s throne.
In their first unambiguous victory over the Avars, the Western Romans gained all the territories which they had retaken and held over the past four years: Dalmatia up to the Dravus and Drinus, the now-not-so-former province of Praevalitana, southern Dardania, northern Epirus, western Macedonia and Thessaly, creating an overland connection from Rome to Thessalonica and Athens. Avar exclaves persisted in the mountains of southern Epirus and Aetolia, comprised of Sclaveni who had dug in there and been reinforced by those among their fellows who fled the restoration of Roman rule in Macedonia and Thessaly rather than accept it. Ljudevit’s son Borut was confirmed as the new Dux of the Carantanians and rewarded with more land up to & including Aquae Iasae[13], while the Horites were settled in the rest of the Dalmatian hinterland – Radimir built a new capital for himself northwest of the ruins of Andautonia, near the new border with the Carantanians, and called it ‘Zagrab’ – and the Ostrogoths were awarded the coast and adjacent areas, as far as the remains of Ulcinium[14] and Diocleia. Macedonia and Greece, for their part, would now be populated by a mixture of Sclaveni settlers who acknowledged the rule of the Augustus and returning Greek refugees from Thessalonica and Athens.
The triumphant Horites taking a breather by the Savus, wher ethey would soon set about building their new capital, along with a Western Roman officer
Though the victory was imperfect, for besides these exclaves the Avars still dominated in Pannonia, Moesia and Macedonia beyond the Axios River, it was enough to revitalize Western Roman morale after the battering they’d been through over the past twenty years. Aemilian and Constans were treated to a joint triumph upon returning to Rome, after which the magister militum returned to the March of Arbogast to fend off the Iazyges and Saxons before they got any bolder. As for the fifty-four-year-old emperor himself, Romanus died in his sleep exactly six months after his son (who was swiftly enthroned as Constans II before the year’s end) and generalissimo had prevailed on the Dardanian Fields: but he perished with the satisfaction of knowing that though he never expected nor had he prepared to take the purple, he rose to meet the many challenges of his thirty-year reign and guided the Western Roman Empire through both the Pelusian Plague and the Avar invasions with a steadier hand than even he had thought he’d be able to muster. Indeed, though the Western Augustus was usually a nervous and tightly-wound man owing to the many pressures he was under, virtually everyone who saw him (from the Augusta Frederica to the palace servants) between May and November of 570 noted that he seemed vastly less stressed than they could remember since his coronation, as if a great weight had finally been lifted off his shoulders shortly before his death.
In the Eastern Empire, Anthemius remained busy with the Samaritans, who had been racking up such great successes in his absence that even the Galilean Jews were increasingly tempted to join them, despite their historical rivalry. The Eastern Augustus put a stop to their winning streak and scored his first big victory over the insurgents in the Battle of Mount Carmel in April, where he had driven the rebels (previously prone to harassing Christian villages and attacking churches beneath the mountain) away from the lowlands and trapped them in an old fort on the slopes of the eponymous mountain, formerly built and used by the Essenes. Since the Samaritans spurned all offers to surrender and receive an imperial pardon, the Eastern Romans put all 3,000 of the rebels within to the sword after storming their fortress.
Anthemius pressed on against the Samaritans after Mount Carmel, and employed a divide-and-conquer strategy to play upon the ancient rivalry between them and the Jews as he did so. He met some success, bribing the Galilean Jews into abandoning all thought of aiding the Samaritans by relaxing taxes upon them for a five-year period (made possible by the influx of Turkic indemnities into his treasury), distributing gifts to their elders and selling provincial bureaucratic offices in Palaestina Secunda to them at lowered prices. Consequently, when the Romans finally laid siege to the Samaritan bastion at Neapolis late in 570, they did so without any Galileans threatening their rear and had even picked up a few Jewish auxiliaries hoping to pillage Samaritan lands.
East of Rome, the Hunas were stirring again. Baghayash had spent several years quietly resting, meditating and rebuilding his forces, and felt now would be a good time to strike once more into Karnataka. In the years since his earlier defeat, the alliance of the Carnatic kingdoms had broken down, with the Kadambas coming to blows against both the Chalukya and Ganga kingdoms. The Samrat led his army against the isolated Kadambas first – their position between the northern Chalukya and southern Ganga kingdoms meant that him overrunning their lands would also split the remaining two allies apart geographically – and crushed them over the last six months in 570, while the Chalukyas and Gangas focused on grabbing as much Kadamba territory as they could in the meantime. By the year’s end, Baghayash had achieved his initial objective and was making preparations to roll the two remaining kingdoms over separately, while the Kannada kings were aware of the danger they were now in and hoped to coordinate a joint counterattack into the former core of Kadamba territory to stop the ascendant Hunas.
In China, while the Liang began to push the Chu back in the southwest and achieved a major victory in the Battle of Jinxing in June, by far these events were overshadowed by explosive developments to the east and north. Firstly, Qi forces stormed the walls of Jiankang on June 30 (assisted by traitors within the Chen ranks who were dissatisfied with Empress Dowager Gou’s regime and feared their imminent demise at Qi hands enough to try to win favor with Emperor Xiaojing of Qi) and overcame the half-starved defenders in fierce street-to-street fighting which lasted eleven hours, burning large parts of the imperial capital down in the process.
The child-emperor Aiping and his court tried to flee down the Yangtze in a prepared boat, but Empress Dowager Gou had insisted on taking so much treasure with them that said boat sank near the river’s mouth when it was unexpectedly buffeted by a storm. This disastrous turn left the Chen dynasty’s remnants very dead – and some inquisitive local brigands & fishermen very wealthy when they investigated the wreck in the days and weeks to come. After a century-long reign, the Chen dynasty was now officially no more, and the Middle Kingdom’s future would be decided by one of the other contenders which had risen across the land instead. Of those, the Qi certainly seemed the likeliest to reunify China now, and Emperor Xiaojing had the additional satisfaction of knowing that he had avenged the outrages visited upon his family by the Chen with his latest victory as well.
Emperor Xiaojing of Qi is fêted in Jiankang after taking the city from the last of the Chen dynasty, toppling the latter altogether in the process
Secondly, a major peasant uprising broke out behind Tegreg lines in July, sparked by the abuses inflicted upon the local Chinese populace of the northwestern provinces and the reality that neither the Qi (too busy with securing their hold in the east) and the Later Han (struggling to defend their own core territories) would be coming to save them sinking in. The former soldier Han Zheng rose to lead them, and was acclaimed as ‘Emperor Shenwu of Later Zhou’ by his followers immediately after liberating Liangzhou[15] and killing every Tegreg found there. The rise of Later Zhou – eighth and last of the Eight Dynasties who lent their name to this turbulent period of Chinese history – created a new headache for Issik Khagan, whose position in northwestern China was now even more unstable and vulnerable to encirclement, while further encouraging the Later Han to push the Turks even harder from the south.
While China fully realized its Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms era (though the 'Eight Dynasties' never did coexist altogether at the same time), Japan was not about to get left behind in the headlong rush into a renewed time-of-troubles. Having given his enemies a year to simmer down and think themselves safe, that he truly was going to let bygones be bygones and avoid further persecuting them, the Great King Heijō struck against the clans he deemed troublesome in the dead of 570’s winter. Two detachments of his finest and most reliable soldiers, commanded by promising officers from lesser families whose loyalty he did not doubt, fell upon the residences of the Yamanoue and the Kose both, decimating the two clans in a bloody purge.
The Great King did spare the children of these clans, including their new patriarchs: Kose no Kamatari and Yamanoue no Mahito, both under the age of ten. These were ferried back to Asuka, where Heijō treated them courteously (for a man who had just killed their parents, aunts and uncles) but never allowed them to forget that he was ultimately holding them hostage, and expected to be able to control them well into the future. He did not believe they could cause him any real trouble in the short term on account of their youth, so he would deploy the army he’d been quietly assembling at Asuka to cow the rest of the kabane into absolute obedience – as he planned to do over the next few months and years, now that he had expended the element of surprise on the largest and most obvious roadblocks to his centralist designs – and to set the Sun of the Yamato dynasty firmly above all Japan.
Heijō, the first historically attested Great King – and tyrant – of Japan
1. Western Roman Empire
2. Eastern Roman Empire
3. March of Arbogast
4. Franks
5. Burgundians
6. Alemanni
7. Bavarians
8. Thuringians
9. Lombards
10. Ostrogoths
11. Visigoths
12. Aquitani
13. Carantanians
14. Horites
15. Altava
16. Theveste
17. Romano-British
18. South Angles
19. North Angles
20. Britons of Alcluyd
21. Picts
22. Dál Riata
23. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta & Connachta
24. Frisians
25. Continental Saxons
26. Vistula Veneti
27. Antae
28. Iazyges
29. Avars
30. Gepids
31. Hoggar
32. Kumbi
33. Garamantes
34. Nubia
35. Aksum
36. Quraish & Yathrib
37. Caucasian kingdoms of Lazica, Iberia & Albania
38. Armenia
39. Padishkhwargar
40. Ghassanids
41. Lakhmids
42. Southern Turkic Khaganate
43. Northern Turkic Khaganate
44. Indo-Romans (nominally Eastern Roman subjects)
45. Tír na Beannachtaí
46. Hunas
47. Later Zhou
48. Later Han
49. Qin
50. Qi
51. Cheng
52. Chu
53. Minyue
54. Yi
55. Later Liang
56. Nanyue
57. Champa
58. Funan
59. Goguryeo
60. Southern Korean kingdoms of Baekje, Gaya & Silla
61. Yamato
62. Papar
====================================================================================
[1] Osijek.
