So,northern turks get their phyrric victory,ERE decided that they do not need more territory,and WRE is fighting in Africa with good chances to finish off donatists.
China could be united/or not/,but on Suatra we have first real kingdoms.I hope,that they create sea empire,and discover Australia.Fishermans from Java did so before England in OTL,so why not them?
P.S about slavic people - dunno about others,but in Poland we were very prymitive pagans.In 1966 commies try to find some pagans shrines to counter Church,but found only one small in Gniezno,destroyed before Poland was christianed.
588 was a year free of both military and political troubles for the Western Roman Empire, and indeed one with great cause for celebration: the Stilichians were visited by the stork twice in rapid succession. Firstly the Caesar Florianus fathered a third son in the early weeks of August, duly named Constans after his grandfather the incumbent emperor, and days later Otho (ever-striving to catch up to his older brother) and his own wife Juliana welcomed into the world their first child, a girl who they named after her mother. The ecstatic Augustus hosted a chariot race on October 12 (the day of the traditional Augustalia festival, suspended after the Christianization of Rome) with an especially large winner’s purse to celebrate, though in a poor portent that marred an otherwise great year for the imperial family, their favored Red and White teams were defeated early on by the Greens and Blues – these charioteers momentarily set aside their long-time rivalry and worked in concert to eliminate their competition before turning on each other.
South of Rome, the Ephesian Christians of Kumbi began to really flex their muscles with an expedition against Aoudaghost, the nearest Donatist city-state, after more than a decade of back-and-forth harassment. Citing their massacre of a Kumbian caravan returning from the salt mines of Idjil as his specific casus belli, King Bannu led a force of just over 2,000 warriors along the western trade route to Aoudaghost in the autumn months and caught the Berbers of the town by surprise. They had not expected a forceful response of this scale, and a haphazard effort at stopping it around the mountain overlooking their capital was quickly routed.
The Kumbians went on to sack Aoudaghost, killing or enslaving the vast majority of its populace and dragging its riches back home with them, not only for revenge’s sake but in a conscious bid to redirect trade to Biru[1] – another town much closer to Kumbi which was already under Bannu’s power. Other Berber towns to the north which had previously resisted efforts by the Donatist kingdom of Hoggar to incorporate them, most importantly Taghazza, now actively sought the protection of the Hoggari in response to Kumbi’s victory. Bannu, for his part, hurried to fortify Kumbi & Biru and to deepen ties with the Ephesian Moors in expectation of a Hoggari-led punitive expedition sometime in the years to come.
Bannu, first Christian Kaya-Maghan of Kumbi, at the beginning of his campaign against Aoudaghost. Note the crosses carved into the shields of the Soninke warriors, a sign of their increasing conversion to Ephesian Christianity
Beyond the Eastern Roman Empire, where Arcadius II and his cohorts were occupied with reconstruction efforts in Galilee and Mesopotamia, the fate of the Tarim Basin was being decided on the fields of Chorasmia. Illig launched a counterattack early in the year which brought him a ways up the Oxus and all the way to Hazarasp, where Issik had concentrated his own forces for what both sides hoped would be the decisive battle in their fratricidal war. Against Illig’s 24,000 soldiers – a mix of Turks, Persians and Sogdians, plus half a dozen war elephants – stood some 25,000 Northern Turks, a majority of whom were not even Tegreg after years of attrition had worn them down, but rather tribesmen gathered from other subject Turkic peoples such as the Khazars and Karluks.
The Battle of Hazarasp initially went well for the Southern Turks, whose elephants gave their Northern kindred a rude surprise – breaking up the first Northern Turkic charge and felling several of Issik’s tarkhans. However, the Northern Turks rallied and shot the beasts down one-by-one under their Qaghan’s direction: Illig had clearly failed to muster enough of the pachyderms to carry his starting momentum and win the battle outright, and squandered those he did have by committing his elephant corps to the battle almost immediately. Though shaken by this opening engagement, the Northern Turkic cavalry went on to overcome their still-slightly-smaller Southern Turkic counterpart, and dealt a decisive blow when Illig himself was felled by a Tegreg lancer belonging to his brother’s household reserve.
The Southern Turkic infantry largely scattered as word of their Qaghan’s demise spread, and were pursued with great bloodshed by the resurgent Northern Turks. One notable exception was a troop of 500 heavily armored Mazdakist warrior-monks from the Zagros Mountains, who had sworn an oath to achieve victory or die and chained themselves together at the feet to prove their seriousness: unable to retreat and unwilling to break their word, they fought to the last man, and Issik was so impressed by their valor to hold his troops back from mutilating their corpses (which he would later return to the Mazdakites of the Zagros). Regardless of any doomed last-minute heroics however, the Northern Qaghan did stand decisively victorious and proceeded to spend most of 588’s remaining months devastating a now-defenseless Transoxiana, sacking previously-safe cities such as Bukhara, in addition to compelling the surrender of the remaining Southern Turkic garrisons in the Tarim Basin. Only in wintertime did he cease his attacks after Illig’s oldest surviving son and successor, Qutlugh Qaghan, agreed to formally cede these regions to the Northern Turks in full and to set the boundary between their Khaganates at the Oxus – largely because he now had to contend with his brothers, who were challenging him for their father’s throne and driving the defeated Southern Turkic realm toward a full-on implosion.
A Tegreg retainer of Issik's takes aim at the chained Mazdakites making their last stand in the name of the fallen Illig in the final stage of the Battle of Hazarasp
In China, 588 was a year of consolidation. In the north, Emperor Wucheng of Later Han (no doubt having learned a lesson from the near-downfall of Great Qi) continued to prove himself a cunning and prudent ruler by avoiding the temptation to annex Later Zhou immediately or to push his luck against any number of foreign adversaries, from the Koreans to the war-weary Northern Turks, in favor of securing the already impressive gains he had won over the past decade and a half. In the south, the exhausted and battered realm of Chu finally conceded defeat to its Cheng and Yi adversaries, who respectively extended their reach into the fertile Jianghan Plain and expelled the Chu from the Sichuan Basin. However, Emperor Yang of Chu did manage to avoid the destruction of his empire thanks to his peace agreement with Emperor Wenxian of Liang holding: the latter was more interested in cultivating the cultural and economic renaissance taking off in his realm than throwing himself headfirst into another war just five years after reaching an accommodation with the former.
Come 589, the Eastern Roman Emperor Arcadius continued to embark on markedly different policies compared to his predecessor – this time, a reversion to attempts to assert religious uniformity on his half of the Roman Empire, as his great-grandfather Sabbatius had done. From Syria to Egypt the Augustus confiscated churches belonging to Miaphysites & Monophysites and placed them under the care of Ephesian clerics, while new taxes were imposed to refill the imperial coffers after the recent wars with the Avars and the Jewish revolts; taxes which always seemed to be heavier on non-Ephesians’ backs than the orthodox Ephesians. The public celebration of non-Ephesian rites even (nay, especially) on holy days, chiefly Easter and Christmas, also came under official harassment in an effort to drive the heterodox Christians into celebrating exclusively alongside Ephesians. To the non-Ephesian sects, Arcadius’ reign must have appeared as two steps back to the bad old days after the one step forward unto respite they had enjoyed under his more tolerant father.
The riots which this reversion to Sabbatius’ policies provoked among the heterodox did not deter Arcadius, who responded to them with an iron hand while also looking to enforce religious orthodoxy among his nearby vassals. Following the death of their king ‘Amr III this spring, the succession was contested between his sons Al-Aswad and ‘Alqama, with the former prevailing and driving the latter into exile with the Romans a few months later. In Constantinople ‘Alqama pleaded with Arcadius for support in taking the Lakhmid throne, and offered to convert to the Ephesian rite to acquire imperial backing; Al-Aswad had offered to renew Lakhmid allegiance to the Eastern Empire, but drew a line at actually converting to the orthodox Roman Church when it was asked of him, at which point Arcadius agreed to recognize ‘Alqama as the legitimate King and Phylarch[2] of the Banu Lakhm. ‘Alqama married the Ghassanid princess Souzan in July in a bid to reconcile their long-feuding clans, and toward the end of the year he would invade his brother’s kingdom with four Roman legions (4,000 men) and 10,000 warriors provided by the Ghassanids backing his claim.
A Monophysite-led riot in Emesa, Syria
Just east of this half of the Roman world, the Southern Turkic Khaganate continued to disintegrate in the fires of another round of fratricidal fighting, this time between Illig’s sons. Qutlugh Qaghan maintained a hold on southern Persia, centered around Istakhr, with the continued backing of the local Zoroastrian elites; to the west, the Buddhist-inclined Qilibi Qaghan had set himself up in Isfahan to rule over the lands lying between the Alborz Mountains, the eastern reaches of the Zagros and the sands of the Dasht-e Lut; and to the north and east, their younger half-brother Qapaghan Qaghan – an open adherent to Manichaean teachings – ruled the remaining outer rim of Illig’s dominion, from the plains & hills of Khorasan to the Gedrosian desert and the shores of Makran, from Merv. The Mazdakites once more asserted themselves as an independent power in the western and Zagros Mountains, as well. An opportunity to exploit Southern Turkic disunity was lost on the part of the Eastern Romans due to Arcadius’ inward turn, although even if he had not, whether he would have wanted to potentially overextend himself as Sabbatius had is a fair question.
The Northern Turks, meanwhile, were trying to (re)build on the ashes they had won with their costly victory. Issik stood triumphant over his fallen brother, to be sure, but to achieve this outcome he had repeatedly devastated the Tarim Basin and Transoxiana – in other words, the very lands he had just secured for his half of the Turkic empire. Brigands (many of whom were former Turkic soldiers) plagued the caravan routes, the burned-out shells that many of the Tarim’s oasis-cities had been reduced to (sometimes more than once) could hardly provide much of anything in the way of taxes, and all but the most intrepid merchants were reluctant to travel & peddle their goods in these dangerous territories on account of all of the above factors. To restore mercantile confidence in and vitality to the Silk Road, Issik would spend all of 589 and the next several years continuing to ride about the damaged trading routes, exterminating & publicly displaying bandits and returning much of their plunder to their victims (while keeping some of it for himself and his warriors), while also sending diplomatic missions to Constantinople and Luoyang with gifts & news that the fighting had ceased.
The demands of reconstruction, which soon extended past bandit-clearances and to the realm of actively assisting the bloodied native Tocharians in rebuilding their cities, took Issik’s eyes off his non-Tegreg vassals – all the worse for the Tegregs, as the casualties they had incurred over the past decades of war (against both China and their Southern Turk kindred) was swinging their Khaganate’s internal balance of power away from them and toward these other Turks. Peoples such as the Khazars and Karluks were now rapidly building up their own smaller confederations within the greater Northern Turkic Khaganate, absorbing or subordinating lesser tribes and even beginning to independently expand their nomadic domains beyond the Khaganate’s official borders: the Khazars were having the greatest success in this regard, harassing rival Turkic tribes who had long avoided Tegreg domination such as the Bolghars into either submitting to their suzerainty or fleeing for greener, safer pastures elsewhere. With the Tegregs having considerably exsanguinated themselves through their fratricidal infighting and the survivors focused in the south, these increasingly powerful and independent ‘lesser’ Turks in the west began to position themselves to eventually challenge their eastern overlords, and if possible throw their yoke off entirely.
Brigands accosting Sogdian traders almost as soon as they have stopped for water in a Tarim oasis, an all-too-common occurrence along the Silk Road's middle length in the years before Issik Qaghan could fully re-establish order there
When 590 arrived, the first year of the sixth century’s last decade brought with it a major shake-up in Roman-controlled Africa. King Boniface of Altava died this year from drunkenly falling off his horse, paving the way for the Caesar Florianus and Caesarina Dihia to succeed him as the king & queen of the western (and greater) Moorish kingdom on account of the latter being his only child. No sooner had they docked in Iol Caesarea were they informed that Garmul, a regional potentate who was distantly related to Dihia’s family, had raised the standard of rebellion and occupied Altava supposedly to prevent the kingdom from falling under the rule of a woman and a foreign prince, though the pair had repeatedly issued assurances that they would uphold the agreement made between their fathers to keep Altava from being absorbed into the Western Roman Empire and to pass its throne to one of their younger sons when they pass away.
As Dihia was already heavily pregnant by the time they made their journey from Ostia to Iol Caesarea, Florianus remained at his wife’s side for several months to witness the birth of, and then help tend to, their fourth and last son Venantius. This gave Garmul time to organize a defense and root out partisans of the original Altavan royal family in the Atlas Mountains where Roman influence had always been thinnest, but also allowed the Caesar to summon legions and federate reinforcements from other parts of the empire to assist him in pressing his & his wife’s lawful claim. Dihia also did what she could, even while still bedridden, to reach out to the Thevestian Moors and not only re-affirm ties of friendship with them but also secure their assistance in suppressing Garmul’s revolt.
When Garmul did send raiders forth from his mountain bastions to assail the more thoroughly Romanized populations closer to & along the Mediterranean coast, they were thrown back with great force by Florianus, who had amassed a host of 20,000 men – mostly local legionaries and militias, but also five legions (5,000 men) sent from Italy by Constans and contingents supplied by Hermenegild of Gothia and his new Thevestian neighbors. This large Roman army began to move into the mountains toward 590’s end, while the Hoggari to the south were also hurriedly mustering their own armies to take advantage of the opening Garmul’s rebellion had created for them.
Dihia, nominal Queen of Altava following her father's demise (though subject to challenge by her distant kinsman Garmul) and wife of the Caesar Florianus – which also made her key to the Western Romans increasing their control over her kingdom
While the Western Romans were contending with the outbreak of a new rebellion, the Eastern Romans brought the one they were dealing with at this time to an end. Thanks to his much larger army, ‘Alqama defeated his brother Al-Aswad in the field and pursued him to the Lakhmid capital of al-Hirah shortly before the heat of the Arabian summer descended upon all parties. Al-Aswad refused to surrender even when offered leniency and a comfortable exile amid the growing tea-plantations of Pontus, so the Eastern Roman sappers built siegeworks with which their army could storm the city & put him to the sword.
Though ‘Alqama had made it very clear that he wanted his capital & hometown taken with minimal bloodshed, his Ghassanid rivals-turned-‘friends’ had other ideas and started sacking the seat of their ancient enemy after driving Al-Aswad’s men from its walls, while the Roman contingent soon followed out of frustration with the Lakhmid resistance and the scorching weather. Despite ‘Alqama’s efforts to limit the looting, he could not even prevent his allies from pillaging the palace from which he hoped to rule the Lakhmids. And though in the end he stood victorious while Al-Aswad was slain, he was now king of a populace that despised him as an interloper propped up by an oppressive foreign regime (worsened still by Arcadius’ insistence that he fulfill his promise to spread Ephesian Christianity and purge Nestorianism in the Lakhmid kingdom) while being subordinated to an ‘ally’ he really did not care for at this point, yet could not survive without.
Far to the east, the Indo-Romans were beginning to assert their strength as an independent kingdom by exploiting the disintegration of the Southern Turkic Khaganate. King Porphyrus and the elderly Varshasb led their army from Kophen through the sheer mountains of the Caucasus Indicus, first negotiating the defection of Bamiyan (whose Turkic garrison had left to join the army of Qutlugh Qaghan, leaving the town entirely populated & defended by the local Paropamisadae) before splitting up: Porphyrus took 7,000 men north while Varshasb continued westward with 4,000 other warriors. With his army Porphyrus marched to Bactra, one of the few Sogdian cities still loosely controlled by the Southern Turks (in this case it was part of Qapaghan Qaghan’s patrimony), and placed it under siege, while Varshasb did the same with Harev (which had recognized the authority of Qilibi Qaghan).
An Indo-Roman soldier of Porphyrus' army. While his helmet is based on the Roman ridge helm design, the rest of his equipment is clearly derived from local Bactrian smiths
Even further eastward, as tensions cooled in Japan and the various Chinese dynasties and kingdoms took this moment in time to prepare for their next round of hostilities, a new power was rising south of the latter with the indirect assistance of the Liang dynasty. There floated some twenty-five thousand islands, strung out in two massive archipelagos across the Pacific Ocean, home to numerous petty-kingdoms and tribes, some of which had been touched by Indian cultural influences brought by vaishya[3] traders who sought the gold and spices which these isles had in plenty. One of these increasingly ‘Indianized’ kingdoms was Kuntala[4], located on the large island of Sumatra in the western reaches of the southernmost (and larger) of the great Pacific archipelagos, which its Malay inhabitants called ‘Alam Melayu’[5].
By 590, Kuntala was already a fairly prosperous and advanced statelet (especially by the standards of its neighbors), hosting a modest but thriving community of Indian traders and boasting several opulent palaces in addition to both a Gupta-style Hindu temple complex and, in much more recent times, a Huna-style Buddhist monastery. But they took great leaps toward the apex of their power and prominence this year thanks to the intervention of the Liang dynasty, whose Emperor Wenxuan sought to build new trade ties near and far to bring wealth to his dynasty’s war-torn territories. Kuntala’s king Dewawarman, whose very name was an indicator of the Indian influence on his kingdom, welcomed the Chinese embassy (which recorded his kingdom’s name as ‘Kantoli’) and found that what they were offering would lay the groundwork for a most profitable trade agreement.
In exchange for gold, tin, ivory, spices and other raw materials from Sumatra, the Liang would ship high-end goods far beyond the locals’ ability to produce themselves, ranging from porcelain wares to jade jewelry, fine silks and artwork which made Dewawarman weep the first time he saw it. As Dewawarman’s wealth grew, so did his influence over neighboring Sumatran tribes and petty-kings, who were awed by his wealth and sought to involve themselves in trade with China – as well as his ambition. The Kuntalan king in turn would expend some of his newfound riches into building walls around his capital with the aid of Chinese engineers, so as to safeguard said riches from jealous rivals, and would aspire to turn his seat into the entrepôt for Chinese trade in Alam Melayu – or better still, the springboard for a new maritime empire.
