638 saw the outbreak of another conflict on Rome’s frontiers, this time in the south. For years now the Donatists of Hoggar had been stepping up their attacks on settlements in and just beyond the Atlas Mountains, exploiting first the regency of Stilicho and then his war with the Eastern Romans, while also sending small armies southward to assail Kumbi’s waystations and oasis-towns in the southern Sahara. These assaults culminated in a major raid on Zabi[1] which resulted in the town being burned to the ground. This stirred Eucherius, who as King of Altava was responsible for the Western Empire’s first line of defense in northwestern Africa, to action: quickly assembling a force of 5,000 men (a fifth of whom were sent from the Aurès Mountains by his mother Tia), the younger Stilichian brother annihilated the same Hoggari raiding party responsible for sacking Zabi at the Battle of Auzia[2] in March when it dared venture further north.
Stilicho was interested in taking Hoggar down a peg or fifty, emboldened as he was by his victories in the east and being eager to avenge the defeat of his grandfather and his wife’s great-grandfather at their hands at the end of the sixth century. The
Augustus moved no fewer than ten legions – 10,000 men – into Africa to form a punitive expeditionary force and ordered his brother & mother to raise further reinforcements to join them, leaving his wife Egilona pregnant once more in Italy shortly before his departure to Carthage. Her father Hermenegild II also joined them with 7,000 Visigoths, evidently no less determined to make up for the failures of the first Hermenegild than Stilicho & Eucherius were for Florianus II. The Western Romans did not risk traveling into the Sahara in the high summer: rather, it took until September for this combined force of about 24,000 to set out from their rallying point at Lambaesis, and they were careful to establish waystations & supply depots (or appropriate existing ones formerly used by desert caravaneers) to form a supply line as they closed in on the Hoggar Mountains.
Eucherius of Altava receiving word of the destruction of Zabi. Of the three children of Emperor Venantius and Tia of Theveste, he was the only one noted by contemporary historians to take after his father and paternal grandmother
Meanwhile to the east, Constantine IV was directly coming to blows with his uncle for the first time. As the Southern Turks turned south, leaving the burning wreck of Armenia behind them, he moved north from Laodicea to intercept them, and having been alerted by the Ghassanids that the Lakhmid-supported half of the Turkic army was also reforming to move from the east he resolved to engage Heshana’s hordes separately while he still could. In that he succeeded, as the 28,000-man Eastern Romans first confronted Heshana’s still-35,000-strong army as it emerged out of the Amanus Mountains[3] near Cyrrhus[4].
In the battle which followed, the Turks at first seemed to have the advantage. Heshana’s sons led the Turkic cavalry into a contest against its Eastern Roman counterpart and overcame them, in the process slaying the Ghassanid king Al-Aiham ibn Sharahil, after which they stampeded toward Constantine’s infantry and foot-archers. But the Romans were prepared, and had dug trenches lined with caltrops & sharp wooden stakes to protect themselves from the inevitable Turkic charge. The Southern Turks floundered, with those horsemen who did not fall into the trench being cut down by the Roman heavy infantry or shot to death by their crossbowmen & archers, and Heshana’s third son Taspar perished after being thrown into the trench (and right onto a sharpened stake) by his dying horse.
Constantine, who had been rallying his scattered cavalry, now ordered his legions to press their advantage and counterattack, pursuing the Turkic cavalry back toward their Qaghan. Heshana directed his own infantry into the fray, but they proved far inferior to the Roman legionaries and he ended up having to lead his cavalry reserve into action himself to prevent a rout. After night fell and forced the bloodletting to an end, the
Augustus remained confident of victory and divided his forces to block the Turks’ eastern route of escape. However, Heshana moved again before dawn – rather sooner than Constantine had anticipated – to break through his eastern division, preventing the Romans from winning a truly decisive victory at Cyrrhus.