[2] Stari Slankamen.
[3] Khorramshahr.
[4] Now better-known as Guangdong.
[5] A very early Japanese sword, predating even the tachi (which in turn preceded the famous katana).
[6] Lebane, Serbia.
[7] The Morava River.
[8] Lezhë.
[9] Early Albanians of the Komani-Kruja culture. The most popular theory for their ethnogenesis is that they were the last extant descendants of the Illyrian tribes.
[10] Nablus.
[11] Nanning.
[12] Kosovo Field.
[13] Varaždinske Toplice.
[14] Ulcinj.
[15] Wuwei.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Farewell Romanus, you did much better than expected, despite all the calamities (civil war, Avars, wife). The Avars are still a clear and present threat, it will take combined offensive with ERE to eliminate them as mayor threat. The biggest problem I see for the WRE is that Constants seems very susceptible to advice of his mother, guaranteeing a civil war at most inopportune moment.
The map makes following the events in China much easier.
The map makes following the events in China much easier.
Many thanks for the map. Makes events in China especially clearer. Also shows the dominance of the Hunas in India. Wonder if they could make it a lasting empire although their always going to be vulnerable to attacks from the NW region especially.
Both empires have come through rough times but have been aided by the fact their rarely come under attack from more than one ememy at a time and have had some key victories, sometimes against the odds. Also their gradually forcing religious uniformately although sooner or later there's probably going to be some clashes over dogma. However both have done better than OTL albeit that the western empire has much territory that the east had OTL. Which does leave the eastern capital on the fringe of its empire. I wonder, especially if they continue to hold territory so far east there might be a move to centralise the capital. Constantinople of course has stragetic and historical importance but the current system does mean the emperor has to reply on either generals fighting his wars or if he's leading the army loyal people keeping the central government under his control.
Both empires have come through rough times but have been aided by the fact their rarely come under attack from more than one ememy at a time and have had some key victories, sometimes against the odds. Also their gradually forcing religious uniformately although sooner or later there's probably going to be some clashes over dogma. However both have done better than OTL albeit that the western empire has much territory that the east had OTL. Which does leave the eastern capital on the fringe of its empire. I wonder, especially if they continue to hold territory so far east there might be a move to centralise the capital. Constantinople of course has stragetic and historical importance but the current system does mean the emperor has to reply on either generals fighting his wars or if he's leading the army loyal people keeping the central government under his control.
gral
Well-known member
I assume this is in the same place as(or close to) OTL Zagreb?
Hm. Perhaps Emperor Heijou will learn here the same lesson the Taira would learn 600 years later in OTL, about not sparing the enemy's children?
Another great chapter - it seems,that Avars saved WRE from cyvil war.And samaritans turks.They should be named by turks "good samaritans" now.
Crossbowmen with scutum - we have"italian infrantry" from 14th now.
Poland - oldest city is Cracow - with stronghold on Wawel hill,becouse it was capitol and castles were built there one after another,we do not knew how old actually could it be.
But,if it existed in 570AD,it was probably small one with walls made from soil.
We also discowered "treasure" made from 4212 iron fake axes,probably some kind of early money - but it was about 850AD.
More important is
- probably from 700AD.Nobody knew why it was made,not corpse was found by archeologist before WW2.So,not tomb.
But,in your TL,it could be made earlier.
Crossbowmen with scutum - we have"italian infrantry" from 14th now.
Poland - oldest city is Cracow - with stronghold on Wawel hill,becouse it was capitol and castles were built there one after another,we do not knew how old actually could it be.
But,if it existed in 570AD,it was probably small one with walls made from soil.
We also discowered "treasure" made from 4212 iron fake axes,probably some kind of early money - but it was about 850AD.
More important is
- probably from 700AD.Nobody knew why it was made,not corpse was found by archeologist before WW2.So,not tomb.
But,in your TL,it could be made earlier.
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571-573: Red and White
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
571 proved a peaceful year for the Western Roman Empire (barring a few border clashes with the Saxons and Iazyges), a much-welcome break from the constant (however well-handled) turmoil of Romanus II’s reign. Constans II soon proved to be a man more like his uncle and grandfather than his father: a confident and energetic sort who had already proven his mettle in battle, but whose true passion laid in glorious architectural projects – as well as the centralization and consolidation of imperial power into his hands. Both Stilichian ambitions, though carried by Constantine III and Theodosius III, fell by the wayside in the reign of Romanus II as the Western Romans were forced to prioritize their survival against the maelstrom of plague, internal unrest and Avar invasions battering them, but now that they had seemingly overcome those troubles, Constans was determined to pick up the torches which his father had dropped.
The new Augustus of the West had the wisdom to not immediately jump to firing Aemilian from his post, as his mother persistently counseled him to do, for fear that it would bathe his reign in an inaugural bloodbath. Instead, he took advantage of it being a warmer year than most of the past 35 had been – and consequently one with a relatively abundant harvest – to build goodwill shortly after his coronation with chariot races, gifts of bread & flour to the masses, and banquets for the Senate & the federate kings, who he kept unaware of his intentions. When old Pope Pelagius died in May, Constans saw him off with a suitably dignified funeral and sponsored the construction of a new tomb in the atrium of Saint Peter’s Basilica to serve as his final resting place, while also carefully engineering his first major political appointment-of-sorts: he leaned on every connection he could count on, from friendly clerics in Rome to the revitalized fan-clubs of the Red and White chariot-racing teams traditionally favored by the Stilichians, to sway the Roman people in favor of the archpriest Ioannes of the Basilica of Saint Sabina[1], an independent candidate unaffiliated with the Greens and Blues. At the same time, the emperor also leaked information that the Green candidate had tried to bribe him in an act of simony, while the Blue candidate’s reputation was damaged by rumors that he had celebrated Easter using the wrong calendar. Thus, when he accepted the Roman people’s election of the archpriest as Pope John I, he seemed magnanimous and uninvolved in the decision, which in any case was beyond the reproach of the other factions due to the discrediting of their own candidates.
The election of Pope John set the tone for Constans' reign: one of careful intrigues and maneuvers to increase imperial power, while also struggling mightily to avoid pushing either the Blues or Greens too hard as his uncle Theodosius III once had
Constans also began his building programs quite modestly, committing to repairing everything from statues to bath-houses which had been damaged by the Avar incursion into northern Italy early in his father’s reign. However, he proposed the expansion of future construction & repair works into the realms of the federates at his banquets with increasing insistence, arguing that doing so would not only bring lasting glory to himself but also prosperity (and, of course, pleasing classical aesthetics) to the Roman lands now in barbarian hands. Secretly the Augustus hoped to not only impress and appease his federates with these projects, but also entice more Romans to move to their territories (particularly getting Illyro-Roman refugees to return to their forefathers’ homes, now in lands controlled by the Ostrogoths or Sclaveni) and create local nexuses of Roman citizens that he could count on to press against the barbarians from the bottom-up in case they caused him trouble, while also slipping his agents (in the guise of engineers and foremen) into their courts as advisors.
To the east, the Eastern Romans finally brought the siege of Neapolis to a successful conclusion on June 21. Anthemius had starved the defenders so severely that the surviving Samaritans were beginning to turn to cannibalism, at which point he decided it was time to storm the walls and finish them off before they could re-enact the deeds of the Zealots at Masada[2] on a larger scale. With a ram and siege towers the Romans and their allies broke into the city, putting any resisting Samaritan they found to the sword in a battle which (in itself a testament to the determination of the Samaritans) lasted five hours. The Eastern Caesar Arcadius (now a man of nineteen) first distinguished himself in this assault, being one of the first men off the first of his father's siege towers to reach the walls and the first to raise the labarum over Neapolis' battlements.
Having taken the city, the Eastern Augustus allowed his troops to pillage Neapolis and further ordered the enslavement of the non-Christian population as punishment for their stubborn defiance. He was more measured in his treatment of the remaining Samaritan resistance, who were now dispirited and leaderless after the fall of their provisional capital: once more he repeated his offer of pardon to any Samaritan who would turn himself and his weapons in to the Roman authorities. That said, for having caused the Eastern Empire so much trouble over so many decades, Anthemius also levied additional punishments by banning them from living in any city other than Sebastia[3] and imposing a stiff tax on any Samaritan who wished to worship on their holiest site, Mount Gerizim – where they additionally had to tolerate the continued presence of a Christian church[4]. The first of the collected indemnities were used to fortify that very church, to better protect it against any mob of angry Samaritan pilgrims, as well as to repair others damaged or destroyed by the Samaritans in their initial offensive. It was the emperor’s hope that this treatment would be enough to put a stop to such rebellions in the future, a hope which more hard-line elements among the Eastern Roman officer corps and clergy thought to be vain.