A wall carving depicting the arrival of the first Chinese diplomatic mission in Kuntala
591 was a year of continued conflict in Africa, where the Western Caesar was busy taking the fight to Garmul. The Berber insurgents found that they could not defeat Florianus’ large army in open combat following the Battle of Mina[6], where he inflicted a disastrous defeat upon them, after which Garmul switched to a strategy of guerrilla warfare. The Western Romans slowly yet steadily advanced regardless, aided not only by their superior numbers & equipment but also by local sympathizers, who – whether motivated by loyalty to Dihia’s dynasty or (more often) the gifts which the Roman treasury made available to them – helped the Romans navigate the Atlas Mountains or outright joined them against the usurper. The Augustus Constans was reluctant to expend more of his dwindling fortune, having exhausted much of it between his own wars & festivities and buying the loyalty of the Greens & Blues, but Florianus had insisted that bribing the Moors back into line would greatly accelerate his progress against Garmul and the results showed him to be entirely accurate in that assessment.
About halfway through 591 however, both sides’ plans were upset by a Hoggari invasion. Taking advantage of the emptying of the Limes Mauretaniae by Garmul, the Donatist king Takfarin (whose name was translated into Latin as ‘Tacfarinas’, much like the Berber warlord who battled Emperor Tiberius’ legions nearly six hundred years prior) led a host of 12,000 to overcome the token garrisons still left in the Atlas border-forts and advance upon Altava. Caught between two threats he could not possibly defeat, Garmul tried to open negotiations with the one that wouldn’t execute him for treason and offered to become a client of Hoggar’s if they would assist him in winning Altava’s independence from the Western Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for him, Takfarin was about as inclined to compromise as the average Donatist and turned on him as soon as the Hoggari army had made it past the gates of Altava: the invading king personally killed Garmul for being (in his eyes) a heretic as well as a nuisance who had previously helped his distant cousin Boniface fend off Hoggari raids, and sacked the seat of Hoggar’s primary enemy for the past hundred years. Though outraged at the devastation of his wife’s nominal capital, which also represented the furthest the Hoggari had ever gotten against Rome to date, Florianus recognized that this development could actually be turned to his advantage, and together with Dihia he issued (in his capacity as King of Altava jure uxoris) amnesty to those among Garmul’s followers who he hadn’t bribed to join him yet, in exchange for turning their spears and arrows against the hated Donatists. Thus despite continuous harassment by the Hoggari, the Mauro-Roman army was able to slowly but methodically resume its advance from Mina toward Altava as the year drew to a close.
Takfarin of Hoggar about to enter (and sack) Altava
Altava was not the only target of Takfarin’s aggression in 591. The King of Hoggar also dispatched a much smaller army, about a sixth the size of his own, under the leadership of his brother Yattuy to assail Kumbi before they could start thinking about aiding their fellow Ephesians. Aided by the other Donatist Berbers of the Saharan trading cities (most importantly Taghazza and Tamentit), who swelled their numbers to 3,000, Yattuy managed to travel as far as Biru and sack that town – derailing Bannu’s hopes of turning it into a trading hub to replace Aoudaghost – before being repelled by the Ephesian Soninke outside of Kumbi itself exactly a week before Christmas. Undeterred by this defeat, Yattuy spread his remaining troops out to lock down all the Saharan oases he could reach and to prey on caravans leaving Kumbi in an effort to make Bannu and his people suffer.
Meanwhile in the Eastern Empire, Arcadius had found a use for the many thousands upon thousands of Sclaveni who had settled in Thrace while it was under the rule of their previous Avar overlords, and who still posed something of a nuisance to the Greco- and Thraco-Romans trying to return to their grandparents’ homes now. To simultaneously replenish the ranks of his armies and uproot them from Thracian soil, from where a Slavic rebellion could open the Danubian frontier to the Avars once more and menace nearby Constantinople, the Eastern Augustus initiated a huge recruiting drive in this region, promising to allow the Sclaveni warriors’ families to stay in exchange for no less than a decade’s military service.
Some of these Sclaveni (mostly those from already-prominent families) were recruited straight into the legions proper, but most were formed up into separate light & medium infantry units designated as numerii or auxilia Thraeces (Thracian auxiliaries). Since sending them to man the partly-restored Danubian limes would run counter to his intentions behind recruiting them in the first place, Arcadius instead deployed his new Slavic soldiers to the other side of his empire, where they were set about garrisoning the Turkic border and suppressing mounting unrest in Egypt, Syria & Mesopotamia. As the vast majority of the Sclaveni were still pagan, they had no stake in the bloody theological disputes between the Ephesians and rival Christian sects, and proved to be generally reliable and hardy troops as long as they were paid regularly and neither they nor their kin at home were excessively mistreated – besides, it wasn’t as though the Avars were in any shape to come back for them any time soon.
A Thracian Slav auxiliary of Arcadius' army. His possession of a sword and hauberk indicate that he is not a lower-class 'numerus', but one of the wealthier and better-equipped 'Auxilia Thraeces'
On the extreme eastern end of the Roman world, the Indo-Romans started the year with successes at both Bactra and Harev, whose meager garrisons surrendered several weeks apart after depleting their already-low provisions. Porphyrus was fortunate in that Qapaghan Qaghan was physically cut off from reinforcing Bactra by the Northern Turks’ Transoxianan conquests and thus did not respond to him at all, instead focusing entirely on the war against Qilibi Qaghan to the west (from whom he would capture Nishapur this year). However, Varshasb had less luck against Qilibi, who did send an army to retake Harev (which the Romans called by its ancient Macedonian name, Alexandria Ariana) and soon placed him under siege there.
While his son-in-law squandered time in snapping up the remaining Southern Turkic possessions to the north, finishing with Drapsaka in September, a disease outbreak killed Varshasb and decimated his men in the south, after which Qilibi’s Turks retook Alexandria Ariana and put the survivors there to the sword. Porphyrus had little choice but to hurry back to Kophen and organize a defense of his mountain kingdom against the Southern Turks of Qilibi Qaghan, who now sought to erase the impudent Indo-Romans off the map for pestering him & forcing him to divert resources against them at a time when he would rather be concentrating entirely on combating his brothers.
Beyond the lands of the Romans and Turks alike, Emperor Wucheng of Later Han finally made his move against his ally-turned-client-state, the Later Zhou, in mid-summer of 591. He invited their Emperor Xianzong to a week-long festival in Luoyang to celebrate the birth of his newest grandson (and the latter’s nephew), Prince Chengyou, only to get him drunk enough to pass out at the last day’s banquet and take him hostage. Xianzong was compelled to abdicate to Crown Prince Hao Jian, his brother-in-law and Wucheng’s heir, who ‘held’ the crown of Later Zhou long enough for a sham coronation before handing it off to his father. Wucheng duly gave Jian the title of Prince of Zhou and also granted Xianzong (now just Han Xizai once more) the honorary title of Prince of Zhao & a comfortable estate on the northern banks of the Huai, far away from the core Later Zhou territory, for his rapid submission.
Wucheng’s bloodless victory, though long expected by all (except it seems the former Emperor Xianzong himself), put the Great Qi in a dire position. The Later Han now ruled nearly all of northern China, and only they stood in the way of Wucheng’s complete dominion over all Chinese territory north of the Yangtze River. Knowing that further conflict was an inevitability, Emperor Mingyuan of Great Qi heeded the counsel of his advisors to launch a pre-emptive attack on the Later Han while they were still securing their rule over the Later Zhou lands in the distant northwest, in the hopes that they could catch the Han off-balance and at least secure enough territory to even the odds between the two dynasties. Thus did war erupt in northern China once more after a few years had passed for the various combatants to catch their breath, with Qi troops surging across the Huai while Wucheng marshaled his armies around Luoyang to respond to this incursion – and, he hoped, to defeat the Qi once & for all, thereby completing the unification of at least northern China before he died of old age.
Xianzong of Later Zhou kowtowing to Wucheng of Later Han, uniting their realms and affirming the latter as the most powerful ruler in northern China as the sixth century approaches its end
Past the shattered Middle Kingdom, two of the petty-kingdoms of Korea were back at each other’s throats. Frustrated by their earlier defeat at the hands of Baekje and still coveting the fertile Han River valley, Silla launched an attack on their western neighbor just as the spring of 591 was ending. The first battles of this latest Baekje-Silla War went Silla’s way, compelling King Heon of Baekje to once more appeal to his traditional allies in Japan for help. Of the two Ōomi who ruled Japan in all but name Yamanoue no Mahito was eager for a Japanese return to Korea so that he might aid his Buddhist co-religionist and patron, while the Shintoist Kose no Kamatari was more indifferent to Baekje’s plight.
In the end Yamanoue agreed to go alone, while Kose would remain in Asuka to ‘hold the fort’ and keep Japan well under the diarchy’s control. In this first test for their gōzoku system, Yamanoue was only able to call up a modest force of 3,500 warriors (almost entirely drawn from his domains and those of his allies) and relied on the Baekje fleet to transport them over the Korean Strait. Unfortunately for the Buddhist half of the Ōomi regime, not many of the gōzoku (especially the ones who held to Shintoist ways) had any particular interest in Korea which would motivate them to fight there, requiring Yamanoue to compel them to do so in his capacity as their overlord.
It seems like China might be lurching towards unity again, with it seems like no great threat to their north as a weakened Northern Turkic state falters and has increasing problems keeping some its more powerful subjects in order after it's pyrrhic victory over its southern kin.
The empires continue to go from strength to strength as neighbours are weakened. In the west the Donatist, caught between two sets of enemies and with far less resources are likely to be crushed while in the east the intolerance of the new emperor and the steady decline of other sects under persecution makes it look like Ephesian dominance will become pretty much total.
The Western Roman Empire remained focused on their intensifying African war throughout 592. While Otho celebrated the birth of his son Julianus in Rome itself, his brother continued to lead the Roman army against Hoggar’s forces across the Atlas Mountains and the coast of Mauretania – a more difficult endeavor than his earlier war against Garmul, for the Donatists were fiercely motivated fighters who battled to the last man for every mountainside village and Atlasian pass. While he took advantage of the rough terrain to hold off the lumbering Roman advance with a fraction of his forces, Takfarin massed the rest of his men for a dramatic breakout from the mountains toward spring’s end and captured Siga[1] on the shoreline at the climax of his advance.
However, with this victory Takfarin exposed himself to Roman counterattacks outside the favorable ground in the mountains, and Florianus was quick to call on Hermenegild of the Visigoths to cross the Pillars of Hercules & assist in setting up a pincer-trap for the Berber invaders. It took the Romans several months to redeploy their army and for the Visigoths to land in force in western Mauretania, during which Takfarin devastated as much of the Mauretanian coast as he could and shipped the plunder and slaves (for the Donatists, not recognizing Ephesians or indeed anyone else as true Christians, believed the local Moors were fair game for their slave markets) back toward Hoggar through the western Atlas mountain-passes which he still controlled. However, he failed to either stop Hermenegild from landing at all – he sent a 4,000-strong detachment to secure Tingis[2] ahead of the Visigoths’ arrival, but the garrison was able to hold out until Hermenegild’s landing compelled the Hoggari to retreat – or to keep Florianus from marching the bulk of his army out of the Atlas Mountains, as their greater numbers, discipline and heavy equipment allowed them to weather multiple Hoggari attempts to attack & knock them off-balance.
As the two armies closed in on Takfarin, he reordered his host for a frantic assault on Florianus’ legions before they could unite with Hermenegild and stomp him flat between them. At the Battle of Portus Divinus[3] the Hoggari fought ferociously, but they could not halt the relentless advance of the well-armored legionaries nor their equally fanatical and vengeful Moorish auxiliaries (who together outnumbered the men of Hoggar by a comfortable margin – 16,000 to about 9,000), and Takfarin ordered a retreat after having to break off a desperate charge against the Western Caesar’s position in the face of his valorous bodyguards and the bolts of his crossbowmen. The Hoggari fell back into the western Atlas Mountains, struggling to raze & torch as much of Mauretania Caesariensis as they went and enduring continued harassment from the Altavan light cavalry in Florianus’ service in the process, while Florianus united his host with Hermenegild’s in preparation for scouring the mountains clean of the Hoggari and of Donatism once & for all.
A loyalist Altavan nobleman, attendant and lower-class foot skirmisher. Men such as these would have comprised a large part of Florianus' army as they took the fight to the Hoggari
Off in the distant east, in a mirror to the Western Empire’s conflict with the Berbers, the Indo-Romans were ironically waging an asymmetrical war against a superior enemy themselves. Like Takfarin was doing against his distant kindred, Porphyrus had dispersed elements of his army across the mountains of western Bactria, trying with all his might to wear down the oncoming Southern Turkic army with needling jabs in the form of constant hit-and-run skirmishes concentrated against their vanguard and supply line. Unlike Takfarin, he had the good fortune to be facing a much less organized and energized enemy with less local support than Florianus’ legions, and the Southern Turks – already exhausted from their earlier defeat by their own wayward cousins and ongoing civil war – faltered more quickly in the face of this strategy. When the Indo-Romans made their stand at the Battle of Turquoise Mountain[4], they overcame the much-weakened Turkic host and routed them back toward Alexandria Ariana, which Porphyrus now besieged once more.
Further still to the east, the Great Qi made considerable progress early on against the Later Han, who still needed time to concentrate the bulk of their armies (dispersed over their northern and especially northwestern lands) onto the Central Plains of China. Both banks of the Huai River had fallen under Qi control by the end of spring, and Qi hosts had captured both the ancient capital of Chang’an in the west and the bustling market town of Kaifeng in the east by summer’s end. However, Emperor Wucheng was able to rally sufficient forces to defend his capital of Luoyang from a two-pronged Qi attack at the start of September and stabilize his position, after which he began to mount counterattacks against his rival Mingyuan’s overextended armies in a great effort to push them from the Yellow River.
In Korea, the arrival of Yamanoue no Mahito’s army proved a welcome boon to the flagging Baekje, which had been on the verge of losing the entirety of the Han River valley to Silla prior to their coming. Together with the Japanese, King Heon was able to prevail at the Battle of Hanseong[5] after which they began to drive the Silla army out of Baekje, and by the end of 592 they had begun to push into Silla territory themselves. Following another defeat in the Battle of the Donggang River that autumn, King Dongryun of Silla appealed to his northern neighbor Goguryeo for aid, offering to split the Han River’s course with the latter and claiming that the Yamato were looking to conquer all of Korea through Baekje (which he further characterized as a Japanese puppet). Yeongyang of Goguryeo was up for the fight, believing that the Baekje-Japanese alliance should be a pushover compared to the Chinese who previously nearly overran his entire kingdom before he drove them out, but he certainly was not thinking of sharing any spoils with Silla even as his army began to cross the Imjin River to aid them.
A Baekje warrior of King Heon's army. Though Baekje metallurgical techniques greatly influenced Japan's smiths, the Yamato left their own influences on their allies in the exchange, as can be seen in this man's helmet
593 saw continued Western Roman progress in the Atlas Mountains, although the terrain and dogged Hoggari resistance ensured that it would be slow and grinding. Their greatest success came in the Battle of Aquae Sirenses[6], where Takfarin’s men made a major attempt to stop their advance amid the town’s devastated baths and nearby hills. Florianus led his Italic and Afro-Roman legions to crush the Berbers in the town ruins in a straightforward battle, while leaving the Visigoths and Altavan auxiliaries to contain the men in the hills until after he had put the bulk of Takfarin’s army to flight: he then drew them out of their positions by having the federate troops execute a feigned retreat following an inevitably-failed attack on their defenses, after which the Caesar led his reordered caballarii in a devastating charge to rout them.
While their Western Roman allies far to the north were slogging through the Atlas Mountains, across the Saharan caravan routes Bannu and the men of Kumbi were waging their own, much more difficult struggle against the Berbers of Hoggar. Dividing his own army up into small detachments to try to counter Yattuy’s raiders had proven to be a losing strategy for the king of Kumbi, for his warriors were mostly footmen and thus less mobile than their nimble & mounted Hoggari adversaries, so this year he pulled his men back together and launched a concentrated counterattack against the Berbers occupying Biru instead.
The following battle went well for the Soninke, but Yattuy and his troops simply fled on horseback once they saw the tide turning against them while most of Bannu’s men were unable to follow, and Bannu wisely forbade his few horsemen from pursuing the Berbers far out of fear that they would simply turn around and destroy the now-outnumbered Soninke riders once they were far enough from Biru. An attempted offensive targeting distant Taghazza failed to even get halfway to its destination, as Yattuy’s own horsemen relentlessly harassed the Soninke host every day they spent walking on the northward caravan road and disappeared back into the Saharan sands before a proper counterattack could be mounted against them, until finally the exasperated Kaya-Maghan of Kumbi ordered his army to turn back and defend what they had already retaken before he lost too many warriors to Berber arrows or thirst.
Hoggari Berbers launching a hit-and-run attack on the men of Kumbi in the sands of the Sahara
In Central Asia, the Indo-Romans recaptured Alexandria Ariana after its already rather weak Turkic garrison was, ironically, devastated by a disease outbreak much like Varshasb and his army had been before them. The bigger picture of the conflict favored Porphyrus’ kingdom as well, as Qilibi Qaghan had clearly not sent enough men to try to crush him but did send more than he could afford to lose: he was now certainly on the losing end of his war against his brothers, as Qapaghan Qaghan advanced to Sarakhs this year while Qutlugh Qaghan attacked from the south to occupy Yazd and Arrajan, threatening his own capital at Esfahan from the south and east. Porphyrus accordingly took advantage of the middle Turkic brother’s predicament to launch a renewed drive into his fringe territories to the east, leaving the Paropamisus Mountains behind to capture Marwarudh[7] to the north and Taybad & Pashang[8] to the west.
Well beyond the mountain homes of the Paropamisadae, the war in northern China continued to grow in intensity as Emperor Wucheng of Later Han pressed his new advantage against the Great Qi. By far the greatest victory of the Han forces was won in mid-spring: the Battle of Xuchang-Luohe, actually two battles which are nevertheless often counted as one due to being fought at different points on the same day and the close proximity of their respective battlefields to one another. Here around the capital of Cao Cao and his heirs the Cao Wei, Wucheng led his host of 60,000 to victory over two smaller Qi armies (the first of 45,000 at Xuchang, and a reinforcing 25,000-strong force at Luohe immediately to the south a few hours later) before they could merge, dealing a severe blow to Mingyuan’s strength and forcing the remaining Qi forces between & along the Hong and Quan tributaries of the Huai River into a precipitous retreat.