The Southern Turks in full retreat from Cyrrhus
East of Hoggar and south of Egypt, Nubia’s and the Hashemites’ tug-of-war over Aksum continued. Ephannê and Michaêlkouda built upon their victory at Bayir Giorgis last year to push the Muslims back from Lake Tana’s shores, inflicting further defeats upon their foe across the western Aksumite Highlands at the Battle of Tis Abay[5], the Battle of Wasel[6] and the Second Battle of Roha throughout the spring and summer months. The situation grew alarming enough for Qasim that he summoned additional reinforcements from Arabia to join him, and while the reinvigorated Christians made preparations to march to the northeast and retake Aksum he & Talhah ibn Talib harassed them with raids and delaying actions, both to buy time for Zayd ibn Harith to organize those reinforcements and to weaken them ahead of their confrontation.
When Ephannê launched his campaign in September, the Muslims were prepared. Caliph Qasim engaged the Nubians & Aksumites in the forests around the village of Gestet, swiftly occupying the high ground at Talhah’s advice and launching smaller-scale attacks with his light cavalry & foot-skirmishers to disrupt their formations as they prepared for battle. Noting that he was now facing a superior and fully ready enemy on unfavorable ground, Ephannê ordered a retreat, but Qasim seized the opportunity to order the Islamic army to charge downhill and converge upon the Christians. The result was a disaster for the latter, who lost a little over 10,000 men out of a 30,000-strong army (mostly in the rout) including Ephannê himself, while the Muslims lost a scant 1,000.
It fell to Michaêlkouda to pick up the pieces, including his father’s crown, and mount a defense in the western highlands once more. At the Battle of Ku’bar[7] a month later he managed to fight the Muslims to a standstill, which impressed Qasim to the extent that he offered to call a truce and initiate negotiations even though Talhah had advised him that they had the numbers to prevail with another day or two of combat. The Caliph’s response had been that clearly, the Christian victory at Bahir Giyorgis and now their apparent recovery from the shattering defeat at Gestet were signs from Allah demonstrating that they should have stopped at Aksum, and this was not the correct time to conquer Nubia or the far western Aksumite highlands. If Talhah considered his Caliph’s interpretation of signs from above to be questionable, he kept such thoughts to himself rather than potentially provoke the Heir of the Prophet.
The Hashemites agreed to leave to Michaêlkouda those parts of Aksum which they had not yet conquered – that is to say, from the central-southern Semien Mountains in the north to the Blue Nile’s basin and the Baro River in the south, approximating to the northwestern quarter of the fallen Aksumite Empire[8] – though Qasim clearly expected to return for these lands someday, or else that his sons and grandsons would be the ones to conquer these stubborn African Christians in the future. As for the Muslims, they would continue to hold the greater part of old Aksum (including its entire coastline and the eponymous capital city itself) where they began to implement Islamic governance, reversing efforts by the last Eastern Roman-influenced
Baccinbaxabas to enforce Ephesian Christianity and allowing the native Miaphysites to practice openly so long as they disarmed, accepted the Caliph’s rule and paid the
jizya tax. It is from this point onward that the former Aksumites are referred to simply as 'Ethiopians' (as the Romans primarily did) or 'Abyssinians' (after their name for themselves,
Habesha), on account of the downfall of the kingdom which gave them their old name. Of the Ethiopians, Christian noblemen were invited to work alongside Arabs crossing over the Red Sea in the Caliphate’s burgeoning regional administration, although naturally converts to Islam were favored for the highest and most lucrative offices.
Michaêlkouda, King of Nubia and the Ethiopian Highlands, who managed to buy his kingdom a small respite from the Muslim yoke
In the Caucasus Indicus, after fighting his way past Indo-Roman ambushes of increasing frequency and intensity, Toramana II and his army finally reached Kophen at the height of 638’s summer – only to find that the capital city had been abandoned, and Sogdianus and his court had fled northward while the population dispersed into the surrounding mountains with everything they could carry on their backs and in their arms. The already-furious
Mahārājadhirāja‘s rage was stoked to even greater heights by this revelation and he had the empty city, including Belisarius’ first church, burned to the ground before setting out in pursuit of his enemies. Sogdianus for his part had sent his family to the safety of Alexandria-on-the-Oxus[9], but remained in what his Paropamisadae followers called the ‘Panjshir’ Valley (or the ‘Valley of the Five Lions’) to continue fighting against the Hunas.