From left to right: the Eastern Caesar Arcadius, a signifer of the elite Excubitores, and the prematurely-aged Flavius Anthemius Augustus Tertius standing victorious in the hills of Samaria
East of Rome, the Samrat Baghayash moved against the northern Chalukyas early in the spring, hoping to sweep them off the board altogether before they could coordinate a counteroffensive against his army in Karnataka with their Ganga allies. In this endeavor, things did not proceed entirely according to plan: the Hunas did manage to defeat the Chalukya army in the field, but never decisively, and their royal court was able to flee their capital of Vatapi[5] with most of their subjects ahead of Baghayash’s capture of the city. The arrival of the monsoon season in June & July ground the Huna onslaught to a halt, and once the heavy rains lifted in October the Samrat was forced to turn away to deal with a major Ganga incursion into his southern flank, allowing the Chalukyas to retake their capital and wipe out the garrison he had installed toward the end of 571.
Further to the northeast, over the Himalayan Mountains, China as a whole was beginning to gain reprieve from the Northern Turks. Under heavy pressure from both the Later Han to their front and the newly-risen Later Zhou to their rear, Issik Khagan spent the spring and summer executing a great retreat from western China, abandoning his remaining conquests in the area and whatever chance he might still have had at knocking the former out of the war to avoid encirclement. His withdrawal briefly took him into Qi territory, where his warriors avoided the fortified cities but despoiled the countryside to sustain themselves – much to the annoyance of Emperor Xiaojing, who found the Turkic incursion an unwelcome interruption of the festivities following his elevation of his dynasty to the Great Qi in Jiankang.
In the autumn the Turks fought their way into the Hexi Corridor – now controlled by the Later Zhou – to return to their homeland: they succeeded at that but nothing more, sustaining grievous casualties (Issik himself was injured by a Chinese crossbow bolt to the shoulder) and managing to limp back home in fragmented groups. Not only had Emperor Shenwu of Later Zhou managed to survive the Tegregs’ wrath, but their losses were so high that the Chinese would not have to fear another Turkic attack for at least another decade. All in all, Issik’s first adventure into China had ended nearly as poorly as his brother’s into Roman Mesopotamia: his only lasting success lay in the Turkic breaching of the Great Wall and conquest of several northeastern territories around it, from which the Great Qi (busy consolidating their new conquests in the south and increasingly mired in skirmishes with the Minyue and Chu) had yet to expel them.
The Northern Turks eventually succeeded in cutting their way past Later Zhou efforts to trap them in front of the Hexi Corridor, but only at a great cost to themselves
Over the seas, Heijō wasted no time in moving against his remaining rivals among the kabane. He struck westward from the Kinai region with his well-prepared army, bowling over the magnates of the western provinces who were still in shock from his successful decapitation strikes against the Kose and Yamanoue clans: those who did not submit swiftly and give him hostages, he treated much in the same way, and often before they could amass enough armed retainers to even slow him down. The Great King encountered serious resistance chiefly from the Kibi clans of Izumo, but he shattered their outnumbered force at the Battle of Tonbara[6]. By September, his lieutenants had crossed over into Shikoku and Kyushu to compel the submission of the magnates there, increasingly returning to Honshu with hostages from the clans which bowed – and plunder from those which refused to do so.
When the spring of 572 dawned, it did so over a still-peaceful Western Roman Empire. Constans continued to busy himself with internal affairs and the further improvement of his army, which in this year meant the provision of ever-more scuta to his crossbowmen – the increased odds of survival that the shielded crossbowmen (or arcuballistarii scutarii) enjoyed at the Battle of the Dardanian Plains, compared to their less fortune unshielded comrades, was impossible to ignore. He also appointed Honestus to the rank of Comes Illyrici, intending on making his brother-in-law into the first of a core of high-ranking military officers who he could be assured were loyal to him above (and ideally entirely to the exclusion of) the Green and Blue cliques.
Instead, the main bout of violence in Western Europe this year came from Britain. Now it was the South Angles’ turn to go on the warpath: their king Æþelric perished shortly after the end of winter, and his son & successor Æþelhere was eager to start his reign with a glorious war of conquest. Within a few months of his coronation, the new king launched an attack on the Romano-British kingdom to his south, which was still led by a now-greatly-aged and increasingly ailing Riothamus Constantine. Through a clerical Anglo-Saxon mission to Rome he reported not only the pace of Christianization of his kingdom but also his decidedly optimistic assessment of his prospects in the war, which persuaded Constans to send a small force led by the military count Jovinus – 1,000 crossbowmen and 200 horsemen, mostly to see how they would fare against a different and non-nomadic foe in the Romano-British – by sea to assist the English war-host.
The refined British strategy, in turn, was to withdraw their vulnerable civilian populations (with all the supplies they could carry, naturally) to increasingly well-fortified castellae as the English advanced – thereby forcing Æþelhere to either detach elements of his larger army to besiege each fort he came across or risk having his rear needled by their garrisons. This gambit of Constantine’s worked well to reduce the strength of the main English army and buy time for him to organize his own, considerably evening the odds for his core legions and the aristocratic forces he was able to call up to support them, ultimately leading to his successful repulsion of Æþelhere in the Battle of Verulamium that September.
When it came to fort-building, the Romano-Britons still adhered to the standards of their forefathers as best they could. Consequently their castellae and castra consistently proved very difficult for the English to take, especially the ones fortified with stone rather than wood
However Constantine’s success did not come without a cost, as secondary English detachments were able to scour much of Icenia in the meantime and even threatened Camulodunum toward the year’s end. The Western Roman contingent’s crossbows gave the heavy British cavalry and infantry a nasty shock and would probably have cost them the battle if Æþelhere had requested more such men, much to his frustration. Constans however was satisfied by their performance, and in his report back to Rome Jovinus correctly identified weaknesses in the crossbow’s shorter range and longer reloading time compared to the longbows preferred by their British adversaries, reinforcing the importance of providing them with scuta.
Elsewhere, while the Eastern Romans were enjoying a restoration of peace between the defeat of the Samaritans last year and the surrender of most of the Nestorian insurgents trapped in the Mesopotamian Marshes in this one, the Hunas were still busy bringing war to the Carnatic kingdoms. Baghayash engaged the Ganga army in the Battle of Surabhipura[7] early in the year and prevailed there, overcoming the obsolete and inexperienced Ganga forces despite the terrain advantage conferred upon them by the Dandavati River coursing through the battlefield; but his pursuit was hindered by the Kyanasur Forest, where stronger elements of the Ganga host rallied and turned to ambush the Hunas.
Though these sporadic counterattacks only irritated and slowed down the larger Huna army rather than turn the tables on them altogether, Baghayash was forced to break off his counterattack against the Gangas altogether after being warned by his rearward garrisons and scouts that the Chalukya were now advancing on him. Since the Gangas had managed to escape his fury relatively intact and were clearly rallying for another round, the Samrat prudently decided to retreat and spend the rest of the year amassing reinforcements rather than risk getting caught in a pincer attack. This gave time for the Chalukyas and Gangas to unite their own armies, certainly, but he had taken his measure of both and found them wanting in an all-out clash: Baghayash expected to engage and crush them both in a decisive battle or two next year, thereby allowing him to impose his yoke on all Karnataka without getting bogged down in any further silly cat-and-mouse games.
In China, Emperor Xiaojing of Great Qi sent a modest expeditionary force northward to drive the Tegregs out of the lands belonging to him which they still occupied, intent on bringing the bulk of his strength to bear against Chu. However, far from spending most of their time fighting the Turks, his northern detachment ended up battling the Goguryeo instead, for the northern Korean kingdom took this opportunity to attack the Qi’s remaining holdings around the Liao River. In the time it took for these reinforcements to turn around, they seized the double cities of Xuantucheng & Gaimoucheng[8] and destroyed most of the Qi garrisons east of the Liao, driving the survivors toward Sanshan[9] where the latter were able to huddle behind the stronger town walls and receive supplies by sea to hold out against their besiegers.
Goguryeo cavalry descending upon the outnumbered and surprised Qi defenders of northeastern China
South of the Yangtze, the Chu were facing trouble in almost every direction: the Liang were pushing them back from the southeast, the Cheng were invading their western territories, the Yi raided their southwestern border and now the Qi were attacking from the east. Their only relief was that the Later Han didn’t also add to the dogpile by attacking them from the north, for Emperor Wucheng was doubtless still angry over the Qi practically abandoning him in the war against the Turks.