Wucheng was determined not to give his opponents any chance to rest & reorganize, and pushed his sons and generals hard to pursue the Qi back to the Huai. For this the Han were dealt an embarrassing reverse at the Battle of Bozhou in late June, where the Han general Liu Tong was killed and his 18,000 troops routed after launching an over-bold attack on Emperor Mingyuan’s 40,000-strong army rather than pull back to regroup with Crown Prince Hao Jian as the latter had commanded him to. Mingyuan went on to consolidate his previously-scattered armies and establish a defensive line of sorts from the eastern bank of the Quan River to the lower Guo & Hui, stretching to (and anchored by) Lake Hongze to the east. In response, Wucheng sent Hao Jian to cross through the Dabie Mountains and over the upper Huai River in wintertime with 50,000 men so that they might circumvent Mingyuan’s defenses north of and on the Huai – a task made difficult by the rough terrain of those forested mountains, the snowfall and the heavy sheets of seasonal freezing rain which lashed the Han soldiers as they marched.
Hao Jian's army on their arduous march through the Dabie Mountains in the winter of 593
Meanwhile in the Korean peninsula, the Goguryeo attack did not come as a total surprise for the Baekje-Yamato alliance, but they had failed to fully prepare for it anyway: Yeongyang stormed over the Imjin River during winter when both Heon of Baekje and Yamanoue no Mahito were expecting an attack in the spring. The Japanese-supported Baekje counterattacks came in a disorganized and piecemeal fashion, allowing Goguryeo to crush their scattered detachments in detail than have to face one or two large concentrated armies south of the Imjin, and Dongryun of Silla also took the chance to counterattack in a bid to drive his adversaries out of his kingdom & the upper reaches of the Han River.
Baekje was driven out of the Han River valley altogether by summer’s end, and Heon & Yamanoue incurred great losses in stopping the unified Goguryeo-Silla onslaught in the Battle of Choryong Pass[9] on August 28 this year. Yamanoue had played a part in preventing Baekje from being totally overrun by its enemies, but now neither he nor Heon had the manpower to go back on the offensive and reconquer the lost northern half of the Korean kingdom. Since it would have been a disgrace for Baekje to lose so much more territory than just the Han River valley, and their defeat would bring shame to Yamanoue’s name as well, he appealed to Kose no Kamatari for additional assistance as 593 drew to a close, though it was all but certain that even if Kose would entangle his half of Japan in this Korean war he’d certainly crave considerable concessions at home from Yamanoue’s faction in return.
The summer of 594 finally brought the Western Romans to Altava’s gates. Takfarin had continued to slow their advance throughout the spring months with traps, ambushes and hit-and-run skirmishes, and used the time those tactics bought him to repair the mountain city’s fortifications to the best of his ability. Against the walls and surrounding mountains which protected his wife’s rightful capital, Florianus in turn deployed the power of Roman engineering, assembling not only battering rams and siege towers around Altava itself but also ordering the construction of siege engines in distant Iol Caesarea, which then had to be carefully brought through the Atlas Mountains and guarded against the attacks of stay-behind elements of the Hoggari army which continued to cause trouble in those passes.
It took the rest of the year for all the pieces to fall into place for Florianus, but when they did, there was little Takfarin could do to stop him from retaking Altava after all these years. The Western Caesar had not been sitting idle as he waited for his onagers and ballistae to be brought to him, but actively contested the hilltops and mountains around his target: slowly but surely, the more numerous and better armed Romans wrested these strategic positions away from Takfarin’s Berbers over the weeks and months. Despite the efforts of the Donatists in the countryside, more than half of the heavy siege weapons Florianus had commissioned finally reached his camp in the first week of December, and he immediately had them positioned on hill-top or mountainside vantage points from where they could effectively reduce Takfarin’s fortifications.
Since the men of Hoggar responded to a final Roman demand for their capitulation by riddling the Caesar’s envoy with arrows, Florianus ordered the assault to begin on December 22 of this year and for no prisoners to be taken. Though the Hoggari were able to destroy one Roman ram with oil & flame and neutralize the other with a successful sally, the Western Roman onagers flung boulders to breach Altava’s walls while the ballistae cleared them of Berber warriors with their bolts, and those defenses which were not reduced to rubble were scaled by the legionaries in siege towers. A third ram succeeded where the first failed and broke open the main gate shortly after midnight on the 23rd, after which the rest of the Roman army poured in and set about annihilating the Hoggari defenders, although it took them until the evening of the 24th to eliminate the last pockets of fanatical resistance in furious house-to-house fighting.
Roman artillery pummeling Takfarin's warriors in Altava from their vantage points outside the city
Despite having sustained severe casualties (of the nearly 30,000 Romans, Goths and Moors who besieged Altava, a fifth were killed or injured to the point where they wouldn’t be able to fight again for months or even ever in this assault), the Western Romans had won a decisive victory, completely wiping out the defending Hoggari army and allowing Florianus to return his wife’s capital (burnt out as it may have been) to her as a Christmas gift. Although the Romans discovered that the Donatists had tried to dig an escape tunnel leading out of the city in the months leading up to the final assault, Takfarin never used it himself and was instead found lying among the dead, felled by a plumbata and multiple sword-strokes on the steps of Altava’s church: Florianus had to concede that in the end, he was no coward or hypocrite, even as he had the Berber king’s corpse put on display. (Besides, Takfarin must have known that if he had fled and managed to survive all the way back to Hoggar, the Donatist elders would surely have declared him a lapsus[10] for such an outrageous act of cowardice.)
Thus were the Donatists finally driven out of their last major strongholds in Roman Africa (although they still had control of several of the forts on the Limes Mauretaniae), this time – the Western Romans and their Moorish subjects hoped – for good. Yet, the war was not over, for the victorious Caesar was determined to now destroy the threat they posed once and for all by driving on to its source in Hoggar and obliterating the enemy kingdom which had troubled his people for almost two centuries. Yattuy had succeeded his brother there and pledged to continue fighting to the last man, terms which Florianus found absolutely acceptable.
Far away in the orient, Qilibi Qaghan was finally defeated by his brothers in the first six months of this year, his domain extinguished and partitioned between them: the middle son of Illig Qaghan himself was slain in a final battle with his senior, Qutlugh Qaghan, a day’s ride south of Esfahan, which immediately capitulated to the latter after its remaining defenders were shown their former overlord’s body. Qutlugh absorbed the southern and western parts of Qilibi’s central Persian realm, while the north and east (including the ports on the Gedrosian shore) was taken over by their last remaining brother Qapaghan. Porphyrus and the Indo-Romans raced to grab as much of Qilibi’s easternmost territories as they could in the first few weeks after his death, and managed to push as far as Zarang, Zabol and Phrada[11] before Qapaghan’s fist came down. As he had already offended Qapaghan by seizing Bactra years before and now shared a land border with him, Porphyrus naturally sought an alliance with Qutlugh to keep the youngest of Illig’s sons at bay.
Porphyrus and his Paropamisadae wife, Parwane, treating with Qutulugh's envoy in the recently-recaptured Alexandria Ariana
In the furthest east, while Yamanoue no Mahito continued to plead for reinforcements for home and the Japanese and Baekje forces in Korea were increasingly pushed toward the peninsula’s southwestern corner, the war in northern China was headed for a turning point. Hao Jian had made his way through the Dabie range despite the poor conditions and descended from Mount Jigong in spring, having lost thousands of men in his arduous march – but not nearly enough to cripple his host, which made their presence south of the Huai known by seizing Xinyang and clearing a path on the Huai River’s southern banks for the reinforcements Emperor Wucheng was sending.
This development sent the Qi court into a panic, for Hao Jian was now in position to bypass their defenses along the Huai, and resources were hastily amassed for a major counterattack in the hopes of pinning and crushing the Crown Prince’s army before more of his father’s troops could join him. The First and Second Battles of Xinyang followed: against 80,000 and then 90,000 Qi soldiers, Hao Jian dug in and held his ground in both the spring and summer of 594, aided in-between the battles by a trickle of supplies and reinforcements from over the Huai. Wucheng meanwhile did not send him more than 15,000 new soldiers, instead concentrating the bulk of his strength into a series of attacks on the Qi forces still north of the Huai, while his rival Mingyuan saw the writing on the wall after his generals’ defeat in the First Battle of Xinyang and began to withdraw southward over the river from mid-spring onward.
In the end, Hao Jian’s victories firmly shifted the tide of this war in Later Han’s favor. The Great Qi were able to avoid an early encirclement and annihilation by committing to a major second attack on Xinyang, which kept his army bottled up by the Huai’s upper banks and prevented him from simply pushing east to cut off their route of retreat and destroy the battered & disorganized troops who had managed to make it over the river. However, the Qi had also now lost all of their initial conquests and the Han had a foothold beyond the Huai, allowing them to advance on two axes: Emperor Wucheng would surely attack all along the river while his heir pressured the Qi’s western flank. Since the Qi’s strongest defenses were along or directly beyond the Huai, once those were overcome by this inevitable two-pronged offensive, there would be little left to stop the Han from pushing all the way up to their capital at Jiankang. In Wucheng’s estimation, his victory was now just a matter of time and bloodshed.
The Later Han army bound their own wagons together to create an impromptu field fortification with which to hold back the Great Qi attack in the First Battle of Xinyang, 594
Early in 595, Florianus was marshaling reinforcements and resources for a punitive expedition into the heart of Hoggar when disaster struck the Western Roman Empire. Amid the chilly April downpours, Rome itself was struck down by an outbreak of disease: not the bubonic plague again, fortunately for the Roman citizenry and everyone living around the Mediterranean in general, but rather typhoid fever. Among the casualties were Florianus’ father Constans and eldest son Romanus, both of whom perished despite the imperial household physicians’ efforts to cure them with ice-baths and cold compresses (inspired by records of how Antonius Musa once cured Augustus of the same illness nearly six centuries prior).
The Western Roman offensive against Hoggar had to be put on pause as Florianus hurried home for his coronation, for not only did he have to mourn his father and son, but he was also concerned that his brother Otho might be plotting to seize his rightful throne from him. His worries were justified – Otho did not dare to openly claim the purple himself (at least not yet), but instead worked through Green-affiliated Senators to lobby for his claim in a roundabout fashion, and was also quietly assured of the support of his childhood mentor Pope Anastasius II, who remained conspicuously silent on the matter of the succession and whether he would crown Florianus Augustus. On the other hand, Florianus secured the support of Patriarch Marius of Carthage (who had recently succeeded Samaritanus, and greatly approved of Florianus’ commitment to finishing off Hoggar) before sailing from that great city, and was backed at home by their mother Verina as well as a faction of loyal Senators and Scholares.
Florianus arrived in Ostia on July 21 to find that, to his great relief, Otho had yet to become emperor. His presence in Rome galvanized his supporters and discouraged those of his brother, who were getting dangerously close to hatching a coup against Verina as she tried to maintain order in the Eternal City and keep its gates open to her eldest son. Not even a week after his arrival Florianus was informed by Martinus, the tribune of the Scholae Palatinae still in the city, that the Senators Petronius Probianus and Anicius Rufinus (a second cousin of Otho’s wife Anicia Juliana) tried to bribe him into supporting their scheme to overthrow Verina & the civil government. Moreover, Genobaudes was concerned that the younger of Constans II’s sons was too close to the Greens, and so instructed the Blue partisans in Rome not to lend him any support at this time.
The rightful new emperor ordered Martinus to arrest Probianus and Rufinus, and also to bring his brother before him. Otho vehemently denied any connection to the pair, claiming that they were rogue Senators acting entirely on their own initiative and that he had no plan to usurp the throne; still Florianus was not convinced, in part because Probianus and Rufinus protested against this attempt to throw them beneath the chariot of imperial justice and denounced him as the conspiracy’s true mastermind, and would have killed him on the spot but for the intervention of the empress dowager. Verina’s tearful entreaty to keep her sons from shedding each other’s blood gave Otho a stay of execution, for Florianus agreed to commit him to house arrest in Ravenna rather than follow in the footsteps of Caracalla and kill him in their mother’s arms, although the decision went against his instincts and he privately feared he would regret this instance of clemency in the future. Pope Anastasius went along with the flow and crowned Florianus & Dihia Augustus & Augusta a month later, with the full approval of the Senate – minus Probianus and Rufinus, who were found guilty of treason and executed alongside a few others they had implicated under torture, and an especially foolish peer named Phoebus Infortunus who managed to alienate both camps by recommending that Florianus and Otho divide the West and rule as co-emperors.
Verina protecting Otho from Florianus' wrath
Florianus II’s distractions, first with fending off his brother’s prying claws in the rush for the purple and then with arranging his new Caesar Constantine’s betrothal to the Eastern Emperor Arcadius’ daughter Anastasia in place of the now-dead Romanus, gave Yattuy some breathing room in Hoggar. Having been warned by his scouts and stragglers from Takfarin’s army that the Romans and their various allies remained on guard under the overall leadership of Hermenegild, Yattuy used this valuable time to strengthen his grip on the captured border-forts of the Limes Mauretaniae and prepare his people to defend his kingdom of mountains & deserts, determined to make the Romans pay for every grain of sand with blood. As Yattuy’s orders to concentrate the Hoggari armies in the Hoggar Mountains required them to leave the distant south, Bannu and the Kumbians enjoyed a respite from constant Berber harassment late this year, and marshaled another expedition of their own to seize Aoudaghost for good sometime in the next.
To the east, Qutlugh and Porphyrus had just agreed to an alliance against Qapaghan when the latter burst through his oldest brother’s new borders, aggressively pushing to Qumis[12] & Ardestan over the spring & summer before being halted by the Alborz and Karkas Mountains. Both brothers had also made overtures to the militant Mazdakites of the northwest, but in the summer of 594 they finally chose to favor the seemingly victorious Qapaghan. Unfortunately for the Qaghan they didn’t pick, their numbers and martial might outweighed the commitment of the Indo-Romans.
With Qapaghan’s horde and the Mazdakites closing in on Esfahan while Porphyrus besieged Dozzaab[13] but lacked the strength to truly distract the former, Qutlugh dared turn to Arcadius for aid. The Eastern Roman Emperor was intrigued by the possibility of creating a friendly Turkic client state to serve as a buffer against their much less friendly cousins further to the east & north, but preferred to focus on internal developments & the suppression of heterodoxy. Ultimately he decided to outfit Sapor with an army of 15,000 to bolster Qutlugh’s position, but would wait a year before dispatching these men – both to give himself and Sapor time to repress a Nestorian uprising in Hulwan, and to let Qutlugh bleed a bit more so that he really would be in no position to rebuff Roman demands once they came in to save him, in spite of the risk posed by the speed and ferocity with which Qapaghan was advancing.
Further still eastward, while the Later Han had begun their slow but steady push across & around the Huai against the Great Qi, the war in Korea was experiencing a dramatic turnaround. Kose no Kamatari had agreed to support his brother-in-law and co-regent after the latter capitulated to his demands, allowing him to exclusively appoint his allies to new ministries & court positions and to restrict Buddhism to a few select provinces in the western shoreline of Honshu. By late summertime Heon and Yamanoue were pinned down in the Honam[14] region, having lost even the Baekje capital of Ungjin[15] to the combined strength of Silla and Goguryeo, and were then besieged in Gwangju.
A Baekje delegation presents Kose no Kamatari with gifts for finally arriving in Korea to rescue them, and not a moment too soon at that
It was then that Kose arrived to their rescue, landing with some 13,000 Yamato warriors on the Yellow Sea coast[16] and sweeping southeastward to attack the allied Silla-Goguryeo armies from behind. The northern and eastern Koreans were taken by surprise, and routed with great loss between Kose’s host and the sallying Baekje-Japanese defenders of Gwangju: kings Yeongyang and Dongryun were both among the allied dead. It would be no exaggeration to say that this more forceful Japanese intervention had reversed the course of the war almost overnight, putting Baekje back in position to go on the offensive while leaving their adversaries reeling.
Far to the south, Kuntala was beginning to flex its Chinese-enriched muscles against its neighbors. With his newfound wealth Dewawarman had no trouble recruiting mercenaries from as far as Funan, after which he turned his expanded army against rival petty-kingdoms on both sides of the Melayu Straits[17]. Kuntalan warriors subjugated the kings and tribes of Jambi to the north, then crossed the straits to bring the Lingga islands to heel and end 595 by conquering Kedah, compelling the ruler of that port city to do obeisance before Dewawarman and pay him tribute. Not only did Kedah give the Kuntalans a safe and prosperous trading port with which they could secure control over the Melayu Straits, but it would also serve as a foothold on the Malay Peninsula and a launching pad for further expeditions against stronger regional rivals to the east and north – Kelantan and Langkasuka, Dewawarman’s next and most natural targets for continued expansion.
Kuntalan laborers building a new ship for Dewawarman, one (among many more) that will sail abroad not to trade but to conquer
[4] The former site of Firozkoh, near Chaghcharan.
[5] Seoul.
[6] Bou Hanifia.
[7] Marw al-Rudh.
[8] Now Deh-e Pashtak.
[9] Near Chungju.
[10] ‘Lapsed’ – originally a term for Christians who renounced their faith under Roman persecution but later returned to the Church. Although the majority of Christians forgave them & welcomed them back, the Donatists considered them to be absolutely unforgivable, and the readmission of these apostates into the Church formed the root of their schism away from the orthodox Christians in the first place. By this point, to be denounced as one of the lapsi in Donatist Africa would have been tantamount to being excommunicated and outlawed: in Takfarin’s case, for such a calamitous failure capped off with the cowardly abandonment of his men, he would have been considered no better than a traditor (the worst category of lapsi) who gave up the scriptures and his fellow Christians to Roman hands.
[11] Farah, Afghanistan.
[12] Near Damghan.
[13] Zahedan.
[14] An ancient term for southwestern Korea – now divided into North & South Jeolla provinces, as well as the city of Gwangju.
Donatist would live longer,but,as pelagians in Britain,they are doomed.Unless....take camels,go through Sahara,and made kingdom there.
Just like pelagians could go to America.
Which is good idea for dealing with Otho - send him there with,let say,500 soldiers to rule as Emperor hand there.
Another thing - there is interesting Manga about japaneese archeology,with one or more interesting theory per chapter.
Here,chapter with 2 theories -
1.First - Hitsuji Tayuu who come from Persia to manufacture copper in 8th century was christian.
2.Hata clan who wcome to Japan in 5th century was jewish christians.