Come 639, while his sister Serena gave birth to another daughter up in Augusta Treverorum (christened Modia), Stilicho was pursuing an innovative strategy down in Hoggar. Instead of marching directly into the mountain homeland of the Donatists and likely dying a death-by-a-thousand-cuts at their hand, as Hermenegild I and Iaunas had almost 40 years prior, he established positions and built fortlets at the entrance of every mountain pass he could reach in an attempt to blockade their kingdom and cut off all of their overland trade routes. This strategy could not possibly work without the aid of the Kingdom of Kumbi, who Stilicho enlisted to attack the Donatist state’s allies further south in the Sahara and eventually seal off the southern exits of the Hoggar massif.
This strategy proceeded slowly, but it did prove a good deal safer for the Western Romans than simply invading Hoggar head-on would have. Over the course of 639 Soundiata of Kumbi led his warriors to one victory after another over the oasis-towns of the Sahara, working their way up from Biru to Taghazza and then Tamentit while the Altavans launched a supporting attack to take Tamdoult up in the north. The
Augustus himself gave the Kumbians a helping hand by incrementally advancing into the Hoggar Mountains and directing his engineers to build even more forts there while his legionaries fended off Donatist raids & attempts at sabotage, preventing Izîl of Hoggar from sending the majority of his forces southward out of fear of the threat Rome increasingly posed to his central strongholds while at the same time denying him any actual chance at forcing a potentially decisive engagement on favorable terrain.
Stilicho's African legionaries on break from fort-building in the Hoggar Mountains
To the east, Constantine failed to trap and completely destroy Heshana Qaghan’s first army before it linked up with his second in the year before, and he had to face the consequences in 639. The Turks regrouped at Apamea and crossed back over the Euphrates in the late spring, while Constantine mustered what reinforcements he could from the Ghassanids and southern Anatolia before setting out from Antioch to confront them. However Heshana’s own reinforcements outnumbered his by more than two-to-one, so by the time the two armies met at Besalatha[10] east of Beroea in early May, the Southern Turks were fielding nearly 50,000 men (including the Lakhmids, other Nestorians who’d come out of hiding in the Mesopotamian Marshes, and a regiment of Jews raised from Babylon) against roughly 30,000 Eastern Romans.
Heshana positioned his Lakhmid auxiliaries at the forefront of his army, hoping to draw the Romans (who must have still resented the Lakhmids’ recent treachery) as well as their Ghassanid rivals out. Constantine’s men did not fall for this trick but those of Al-Aiham certainly did, and in the initial clash the Ghassanid Arabs did well enough to seemingly vindicate this decision. However, after putting the Lakhmids to flight Al-Aiham refused to heed Constantine’s orders to fall back and rejoin the main army, instead inviting the Emperor to follow him in pursuing them so that they might sweep the Turkic host off the field together. Constantine did not do as his vassal advised and thus stayed out of the real jaws of Heshana’s trap, but it did mean he could do little more than stand at a distance and have his crossbowmen & archers exchange missiles as the Turks promptly closed around and mauled the Ghassanids with the aged Qaghan leading them from atop a new blood-bay steed (his original mount having broken its legs and promptly being put down during the retreat from Cyrrhus previously), in the process killing Al-Aiham.
As far as Heshana was concerned, although Constantine’s failure to fall for his bait and get the Eastern Romans annihilated almost immediately after the start of hostilities was disappointing, the first stage of the Battle of Besalatha already amounted to a victory for him: he had weakened the Roman army by obliterating its Arab contingent, while most of his own losses fell upon the Lakhmids, who he deemed to be far more expendable than his own Turks and Persians. The Turks proceeded to capitalize on the moment and go on the attack, caving in the Eastern Romans’ flanks with a series of charges preceded by the arrows of their horse-archers and forcing Constantine to withdraw from the field before sunset. Besalatha had not been as total a victory as Heshana had wanted, but it did seriously hurt the Eastern Romans and give the Turks a strategic advantage going forward. By the year’s end Heshana would compel the surrender of the cities of Upper Mesopotamia (which had lost all hope of relief after Besalatha) and defeat his nephew twice more at Europos[11] and then Beroea itself, driving Constantine southward all the way to Jerusalem and once again geographically splitting the Eastern Empire along a north-south line by occupying both Syria Prima & Syria Secunda in addition to parts of Phoenicia.