Against this massive pile-up of threats, Emperor Yang frantically raced to first halt the Liang counterattack in the Battle of Guizhou[10] while also dispatching reinforcements to fend off Yi raiders, then spent the summer struggling to hold back the Cheng – preventing them from marching on his capital at Changsha, though he couldn’t keep Jiangzhou[11] out of their hands. With that done and the vengeful Cheng army knocked back on its heels by August, he hurried eastward to beat back the Qi offensive as autumn and winter set in. Thanks to the severely embattled emperor having pushed himself & his men to their utter limit and achieving several hard-fought victories, Chu was still (barely) standing by the end of 572, although Yang found himself forced into unfavorable negotiations with Emperors Xiaojing of Great Qi and Shang of Liang anyway.
Across the Tsushima Strait, the Great King Heijō set about imposing his long-desired reforms on the lands of the Yamato. Chiefly he monopolized most kabane offices within the Yamato clan, appointing his various cousins kuni-no-miyatsuko (local governor) of numerous small fiefdoms throughout the land so that they might supervise and if need be, undermine the established clans which had bowed (or been made to bow) before last year’s offensives. Almost as importantly, he also awarded the title of sukune (military commander) exclusively to unlanded kin of his or officials from lesser families who had nevertheless demonstrated unwavering faith toward the royalist cause.
Although generally accepted at the time out of shock and fear of his loyal army, Heijō’s choices would prove short-sighted – and increasingly disastrous – over the next years. By selecting his appointees based solely on their loyalty and blood ties to himself, he quickly saddled Japan with a surfeit of new officials & nobles who were more often than not corrupt, oppressive and/or inept (if nothing else, due to being thrust into roles in which they had little to no prior experience or training), prone to extracting even more than the already-heavy taxes he assigned to them (necessary to sustain his large core army) so they could skim some rice and valuables off the top for themselves and to harshly overreact to any signs of resistance. Thus, the Great King’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress resentful opposition to his rule among the provinces would ironically contribute to a groundswell of it instead. Worse still, some of his extended Yamato kin harbored ambitions of their own and were more independent-minded than he would’ve liked – and now he had inadvertantly given them power-bases of their own to cultivate.
The early 570s heralded the dawn of Heijō's reign of terror, a period considered to have been a dark age for Japan even by the majority of Yamato loyalists in later times
In 573, all eyes in the West moved back onto Britannia once the winter snows began to clear. Constans provided his English ally with additional reinforcements, including trained engineers and sappers; however not all of these were able to reach English-occupied Branodunum[12], as several of their ships were lost in a storm soon after departing Gaul and more were sunk by the Romano-British fleet in the Battle off the White Cliffs. Although that battle was overall a defeat for the Western Romans, enough of their vessels managed to escape and continue northward to dock at their intended destination, including the ones bearing the majority of the Roman engineers. These men covered one of the Anglo-Saxons’ principal weaknesses – siege engineering – and helped them capture Camulodunum by storm in mid-summer, where they oversaw the construction of siege towers which the English went to use to overcome the city’s Roman walls.
The loss of the Pendragon dynasty’s birthplace was a grievous affront which the Riothamus had to answer, forcing Constantine of Britannia to depart from Londinium with nearly the full strength of his kingdom – 11,000 men – to engage Æþelhere’s army of 14,000 (including about 2,500 Western Romans under Jovinus) near Caesaromagus[13] that July. In an immense stroke of luck for Constantine, a sudden rainstorm descended upon the battlefield while both sides were arraying for combat: his own archers could (and did) simply unstring their bows while waiting for the rain to let up, but the Western Roman arcuballistarii were not so fortunate, and many of their crossbows were taken out of commission by water damage to the sinew bowstrings.
Unwilling to retreat and risk being branded a coward just one year into his reign, Æþelhere remained committed to the fight even without the majority of Jovinus’ crossbowmen. Consequently, the Anglo-Romans got the worst of the initial exchange of missiles, and the heavier British troops were able to close in for the melee without having to fear the armor-piercing bolts of the arcuballistarii at close range. The English infantry still acquitted themselves well, as did Æþelhere himself – he dueled Constantine’s heir, King Maximus of Dumnonia, and eventually slew him with an ax-blow to the head – but the battle was decided by the victory of the British cavalry under Constantine’s personal command over the Anglo-Romans, who were sorely missing the additional Roman horsemen who had been sunk with their transports in the Battle off the White Cliffs months earlier. The English were forced to fall back under threat of encirclement, leaving Camulodunum’s skeleton garrison trapped under siege by the victorious Romano-British in the process, and Jovinus was injured in a rearguard action days after the battle.
Wax sculpture of an early British longbowman of the sixth century, of the sort that Constantine I of Britannia would have fielded at the Battle of Caesaromagus. That battle demonstrated the strengths of their weapon, picked up from their Cambrian auxiliaries, and the limitations of the crossbow increasingly favored by the continental Romans
Fortunately for the Anglo-Roman allies, the death of Constantine’s son left a deep crack in his heart and also threw the line of succession into confusion: Maximus had left behind an eleven-year-old son of his own, Artorius, who Constantine now favored to succeed him, but the Riothamus also had other sons and sons-in-law who were sure to contest their underage nephew’s claim if their elderly father/father-in-law were to perish before he came of age (and quite possibly even if he were of age to rule in his own right). He sued for terms in August and came to an agreement with Æþelhere & Jovinus, ceding Icenia[14] to the South Angles in exchange for the return of Camulodunum and the betrothal of Arviragus to the English king’s own daughter Beorhtflæd. Thus could Æþelhere still claim victory, albeit of a far more limited sort than he had originally hoped for, and send his allies home with some satisfaction, though they had both been humbled in this war’s final battle.
It took Jovinus until November to heal from his wounds in Lincylene and return to Rome, in which time the Empress Dowager successfully pressured her son to appoint Green-aligned Senators to the recently-vacated high offices of magister officiorum and quaestor sacrii palatii. His final after-action reports convinced Constans of the necessity of both maintaining a large number of sagitarii armed with conventional bows, rather than outfitting most or all of his missile troops with crossbows, and of manufacturing oiled-leather bowstrings for the arcuballistarii which could better withstand any sudden rains. As a reward the Augustus deigned to grant him the honor of Consulship for the year 574, alongside the young Visigoth king Hermenegild.
Far to the east, Baghayash’s conflict with the Carnatic kingdoms was approaching its climax. Reinforcements from northern India and his new conquests in Andhra had swelled the size of his host to nearly 70,000 men, though his rapidly-inflated ranks were also now much more fractious than before, with many of the Indian lords (especially the Andhrans who had only reluctantly begun to accept his rule) holding little love for him and even less for any orders he or his subordinate Huna rajas might give them. Against this formidable (at least on paper) horde, the Chalukyas and Gangas presented their full combined strength – 40,000 men, outnumbered nearly 2:1 by the Hunas but much more unified and eager to fight in defense of their homelands.
Once Baghayash resumed his offensive, targeting the lands of the Gangas first, Rajas Vishnuvardhana of the Chalukya and Harivarma II of the Ganga awaited him in the Western Ghats and managed to engage the Hunas beneath Mount Brahmagiri. The Indian allies had occupied highly advantageous terrain, further leveling the playing field between their armies and that of the Samrat; but though his Indian advisors counseled retreat, Baghayash was undeterred. While drawing up his army for battle he even placed his heir, the sixteen-year-old Mahasenapati Harsha, in the Huna vanguard, apparently under the belief that the boy should prove himself a man worthy of carrying the Hephthal dynasty’s legacy into the future or die and make way for another son who can.
Harsha, the young Mahasenapati of the Hunas, grimly accepting his father's order to fight in the vanguard on the morning of the Battle of Brahmagiri
Though the Indians on Brahmagiri’s ridge had a comfortable place from which to loose their arrows upon the Hunas below, the latter’s more numerous archers were assisted by a strong gale which blew into the Indians’ faces and the steel bows wielded by the elite elements among their ranks, keeping the exchange of missiles between the two armies from becoming lopsided in the allies’ favor. Harsha’s vanguard advanced beneath the cover of their side’s arrows, but were fiercely rebuffed by the Kannada infantry and pushed back downhill early in the fighting. Some of the Indians gave chase, but were rudely shocked when Harsha managed to rally his troops and turned around to annihilate them on the low ground with the help of other surging Indo-Hunnic contingents, much to his father’s satisfaction.
Following these early (but quite sanguinary) clashes, the Kannada kings resolved to remain on the mountain and fight defensively until they could be absolutely sure that they had gained an overwhelming advantage over their opponents. For his part, Baghayash considered his son’s turnaround to be a sign of victory and weighed withdrawing to find more favorable ground to fight on at this point, but ultimately decided that the opportunity to destroy the Chalukyas and Gangas here and now was too great to forsake. The Hunas launched several fruitless attacks on the allied lines throughout the day, and after beating back the sixth such assault Vishnuvardhana and Harivarma finally decided it was time they counterattacked.