Not solid proofs,but still interesting.And @Circle of Willis could use it anyway:
For the newly enthroned Florianus II, 596 was a year in which his African adventure had to be suspended in favor of the continued consolidation of his position and the arrangement of strategic marriages for his three remaining sons. Aside from forcefully impressing upon the Senate and Pope Anastasius that their wavering loyalties may be forgiven but would not be forgotten and certainly would never again be tolerated in the future, the Augustus of the West also finalized his Caesar Constantine’s betrothal to the Eastern Roman princess Anastasia; set up the betrothal of his third son Constans to the Visigoth Adonsida, daughter of Hermenegild; and finally arranged his youngest son Venantius to marry Thiyya (whose name was Latinized as Tia) of Theveste, and for him to be brought up alongside his betrothed at the Thevestian court at Arris.
Florianus’ primary intention with these marriages was to strengthen his ties to the Eastern Empire and the federate kingdoms, in particular not only befriending Hermenegild but also hopefully driving a wedge between him and his Ostrogoth cousins in the Green camp (who he still heavily distrusted following the collapse of the Anicii plot to enthrone his brother). However, he also harbored a secondary intention: enabling his younger sons to subvert said federate kingdoms and bring them under imperial control by supplanting their native barbarian dynasties with Stilichian cadet branches. This would be his way of building on and extending his father’s (admittedly more subtle and much more gradual) plans to re-centralize the Western Roman Empire.
Now the emperor expected this to be much more easily done with Theveste, for the blood of the Silingi Vandal kings was wearing thin there just like that of their kindred in Altava and young Tia was the sole child & heiress of her father Iaudas. Once he passed away, Theveste would fall first under a Stilichian-aligned queen regnant and then, hopefully, become part of the greater Stilichian patrimony in Africa under her children with Venantius, as was happening with Altava under Dihia and himself. The two of them jointly agreed that Venantius should succeed the former as the King of Altava once she passed on, which meant that if he in turn had at least one son with Tia, all of Moorish Africa would be reunited under a Stilichian king – a most fitting outcome in Florianus’ eyes, that the Romano-Vandalic Stilichians should eventually come to directly rule over all the kingdoms populated by the descendants of their people. Visigothia would be a tougher nut to crack, as Hermenegild already had two sons who were approaching maturity, but the Emperor was confident he could sideline or otherwise permanently deal with them at some point in the future and clear the way for Constans, too, to bring all Hispania back under full imperial control.
Emperor Florianus discusses his future designs with Constans, while his wife Dihia takes up the attention of her new auburn-haired daughter-in-law Adosinda
The Augustus also had to fret about his northern federates in his first and rather busy first year in power. The old Frankish king Childeric II died in September of this year, and once again his kingdom was set to be partitioned between his heirs. His oldest son Chilperic had already predeceased him, so his younger son Chlothar claimed the entirety of the Frankish kingdom; however Chilperic’s son Clovis contested his uncle’s claim, and demanded part of his grandfather’s dominion in his late father’s stead. The Dux Germaniae Genobaudes favored Chlothar, who had fought at his side as first a legionary commander and a leader of autonomous Frankish contingents for decades, but Florianus preferred to keep Francia as divided as possible and considered cultivating Clovis to serve as a counterweight against the Blues, loyal only to the Stilichians.
Consequently the Western Emperor appeased Genobaudes by finally appointing him to the office of magister utriusque militiae which he had been coveting for almost as long as he had been Chlothar’s friend, in exchange for talking (and bribing) Chlothar into accepting only half of the Frankish kingdom. Francia was again divided in twain, this time along the Samara[1] River and the upper reaches of the Esia[2]: Chlothar would rule the eastern kingdom of ‘Austrasia’ from Noviodunum, while Clovis II was given the western half or ‘Neustria’ to govern from Lutetia. The partition was shaky from the start – Chlothar attempted to poison his nephew before the year was even over, and Clovis retaliated by having assassins disguised as brigands try to waylay Chlothar the week after Christmas – but similar to his sentiments on Hispania, Florianus believed he had secured a lid on the potential of a Frankish civil war which would devastate northern Gaul and could now afford to turn his eyes away from that region.
And where would he cast his gaze now, but the African theater? Florianus authorized Hermenegild to finally begin the invasion of Hoggar proper late in the year after both securing his signature on Constans’ betrothal to Adosinda and resolving the issue of the Frankish inheritance, in which he would be aided by Iaudas and the Moors of Theveste. Yattuy and his warriors were well-prepared however, and in the face of their numerous ambushes, raids and formidable defensive positions, the great Roman-Gothic-Moorish host lumbering southward from the Atlas Mountains barely made any progress toward the Hoggar Mountains at all in the last months of 596. Rome’s Aethiopian allies far to the south had greater success, as Bannu and his army were able to conquer Aoudaghost once again and add it to the Kumbian domain, this time permanently they hoped; while it certainly helped greatly that Aoudaghost was closer to Kumbi than Taghazza had been, and thus their host’s supply line was both shorter and less vulnerable to Berber attacks than that of their previous expedition, they also benefited from Yattuy having pulled all of his strength away from the Berber trading hubs of the Sahara to defend Hoggar from the Western Empire’s onslaught.
While the Occident was preoccupied with internal stability and marriage games this year, the Oriental half of the Roman world was preparing to finally intervene in the Southern Turkic civil war. As promised, Sapor crossed the Tigris into Qutlugh Qaghan’s territory with 15,000 soldiers – a mix of legionaries, auxiliaries from Armenia and Georgia, and including both a troop of camel-riders from Ghassanid lands and a contingent of elite archers from Sapor’s native Mesopotamia – in mid-summer, having allowed their ally to take a severe beating first per Arcadius’ design. Said beating included the loss of his very capital of Esfahan to the joint advance of Qapaghan Qaghan and the Mazdakites, so that by the time the Eastern Romans arrived he had already been driven into the marshes of Khuzestan: not even able to hold Susa, he had fallen back to Aginis[3] further toward the south of that region.
Qapaghan Qaghan riding across central Persia, newly wrested from the hands of his brothers, at the head of his Tegreg vanguard
It was on a hot and humid July afternoon that Sapor arrived to break the siege of the river city, just in the nick of time – hunger, the heat and attendant disease had placed a grave strain on the defenders’ ranks. The Battle of Aginis which followed saw Qapaghan forced to withdraw before he could deliver the killing blow to his older brother’s neck, as wedges of Eastern Roman cataphracts backed by the Arab camelry managed to break through the ranks of his own heavy horsemen & Mazdakite warrior-monks to threaten his encampment while Qutlugh had sallied forth from his gates with all those among his men who could still stand or ride a horse. By the year’s end, Sapor had gotten Qutlugh to agree to recognize Arcadius as his suzerain in exchange for continued Eastern Roman support against his brother, and together the two had retaken Susa and turned Khuzestan’s border into their new defensive perimeter before carrying their campaign further into Persia.
Beyond the Tian Shan, the Later Han continued to methodically drive the Great Qi back toward Jiankang. The spring and summer saw hard-fought and increasingly desperate battles at Huainan, Bengbu, Datong[4] and Gaoyou, each of which ended in progressively costlier Han victories. Although Emperor Wucheng was in position to attack Jiankang by the end of July, he ruled out an immediate assault on the metropolis due to how much the previous battles had bled his army and resolved to besiege it until either Emperor Mingyuan of Great Qi surrendered or died of starvation. To fully surround Jiankang however, he had to cross the Yangtze, which promised to be an even costlier endeavor after the Qi had used the delays they’d won with their previous battles to construct numerous fortlets and fortified grain-houses across the Yangtze Delta in preparation for the defense of their capital. It took the rest of the year for Wucheng’s flanking force, again led by Hao Jian, to even clear a path to cross the great river, which he did with a pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Chaohu[5] in December after the Tongyang River linking the lake[6] which that village was named after to the Yangtze froze over and allowed him to bypass the defenders’ fortifications.
Closer still to the Rising Sun, its warriors and those of its ally Baekje spent nearly all of 596 on the offensive against their bloodied and disoriented enemies. Goguryeo and Silla were still reeling from the loss of their kings and thousands of soldiers in the Battle of Gwangju, and were unable to prevent Baekje from pushing them all the way back to the Han River by the end of this year. Seeing that their enemies were in utter disarray while China remained consumed by the struggles of the Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms, Kose no Kamatari and Yamanoue no Mahito both persuaded King Heon not to accept any settlement that would merely restore the status quo antebellum, but to dare attempt to unite the entire Korean peninsula under Baekje’s banner while the window of opportunity was still open – and of course, Yamato warriors would continue to help him every step of the way. Win or lose, they had now firmly affixed the Yamato state to its first major continental entanglement, and linked its destiny (or at least the destiny of their regime) to that of Baekje.
In the West, 597 marked a shift back toward foreign affairs – chiefly the ongoing war with Hoggar – as Florianus’ confidence in his hold on power grew. Alas, Hermenegild, Iaunas and his other generals were still having serious difficulty as they slogged through the rocky deserts on their way to Hoggar, battered not only by sandstorms and the blistering Saharan heat but also constant Hoggari raids as they went. In order to avoid dying of hunger or thirst in the desert sands, Hermenegild also had to disperse more and more of his soldiers to secure the Western Roman supply lines and build the occasional fortified watchtower (which would then require its own garrison) to anchor & safeguard these aforementioned routes, further costing the Romans time and manpower before they even reached the Hoggar massif. The only positive he could count on was that the Augustus, having personally fought the Donatists before and grown wise to their tricks, was quite understanding of the challenges he faced and did not urge him to throw caution to the wind or threaten to remove him from his position for not advancing quickly enough.
A Hoggari warrior attacks one of Hermenegild's Visigoths in one of many, many desert ambushes
Just beyond the Roman world, there was another shift in borders and the regional balance of power among the realms of their Angle allies. King Eadwine of North Anglia perished of old age in the autumn months of 597, and according to both his will and the judgment of his Witan, his realm (itself only a fragment of the formerly united English kingdom) was duly partitioned between his sons. The border between the two successor-kingdoms was set at the River Tinan[7] (or, as the Romans still called it, the Vedra): Eadwine’s elder son Eadberht ruled everything south of that river and kept Eoforwic as his capital, while the younger son Eadwald ruled from Bebbanburh[9] over the lands extending from the Tinan’s northern banks to the shores of the Bodotria, where Anglo-Saxon control was anchored by the fortress their father had built at Striuelin[8].
The senior North Angle kingdom was dubbed ‘Dere’ (Latin: ‘Deira’), for the Britons living there who had since been extirpated or assimilated by the Angles called it ‘Deifr’ in their day, while the junior one was called ‘Beornice’ (Lat.: ‘Bernicia’), which again was a translation of its former Brittonic name ‘Bryneich’. While Eadwald and the Bernicians focused on continuing to settle north of the Bodotria, which brought them into ever-intensifying conflict with the native Pictish clans, Eadberht and the Deirans had to contend with Æþelhere of South Anglia, who – on account of his peace agreement with Artorius III still holding, and thus keeping his southern border quiet – now considered striving to reunify the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms once more. The issue of reckoning Easter’s date, in which the South Angles believed their northern kin were in error for celebrating the holiday alongside their Celtic neighbors and thus being out of step with Rome’s calculations, gave the king in Tomworðig further reason to turn his gaze northward, even if his course should escalate to the point of a less-than-peaceful ‘fraternal’ correction of the northern Angles.
Eadwald, King of Bernicia, visits a monastery north of the Bodotria on his way to fighting Picts who had been raiding Anglo-Saxon settlements in the region
Elsewhere, the Eastern Romans and their new Turkic allies/vassals began to stumble into reverses as they attempted to go on the offensive against Qapaghan Qaghan. Sapor had expended the element of surprise at the Battle of Aginis the year before, and Qapaghan was now not only on guard against the new interlopers but aggressively marshaling his resources against them & their weakened proxy. In this the rival Turkic warlord had a little inadvertant help from the Indo-Romans, who sued for peace after he defeated Porphyrus at Bost[10] in the spring: he allowed the Indo-Roman kingdom to keep most of their gains save Dozzaab, deciding that those fringe eastern territories were not worth the manpower needed to retake & hold them when he could be redeploying those troops against his brother and the Eastern Romans instead.
After being harried by Mazdakite detachments for months, Sapor and Qutlugh engaged their elusive foe in another major battle outside Khurha[11], south of the village of Qom where Qapaghan had established his headquarters for the time being. Now however, it was they who were leading a bloodied and weary host while their enemy was not only well-rested, but had a nasty surprise in store. To crack the ranks of the Roman & pro-Qutlugh Turkic cavalry and the Ghassanid camelry, Qapaghan had bought a troop of Indian elephants from the Huna lands with the treasure he’d gained from sacking Esfahan several years ago, and at the Battle of Khurha they proved to be worth every ounce of gold & gems he had spent on them. Sapor’s lines were broken by the elephants who spearheaded Qapaghan’s attack, and he was forced to retreat back southward, sustaining further losses under continued harassment by the Mazdakites and pro-Qapaghan Turks on the long road back to Khuzestan as he went.
To the east, Later Han progress against the defenses of the Great Qi continued incrementally in 597. Hao Jian crossed the Yangtze west of Jiankang in the spring, having spent the first months of the year mopping up lingering resistance north of the river – and almost immediately ran into further Qi defenses at Jiuzi[12], just east of his crossing at Tongling. Attempting to bypass the strong Qi fortifications here was rendered impossible by the similarly stout defense of Wanling[13], and the deeply frustrated Emperor Wucheng began moving more and more troops across the Yangtze at Tongling for a major offensive in the next year. He assigned Hao Jian with the intimidating task of taking Hangzhou, a town on the Qiantang River which the Qi had converted into a major port and fortress since they captured it from the fading Chen: as the southern anchor of the Qi defensive network, Wucheng hoped that taking the city would unmoor Jiankang’s outer defenses and accelerate the war’s conclusion.
In Korea however, the progress of Baekje and Japan against their enemies was anything but sluggish. This year Heon, Kose and Yamanoue would feast in Seorabeol[14], the capital of Silla, after overcoming its frantic defenders and sacking it in mid-summer. Dongryun’s successor, King Geumryun, had fled not only the country but the entire Korean Peninsula ahead of the allies’ arrival (demoralizing his remaining soldiers and contributing to the city’s faster-than-expected fall before their assault), sailing to Goguryeo lands and then traveling all the way to China to seek aid. The embattled Emperor Wucheng had informed Silla’s young exiled king that there was no way Later Han could render any help to him at present, but promised to host him at the Han court for now and to more seriously entertain the prospect of backing his claim with a Chinese army once the Great Qi were dealt with. Until then, the three men who had triumphed over Silla got to celebrate their victory amid its ruins and to concentrate their undivided attention against King Dojeol of Goguryeo, whose armies they drove beyond the Imjin by December of 597.
Geumryun of Silla asking Emperor Wucheng of Later Han for assistance against Baekje and its new Japanese ally
598 was the year in which Hermenegild and Iaunas finally, at long last, reached the Hoggar Mountains. Between the losses incurred in Donatist ambushes and the troops dispersed to protect the Roman supply lines however, their army had fallen to half its strength; they now faced the challenge of rooting Yattuy and his warriors out of the mountain fortresses where they’d ensconced themselves, and had years to prepare for this moment, with only about 15,000 soldiers, a task which both kings considered to be nearly impossible. Unfortunately for them Florianus had invested a great deal of time and resources into this campaign, even taking the unpopular move of raising taxes to continue financing the punitive expedition, and was adamant that his vassals and generals could not return to Roman territory without first securing something resembling a victorious outcome. Hermenegild occupied the village of Arak at the mountain range’s northwestern entrance while Iaunas took Illizi in the northeast as his staging ground, and waited for the scorchingly hot summer to fade into the slightly less blistering autumn – after which they began their arduous incursion into the vast desert gorges, where thousands upon thousands of Yattuy’s Berbers awaited them with slings, arrows and javelins.
Meanwhile in distant Aginis, Sapor had warned his overlord Arcadius of the threats facing his army and gotten what he asked the Eastern Emperor for: a shipment of carroballistae, originally assembled in Edessa, with which he could more effectively combat Qapaghan Qaghan’s elephants, as well as two legions’ worth of reinforcements and twice that number in accompanying Caucasian auxiliaries. With all this additional help, the Sassanid prince felt confident in taking the fight back to Qapaghan, who in any case was storming into Khuzestan after spending the early winter and spring months resting & gathering reinforcements of his own.
The Eastern Romans and their allies selected Shushtar as the place where they would make their stand, as the fortified island-city and the rivers surrounding it made for excellent defensive ground – and Sapor wanted every advantage he could get over Qapaghan’s army which, at 40,000 strong, was twice the size of his own. The Romans ably defended the crossings of the Karun River & its tributaries which protected their chosen headquarters, using their carroballistae as mobile platforms with which to snipe the Turkic war elephants and throwing back one Turkic attack after another over four days: only once did a Turk contingent manage to force a crossing just north of Shushtar, led by Qapaghan’s son and heir Heshana, but they were driven back with great loss by a counterattack involving large numbers of Georgian and Armenian auxiliaries. That said, Heshana did manage to kill his uncle Qutlugh in the initial fight for the ford, in so doing eliminating the Romans’ preferred claimant.
Prince Heshana takes an arrow to the eye as he leads his men to storm across the Karun
This development did not overly trouble Arcadius II, who was feeling the financial pinch from this conflict and had always been leery of the prospect of reviving his great-grandfather’s borders (even if only indirectly). He sued for peace immediately after the Battle of Shushtar and found Qapaghan receptive, for the last Qaghan standing was exhausted by years of warfare against first his Northern Turkic cousins and then his own brothers, and needed time to recover & rebuild the kingdom which he had now won by default. The two emperors agreed to a truce in which the Eastern Empire kept Khuzestan, but Qapaghan would be recognized as sole sovereign over the rest of the Southern Turkic Khaganate from the Zagros to the edges of the Indicus Caucasus. Arcadius savored his victory (and avoidance of imperial overstretch) by mixing sugar from the newly-won plantations of Khuzestan into his Pontic tea, but even this limited triumph had made him enemies for life in Qapaghan and especially the young Heshana, who had lost an eye to a Roman arrow during the Battle of Shushtar.