Heshana Qaghan admiring the carnage – and his major victory, of course – at the Battle of Besalatha
In East Africa, Qasim was not only quickly consolidating his control over the majority of old Aksum but also extending Islam’s power further eastward and southward. Shifting his armies away from the Aksumite Highlands, he rapidly brought the city-states of coastal Macrobia to heel one after the other, so that by the end of 639 the Hashemite Caliphate would control the entire coastline of the region and even made inroads with the nomadic tribes of the hinterland. Not satisfied with gaining control over the Horn of Africa and wary of intervening in the Roman-Turkic war to the north while it still seemed that at least one of the combatants was in good shape, the Caliph instead looked to send traders, missionaries and
ghazw raiders down the shores of Azania[12]. In this way Islam increasingly overtook the middle of the Silk Road’s ocean-borne length, as goods ranging from porcelain to sandalwood to pepper & other spices were often transported from Indian ports to ones in this region with the help of monsoon winds before sailing northward into Himyar and the Red Sea, as well as a growing supply of slaves, ivory, animal pelts and other exotic goods.
Meanwhile in northwestern India, despite having taken Kophen and its immediate environs, Toramana was finding it more difficult to finish off Sogdianus and the Indo-Romans than he’d originally anticipated. Continuing resistance in the mountains wreaked havoc on his army’s supply lines, he had to dispatch Mihirabhoja with a 40,000-strong detachment to take Alexandria-in-Arachosia to the southwest after the smaller first army he sent that way was defeated, and far from being intimidated into submission when he unleashed a reign of terror on all the villages he could reach, the native Paropamisadae only grew more defiant toward him and more firmly aligned with the Belisarians. Toward the year’s end however, the Hunas achieved a major breakthrough at the expense of the Indo-Romans in the Battle of Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus[13], where they killed 3,000 Indo-Romans (half of whom had surrendered to them), sacked the town and opened the road to Sogdianus’ camp in the Panjshiri mountains.
In 640, the Emperor Stilicho found himself facing two unexpected maneuvers on the part of his Hoggari enemies. Firstly their king Izîl descended from his mountain holdfast to lead the Donatists in force against the Western Romans, having been driven to this unusual course of action by the tightening of the noose around his realm between the Romans’ continued fort-building and the looming approach of the Kumbians to the south. The army of Berbers he had assembled numbered 16,000 strong, a respectable army by any standard west of China, and at first overran the forward-most and incomplete fortlets of the Romans in the spring. But the
Augustus welcomed this challenge, viewing it as a rare opportunity to engage and decimate the hated heretics and raiders in pitched battle, and moved to meet Izîl’s advance in a great gorge south of one of his main fortresses at Arak.
While the centerpiece of the ensuing Battle of Arak Canyon was the stout defense the legions put up in the gorge itself, the battle would truly be decided in the mountains above. There the strength and determination of the Moors of Altava & Theveste would be tested to their limit, as they maneuvered to prevent the agile light infantry & horsemen of Hoggar from seizing the high ground and assailing the more heavily equipped Western Romans and Goths below with their slings & javelins. Fortunately Eucherius proved not only to be a much more loyal lieutenant to his big brother than their granduncle Otho had to Florianus II, but a more capable battle commander as well: over two days of combat beneath the blistering summer sun he led the lighter elements of the Western Roman army to victory amid the cliffs, crevices and peaks of the mountains flanking the great canyon, and on the third day Izîl withdrew after having failed to make much of an impression on the main Roman line, while his losses in the cliffs above had grown unacceptably high. Shortly after this Roman victory, the Hoggari sprang their second surprise upon Stilicho: an offer of ceasefire and negotiations for terms to end the war, as Izîl appeared to not only acknowledge that he was beaten but to also be the rare sort of Donatist who would not insist on fighting to the death.