Instead of an undisciplined, piecemeal attack which could be easily overwhelmed (as Harsha’s pursuers were earlier), the entire Kannada host descended from Brahmagiri in a furious downhill assault which routed much of the Huna army, especially its Indian contingents. Their victory seemed imminent at this point, but Baghayash personally waded into the fighting with his reserves and trump card – a force of sixty war elephants – to hold back their onslaught, eventually turning the tables once Harsha and his other generals beat his routing men back into line and scattering the Kannada toward twilight. The allies had lost 10,000 men and killed nearly twice as many Hunas before being defeated, but with his far larger empire & population the Samrat was better able to absorb the loss of a quarter of his army than his enemies were. The two kings withdrew to the summit of Brahmagiri, where they expected to have to mount a last stand and go out in a blaze of glory no later than the next morning, but were surprised when Baghayash offered terms at sunrise instead of trying to finish them off.
On the ropes in the final stage of the Battle of Brahmagiri with much of his army on the precipice of disintegration, Baghayash nevertheless managed to turn the tables on the Kannada kings by deploying his powerful reserve
In acknowledgement of their valor and to avoid further needless bloodshed when he would rather preserve his remaining strength to assail the Tamil kingdoms instead, the Samrat declared his willingness to allow Vishnuvardhana and Harivarma to not only live but to also continue to govern their ancestral lands, in exchange for a healthy tribute; recognition of his suzerainty over them; and the installation of modest Huna garrisons in their capitals. Believing that these were the best possible terms they could have gotten for themselves and their people under the circumstances, the two kings accepted, securing Huna overlordship across Karnataka after a much more challenging war than the one against the Vishnukundinas and freeing Baghayash up to turn his attention to the subcontinent’s southernmost tip.
North of India, there was trouble stirring in the lands of the Turks. Having failed to secure more than the most marginal of conquests in China, Issik Khagan faced a challenge from several tribes within his confederacy in the spring of 573, spearheaded by the Göktürks. His loyal Tegregs managed to swat these upstarts down in the Battle of the Plain of Mubalik[14], but the Khagan understood that he had to do something to shore up his position and restore his followers’ faith in him very soon or face other, likely more successful rebellions against his rule. To that end he began to lead his warriors westward, assailing the lands of independent Turkic tribes such as the Onogurs and later the Slavic Antae, and eventually reaching the northeastern shores of the Euxine Sea; but though these conquests afforded the Northern Turks new grazing lands, tributaries and slaves, they were insufficiently glorious to restore the Turks’ confidence in him. Accordingly Issik next prepared to challenge his brother for control over the latter’s half of the Tarim Basin and the profits of the Silk Road, putting the two Turkic Khaganates on a collision course with one another.
Issik Khagan out hunting on the Pontic shore with several of his new westernmost vassals: the chiefs of peoples such as the Oghurs, Onogurs, and Khazars
East of them both, Emperor Yang of Chu reached terms with the Liang and Great Qi, paying indemnities to the former for having invaded their territories first and ceding land as far as Wuchang[15] to the latter for peace. With that done and the Qi armies redirected to drive the Koreans out of their northeastern domains, Yang could now turn his full attention to his one remaining active front with the Cheng. There he achieved considerable success, recapturing Jiangzhou and successfully defending it against Emperor Zhi’s army in a great battle before its gates in July. Though he lacked the strength to completely push the Cheng out of his lands and had to acknowledge as much in the peace treaty he would sign near the year’s end, Yang’s victory here ensured the Chu would survive past 573, despite his earlier mistakes in making enemies out of most of his neighbors.
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[1] Also known by its modern Italian name Santa Sabina, this historic basilica is located on the Aventine Hill and has famously come to serve as the mother-church of the Dominican friars.
[2] A Jewish mountain fortress in the eastern Judean Desert. It was the site of the famous last stand of nearly a thousand Zealot rebels and their kindred during the Jewish-Roman War of 66-73, where they committed mass suicide (leaving only two women and their children alive in a cistern) just as Roman engineers were about to overcome their previously-impregnable defenses.
[3] The city of Samaria, not to be confused with the region as a whole.
[4] The Samaritans have still gotten off more lightly than they did following their last failed rebellions against the Byzantines IOTL – Justinian outlawed Samaritanism and killed hundreds of thousands of Samaritans in response to major uprisings in 529-531 and 556, and the last revolts in the 570s seem to have resulted in such a thorough genocide of the Samaritans that they were rendered a non-factor in the region (after which they have continued to dwindle until today).
[5] Badami.
[6] Now part of Iinan.
[7] Soraba.
[8] Now united as Shenyang.
[9] Dalian.
[10] Guilin.
[11] Chongqing.
[12] Brancaster.
[13] Chelmsford.
[14] Ordu-Baliq.
[15] Now part of Wuhan.
To answer some of the previous queries:
@Butch R. Mann Constans' situation is going to be a complicated one, though not as challenging as the one his father had to navigate (at least, not yet), as I hoped to shed some light on in this chapter. He's certainly more favorably inclined toward Frederica and the Greens than he is toward Aemilian and the Blues, but he also has no desire to become their puppet, and will probably spend much of his reign trying to walk the tightrope of undermining factional influence and centralizing the WRE without sparking a civil war. If it does come to violence though, he's already shown signs of preferring to back up the Greens over the Blues.
@stevep At present, Constantinople has too much value (economically, politically, sentimentally) for the Sabbatic dynasty to want to leave it. If they manage to maintain their current borders and decide to move their court elsewhere down the road though, I think Antioch would probably make the most sense for a new capital.
@gral Yes.
@ATP Oops, didn't see your edit until I returned to this thread to start finalizing today's update. Per the last couple of maps, the Iazyges have moved into an area including modern-day Lesser Poland/Malopolska after deserting the WRE in the face of the initial Avar invasion ~25 years ago, and have since set themselves up as the overlords of the local Slavs (who Roman geographers would probably classify among the Vistula Veneti tribes). Good chance Krakow would be around as one of the small Slavic strongholds under their suzerainty at this time. The Western Romans would love to punish them for their treachery, but distance and the continued existence of greater threats like the Avars (who also pose a danger to Iazyges) and Saxons will probably keep them from doing so themselves. So if the Iazyges are brought down in the future, it will more likely be at the hands of the Avars or a proto-Polish rebellion rather than a Western Roman expeditionary force.
The new Augustus of the West had the wisdom to not immediately jump to firing Aemilian from his post, as his mother persistently counseled him to do, for fear that it would bathe his reign in an inaugural bloodbath. Instead, he took advantage of it being a warmer year than most of the past 35 had been – and consequently one with a relatively abundant harvest – to build goodwill shortly after his coronation with chariot races, gifts of bread & flour to the masses, and banquets for the Senate & the federate kings, who he kept unaware of his intentions. When old Pope Pelagius died in May, Constans saw him off with a suitably dignified funeral and sponsored the construction of a new tomb in the atrium of Saint Peter’s Basilica to serve as his final resting place, while also carefully engineering his first major political appointment-of-sorts: he leaned on every connection he could count on, from friendly clerics in Rome to the revitalized fan-clubs of the Red and White chariot-racing teams traditionally favored by the Stilichians, to sway the Roman people in favor of the archpriest Ioannes of the Basilica of Saint Sabina[1], an independent candidate unaffiliated with the Greens and Blues. At the same time, the emperor also leaked information that the Green candidate had tried to bribe him in an act of simony, while the Blue candidate’s reputation was damaged by rumors that he had celebrated Easter using the wrong calendar. Thus, when he accepted the Roman people’s election of the archpriest as Pope John I, he seemed magnanimous and uninvolved in the decision, which in any case was beyond the reproach of the other factions due to the discrediting of their own candidates.
The election of Pope John set the tone for Constans' reign: one of careful intrigues and maneuvers to increase imperial power, while also struggling mightily to avoid pushing either the Blues or Greens too hard as his uncle Theodosius III once had
Constans also began his building programs quite modestly, committing to repairing everything from statues to bath-houses which had been damaged by the Avar incursion into northern Italy early in his father’s reign. However, he proposed the expansion of future construction & repair works into the realms of the federates at his banquets with increasing insistence, arguing that doing so would not only bring lasting glory to himself but also prosperity (and, of course, pleasing classical aesthetics) to the Roman lands now in barbarian hands. Secretly the Augustus hoped to not only impress and appease his federates with these projects, but also entice more Romans to move to their territories (particularly getting Illyro-Roman refugees to return to their forefathers’ homes, now in lands controlled by the Ostrogoths or Sclaveni) and create local nexuses of Roman citizens that he could count on to press against the barbarians from the bottom-up in case they caused him trouble, while also slipping his agents (in the guise of engineers and foremen) into their courts as advisors.