To the south, while Arcadius and Sapor had been busy directing the war against Qapaghan Qaghan and his Southern Turks, a certain merchant family in Mecca celebrated the birth of their first son. Muhammad ibn Abdullah[15], a nearly thirty-year-old scion of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe which dominated that city, and his wife Khadijah[16], a Christian (though of an Ebionite[17] persuasion deemed heretical by the Ephesians) and prosperous caravan-master in her own right, welcomed into the world a healthy boy named Qasim[18] in January of this year. Whatever future impact they may have on the course of history however, at the time this occasion was largely forgotten outside the circles of Quraysh clan elders and traders, as this family was utterly beneath the notice of the emperors and princes to their north and the Quraysh themselves were engaged in one of their endemic wars with the neighboring Hawazin tribe.
In China, Hao Jian worked to surround and properly invest Hangzhou, an assignment made all the more difficult by the fact that detachments of Great Qi troops had fortified and garrisoned themselves in numerous small villages on the road to the larger city while also evacuating the former inhabitants behind its walls. The Han nevertheless advanced, slowly but steadily, with the assistance of siege weapons carried from beyond the Yangtze, and the Crown Prince also fought off a secondary Qi army which marched out of Jiankang to try to attack him from behind while he was establishing part of his siegeworks. By the year’s end Jian had finally achieved his objective of fully surrounding and laying siege to Hangzhou, aided by several diversionary attacks which his father the Emperor of Later Han had staged on Jiankang to draw the Qi’s attention and keep them from sending any more armies to relieve the southern city. As Hangzhou’s fortifications were newer and less formidable than those of Jiankang (relatively speaking – it was strong enough to deter Prince Jian from ever attempting to storm the walls), the Han expected it would fall before the capital did, and in the meantime Wucheng continued to try to negotiate a victorious peace settlement with his counterpart Mingyuan.
Hao Jian overlooking his army as they begin the Siege of Hangzhou
In Korea, the Japanese and Baekje were running into their first serious difficulties as they pushed deeper into Goguryeo territory across the Imjin, for King Dojeol expended a small fortune to bolster his flagging armies with many thousands of Mohe mercenaries. They earned their keep almost immediately, proving to be horsemen of greater skill & ferocity than their Goguryeo employers and routing the allied armies in the Battles of Solme[19] and Busogap[20]. King Heon, Kose and Yamanoue retreated first to the Imjin, then back down to the Han after the Goguryeo-Mohe host defeated them a third time in the Battle of Panmunjeom[21], where they were able to finally manage a successful defense on the riverbanks to keep their adversaries back.
The Yamato regents realized that they could not defeat Goguryeo without additional reinforcements from their island home: now at this point Kose was prepared to cut his losses and negotiate a truce with Dojeol, but Heon and Yamanoue persuaded him to raise additional troops by offering large boxes of rice (or koku) from their granaries to families willing to send an additional male to fight for them, and to attempt one more push across the Han once the new volunteers were ready. If it failed, Yamanoue promised that he would support suing for peace with the Goguryeo, assuming of course that the Japanese were not routed off the peninsula altogether in defeat.
Dojeol exhorts his horsemen and Mohe mercenaries to drive the Baekje-Japanese army back over the Imjin River
The Western Romans spent the first half of 599 in a valiant effort to push toward the core of the Hoggar Mountains, where Yattuy awaited them at his capital of Abalessa. Hermenegild had the larger share of Roman troops and thus got close to their objective first, pushing past increasingly numerous and savage Berber attacks to do so – only to realize, once he had the mountain city in sight, that it was truly impossible to take with the 6,000 men he still had at that point. The defenders outnumbered him, he had no means of constructing siegeworks without exposing himself to further attack, and on top of it all his army was on the verge of running out of food and water, his already slim supplies having been further thinned by Hoggari night-raids.
Faced with a situation that was no longer ‘almost’ impossible, the Visigoth king decided he would rather face Florianus’ wrath and the possibility of death beneath a Roman executioner’s ax than the certainty of death here in the Sahara. He sued for terms, offering to turn right around and leave the Hoggar Mountains if Yattuy did not pursue him and provided him with enough food and drink to escape the Donatist kingdom: else he really would stage a suicidal attack on Abalessa, and although both kings knew he would be defeated, Hermenegild boldly declared that he could still cost Yattuy gravely before falling. To his shock, Yattuy appeared to fall for his bluff at first and gave him everything he asked for – not only an escape route, but sacks of grain and water.
Unsurprisingly, just like his brother, Yattuy was not about to keep any promise made to outsiders and almost immediately attacked the Romans as they tried to retreat through the Hoggari gorges. Hermenegild for his part did not actually think the Donatists would honor their word either, but the speed and ferocity of their attacks still proved too much for his battered and heat-exhausted army. Their discipline eventually collapsed under the strain of constant Hoggari raids, and the troops largely dispersed by mid-June; barely over a thousand of these men (sans Hermenegild, who died of thirst after being trapped in a cave-in while hiding from the Berbers with a few bodyguards) managed to limp back to Illizi, where Iaunas had managed to retreat in relative safety with most of his contingent intact long ago, and from there they withdrew further back north to Roman territory, collecting the Saharan garrisons they’d left earlier to protect their supply lines. All in all, some 12,000 Western Romans (out of the nearly 30,000 who participated in this campaign) made it back to the Atlas Mountains in a clear and costly defeat for the empire: Florianus had succeeded in saving Roman Africa from the deadliest Hoggari attack to date, but he had also overreached in his failed attempt to destroy Hoggar altogether and paid for it, the distractions of his first years in power having given Yattuy far too much time to prepare for his assault.
A Thevestian Moorish horse-archer takes aim at pursuing Hoggari warriors in a rearguard action
When Iaunas sent heralds to inform Florianus of the disaster, however, they found he took his defeat exceedingly well. It did not take them or their master to find out why: with Hermenegild missing deep in Hoggari territory and as good as dead, the Western Augustus now swung his plan for Hispania into action. His messengers descended upon the Visigothic Thing being held in the Baurg, interrupting the Gothic nobility as they debated the fate of the kingdom and which of his sons should succeed him or whether it should be partitioned between them, to inform all gathered that the Emperor of the Occident believed his son Constans was entitled to kingship over the Visigoths by right of his marriage to Hermenegild’s daughter Adosinda.
That the couple should have the largest share of the inheritance would not be up for debate; however, if the princes Liuveric and Theodoric complied, they would be allowed to retain modest kingdoms in Gallaecia and Celtiberia. Obviously they did not agree to having this arrangement forced upon them, deeming it a most unwelcome and unlawful intrusion by the imperial authorities into the internal matters of the Goths, and raised the standard of rebellion – at which point Florianus sent the Italian and Gallic legions in to help those of Hispania in subjugating them. With many Visigoths having died in the Saharan sands with their previous king it was not difficult for the Romans to drive the remaining Balthing loyalists into the mountains and plateaus of the northwest, and having branded the princes treasonous outlaws for their defiance, Florianus now expected to crush them utterly and seize the entirety of the Visigoth kingdom for his third son (newly installed in Carthago Nova) in one fell swoop.
However, the Emperor’s brazen, opportunistic (for his original intention with Constans' marriage was to befriend Hermenegild and turn the Visigoths against the Ostrogoths, not usurp their kingdom) and frankly rather unjustified power-grab (at least he could have argued that his wife was the rightful sovereign of Altava by Moorish custom and the will of her father, unlike what he was now trying to pull with his Visigothic daughter-in-law) greatly angered and worried every single one of his other federates. Even the normally friendly and loyal Iaunas was now on edge, having witnessed how quickly his overlord could turn to usurping a vassal’s kingdom – especially when that vassal was a man like himself, for Hermenegild had similarly never gone against Rome’s commands until the last desperate weeks of his life. In particular, old Viderichus and the Ostrogoths now gave up any thought of continuing to work under him and began to actively plot his overthrow (again), while Genobaudes loudly protested the decision in Rome’s halls.
Viderichus' nobles pledge their swords and a Green-aligned Senator toasts to his brewing plot against the Augustus Florianus
Far off to the east, south of both China where the Later Han continued their Siege of Hangzhou and Japan where the regents continued to amass their reinforcements for what they hoped would be their final Korean offensive, Dewawarman of Kuntala was making further moves to strengthen his control over the Malay Straits and Peninsula. In this penultimate year of the sixth century he marched on Kelantan from his foothold at Kedah, having first secured his northern flank by arranging the marriage of one of his many sons to a daughter of Langkasuka’s king Adiputra, and with his far greater resources & recruitment of sellswords from as far as eastern Java to reinforce his army and fleet, his victory was a matter of time. Kelantan’s own king Indrashangar yielded after being defeated in the Battle of Bukit Gua Musang[22], where the Kuntalans bribed a local hunter into showing them a secret tunnel into the eponymous ‘Civet Cat Mountain’ that allowed them to bypass the Kelantanese defenses: in exchange for his submission and tribute, Dewawarman allowed Indrashangar to retain his crown as another local vassal of Kuntala, in accordance with the ‘mandala’ political model[23] which he was pioneering.
And on the other side of the Earth, Pátraic mac Amalgaid finally managed to overcome and slay his adversary Ólchobar this year, allowing him to realize his ambition of becoming the undisputed High King of the New World Gaels. Or so he thought: in the years it took for the two to arrange and fight a decisive battle, numerous petty-kingdoms had sprung up all over southern and western Tír na Beannachtaí, and none of these were particularly inclined to recognize Pátraic as their suzerain – much less pay him tribute in fish, berries and other foodstuffs, when they needed every ounce of food they could get their hands on to survive the harsh winters. Pátraic himself tried to assert his authority over them, but by now he was an aged and weary old man and while his kingdom was the largest on Tír na Beannachtaí, the petty-kings who could normally only call upon as few as a dozen fighting men apiece had the strength to oppose him if they worked together, which they did when he went about declaring himself their overlord. Thus the Irish of the New World remained politically fragmented, even as they spread to overtake the entirety of Tír na Beannachtaí and then (over the decades to come) the other outlying islands discovered by their kindred from Connaught and Leinster.
[15] The first of the three butterfly-proofed religious figures of this timeline I’ve mentioned in the past, the soon-to-be Prophet of Allah surely needs no introduction.
[16] ‘Youm-e Maadar’ – ‘Mother of Believers’ – to Muslims, she was Muhammad’s first wife and first follower.
[17] Denounced by the other Christians as ‘Judaizers’, the Ebionites were an early Christian sect who rejected Saint Paul’s efforts to distance the then-new religion from Judaism. Among their teachings were an adoptionist belief, that Jesus Christ was not the literal Son of God but a biological son of Joseph and Mary who was later chosen by God to be the Messiah; the perpetuation of mandatory circumcision, ritual ablution (mikvah) and the celebration of Passover; and denouncement of animal sacrifices, coupled with a commitment to vegetarianism and apostolic poverty (their name literally meant ‘the poor ones’). Although they had gone extinct in the Roman world by the end of the 5th century, some Ebionite communities were known to have survived into the 7th in Arabia (their final disappearance coinciding with the rise of Islam) and probably had an influence on Islam’s view of Jesus.
[18] Muhammad and Khadijah’s first son, he historically did not live past the age of three. As neither Qasim nor any of his younger brothers survived childhood, Muhammad’s lineage would ultimately be transmitted strictly through his daughters.
[19] Songrim.
[20] Kaesong.
[21] Part of Paju.
[22] Now in Malaysia’s Gua Musang district.
[23] Influenced by Hindu and Buddhist concepts imported from India, the empires of Southeast Asia tended not to be centralized polities like the Roman or Chinese empires were, but loose federations (arguably even less centralized than the Holy Roman Empire) of assorted autonomous tributaries which recognized a single powerful kingdom as their overlord – in other words, they are the periphery of the eponymous ‘mandala’, or circle, with their overlord sitting at its core.
That reminds me a bit certain Ghengis... We now have deep animosity between the Turks and ERE, a fertile ground for the next devastating war and Islam will start it's march in couple of decades.
Given the devastation that the area known as Persia suffered in this timeline, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended like Afghanistan did in OTL.
It looks like the next WRE civil war will be coming even sooner than I expected.
That reminds me a bit certain Ghengis... We now have deep animosity between the Turks and ERE, a fertile ground for the next devastating war and Islam will start it's march in couple of decades.
Given the devastation that the area known as Persia suffered in this timeline, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended like Afghanistan did in OTL.
Indeed.Avars would live longer,althought they are as doomed as in OTL.
Turks would fight ERE again - and let Mchomet create his religion,China would be united and deal with those Yamato barbarians.But not invade islands,and if they try,Kamikaze would save them.
Irish - suprise,suprise - could not be united.
And Kuntala - for whatsever it is worth - could take Australia.
Yes indeed - I have big plans for Heshana and (of course) Muhammad/the Ahl al-Bayt. As always, I'd never emphasize certain characters if they didn't have a major role in the narrative to come. That, and while Islam's birth is near, I definitely don't want to just recreate the OTL Sunni/Shia split, so you can expect the new religion to at least have different leaders and sects abounding...
By the way guys, the next update might take a little longer than usual: as it will mark the start of a new century, just like the update which concluded the 5th century all those months ago, it will include both a map and the 6th-century Roman imperial family tree. That said, I do intend to have it out by no later than May 1st to coincide with the 1-year birthday of this timeline
Interesting. With deep enmity between a powerful Turkish empire ruling the bulk of the former Sassanid empire and then some and the eastern empire and the western emperor having destablised his own empire by his greed it could be set up for Islam to be as lucky in its early expansion as OTL. Although there could be a lot of butterflies that decide otherwise of course. An Islam that doesn't make massive early conquests outside Arabia could be a radically different religion for instance.
Some more from the British Isle with the Anglo-Saxons, being denied their historical southern lands but being more successful in the north. Can't remember if they have overrun the Strathcylde kingdom although being that far north in the east it seems likely its at least a fief. However will they overreach themselves as OTL Northumbria did?
Haven't heard for a while about Axum which could well still have a big role in events to both its north and east.
The Far East is still in chaos although it does sound like Later Han is going to end up emerging as the new unifier of China but things could still change.
Having concluded their African war in a sanguinary stalemate the year before, the Western Romans spent 600 concentrating on their new war against the Visigoths in Hispania. Prince Constans was placed in command of the legions in Hispania, so that he might lead them to victory and seize the Visigothic crown with his hands, but the Balthing brothers remained a step ahead of him in their mountain holdfasts and were further aided by the defection of those Gothic foederati who hadn’t marched to and died in the Sahara with their father. By the autumn of 600, Constans had managed to defend the two-thirds of Hispania which was still under Roman control and repelled a major offensive on the part of Liuveric & Theodoric in the Battle of Toletum, but had himself been defeated when he attempted to push into the Iuga Carpetana[1].
In light of this lack of progress, the Augustus tasked Genobaudes with assisting his son in subduing the Visigoths. However, between his vocal protestations against the Stilichians’ attempt at usurping the Gothic crown in the first place and his poor relationship with Constans, the magister militum almost immediately drew negative attention – and suspicion – to himself. Matters were not helped by his failure to muster more than a few hundred volunteers from the Frankish kingdoms (whose rulers were justifiably concerned that they could someday experience what the Stilichians were doing to the Balthings now) and the Balthing brothers launching a more limited offensive in the early winter months, in which they seized the fortified hill-town of Bursao[2], after he had told Constans that no winter offensive could possibly be forthcoming and thus they should not worry about or make preparations against it.
While the Visigoths were openly locking blades with the Western Roman army in the mountains of Hispania, their Ostrogoth cousins continued to sharpen theirs in Italy itself. This year Viderichus prioritized amassing allies in Ravenna, where he sought to spring Otho from his prison: while unable to bribe his guards to simply let him out of the villa where he was being held in comfort, Ostrogothic agents were able to bribe some of the legionaries posted for the prince’s ‘protection’ to let messages from Viderichus through, and Otho naturally welcomed the offer to become Augustus with the Gothic king’s help. Viderichus also continued to build up support among the Senators, in particular winning over the Consul for 599-600 Anicius Symmachus (who was brother-in-law to both Florianus II and Otho by virtue of having married their sister Maria, and whose first cousin Juliana was also Otho’s wife) by promising to also make him Emperor.
Florianus and his household were not unaware of the dangers they had placed themselves in thanks to his seizure of the Visigoth patrimony, and were making moves to secure their own position. The Emperor himself reminded Clovis II of the Western Franks that he would likely be dead or forcibly cloistered by now if it were not for imperial intervention in his favor and against his Arbogasting-backed uncle, and also began appointing Sclaveni nobles to patronage positions for the first time in Roman history to strengthen his ties to the Carantanians and Horites. Dihia meanwhile not only worked to rebuild her kingdom, but also to repair ties with neighboring Theveste and reassure its king Iaunas that his allegiance to Florianus was not misplaced, aided (accidentally) by the friendship between their children: late this year her efforts seemed to bear fruit, as Iaunas moved his court back from the fortress of Arris deep within the Aurès Mountains to the capital of Theveste itself, much closer to & more accessible from the Roman cities on the coast.
Though there is no way they could have understood it at age ten, the friendship which had grown between Tia of Theveste and Prince Venantius would prove helpful to keeping Africa firmly aligned with the Stilichian cause in the troubles to come
In the Northern Turkic Khaganate, Issik Qaghan died in February of this year of a bad chill, and much as his brother’s throne had been to the south, his own crown was immediately contested by his own sons. His elder son Muqan had the support of the majority of the Tegreg chiefs and warriors, so his younger son Tardush ran to the vassal peoples of the west for aid: the Karluks, Kimeks and Khazars chief among them, and to a lesser extent some of the Oghuz as well, though no doubt their assistance would not come cheap. In exchange for gifts, the hands of his daughters and additional privileges (most crucially the ability to tax trade moving through their lands without any Tegreg oversight whatsoever) these tribes committed themselves to Tardush’s side and gave him a fighting chance against his big brother, turning what would have been a very one-sided rebellion into a full-blown civil war among the Northern Turks and threatening Tegreg hegemony within their own Khaganate.