To the east, the Eastern Romans finally brought the siege of Neapolis to a successful conclusion on June 21. Anthemius had starved the defenders so severely that the surviving Samaritans were beginning to turn to cannibalism, at which point he decided it was time to storm the walls and finish them off before they could re-enact the deeds of the Zealots at Masada[2] on a larger scale. With a ram and siege towers the Romans and their allies broke into the city, putting any resisting Samaritan they found to the sword in a battle which (in itself a testament to the determination of the Samaritans) lasted five hours. The Eastern Caesar Arcadius (now a man of nineteen) first distinguished himself in this assault, being one of the first men off the first of his father's siege towers to reach the walls and the first to raise the labarum over Neapolis' battlements.
Having taken the city, the Eastern Augustus allowed his troops to pillage Neapolis and further ordered the enslavement of the non-Christian population as punishment for their stubborn defiance. He was more measured in his treatment of the remaining Samaritan resistance, who were now dispirited and leaderless after the fall of their provisional capital: once more he repeated his offer of pardon to any Samaritan who would turn himself and his weapons in to the Roman authorities. That said, for having caused the Eastern Empire so much trouble over so many decades, Anthemius also levied additional punishments by banning them from living in any city other than Sebastia[3] and imposing a stiff tax on any Samaritan who wished to worship on their holiest site, Mount Gerizim – where they additionally had to tolerate the continued presence of a Christian church[4]. The first of the collected indemnities were used to fortify that very church, to better protect it against any mob of angry Samaritan pilgrims, as well as to repair others damaged or destroyed by the Samaritans in their initial offensive. It was the emperor’s hope that this treatment would be enough to put a stop to such rebellions in the future, a hope which more hard-line elements among the Eastern Roman officer corps and clergy thought to be vain.
From left to right: the Eastern Caesar Arcadius, a signifer of the elite Excubitores, and the prematurely-aged Flavius Anthemius Augustus Tertius standing victorious in the hills of Samaria
East of Rome, the Samrat Baghayash moved against the northern Chalukyas early in the spring, hoping to sweep them off the board altogether before they could coordinate a counteroffensive against his army in Karnataka with their Ganga allies. In this endeavor, things did not proceed entirely according to plan: the Hunas did manage to defeat the Chalukya army in the field, but never decisively, and their royal court was able to flee their capital of Vatapi[5] with most of their subjects ahead of Baghayash’s capture of the city. The arrival of the monsoon season in June & July ground the Huna onslaught to a halt, and once the heavy rains lifted in October the Samrat was forced to turn away to deal with a major Ganga incursion into his southern flank, allowing the Chalukyas to retake their capital and wipe out the garrison he had installed toward the end of 571.
Further to the northeast, over the Himalayan Mountains, China as a whole was beginning to gain reprieve from the Northern Turks. Under heavy pressure from both the Later Han to their front and the newly-risen Later Zhou to their rear, Issik Khagan spent the spring and summer executing a great retreat from western China, abandoning his remaining conquests in the area and whatever chance he might still have had at knocking the former out of the war to avoid encirclement. His withdrawal briefly took him into Qi territory, where his warriors avoided the fortified cities but despoiled the countryside to sustain themselves – much to the annoyance of Emperor Xiaojing, who found the Turkic incursion an unwelcome interruption of the festivities following his elevation of his dynasty to the Great Qi in Jiankang.
In the autumn the Turks fought their way into the Hexi Corridor – now controlled by the Later Zhou – to return to their homeland: they succeeded at that but nothing more, sustaining grievous casualties (Issik himself was injured by a Chinese crossbow bolt to the shoulder) and managing to limp back home in fragmented groups. Not only had Emperor Shenwu of Later Zhou managed to survive the Tegregs’ wrath, but their losses were so high that the Chinese would not have to fear another Turkic attack for at least another decade. All in all, Issik’s first adventure into China had ended nearly as poorly as his brother’s into Roman Mesopotamia: his only lasting success lay in the Turkic breaching of the Great Wall and conquest of several northeastern territories around it, from which the Great Qi (busy consolidating their new conquests in the south and increasingly mired in skirmishes with the Minyue and Chu) had yet to expel them.
The Northern Turks eventually succeeded in cutting their way past Later Zhou efforts to trap them in front of the Hexi Corridor, but only at a great cost to themselves
Over the seas, Heijō wasted no time in moving against his remaining rivals among the kabane. He struck westward from the Kinai region with his well-prepared army, bowling over the magnates of the western provinces who were still in shock from his successful decapitation strikes against the Kose and Yamanoue clans: those who did not submit swiftly and give him hostages, he treated much in the same way, and often before they could amass enough armed retainers to even slow him down. The Great King encountered serious resistance chiefly from the Kibi clans of Izumo, but he shattered their outnumbered force at the Battle of Tonbara[6]. By September, his lieutenants had crossed over into Shikoku and Kyushu to compel the submission of the magnates there, increasingly returning to Honshu with hostages from the clans which bowed – and plunder from those which refused to do so.
When the spring of 572 dawned, it did so over a still-peaceful Western Roman Empire. Constans continued to busy himself with internal affairs and the further improvement of his army, which in this year meant the provision of ever-more scuta to his crossbowmen – the increased odds of survival that the shielded crossbowmen (or arcuballistarii scutarii) enjoyed at the Battle of the Dardanian Plains, compared to their less fortune unshielded comrades, was impossible to ignore. He also appointed Honestus to the rank of Comes Illyrici, intending on making his brother-in-law into the first of a core of high-ranking military officers who he could be assured were loyal to him above (and ideally entirely to the exclusion of) the Green and Blue cliques.
Instead, the main bout of violence in Western Europe this year came from Britain. Now it was the South Angles’ turn to go on the warpath: their king Æþelric perished shortly after the end of winter, and his son & successor Æþelhere was eager to start his reign with a glorious war of conquest. Within a few months of his coronation, the new king launched an attack on the Romano-British kingdom to his south, which was still led by a now-greatly-aged and increasingly ailing Riothamus Constantine. Through a clerical Anglo-Saxon mission to Rome he reported not only the pace of Christianization of his kingdom but also his decidedly optimistic assessment of his prospects in the war, which persuaded Constans to send a small force led by the military count Jovinus – 1,000 crossbowmen and 200 horsemen, mostly to see how they would fare against a different and non-nomadic foe in the Romano-British – by sea to assist the English war-host.
The refined British strategy, in turn, was to withdraw their vulnerable civilian populations (with all the supplies they could carry, naturally) to increasingly well-fortified castellae as the English advanced – thereby forcing Æþelhere to either detach elements of his larger army to besiege each fort he came across or risk having his rear needled by their garrisons. This gambit of Constantine’s worked well to reduce the strength of the main English army and buy time for him to organize his own, considerably evening the odds for his core legions and the aristocratic forces he was able to call up to support them, ultimately leading to his successful repulsion of Æþelhere in the Battle of Verulamium that September.
When it came to fort-building, the Romano-Britons still adhered to the standards of their forefathers as best they could. Consequently their castellae and castra consistently proved very difficult for the English to take, especially the ones fortified with stone rather than wood
However Constantine’s success did not come without a cost, as secondary English detachments were able to scour much of Icenia in the meantime and even threatened Camulodunum toward the year’s end. The Western Roman contingent’s crossbows gave the heavy British cavalry and infantry a nasty shock and would probably have cost them the battle if Æþelhere had requested more such men, much to his frustration. Constans however was satisfied by their performance, and in his report back to Rome Jovinus correctly identified weaknesses in the crossbow’s shorter range and longer reloading time compared to the longbows preferred by their British adversaries, reinforcing the importance of providing them with scuta.
Elsewhere, while the Eastern Romans were enjoying a restoration of peace between the defeat of the Samaritans last year and the surrender of most of the Nestorian insurgents trapped in the Mesopotamian Marshes in this one, the Hunas were still busy bringing war to the Carnatic kingdoms. Baghayash engaged the Ganga army in the Battle of Surabhipura[7] early in the year and prevailed there, overcoming the obsolete and inexperienced Ganga forces despite the terrain advantage conferred upon them by the Dandavati River coursing through the battlefield; but his pursuit was hindered by the Kyanasur Forest, where stronger elements of the Ganga host rallied and turned to ambush the Hunas.
Though these sporadic counterattacks only irritated and slowed down the larger Huna army rather than turn the tables on them altogether, Baghayash was forced to break off his counterattack against the Gangas altogether after being warned by his rearward garrisons and scouts that the Chalukya were now advancing on him. Since the Gangas had managed to escape his fury relatively intact and were clearly rallying for another round, the Samrat prudently decided to retreat and spend the rest of the year amassing reinforcements rather than risk getting caught in a pincer attack. This gave time for the Chalukyas and Gangas to unite their own armies, certainly, but he had taken his measure of both and found them wanting in an all-out clash: Baghayash expected to engage and crush them both in a decisive battle or two next year, thereby allowing him to impose his yoke on all Karnataka without getting bogged down in any further silly cat-and-mouse games.