Southeast of Turkestan, Hao Jian found an unexpected ally in the Siege of Hangzhou: rats. An infestation of them contaminated & ate through the Qi defenders’ supplies of grain, and although the Qi turned to catching and roasting most of these rats for food instead, the damage had been done – the fall of the city was greatly accelerated, both by the looming threat of starvation and the outbreak of disease which followed the garrison & citizens’ consumption of the vermin who troubled them. The news that Hangzhou would probably fall in months rather than years was most welcome in Emperor Wucheng’s ears as well, for his latest round of negotiations with his counterpart Mingyuan had fallen through after the Emperor of Great Qi insisted on keeping his realm independent of the Later Han with its boundary set along the Yangtze.
Suffice to say the defenders of Hangzhou will not be celebrating the Year of the Rat for quite some time, if not the rest of their lives
In Korea, the sixth century ended with the Baekje and Yamato launching their great northward offensive out of the peninsula’s southwestern corner, the latter having managed to muster over 15,000 reinforcements and the former providing them with enough ships for transport in the late spring months. Heon, Kose no Kamatari and Yamanoue no Mahito succeeded in breaking the Goguryeo lines to their north and east, pushing their now-outnumbered adversaries back toward the Han River and scoring a major victory in the Battle of Sabi[3]. However, their effort to pursue the Goguryeo over that river was halted in the Battle of Dongducheon on account of the Goguryeo calling in Mohe reinforcements of their own, and King Dojeol had pushed them back south of the Han by the year’s conclusion. Both sides were now determined to decide the outcome of the war in the next few battles, which were sure to further soak the Han River valley where this all began in yet more blood.
The dawn of the seventh century saw Florianus still embattled between both his war against the rebellious Visigoths on one hand, and the schemes of the Ostrogoths on the other. Increasingly concerned that Rome may no longer be a safe residence for his family, the Western Augustus took his heir Constantine’s marriage to the Eastern Roman princess Anastasia in the summer of this year as an opportunity to also get the former out of the Western Roman Empire altogether. He proposed to his counterpart Arcadius II that his Caesar should live in Constantinople for a time, not only to leisurely tour the Orient and allow his homesick new wife to stay close to her family for a while longer, but also hopefully to gain some fighting experience as part of the Eastern Roman army. Arcadius for his part was happy to host his new son-in-law for a few years, believing doing so would allow him to increase his influence over the West in the years to come.
In Hispania, Constans and Genobaudes were having a little more success against the Visigoths this year than they had in the last. Their combined forces, aided by a 3,000-strong detachment sent by Prince Enneco of the Aquitani, recaptured Bursao after a four-month siege early in the year and used it as a springboard for attacks into the Iuga Carpetana and beyond from the east. Although slowed by the terrain, increasingly frequent & forceful Gothic counterattacks, and continuous disputes between the two commanders, by the year’s end Genobaudes and the Aquitani had captured Vareia[4] along the Hiberus[5] while Constans was steadily pushing in from the south. As of Christmas 601, he had partially broken through the Iuga Carpetana and captured Segobriga on the Gothic side of those mountains.
As for the Eastern Romans, a few months before his daughter’s wedding Arcadius II had to deal with a substantial Southern Turkic incursion into Susiana (as the Romans once again renamed Khuzestan), though it had not even been half a decade since he inked his peace treaty with Qapaghan Qaghan. Fortunately for him, the raiders were halted by the auxilia Thraeces in the Battle of Gotvand: though they had been part of Sapor’s army before, this time 2,000 of the Slavic warriors had to fight alone for several days without Roman support, and yet they managed to fight the Tegregs to a standstill at Gotvand despite being outnumbered thanks to seasonal flooding of the Karun making the river’s upper banks more treacherous than usual for the Turks to cross. They were able to hold the 10,000 Tegregs at bay for three days before being relieved by Roman reinforcements, proving to Qapaghan that taking Khuzestan back from the Romans would not be an easy affair at this time.
Arcadius demanded of Qapaghan an explanation, at which point the latter claimed one of his more restless vassals had launched the attack without his authorization. Unconvinced but also unwilling to start up hostilities again so soon, the Eastern Augustus agreed to settle for financial reparations (including the return of the meager loot the Turkic pillagers had been able to collect before being stopped by his Sclaveni auxiliaries) and the marriage of his own Caesar Leo to Ayla, one of Qapaghan’s daughters, who would be further required to undergo baptism before the wedding could go through. Heshana bitterly opposed this attempt at upholding the peace between the two empires but was overruled by his father, who determined that the Southern Turks really weren’t ready to go back to war yet, and would later be further angered by the news that he’d been saddled with a half-Roman nephew named Constantine on the last day of the year.
The Tegreg princess Ayla seemed to be more or less content to convert to Christianity & become the first Turkic Roman Empress. A pity for both their peoples that her brother could not be happy for her, to put it mildly
Well south of the Roman world, Kumbi continued to consolidate its gains and grow in power, taking advantage of its distant neighbor Hoggar being too worn-out from repelling the latest Roman invasion to mount any serious raids south which may have compromised Bannu’s efforts. King Bannu replaced his capital’s wooden wall with one of mud-bricks, modeled after the opus africanum style of masonry popular in Roman Africa, and with the help of the late, sainted Lucas’ disciples among the men of Kumbi he also worked to adapt the Latin alphabet to the Soninke language, so that his people might communicate in (and learn & spread the Gospel using) a written language for the first time. In Aoudaghost he had the town’s Donatist church rebuilt, reconsecrated by an Ephesian priest, and oversaw the baptism of the surviving residents into the orthodox rite – those opposed were either dead or had fled to join their fellow Donatists in Taghazza to the north, where they were no doubt seething and denounced the converts back home as lapsi. Taghazza, for its part, now formally accepted Hoggar as its suzerain for protection against Kumbi.
Over in Turkestan, while the Southern Turks seethed at their latest defeat in-between continuing to rebuild their tattered realm and armies, their Northern kindred continued to tear themselves apart with the assistance of the various other Turkic peoples who were now increasingly only nominally subjugated under their hold. The Tegreg loyalist forces under Muqan Qaghan racked up a number of small victories in the first half of 601, but these were undone by a major victory on the part of Tardush and the rebel Turks in the Battle of Beshbaliq[6]. By far the largest battle fought between the two brothers, it pitted 30,000 Tegregs against a 40,000-strong assortment of pro-Tardush insurgents (mostly Kimeks and Khazars), and ended in a heavy defeat for the former – between the actual battle itself, the rout and their dispersal into the Gurbantünggüt Desert they sustained 16,000 casualties, a little over half their fighting men and a severe blow not just to Muqan now but to the Tegregs as a people in the longer term.
In China there was a sea-change: Hangzhou’s starved defenders surrendered to the Later Han forces besieging them in mid-summer of this year after exhausting the last of their rations, and Hao Jian not only enforced discipline to prevent his troops from sacking the city but even personally oversaw relief efforts to feed the citizenry after the Qi men had stood down. This great victory had the desired effect of unmooring the Great Qi defensive lines around the Yangtze and finally drove the rival Emperor Mingyuan to capitulate to his father, who triumphantly paraded into Jiankang on the first of July and magnanimously awarded Luo Xie (as Mingyuan was now back to being known as) with the title ‘Prince of Qi’ after the latter formally kowtowed to him & recognized his overlordship. The Qiang kingdom of Qin, the most obvious next target for Later Han, sensed the way the winds were blowing soon after news of Great Qi’s defeat reached them, and decided it would be better to stand at the side of China’s new likeliest unifier than to be trampled beneath their feet: instead of risking probable defeat in the near-future they voluntarily became a Han vassal, for which their ruler Ma Jun was similarly awarded the hereditary dignity of ‘Prince of Qin’.
Emperor Wucheng was able to savor his unification of northern China for only a few months before expiring of old age in December of 601, leaving Crown Prince Jian – or rather, Emperor Yang of Later Han now – with the task of bringing China’s southern half to heel. This was unlikely to be easy, for the dynasts and kingdoms of the south reacted with alarm to Later Han’s triumphs and Chu, Cheng and Minyue formed a coalition to oppose any move on Emperor Yang’s part in their direction. However, all of these states had a bitter history of frequent clashes between them which they had to overcome if this alliance were to last at all, and Yang expected he would be able to exploit their past bad blood to divide & conquer them in the years to come.
In Korea, the Goguryeo and Baekje-Yamato coalition were also moving toward the decisive battles with which they hoped to resolve their war. They would fight three such major battles along the Han River this year: first the Battle of Michuhol[7], in which Goguryeo was triumphant, then the Battles of Hanseong and Usooju[8], which were Baekje-Japanese victories – brought on by the clever use of iron caltrops to break up a Mohe cavalry charge in the former, and the Han River itself conveniently flooding immediately before the Goguryeo army tried to cross it in the latter. The latter two victories gave a critical edge to the Baekje-Yamato, allowing them to trap & besiege 12,000 Goguryeo troops in Michuhol while also sweeping the rest of the bloodied & demoralized Goguryeo army toward the Imjin River.
Baekje and Japanese troops routing the Goguryeo infantry toward the end of the Battle of Hanseong
By the end of 601 King Dojeol had to admit defeat and sue for peace. In the negotiations which followed the Imjin was made into the new border between Baekje and Goguryeo, securing the former’s control over the Han River, and the latter also agreed to pay tribute to the Yamato. Kose and Yamanoue returned to their island home covered in glory and bringing with them much plunder, having scored Japan’s first major continental victory and assisted (not that they even really needed to) the Baekje in effortlessly vassalizing the small Gaya confederacy in southern Korea which had remained neutral this entire time, although the domestic balance of power back on the Home Isles now favored Kose’s faction as a result of his deal with Yamanoue and Yamanoue’s own considerable losses in Korea. The regents may have celebrated prematurely however, for Geumryun of Silla continued to advocate in Luoyang for his kingdom’s restoration and with the Great Qi defeated at last, the Later Han were now free to consider that project with greater seriousness…
If 601 was a year in which Western Roman forces in Hispania were able to take a step forward, alas 602 was one in which they were driven two steps back. Constans attempted to launch a drive toward the Baurg (or, as it had come to be called in the vernacular speech of the Hispano-Romans, ‘Burgos’) where his brothers-in-law had established their capital, but his offensive was undone by Genobaudes’ failure to support it from the east. Instead, his forces were ultimately halted and rolled back all the way to the slopes of the Iuga Carpetana in the five-day Battle of the Durius[9] this summer, while Genobaudes took almost no action at all in the east despite being informed, and then ordered, to advance with increasing desperation by Constans’ messengers.
The Balthing brothers Liuveric and Theodoric, who waged a determined struggle not only to secure their inheritance but also to preserve their people's autonomy
The Western Roman prince complained of Genobaudes’ inaction to his father, who subsequently recalled his magister militum with intent to sack him for this latest failure. However Florianus changed his mind after recalling how Genobaudes’ great-grandfather Aloysius had revolted against his own granduncle Theodosius III after being fired from that office, and decided to head off the possibility of history repeating itself by arranging his assassination instead. Several agentes in rebus gained access to Genobaudes near Caesaraugusta in August of this year, claiming that they bore an important missive from the Augustus, and promptly strangled him to death.
The magister militum’s demise was officially blamed on agents of the Balthing brothers, but few in the elite Roman and federate circles bought that story. Though he initially feigned submission in order to be confirmed as the next Dux Germaniae, Genobaudes’ son Teutobaudes first pointedly refused to send his elder son Aloysius to Rome, where he would have served as a hostage, claiming the child was too young and sickly to make the trip. Secondly, before the year ended he would also arrange the marriage of his sister Hilaria to the Ostrogoth prince Theodemir, Viderichus’ younger son.
The Augustus must have realized then that he had gravely erred, and that by attempting to continue his father’s efforts to centralize the Western Empire & weaken the federate kingdoms with little to none of the latter’s caution or subtlety, he had brought his realm to the brink of a major federate revolt of a sort not seen since (and probably exceeding) the Second Great Conspiracy of the 470s. Realizing that he had averted an immediate rebellion in the north but at the cost of driving the Blues and Greens together – an unprecedented event – Florianus now hurried to shore up the support of his other federates in preparation for a civil war he could see coming. Most importantly this year, he named Iaunas his new magister utriusque militiae on account of being the strongest of the federate kings whose loyalty he could still count on, one of a very short list indeed in these days (which, the emperor had to admit, was his own doing).
Far to the southeast, 602 marked the outbreak of another civil war in Aksum. The Baccinbaxaba Tewodros was by now an old man, and even feebler than he had been in the prime of his life: power in this African empire, previously increasingly dispersed between his magnates, had in past years become concentrated in the hands of two of the greatest of their houses – that of Tessema of Begemder, a magnate whose power-base was in the western & central Aksumite highlands around Lake Tana, and Gadara of Adulis[10], whose lands and clients lay much closer to the imperial capital. Tessema’s sister had married Tewodros in their youth, while Gadara’s daughter married him in his old age after his first wife had predeceased him; both marriages produced issue, and naturally both magnates sought to place their kinsman on the Aksumite throne when Tewodros expired.
When the old emperor did finally die in his sleep on a hot August night this year, Gadara made the first move. His supporters, financed by the great merchant families of the coast and of Himyar, seized control of the capital with a minimum of bloodshed and declared his grandson Gersem the new Baccinbaxaba, putting to death those few who they could not bribe or coerce into kneeling before the young man. This was of course an unacceptable state of affairs to Tessema, who pronounced his nephew (and Gersem’s considerably older half-brother) Ioel to be the rightful ruler of Aksum and called the other highlander lords to arms for his sake. Though Gadara’s partisans were more numerous, those of Tessema proved to be the more skilled warriors and the first stage of this new Aksumite civil war mostly went in their favor, their advances toward the capital only coming to a halt when Gadara successfully incited the Jews of Semien[11] into rising up against Tessema.
The disorder in Aksum weakened their control over their vassals, such as the Quraysh clans of Mecca and the Macrobian city-states along the eastern coast of the Horn of Africa
On the other side of the world, the Northern Turkic civil war was winding down just as the Aksumite one was beginning to heat up. Muqan Qaghan’s partisans had increasingly abandoned him in the wake of the Battle of Beshbaliq for fear that he would soon be defeated and they would go down with him unless they cut ties, making his defeat a self-fulfilling prophecy. By September he and one of his last field armies had been slaughtered on the shores of Lake Gagan[12], where he was trying to raise a new army after being forced out of the Tarim Basin but was betrayed by several of his tarkhans, who revealed his whereabouts to Tardush in hopes of finding rewards in the new order.
On his way to the Northern Turkic throne, Tardush rewarded those traitors with a relatively quick death in the form of beheading. That done, he received the submission of Muqan’s remaining adherents among the Tegregs and could finally call himself the undisputed Qaghan of the Northern Turks, but soon found that his victory was nothing short of pyrrhic. His people had further bled themselves for nobody’s gain but his, while his non-Tegreg ‘friends’ in the west had grown so greatly in power that they were now virtually independent entities in their own right – their tribute payments were now smaller and more tardy than ever, and although they still feigned respect whenever he visited their camps the Khazars, Kimeks and Karluks did as they pleased the instant he turned away. At this time, Tardush could do little but focus on rebuilding Tegreg strength in the east, understanding that attempting to reassert Tegreg rule in more than just name over the Western Turks could only end in disaster given how weak they were at this time.
Further still to the east, while the Later Han and Yamato savored their recent victories, Dewawarman of Kuntala attempted to gain another such triumph over his next and greatest obstacle to consolidating control over the Malay Peninsula: the kingdom of Langkasuka, which dominated the north of said peninsula and the Kra Isthmus connecting it to the rest of mainland Asia. The Langkasukans proved a more difficult adversary to overcome than Kedah and Kelantan had been, however, and its king Bhadagatta III used his own not-inconsiderable treasury to reinforce his army with 6,000 Funanese[13] mercenaries from the north.
Those sellswords earned their pay late this year in the Battle off Patani[14], where Dewawarman led 18,000 warriors aboard 80 ships in an attempt to circumvent the hostile terrain of the northern Malay Peninsula and were met by Bhadagatta’s 60 ships and 14,000 warriors (including the Funanese) before they could reach the Langkasukan capital of Ligor[15]. Though the Kuntalans had the edge in numbers, the Langkasukans proved to be more ferocious fighters and were further aided by favorable winds, allowing them to quickly close in and board many of the bulkier Kuntalan warships early in the battle. Ultimately Dewawarman retreated after barely fighting off an attack on his flagship, and 50 of his ships followed – the rest having been sunk or captured by the Langkasukans. Frustrated but in no way deterred from pursuing his ambitions of complete maritime dominance over the entirety of Alam Melayu, he fell back to Kuntala to lick his wounds and more thoroughly plan a second invasion of Langkasuka in the future.
603 was a year of mixed fortunes for the Western Roman Empire. In Hispania, efforts by Liuveric and Theodoric to strengthen their armies in the spring with a campaign of taxation & forcible conscription was especially poorly received in the mountainous highlands of northwestern Hispania. There the Visigoths were driven out by the local Celtiberian tribes which had troubled both them and Rome in the past: the Callaeci, Astures and Cantabri, whose persistence and ferocity in defending their ancient homelands had won them a measure of autonomy even at the height of the Empire. An attempt by Theodoric to snuff out the uprising before it firmly established itself was ambushed and routed in the Battle of Asturica[16] later that summer, around the same time that his brother held Constans’ renewed advance back outside Salmantica[17].
Their rising was a most welcome boon to the Stilichians, who hurried to take advantage of this insurgency exploding in their Gothic enemies’ rear by cutting a deal with the rebels. Western Roman envoys traveling by ship from Burdigala offered to acknowledge the elevation & organization of their lands into a federate principality spanning the former borders of the province of Gallaecia, similar to the privilege which had been extended to the Aquitani, in exchange for their full co-operation with Constans to defeat the Visigoths. The tribal chieftains and warlords agreed to this proposal on winter’s eve and elected one Vismaro, strongest of the Gallaeci chiefs, to be their first Prince, a decision which Constans and Florianus II recognized.
Vismaro, prospective Prince of Gallaecia, stalking the forests of his putative realm for Visigoth stragglers
Elsewhere, the Western Caesar Constantine fathered a daughter with his wife Anastasia this year, who was baptized Verina after her grandmother in Constantinople. The news came as a welcome respite to Florianus, who continued to live in (entirely justified) fear of a coup, rebellion or assassination attempt. Such was his worry that he denied his mother Verina’s requests to have Otho brought to her all the way up to her dying day in September of this year, and then further ordered Otho to remain confined in Ravenna rather than allow him to travel to Rome for her funeral. All the while the Greens and Blues continued to secretly muster military resources in their lands as they plotted his downfall, with Viderichus and Otho himself working to subvert the garrison of Ravenna in particular.