In China, Emperor Xiaojing of Great Qi sent a modest expeditionary force northward to drive the Tegregs out of the lands belonging to him which they still occupied, intent on bringing the bulk of his strength to bear against Chu. However, far from spending most of their time fighting the Turks, his northern detachment ended up battling the Goguryeo instead, for the northern Korean kingdom took this opportunity to attack the Qi’s remaining holdings around the Liao River. In the time it took for these reinforcements to turn around, they seized the double cities of Xuantucheng & Gaimoucheng[8] and destroyed most of the Qi garrisons east of the Liao, driving the survivors toward Sanshan[9] where the latter were able to huddle behind the stronger town walls and receive supplies by sea to hold out against their besiegers.
Goguryeo cavalry descending upon the outnumbered and surprised Qi defenders of northeastern China
South of the Yangtze, the Chu were facing trouble in almost every direction: the Liang were pushing them back from the southeast, the Cheng were invading their western territories, the Yi raided their southwestern border and now the Qi were attacking from the east. Their only relief was that the Later Han didn’t also add to the dogpile by attacking them from the north, for Emperor Wucheng was doubtless still angry over the Qi practically abandoning him in the war against the Turks.
Against this massive pile-up of threats, Emperor Yang frantically raced to first halt the Liang counterattack in the Battle of Guizhou[10] while also dispatching reinforcements to fend off Yi raiders, then spent the summer struggling to hold back the Cheng – preventing them from marching on his capital at Changsha, though he couldn’t keep Jiangzhou[11] out of their hands. With that done and the vengeful Cheng army knocked back on its heels by August, he hurried eastward to beat back the Qi offensive as autumn and winter set in. Thanks to the severely embattled emperor having pushed himself & his men to their utter limit and achieving several hard-fought victories, Chu was still (barely) standing by the end of 572, although Yang found himself forced into unfavorable negotiations with Emperors Xiaojing of Great Qi and Shang of Liang anyway.
Across the Tsushima Strait, the Great King Heijō set about imposing his long-desired reforms on the lands of the Yamato. Chiefly he monopolized most kabane offices within the Yamato clan, appointing his various cousins kuni-no-miyatsuko (local governor) of numerous small fiefdoms throughout the land so that they might supervise and if need be, undermine the established clans which had bowed (or been made to bow) before last year’s offensives. Almost as importantly, he also awarded the title of sukune (military commander) exclusively to unlanded kin of his or officials from lesser families who had nevertheless demonstrated unwavering faith toward the royalist cause.
Although generally accepted at the time out of shock and fear of his loyal army, Heijō’s choices would prove short-sighted – and increasingly disastrous – over the next years. By selecting his appointees based solely on their loyalty and blood ties to himself, he quickly saddled Japan with a surfeit of new officials & nobles who were more often than not corrupt, oppressive and/or inept (if nothing else, due to being thrust into roles in which they had little to no prior experience or training), prone to extracting even more than the already-heavy taxes he assigned to them (necessary to sustain his large core army) so they could skim some rice and valuables off the top for themselves and to harshly overreact to any signs of resistance. Thus, the Great King’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress resentful opposition to his rule among the provinces would ironically contribute to a groundswell of it instead. Worse still, some of his extended Yamato kin harbored ambitions of their own and were more independent-minded than he would’ve liked – and now he had inadvertantly given them power-bases of their own to cultivate.
The early 570s heralded the dawn of Heijō's reign of terror, a period considered to have been a dark age for Japan even by the majority of Yamato loyalists in later times
In 573, all eyes in the West moved back onto Britannia once the winter snows began to clear. Constans provided his English ally with additional reinforcements, including trained engineers and sappers; however not all of these were able to reach English-occupied Branodunum[12], as several of their ships were lost in a storm soon after departing Gaul and more were sunk by the Romano-British fleet in the Battle off the White Cliffs. Although that battle was overall a defeat for the Western Romans, enough of their vessels managed to escape and continue northward to dock at their intended destination, including the ones bearing the majority of the Roman engineers. These men covered one of the Anglo-Saxons’ principal weaknesses – siege engineering – and helped them capture Camulodunum by storm in mid-summer, where they oversaw the construction of siege towers which the English went to use to overcome the city’s Roman walls.
The loss of the Pendragon dynasty’s birthplace was a grievous affront which the Riothamus had to answer, forcing Constantine of Britannia to depart from Londinium with nearly the full strength of his kingdom – 11,000 men – to engage Æþelhere’s army of 14,000 (including about 2,500 Western Romans under Jovinus) near Caesaromagus[13] that July. In an immense stroke of luck for Constantine, a sudden rainstorm descended upon the battlefield while both sides were arraying for combat: his own archers could (and did) simply unstring their bows while waiting for the rain to let up, but the Western Roman arcuballistarii were not so fortunate, and many of their crossbows were taken out of commission by water damage to the sinew bowstrings.
Unwilling to retreat and risk being branded a coward just one year into his reign, Æþelhere remained committed to the fight even without the majority of Jovinus’ crossbowmen. Consequently, the Anglo-Romans got the worst of the initial exchange of missiles, and the heavier British troops were able to close in for the melee without having to fear the armor-piercing bolts of the arcuballistarii at close range. The English infantry still acquitted themselves well, as did Æþelhere himself – he dueled Constantine’s heir, King Maximus of Dumnonia, and eventually slew him with an ax-blow to the head – but the battle was decided by the victory of the British cavalry under Constantine’s personal command over the Anglo-Romans, who were sorely missing the additional Roman horsemen who had been sunk with their transports in the Battle off the White Cliffs months earlier. The English were forced to fall back under threat of encirclement, leaving Camulodunum’s skeleton garrison trapped under siege by the victorious Romano-British in the process, and Jovinus was injured in a rearguard action days after the battle.
Wax sculpture of an early British longbowman of the sixth century, of the sort that Constantine I of Britannia would have fielded at the Battle of Caesaromagus. That battle demonstrated the strengths of their weapon, picked up from their Cambrian auxiliaries, and the limitations of the crossbow increasingly favored by the continental Romans
Fortunately for the Anglo-Roman allies, the death of Constantine’s son left a deep crack in his heart and also threw the line of succession into confusion: Maximus had left behind an eleven-year-old son of his own, Artorius, who Constantine now favored to succeed him, but the Riothamus also had other sons and sons-in-law who were sure to contest their underage nephew’s claim if their elderly father/father-in-law were to perish before he came of age (and quite possibly even if he were of age to rule in his own right). He sued for terms in August and came to an agreement with Æþelhere & Jovinus, ceding Icenia[14] to the South Angles in exchange for the return of Camulodunum and the betrothal of Arviragus to the English king’s own daughter Beorhtflæd. Thus could Æþelhere still claim victory, albeit of a far more limited sort than he had originally hoped for, and send his allies home with some satisfaction, though they had both been humbled in this war’s final battle.
It took Jovinus until November to heal from his wounds in Lincylene and return to Rome, in which time the Empress Dowager successfully pressured her son to appoint Green-aligned Senators to the recently-vacated high offices of magister officiorum and quaestor sacrii palatii. His final after-action reports convinced Constans of the necessity of both maintaining a large number of sagitarii armed with conventional bows, rather than outfitting most or all of his missile troops with crossbows, and of manufacturing oiled-leather bowstrings for the arcuballistarii which could better withstand any sudden rains. As a reward the Augustus deigned to grant him the honor of Consulship for the year 574, alongside the young Visigoth king Hermenegild.
Far to the east, Baghayash’s conflict with the Carnatic kingdoms was approaching its climax. Reinforcements from northern India and his new conquests in Andhra had swelled the size of his host to nearly 70,000 men, though his rapidly-inflated ranks were also now much more fractious than before, with many of the Indian lords (especially the Andhrans who had only reluctantly begun to accept his rule) holding little love for him and even less for any orders he or his subordinate Huna rajas might give them. Against this formidable (at least on paper) horde, the Chalukyas and Gangas presented their full combined strength – 40,000 men, outnumbered nearly 2:1 by the Hunas but much more unified and eager to fight in defense of their homelands.
Once Baghayash resumed his offensive, targeting the lands of the Gangas first, Rajas Vishnuvardhana of the Chalukya and Harivarma II of the Ganga awaited him in the Western Ghats and managed to engage the Hunas beneath Mount Brahmagiri. The Indian allies had occupied highly advantageous terrain, further leveling the playing field between their armies and that of the Samrat; but though his Indian advisors counseled retreat, Baghayash was undeterred. While drawing up his army for battle he even placed his heir, the sixteen-year-old Mahasenapati Harsha, in the Huna vanguard, apparently under the belief that the boy should prove himself a man worthy of carrying the Hephthal dynasty’s legacy into the future or die and make way for another son who can.
Harsha, the young Mahasenapati of the Hunas, grimly accepting his father's order to fight in the vanguard on the morning of the Battle of Brahmagiri
Though the Indians on Brahmagiri’s ridge had a comfortable place from which to loose their arrows upon the Hunas below, the latter’s more numerous archers were assisted by a strong gale which blew into the Indians’ faces and the steel bows wielded by the elite elements among their ranks, keeping the exchange of missiles between the two armies from becoming lopsided in the allies’ favor. Harsha’s vanguard advanced beneath the cover of their side’s arrows, but were fiercely rebuffed by the Kannada infantry and pushed back downhill early in the fighting. Some of the Indians gave chase, but were rudely shocked when Harsha managed to rally his troops and turned around to annihilate them on the low ground with the help of other surging Indo-Hunnic contingents, much to his father’s satisfaction.
Following these early (but quite sanguinary) clashes, the Kannada kings resolved to remain on the mountain and fight defensively until they could be absolutely sure that they had gained an overwhelming advantage over their opponents. For his part, Baghayash considered his son’s turnaround to be a sign of victory and weighed withdrawing to find more favorable ground to fight on at this point, but ultimately decided that the opportunity to destroy the Chalukyas and Gangas here and now was too great to forsake. The Hunas launched several fruitless attacks on the allied lines throughout the day, and after beating back the sixth such assault Vishnuvardhana and Harivarma finally decided it was time they counterattacked.
Instead of an undisciplined, piecemeal attack which could be easily overwhelmed (as Harsha’s pursuers were earlier), the entire Kannada host descended from Brahmagiri in a furious downhill assault which routed much of the Huna army, especially its Indian contingents. Their victory seemed imminent at this point, but Baghayash personally waded into the fighting with his reserves and trump card – a force of sixty war elephants – to hold back their onslaught, eventually turning the tables once Harsha and his other generals beat his routing men back into line and scattering the Kannada toward twilight. The allies had lost 10,000 men and killed nearly twice as many Hunas before being defeated, but with his far larger empire & population the Samrat was better able to absorb the loss of a quarter of his army than his enemies were. The two kings withdrew to the summit of Brahmagiri, where they expected to have to mount a last stand and go out in a blaze of glory no later than the next morning, but were surprised when Baghayash offered terms at sunrise instead of trying to finish them off.
On the ropes in the final stage of the Battle of Brahmagiri with much of his army on the precipice of disintegration, Baghayash nevertheless managed to turn the tables on the Kannada kings by deploying his powerful reserve
In acknowledgement of their valor and to avoid further needless bloodshed when he would rather preserve his remaining strength to assail the Tamil kingdoms instead, the Samrat declared his willingness to allow Vishnuvardhana and Harivarma to not only live but to also continue to govern their ancestral lands, in exchange for a healthy tribute; recognition of his suzerainty over them; and the installation of modest Huna garrisons in their capitals. Believing that these were the best possible terms they could have gotten for themselves and their people under the circumstances, the two kings accepted, securing Huna overlordship across Karnataka after a much more challenging war than the one against the Vishnukundinas and freeing Baghayash up to turn his attention to the subcontinent’s southernmost tip.
North of India, there was trouble stirring in the lands of the Turks. Having failed to secure more than the most marginal of conquests in China, Issik Khagan faced a challenge from several tribes within his confederacy in the spring of 573, spearheaded by the Göktürks. His loyal Tegregs managed to swat these upstarts down in the Battle of the Plain of Mubalik[14], but the Khagan understood that he had to do something to shore up his position and restore his followers’ faith in him very soon or face other, likely more successful rebellions against his rule. To that end he began to lead his warriors westward, assailing the lands of independent Turkic tribes such as the Onogurs and later the Slavic Antae, and eventually reaching the northeastern shores of the Euxine Sea; but though these conquests afforded the Northern Turks new grazing lands, tributaries and slaves, they were insufficiently glorious to restore the Turks’ confidence in him. Accordingly Issik next prepared to challenge his brother for control over the latter’s half of the Tarim Basin and the profits of the Silk Road, putting the two Turkic Khaganates on a collision course with one another.
Issik Khagan out hunting on the Pontic shore with several of his new westernmost vassals: the chiefs of peoples such as the Oghurs, Onogurs, and Khazars
East of them both, Emperor Yang of Chu reached terms with the Liang and Great Qi, paying indemnities to the former for having invaded their territories first and ceding land as far as Wuchang[15] to the latter for peace. With that done and the Qi armies redirected to drive the Koreans out of their northeastern domains, Yang could now turn his full attention to his one remaining active front with the Cheng. There he achieved considerable success, recapturing Jiangzhou and successfully defending it against Emperor Zhi’s army in a great battle before its gates in July. Though he lacked the strength to completely push the Cheng out of his lands and had to acknowledge as much in the peace treaty he would sign near the year’s end, Yang’s victory here ensured the Chu would survive past 573, despite his earlier mistakes in making enemies out of most of his neighbors.
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[1] Also known by its modern Italian name Santa Sabina, this historic basilica is located on the Aventine Hill and has famously come to serve as the mother-church of the Dominican friars.
[2] A Jewish mountain fortress in the eastern Judean Desert. It was the site of the famous last stand of nearly a thousand Zealot rebels and their kindred during the Jewish-Roman War of 66-73, where they committed mass suicide (leaving only two women and their children alive in a cistern) just as Roman engineers were about to overcome their previously-impregnable defenses.
[3] The city of Samaria, not to be confused with the region as a whole.
[4] The Samaritans have still gotten off more lightly than they did following their last failed rebellions against the Byzantines IOTL – Justinian outlawed Samaritanism and killed hundreds of thousands of Samaritans in response to major uprisings in 529-531 and 556, and the last revolts in the 570s seem to have resulted in such a thorough genocide of the Samaritans that they were rendered a non-factor in the region (after which they have continued to dwindle until today).
[5] Badami.
[6] Now part of Iinan.
[7] Soraba.
[8] Now united as Shenyang.
[9] Dalian.
[10] Guilin.
[11] Chongqing.
[12] Brancaster.
[13] Chelmsford.
[14] Ordu-Baliq.
[15] Now part of Wuhan.
To answer some of the previous queries:
@Butch R. Mann Constans' situation is going to be a complicated one, though not as challenging as the one his father had to navigate (at least, not yet), as I hoped to shed some light on in this chapter. He's certainly more favorably inclined toward Frederica and the Greens than he is toward Aemilian and the Blues, but he also has no desire to become their puppet, and will probably spend much of his reign trying to walk the tightrope of undermining factional influence and centralizing the WRE without sparking a civil war. If it does come to violence though, he's already shown signs of preferring to back up the Greens over the Blues.
@stevep At present, Constantinople has too much value (economically, politically, sentimentally) for the Sabbatic dynasty to want to leave it. If they manage to maintain their current borders and decide to move their court elsewhere down the road though, I think Antioch would probably make the most sense for a new capital.
@gral Yes.
@ATP Oops, didn't see your edit until I returned to this thread to start finalizing today's update. Per the last couple of maps, the Iazyges have moved into an area including modern-day Lesser Poland/Malopolska after deserting the WRE in the face of the initial Avar invasion ~25 years ago, and have since set themselves up as the overlords of the local Slavs (who Roman geographers would probably classify among the Vistula Veneti tribes). Good chance Krakow would be around as one of the small Slavic strongholds under their suzerainty at this time. The Western Romans would love to punish them for their treachery, but distance and the continued existence of greater threats like the Avars (who also pose a danger to Iazyges) and Saxons will probably keep them from doing so themselves. So if the Iazyges are brought down in the future, it will more likely be at the hands of the Avars or a proto-Polish rebellion rather than a Western Roman expeditionary force.
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Fun thing - polish gentry belived that mythical King Krak/for his memory Mount Krak was supposed to build/ ,come to Cracow about 550AD.
Our archeologist are quite sure,that no bigger settlements existed in those times,so he must be kind of irish king - one with,let say,2000 subjects.
Now,you could made him lazyg.
Our archeologist are quite sure,that no bigger settlements existed in those times,so he must be kind of irish king - one with,let say,2000 subjects.
Now,you could made him lazyg.
Well things are going pretty well for the two empires but the Huna are making slow progress in S India and the two Turkish Khanates have both had problems with neighbours and are now to be engaged in war between them. That would give the empires time to regroup and expand further, whether against them or other neighbours.
China is still having interesting times although it sounds like the Qi are coming out on top. Japan is seeing success for the imperial dynasty but sounds like some very bloody times ahead. The Britons have pulled through this crisis but with heavy losses and sounds of internal division to come.
China is still having interesting times although it sounds like the Qi are coming out on top. Japan is seeing success for the imperial dynasty but sounds like some very bloody times ahead. The Britons have pulled through this crisis but with heavy losses and sounds of internal division to come.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
So the first clash between the longbows and crossbows goes to the longbows. England, at least the southern part will sure have many castles and walled cities, perhaps even more than OTL, a delight for castle lovers like me. There is also possibility of Romano-British and Angles uniting through dynastic marriages, perhaps after some fratricidal bloodshed.
It always goes that way.Crossbowmen never manage to win against archers with longbows.And they would win against muskets,too - if there were still people who knew how to use them.But,since it need at least 5 years to learn...