These efforts in fact were how Otho managed to avert an attempt on his life near the year’s end, as he was able to sway his guards to intervene when his brother sent agentes in rebus to kill him now that their mother was no longer around to protect him. At that same time the Augustus was not even in Italy, having traveled to the lands of the Sclaveni with no fewer than four legions (or 4,000 men) for protection, to once more assure himself of their support and in turn promise the Carantanians and Horites imperial support against the Ostrogoths – culminating in him promising the hand of his niece Juliana to Seslav Radimirović, a younger son of the aging Prince Radimir of the Horites, while simultaneously trying to kill her father (who obviously was not about to consent to the match) back in Italy. It was clear that he would need their ardent support, for between the assassination attempt against Otho and the tensions which had been building up to boiling point over the past years, matters from Augusta Treverorum to Ravenna were imminently about to come to a head…
Off in the east, there was trouble and subterfuge in the lands of the Southern Turks. Qapaghan passed away in the autumn of this year, supposedly gored to death by an old wild boar on a hunt; his heir Heshana did not mourn him overmuch, but then neither did most Southern Turks in light of his embarrassing defeat by and the loss of his daughter to the Eastern Romans. Having accelerated the succession, the newly enthroned Heshana Qaghan set out to pursue his two priorities – firstly rebuilding Persia, which required him to ruthlessly purge banditry from Persia’s roads to make them safe for trade on top of normalizing relations with his weakened Northern Turk cousin Tardush and the Hunas of India, and secondly pursuing revenge against the Romans, though he understood the importance of patience and refilling his coffers before rebuilding the Southern Turkic army. Heshana also took the time & resources to try to revitalize Manichaeism, his faith in which he’d inherited from his father, and to have it fill the void left by the greatly-diminished Zoroastrianism following the numerous invasions of Persia and the rise of Mazdakite Buddhism in the west of the country, sponsoring the elevation of the friendly Parthian exile Mihrdad to be the faith’s new Archegos[18] in Esfahan and building Manichaean temples wherever he could afford to.
A Manichaean fresco commissioned by Heshana Qaghan early in his reign, depicting himself and the Archegos Mihrdad (among other clerics & courtiers) worshiping at the Tree of Life
603 marked a changing of the guard in India as well, though not necessarily a change in outlook, for the Samrat Harsha died at the age of sixty late this year. He was succeeded by his middle son and Mahasenapati Megavahana, who immediately had to fend off challenges by both his older and younger brothers for the throne: this he had done by the end of the year, arranging the former’s assassination and defeating the latter in battle near Girinagar[19] to secure his hold on the Huna crown. That bloody start to his reign aside, Megavahana was a man more like his father than his grandfather – inclined toward economic & artistic development and harmonious relations with his neighbors, rather than viciously fighting to expand & conquer like their Eftal forefathers had been best known for, and unlikely to start large wars unless provoked.
Aside from upholding the reputation of the Huna imperial court as a lavish patron of the arts, Megavahana also continued Harsha’s policy of support for both Buddhism and Śvētāmbara Jainism throughout northern India, and sought to strengthen trading ties both in the west and east. To the west he made moves to enter a rapproachment with Heshana Qaghan, culminating in successful negotiations to clearly delineate their border (which also served Heshana’s plans to concentrate Turkic power against the Eastern Romans in the future) and secure the betrothal of Heshana’s three-year-old first son Bumin to his own five-year-old daughter Karmavati, as well as to sponsor Nasrani Christian merchants involved with the trading routes to the Roman world. To the east, Megavahana sought to improve ties with and win trading concessions from the rising power of Kuntala, where Dewawarman was quite happy to facilitate (and profit from) increased maritime commerce between India and China in order to refill his coffers and accelerate his preparations for another conflict with Langkasuka.
1. Western Roman Empire
2. Eastern Roman Empire
3. March of Arbogast
4. Neustria
5. Austrasia
6. Burgundians
7. Alemanni
8. Bavarians
9. Thuringians
10. Lombards
11. Ostrogoths
12. Visigoths
13. Aquitani
14. Celtiberians
15. Carantanians
16. Horites
17. Dulebes
18. Altava
19. Theveste
20. Romano-British
21. South Angles
22. Deira
23. Bernicia
24. Picts
25. Dál Riata
26. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta & Connachta
27. Frisians
28. Continental Saxons
29. Vistula Veneti
30. Antae
31. Iazyges
32. Avars
33. Gepids
34. Georgia
35. Caucasian Albania
36. Armenia
37. Padishkhwargar
38. Ghassanids
39. Lakhmids
40. Garamantes
41. Nubia
42. Aksum (Tessema's faction)
43. Aksum (Gadara's faction)
44. Quraish & Yathrib
45. Hoggar
46. Kumbi
47. Southern Turkic Khaganate
48. Indo-Romans
49. Hunas
50. Kannada kingdoms of the Chalukyas & Gangas
51. Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Pandyas & Cholas
52. Sogdians & Tocharians
53. Khazars
54. Kimeks
55. Karluks
56. Oghuz Turks
57. Northern Turkic Khaganate
58. Later Han
59. Cheng
60. Chu
61. Minyue
62. Later Liang
63. Yi
64. Nanyue
65. Champa
66. Funan
67. Goguryeo
68. Baekje
69. Gaya
70. Yamato
71. Kuntala
72. Irish of Lesser Paparia, Greater Paparia & the New World
[11] Better known as the ‘Beta Israel’, and pejoratively called the ‘Falasha’ (‘wanderers’) by Christian Ethiopians back in those times, the Ethiopian Jews primarily inhabited the defensible Semiem Mountains of what’s now northwestern Ethiopia and from there often challenged Christian rule after Aksum’s conversion in the mid-4th century. They historically reached the apex of their power under Queen Gudit/Judith, who ruled in the 10th century.
[12] Lake Alakol.
[13] A collection of Indianized, Hindu/Buddhist petty kingdoms which stretched from the Mekong Delta into modern-day southern Thailand, with the richest and greatest of their cities being located in modern-day Cambodia. They were probably an Austroasiatic people related to the modern Mon and Cambodians, as the Tai peoples had yet to migrate this far south.
[14] Pattani.
[15] Nakhon Si Thammarat.
[16] Astorga.
[17] Salamanca.
[18] The title of the head of the Manichaean faith, first borne by Mar Sisin who was the prophet Mani’s foremost apostle and preached in both Roman lands & Central Asia.
And Florianus just keeps making matters worse, at least his father and grandfather had reasons for their troubles (usually Avars or Frederica), but in his case it's down to him. And I don't think his Slavic federati can help him all that much, as they need to guard against the Avars. At least Africa is secure, though that was more due to his predecessors.
Good chapter.
So: turks and ERE woud almost kill each other,and Machomet would create new religion and go no conqest.
He would take ERE part of Africa,but not WRE,berbers there would stop him
What about donatists? in OTL,they surrender and quickly become muslims.Did they remain independent here?
Kumbi would remain independent,too - maybe they take shore and communicate with WRE by sea?
Kuntala would keep expanding.
WRE would get cyvil war,and maybe lost Spain,but that would be all.They would keep rest.
China would kick Japan out of Korea.Unless some papari named MacArhur save them!
Yes indeed, the WRE has some very 'exciting' times ahead self-created by the greed/recklessness/paranoia of their emperor on a scale not seen since Theodosius III (right before the outbreak of the bubonic plague), and even that guy at least managed to keep the Greens & Blues apart instead of working together to come after his head. Good of you to remember the Avars - they're definitely going to have an interest in the imminent civil war, even if the extreme hostility both of the emerging sides (the imperial-aligned Slavs and the Ostrogoths who are about two seconds away from openly rebelling as of this last update) have against them might complicate their prospective advances.
The ERE's position is a lot stabler right now, but without spoiling anything outright I can guarantee the interesting-times train will definitely be pulling into their station in the future as well. Can't say a whole lot about Africa atm, but re: China and Japan, it is pretty difficult to imagine the Yamato being able to hang on to Korea at this point without a miracle or ten to keep the hugely empowered Later Han off their backs.
Speaking of China, I've noticed that I forgot to finish cleaning up the Later Han-Cheng border around the Yellow River while finishing up the world map right before posting late last night. I've since edited in the fixed map.
Lastly - we've made it folks, 200 years. A big thanks to all of you who have been keeping up with my timeline to this point, may it continue for many more chapters and centuries yet
Definitely interesting times ahead for a lot of people. The Eastern empire is in a better condition that OTL as no Phocus revolt, at least so far, to divide the state and the southern Turks seem weaker than the Sassanids were at the corresponding time. Axum is going to have problems as well and is likely to be the 1st significant victim of Mohamed as I can't see his rise be anything like OTL without Mecca and Yemen. Hence the civil war is going to be a disaster for them. One other point with the eastern empire is that unless it loses its territory in Mesopotamia before the Arabs come its going to take the full weight of their 1st surge. Which is unlikely to save a further weakened southern Turkish state however.
Florianus has made multiple rods for his own back and what would be most likely would be his empire falling into chaos with possibly a generation or so down the line a new dynasty arising to seek to unite much of the empire given external threats. However I suspect the dynasty will pull through as they have so often in the past. Mind you with the eastern empire going to have its own troubles and the heir currently there to gain miliarily experience - as well as keep him safe from assassins - he could end up falling in battle against the Turks, which would complicate matters more in the east,
China looks like its uniting again under the Later Han - as opposed to the earlier Late Han - but the new emperor could find himself too overstretched if he seeks to conquer both the southern states and also reassert control in Korea and the north at the same time.
The dawn of 604 brought with it the beginning of the latest Western Roman civil war which virtually everyone with any measure of power or awareness of its deterioriating political situation around the western Mediterranean had been expecting for years, and it came about in a suitably bloody fashion for a conflict that future historians would name ‘Aetas Turbida’ – the Time of Troubles. As the soon-to-be-literally embattled Augustus Florianus returned from the Sclaveni lands in April, having added to his escorting army some 2,000 warriors from the three great Slavic tribes who had just reaffirmed their oaths to him, he found the road to Italy obstructed by nearly 20,000 Ostrogoths and Bavarians near the mountain village of Nemas[1], led by the former’s King Viderichus himself. Suffice to say, they were not there to offer the emperor a friendly greeting.
Battle was joined almost immediately on the foggy morning of April 10, as the Gothic archers had taken up positions in the hills surrounding the town and greeted the approaching Romans with a flurry of arrows. The elite legionaries and Slavic noble warriors Florianus brought – many of them veterans of earlier wars with the Avars and Hoggari – proved their skill and experience in the rapidity with which they arrayed for combat, refusing to panic under the sudden fire of the treacherous federates and swiftly presenting a dense, disciplined shield-wall as the Bavarian infantry led the rebels’ assault. Despite their greater numbers, the Bavarians streaming down from the hills broke against the Western Roman line like a river against a mighty boulder, and were soon sent fleeing in disarray before their bristling spears, swords and plumbatae after failing to make much of an impact at all.
The Teutons rallied and soon attacked again under Viderichus’ direction, this time with the better-equipped and more disciplined Ostrogoths leading the way. Regardless, they still failed to break the elite Western Roman troops, and Viderichus sent in his horsemen to try to outflank them. Florianus anticipated such a maneuver and duly led his Scholae cavalry to repel them, in which – mirroring the infantry engagement – their superior skill at arms and the top-notch quality of their weapons and armor allowed them to hold their own against the larger number of Ostrogoth cavalrymen. The Battle of Nemas was still going nowhere by high noon, leading the frustrated Viderichus to order his archers to begin firing directly into the clashing masses of men on the plain below even knowing that casualties from friendly fire was inevitable.
Ostrogoth and Bavarian troops attacking Florianus' domestici pedites, or household foot guards, at the Battle of Nemas. Some of the Goths are armored exactly like the Romans, wearing ridge helmets rather than their traditional segmented helmets, distinguishing themselves as the elite Romano-Gothic infantry in Viderichus' employ
The arrows felled as many Goths and Bavarians as they did Romans, and it took all of Viderichus’ experience as a statesman to persuade the Bavarian prince Agilolf not to try to kill him on the spot when the latter loudly accused him of treachery. It still wasn’t enough to break the Romans anyway, but one of the Ostrogoth arrows did find its way to Florianus’ neck in the confusion. The Scholae raced to shield their overlord as he swayed in his saddle, and managed to keep the attacking Goths from killing him on the spot; indeed, the Teutons would soon retire due to exhaustion and their complete inability to vanquish either the Roman cavalry or infantry. But the damage was done to Viderichus’ satisfaction, and despite having held his ground the wounded Florianus died later that night, having failed – as Theodosius III had long before him – to live long enough to set things right after provoking a civil war with his own actions.
While Florianus’ elite army withdrew to friendly Carantania, Viderichus spread the word that the Western Augustus was no more. Now by this time Otho had already incited the garrison and people of Ravenna to rebellion, and they had proclaimed him Augustus either in protest of the taxes Florianus had been levying upon them to finance first his ill-fated Saharan adventure & then his Hispanic war or simply because Otho and the Ostrogoths had bribed them with gold & promises of higher office; but until now the situation in Rome itself was still fluid. Pope Anastasius led Green and Blue efforts to sway the city to Otho’s side, but the urban mob and a number of Senators remained loyal to Florianus until news of his death arrived and dispirited them. The Senator Anicius Symmachus took advantage of this shift in the tide to call for a debate on the Senate floor, at which point he and his allies revealed that they had brought daggers into the Curia Julia with the connivance of the guards on his & Viderichus’ payroll and proceeded to massacre the opposition.
By April 30, Rome’s gates were open to Otho and Viderichus. Symmachus dared remind Viderichus that the plan was to make him Emperor, not Otho. Viderichus simply laughed in his face, but allowed him to live because with the decimation of the pro-Florianus Senators, he still needed Symmachus around to serve as a Green figurehead in that bloodstained body and lend their cause a hint of legislative legitimacy. With no other choice (on account of the Ostrogoth blade pressed to his throat), Symmachus led what remained of the Western Senate in acclaiming Otho as the new Augustus of the Occident, and Pope Anastasius crowned him as such the day after. As he donned the purple Otho was confident that he could at least count on Gaul, Germania, most or all of Italy and the Visigoths in Hispania in the bloody struggle ahead.
Of course, although it may have been supported by most of the federate kingdoms in the West their coup was denounced in Constantinople and Carthage, where the Eastern Augustus Arcadius and the widowed Augusta Dihia recognized Florianus’ Caesar and eldest surviving son with the latter, Constantine, as the lawful Western Emperor instead. As Florianus’ last magister militum and overall generalissimo of the loyalist forces in Africa, it fell to Iaunas of Theveste to coordinate the response of loyalist forces in the western Mediterranean. His first move was to rally the legions of Africa and call up Moorish warriors from both his own kingdom and Dihia’s Altava to support them; his second was to rush the wedding of Prince Venantius to his daughter Tia, both of whom turned fourteen this year, though the little joy the teenage royals could find in the hurried ceremony was further marred by the fact that the bridegroom’s father had been killed almost immediately before and the outbreak of civil war gave them no time for a proper honeymoon.
Iaunas leading a column of Thevestian recruits in the African desert. The majority of the Silingi Vandals settled in or around the Aurès Mountains almost two centuries ago, and it shows in their Moorish descendants, many more of whom tend to still harbor Teutonic features such as fair hair & skin compared to their Altavan neighbors
With that done and his forces consolidated around Carthage, Iaunas moved to seize Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica with the assistance of the faithful Carthaginian fleet, with Venantius accompanying him as an aide. By the year’s end he had landed some 18,000 troops at Rhegium, whose magistrate and people yielded & recognized Constantine as their ruler without a fight. Around the same time, Arcadius had given his own son-in-law and claimant an army with which he was sweeping into Macedonia, swiftly receiving the submission of Thessalonica and moving to link up with the Sclaveni who maintained their loyalty to his side of the Stilichian dynasty. Lastly, Florianus and Dihia’s middle son Constans was withdrawing into Baetica to link up with a secondary African army that had crossed over the Pillars of Hercules, even as the Balthings went on the offensive to pursue him.
The eruption of fratricidal bloodletting was not limited to the Roman parts of Western Europe this year. Across the Oceanus Britannicus, Æþelhere of South Anglia went to war against Eadberht of Deira, seeking to bring Eoforwic under his rule as his first big step toward reunifying the Anglo-Saxons. Although both sides fielded armies which were very similar in size and composition, Æþelhere’s cultivation of positive relations with the Romano-Britons had not only freed him up from having to watch his southern flank but also given him access to a market of mercenaries from the British lands, and so to his ranks he had added a complement of Cambrian long-spearmen and longbowmen.
The efficacy of these troops (especially the latter) came as a rude shock to Eadberht, whose cavalry could not overcome the former while his remaining troops failed to withstand the withering fire of the latter, the result being that the South Angles achieved a major victory in the Battle of Donneceaster[2] (which the Roman embassy in Æþelhere’s court still recorded by its old Latin name, Danum). By the year’s end, South Angle forces had won another battle at the village of Fulford and were investing Eoforwic. King Eadberht was not present to lead the defense, having fled his capital for Bebbanburh and taken his family with him, in hopes of finding assistance from his brother Eadwald of Bernicia. He had no such luck in 604 though, for Eadwald was busy fending off efforts by the exiled Pictish King of Fib[3] to retake his kingdom from Bernician settlers who called that land ‘Fifeshire’.
Elsewhere, Heshana Qaghan continued the arduous process of reconstructing the war-torn Persian territories. While there was still no shortage of brigands for him to hang or impale and farmers to reassure about how safe it was now to plant their crops regularly across the devastated countryside, he also took steps to actually rebuild the cities and towns of Persia directly, distributing plunder from his personal treasury and the pockets of slain bandits to finance the repair of walls, wells and temples or just to buy food from abroad to give out to the masses. The Manichaean clergy, whose small numbers and obscurity had given them a measure of protection from the various armies which rampaged across the Land of Aryans since the Hepthalites first shattered the Sassanids a century & a half prior, provided Heshana with a cadre of literate bureaucrats and engineers who helped him rebuild Persia in his image.
Turkic Manichaean priests, newly trained under the patronage of Heshana Qaghan, now forming the nucleus of his new royal bureaucracy
From 605 onward, the Western Augustus Otho found that seizing the purple was only the first step in a long and difficult journey: now he had to not only defend his throne from his rightfully angry nephews, but also carefully balance the competing Blue and Green factions comprising the coalition propping him up, a task that could be as difficult as it was tedious. Naturally his primary ally Viderichus demanded and promptly had to be awarded the office of magister utriusque militiae, but this appointment immediately attracted the ire of the Romano-Frank Teutobaudes, who believed he should have that office instead by virtue of it having been held by his unjustly murdered father Genobaudes immediately before the eruption of hostilities.
To appease Teutobaudes and prevent his supporters from fragmenting in the first year of the civil war, Otho declared him the Western Consul for 605-606 (this nomination was naturally not recognized by the Eastern court) and appointed the candidates he nominated to various civil offices in Italy. He also arranged the marriage of his son Julianus to Renata, daughter of the Blue Senatorial leader Agricola Avitus, at the same time that he wedded his older daughter Juliana to Viderichus’ eldest son Theodoric, a widower twice her age. Most of these offices were vacated for Blue cronies by way of bloody purges targeting the supporters of Florianus and his family, which were largely carried out by the Italic legionaries who had sworn allegiance to Otho or private militias raised by pro-Otho Senators while the Ostrogoths concentrated on combating the advancing loyalists of Constantine on all fronts.
The wedding of the Western Roman princess Juliana to Theodoric, heir to the Ostrogoth kingdom, who has clearly refused to shave his beard but at least bothered to dress in a traditional Roman toga for this occasion
Aside from the political struggles in Italy, the military side of the Time of Troubles’ first stage remained highly mixed and unstable. Othonian forces were most successful in Gaul, where Teutobaudes assailed the pro-Constantine Franks of Neustria with his Austrasian allies; there, Clovis II had attempted to knock his adversaries off-balance with a counterattack but was resoundingly defeated and killed by the larger Othonian army in the Battle of Compendium[4], soon after which his kingdom was overwhelmed, Lutetia captured by treachery and his family sent fleeing to Britannia, from where Artorius III allowed them to continue onward to the South English court at Tomtun[5]. The Othonians also had some success in southern Italy, where Viderichus successfully marched to relieve the siege of Neapolis by Iaunas’ army.
However, the Florianic forces were in ascendancy in Hispania, where despite the Balthing brothers’ best efforts Constans managed to link up with his African reinforcements at Hispalis and defeat the Visigoths in a battle north of the city. Liuveric and Theodoric were forced into retreat back toward the Iuga Carpetana and split up under pressure from their Roman pursuers, with Theodoric continuing along their original northward route while Liuveric holed up in the recaptured Toletum with 5,000 men and promptly came under siege. Constantine himself was having success in the east, where all Macedonia and Achaea fell in line behind him in short order and the aging Croat Prince Radimir assisted him in recapturing the cities of the Dalmatian coast from their mostly-Ostrogoth garrisons.
Alas, starting in the autumn the Avars came to the realization that this was a full-blown civil war tearing their western enemies apart, not some simple coup or provincial revolt, and acted accordingly to keep things from being too easy for either the Othonian or Florianic factions. Dulo Khagan began with raids and limited probing attacks into the lands of the Dulebes, Horites and Carantanians, but by wintertime he was forcefully crossing over the frozen Danube into Roman Moesia with a respectable host of 25,000 behind him. As this attack threatened Constantine’s rear he had little choice but to respond, and while the Slavs backed him up and Arcadius authorized his Eastern Roman troops to help defend against the Avar invasion, it still cost him valuable time and manpower that he could have been using to push against Viderichus and Otho before they could fully harden the defenses of Italy & western Dalmatia against his advance.
A seventh-century Dulebian lancer from the Pannonian frontier. No doubt has trained extensively on the flat plain of his new homeland to better combat the Avars, ever preparing for the return of his people's former overlords & tormentors
Further to the north, Eoforwic’s demoralized defenders surrendered the Deiran capital in the early summer months, having lost their resolve to fight on without their king and accepted Æþelhere’s promise of leniency despite still having enough food in their stores to last the rest of 605. Æþelhere accepted their surrender and followed through on his offer, even recruiting several hundred of the city’s thousand-strong former defenders into his own army. These defectors were put to the test later in the year, as Eadwald finally defeated the men of Fib and spiked their king’s head in September, after which he could finally turn his attention southward.
Æþelhere demanded that Eadwald turn over Eadberht, to which he responded by marching south to confront the South Angles on the battlefield – with his brother by his side as a claimant, not a prisoner. Their armies met near Dunholm[6], where the junior Raedwaldings led the veteran Bernician infantry stoutly held out on a hill against the arrows of Æþelhere’s Cambrians and threw back a massed South Angle assault before launching an unexpected downhill countercharge, routing the more numerous South Angles. Following the battle, Eadberht personally oversaw the execution of any and all former members of Eoforwic’s garrison in their custody for treason. Æþelhere himself fell back to Eoforwic for the winter, irritated that this reversal had cost him his chance at a quick victory but still determined to pursue his plans of conquest nonetheless.
Off in the distant east, the presence of Christianity in China was definitively recorded for the first time this year. As the middle length of the Silk Road became increasingly secure and overland trade naturally picked up with the restoration of peace & safety across the Turkic lands, a Paropamisadae convert and missionary named Sophagasenus (a Latinization of his original Sanskrit name, ‘Subhagasena’) accompanied a caravan from Kophen which made several stops in western China before finally reaching its final destination at the Han capital of Luoyang, and in addition to selling handmade wares crafted in or around the solitary church of the Indo-Roman capital he preached the Gospel at every stop along the way to all who would hear.
Sophagasenus leading the first Chinese Christian converts in a modest Palm Sunday procession
Emperor Yang found Sophagasenus’ presence and teachings curious, and invited him to translate some of his texts (which in turn had already been translated from Greek into Sogdian previously) for the benefit of a Chinese audience. While not swayed to convert himself, the Emperor was an open-minded and generally lenient man, and allowed Sophagasenus to reside & continue preaching in Luoyang, where he would slowly amass a modest audience of converts. At the very least Yang believed that Sophagasenus could help him cultivate stronger trade relations with the ‘Houyuan’[7] or ‘Later Ionians’, as he called the Indo-Romans dwelling in the Caucasus Indicus, as well as the still-mighty and rich Daqin whose customs bore some resemblance to theirs and who lived even further west beyond the lands conquered by the Turkic barbarians.
Speaking of Emperor Yang, he and the Later Han were also beginning to make their moves in Korea, which would have been of far greater consequence in his mind than allowing a novel preacher from the distant western mountains to stay in Luoyang. Emperor Yang decided to focus his attention northward to allow his rivals in the south some time to pick at the lingering wounds between them, in hopes that they would eventually turn against one another and self-destruct in the absence of any Later Han offensive. The situation in Goguryeo provided him with an excellent place to start: having been defeated and compelled to pay tribute to Japan, King Dojeol did not have the money to pay his Mohe mercenaries, who promptly began to rampage across his lands in the belief that conquering their former employer's kingdom would amount to sufficient compensation.
Thus the northern Korean king had little choice but to accept Yang’s offer of assistance in restoring order to his kingdom, and by the end of 605 Han troops had assisted the Goguryeo in suppressing the Mohe – of the survivors who did not simply flee back into their wintry homeland, some 6,000 were killed and three times that number enslaved. Goguryeo thus moved back into the Chinese orbit, ironically only a few decades after fighting to remain independent of Great Qi’s grasp, and gave Yang a platform from which he could strike into Silla in the near future. The Yamato did not seem to take the growing threat seriously at this time, as the regents Yamanoue and Kose had by now gone back to jostling for power at home – the former seeking to undermine and reverse the latter’s growing influence in the aftermath of their Korean adventure.
Goguryeo soldiers welcome a column of Later Han reinforcements to their lands, previously devastated by the Han's immediate precursors the Great Qi and now by their own unpaid Mohe sellswords
606 was another year of mixed fortunes for both sides of the Western Roman civil war. Developments in Italy and Dalmatia were mostly favorable to the sons of Florianus: firstly Iaunas and Venantius threw back an attempt by Viderichus to pursue them into Lucania at the Battle of Grumentum[8]. Soon after the pair received reinforcements from Africa, with which they resumed their advance and once again attacked Neapolis. Though still young and inexperienced at warfare, Venantius showed a spark of martial cunning when he proposed using the section of the Aqua Augusta – an old aqueduct network which had fallen into disuse due to damage from Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in the late fifth century – which once serviced Neapolis to push into the city, and circumvent its defenses before Viderichus and Otho could march to its relief again. The energetic young prince had in long-past summers inspected the ruined aqueduct for no reason beyond Iaunas' daughter daring him to on an Italian vacation, and recalled that part of its channel had pierced solid rock beneath Neapolis' walls: with the water long gone, the passage had become a tunnel which, if expanded, would be traversable for an army.
Iaunas exploited Venantius’ suggestion to capture Neapolis by storm toward the end of May, much to the shock of Otho and Viderichus who were still amassing troops with which to relieve the city. Instead they would end up leading that army to do battle with Iaunas and Venantius outside Teanum Apulum[9] to the east – the first serious test of arms between Florianic and Othonian forces in Italy, with both sides pitting around 25,000 men against the other. Though the Africans dominated the initial stage of the battle, effortlessly outshooting the Gothic and Othonian Roman archers both on foot and horseback, the Othonians proved to be too much to overcome once their armies collided for the melee engagement and Iaunas ended up ordering a withdrawal to Neapolis, which the Florianic host managed to carry out in an orderly fashion thanks to an effective rearguard action waged by their cavalry reserve.
A veteran African caballarius fends off Ostrogothic pursuers of Iaunas' and Venantius' army following the Battle of Teanum Apulum
Though he had won a major battle in southern Italy and prevented his adversaries from attempting a swift march on Rome however, Otho was confronted by more bad news when he returned to the Eternal City. While he was out fighting Iaunas and Venantius, Pope Anastasius had died in his sleep; while it was not altogether unexpected due to the man’s age, his demise was still spun by Florianic propagandists into a sign that God favored their cause and would punish the ‘corrupt’ clergy who took the side of Otho. Worse still, the Roman clergy and mob favored the candidacy of a priest named Lucius, who had initially preached in favor of Florianus (in so doing butting heads with the late Pope) and only changed his tune after news of the latter’s death reached Rome; in other words, someone who promised to be a lukewarm supporter of Otho’s, at best.
This choice was unacceptable to Otho, who bluntly exercised the imperial privilege of jus exclusivae – the ‘right of exclusion’, or the theoretical right of the Emperor (as head of the Roman Church) to veto a Papal selection[10] – to stop Lucius from assuming office. Instead he declared another cleric named Lucretius, the runner-up in the Papal election (and a much more reliable Green partisan), to be the next Pope. Otho’s maneuver went down about as well as expected with the people of Rome: large riots exploded and took several weeks to fully stamp out, and during the chaos not Lucius himself escaped to Neapolis. The emperor had to waste troops doubling Rome’s garrison for some time to ensure security in the capital, thereby dashing any hope the Ostrogoths might have had of launching a counterattack in Dalmatia while Constantine’s army was still freshly bloodied from fighting the Avars. Speaking of which, the sons of Florianus honored the runaway papabile as the rightful Pope Lucius II, denouncing Lucretius as an antipope with the support of the rest of the Heptarchy.
There was more bad news to the northeast, where Constantine had managed to link up with the faithful Sclaveni and the remnants of his father’s elite army. To Otho’s relief this array of unified Eastern & Western Roman and Slavic forces could not drive into northeastern Italy immediately due to the Avar attack, but their combined forces did manage to hold Dulo Khagan back in the Battle of the Ulca[11], albeit at considerable cost to themselves – among whom Constantine was not counted, happily for the senior Stilichians and unhappily for his uncle. As a result of his defeat, Dulo halted his westward offensive and reoriented toward Macedonia instead, while Viderichus took the time bought by this Avar-Roman clash to dispatch his sons to Aquileia, from where they were to shore up Ostrogoth and Othonian defenses in southwestern Dalmatia & northeastern Italy.
Constantine's Roman and Slavic soldiers in the process of pushing the Avars and their Gepid thralls back over the Ulca. The imperial claimant can be seen personally leading this effort from horseback in the background
The Othonians did get a break in the far west, however. Theodoric re-emerged from the mountains of central Hispania: prioritizing saving his brother over fending off Vismaro’s thrust from the north and linking up with Teutobaudes, who was leading a large number of Gallic and various Teutonic troops (mostly Franks and Burgundians, the latter being his wife Burgundofara’s people) to capture Barcino and other Hispano-Roman cities in the northeast loyal to the sons of Florianus throughout the summer months, in August he descended upon Constans’ army outside Toletum where Liuveric was continuing to hold. Facing a substantial disadvantage, Constans sought to retreat away from the city but was caught and killed in a battle near the headwaters of the Flumen Anas[12]. Toward the year’s end, Iaunas would dispatch Venantius to take command of his slain brother’s shattered forces and try to hold the line in southern Hispania, in which he would be assisted by additional Altavan reinforcements scrounged up by their heartbroken and vengeful mother – who, at this point, had now lost fully half of her children.
Beyond Roman waters, the conflict between the Raedwalding branches continued to rage in northern Britain. Eadwald and Eadberht advanced upon Eoforwic in the late winter and early spring months while Æþelhere was still in the process of recruiting and moving new troops from his domains further south, and as a result he found himself besieged in the Deiran capital at the start of summer. In July his reinforcements marching up from Tomtun & Lincylene achieved a significant victory over part of the North Angle besieging force in the Battle of Cyningesburh[13], compelling the Raedwalding brothers into fleeing back northward while he was able to break out of Eoforwic and begin harrying them on their retreat.
Æþelhere's South Angle reinforcements colliding with the Deirans & Bernicians along the River Dun, near Cyningesburh and Donneceaster
However, the North Angles again surprised Æþelhere when they turned and engaged him at Gainford. The battle went poorly for the core South Angle army, as many of Æþelhere’s soldiers had dispersed across the countryside to chase down their foes, and once again the King of the South Angles found himself in a southward retreat. Fortunately, by the time he collected his forces around Eoforwic, he found that his losses – though stinging – had not been crippling. Worse, however, were the reports from his southern sentries of Romano-British troops beginning to amass around the larger castellae across the border: perhaps Artorius III too was noticing that he seemed unable to deal a deathblow to the North Angles, and despite having established the only positive relationship between the Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons in over a century, considered the latter’s continuing troubles to present too good an opportunity to pass up. With that in mind, Æþelhere committed to a major offensive against Bebbanburh come 607 in hopes of ending the war quickly, before the Pendragons could be emboldened any further.
On the other side of the continent, while the Later Han continued to undertake preparations for a great expedition to Korea and the alliance between their enemies in the south grew increasingly frayed as old border conflicts & rivalries began to flare up once more, Dewawarman was making a second go at Langkasuka. This time he had built up an even larger army and fleet (reckoned at 22,000 troops and sailors spread over a hundred ships of varying sizes) over the previous years, and when the Langkasukan fleet tried to stop him before he could sail through the Malay Strait in June of 606, he smote them in the Battle off Lansura[14]: with both sides enjoying calm weather and calmer seas, the clash was a straightforward one in which neither the Langkasukans nor Kuntalans deployed any innovative tricks, simply brute force in a series of ferocious boarding actions – of which the latter’s advantage in men and ships proved decisive.
Having secured the seas with his resounding victory, Dewawarman pressed on into Langkasukan soil and disembarked with his army on the other side of the Malay peninsula two months later. After detaching 5,000 soldiers to take control of the port of Patani and capture the partially finished second Langkasukan fleet there, the majority of the Kuntalan host went on to lay siege to their enemy’s capital of Ligor. Dewawarman would not live to see his victory, as he was killed by a Langkasukan arrow early in the siege, but by December the Langkasukan king Adiputra had been forced to capitulate following an outbreak of disease behind his defenses and the capture of part of his sea-wall in an amphibious Kuntalan escalade. Dewawarman’s son and successor Suryawarman allowed him to live and did not sack Ligor since it had yielded before an overly costly assault became necessary, but he did impose upon the Langkasukans a tribute quota twice that of Kedah’s in memory of his father. Kuntala now completely controlled the maritime trade route which flowed from Chinese ports toward Indian ones through the Malay Strait – a pity that the overland Silk Road had recently been reopened through the now-relatively-peaceful Turkic lands, making Suryawarman’s conquest a little less lucrative than he and his late father had hoped.
[7] The ‘former’ Ionians in this context would have been the ‘Dayuan’, or Great Ionians: a Greco-Bactrian kingdom in the Ferghana Valley with their capital at Khujand, noted for their excellent wine & horses, which was subdued by the (original) Han dynasty in 101 BC. Like the Dayuan, the ‘Later Ionians’ would have seemed to the Later Han a remnant of an advanced and powerful western-based empire (in their case the Daqin, or Romans) almost equal to China itself, who briefly held but then retreated from the mountains they now call home.
[8] Grumento Nova.
[9] San Paolo di Civitate.
[10] Aside from universally recognized Roman Emperors, this privilege was historically exercised by the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors, and sometimes the French king as well. Although the Popes themselves never recognized the existence of such a right, they generally lacked the power to resist its exercise by secular monarchs in more recent centuries. The last time it was exercised was by Franz Josef, to shoot down the candidacy of Mariano Rampolla in the 1903 conclave, after which the newly elected Pope Pius X explicitly forbade the practice for the first time in history (prior Popes had just tried to restrict it).
[11] The Vuka River.
[12] The Guadiana River. The site of Constans’ fall would have been near modern Villarrubia de los Ojos.
Well, the Western Roman uncivil war looks as devastating as expected.
In China Emperor Yang is proving as shrewd as his father was, his enemies to the South are only united by their fear of him and by denying them his immediate threat, he is spurring discord among them, while his Korean intervention is keeping army sharp, while not seriously weakening the southern border.
Maybe next pope create cardinals to elect next pope?
And,if Iazyges are smart,they could help Romans this time - they are not strong enough to be independent forever,and Romans are better overlords then Avars.But - which romans?