Izîl of Hoggar engaged in negotiations with the Western Romans
It could not be said that the Orient got to share in the victories of the Occident this year. From Jerusalem Constantine sought to hold back the Turkic tide in Galilee, while also assembling additional forces in Antioch with which to attack Heshana from behind. But although he had some initial success in fending off the initial Turkic thrust at the Battle of Mount Meron that spring, the Emperor was unable to gather sufficient troops in the north quickly enough to pose any meaningful threat to the Turks’ rear on account of his Caucasian vassals’ inability to recover from their crippling losses at Miks and the gutting of Armenia which followed three years prior. The Eastern Romans were further hindered by yet another great uprising among the remaining Jews of the region, who now sensed an opportunity to throw off the shackles of their long-time oppressor and did not believe the Turks could possibly be any worse as overlords than the Romans.
This ill-timed Jewish rebellion fatally compromised the Roman hold on Palaestina, as the insurgents under Eleazar of Tiberias aided Heshana in breaking through Constantine’s defenses in the Galilee and marched on Jerusalem with his Turks. The
Augustus sought to evacuate to the coast with the holy relics of Jerusalem (though not Patriarch Abrisius, who was determined to continue tending to his flock and defending his patriarchal seat), but was intercepted and defeated at the Battle of Eleutheropolis[14]: here the Emperor of the East lost not only the day and thousands of his men, but also his own life, and only the fact that he was Heshana’s nephew prevented the Qaghan from desecrating his corpse – the same was not true of his fallen soldiers, whose heads Heshana had severed and borne on lances as he moved to besiege the holy city. Thus ended the twelve-year reign of Constantine IV ‘the Turk’, who spent the entirety of his time atop the Eastern Roman throne at war with various enemies within and without.
However Constantine did manage to get the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns and other relics to Ascalon, from where they were transported by ship to Constantinople with the scraps remaining of his host. There they were received by his teenage son Leo II, who now had the unenviable task of ruling a physically-divided empire at the age of fifteen with a depleted army and thoroughly bloodied vassals, most of whom were no longer in any position to render any meaningful help to him. Heshana meanwhile spent the rest of the year laying siege to Jerusalem, which he captured by storm in December after its garrison had been critically weakened by hunger and an outbreak of disease within the walls. His army promptly sacked the city, killing some 15,000 residents and carrying twice that number off in chains, and it did not escape the notice of Roman or Turk alike that the Jewish contingents behaved especially viciously as they sought to vent the frustrations they'd built up over their many past uprisings and the bloody consequent Roman suppression thereof; although Heshana had specifically ordered for Patriarch Abrisius to be spared, Eleazar murdered him anyway, for which the irate Qaghan (who had hoped to not make any martyrs that day and even to retain the Patriarch of Jerusalem as a hostage to ensure Christian loyalty) had him hanged as part of a bid to appease the newly-conquered Christian majority of Palaestina. Trouble with discipline in his ranks aside, Heshana was now in control of most of the Roman Levant, and sought to eliminate the weakened Ghassanids in his rear before proceeding as far as the Romans would allow him over the next few years.
Jewish rebels massacring Roman Christians in Jerusalem after the city's fall to their new Turkic allies & overlords
Further still to the east, early in this year Toramana II launched what he expected to be his final offensive against the Indo-Romans, with the intent of ultimately wiping them off the map as surely as his neighbor Heshana planned to do unto the Eastern Romans. From Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus he marched with 70,000 men into the Panjshir Valley, leaving his
Mahasenapati Mihirabhoja to control Kophen and the south & west of the Indo-Roman kingdom with the rest of his army. However, the weather favored Sogdianus and worked to the Hunas’ detriment almost from the beginning: a heavy blizzard toward the end of February caused an avalanche which blocked off the Salang Pass, trapping Toramana on the other side with little hope of receiving resupply or reinforcement from their base at the ruins of Kophen.
Although his generals advised him to wait for the snow to clear and work to reopen the pass, the
Mahārājadhirāja was determined not to waste any more time and potentially give Sogdianus a chance to flee further north. For his part the King of the Indo-Romans had long prepared for this showdown, and threw nearly everything he had left into combating the Hunas over the course of this ‘Five Lions Campaign’. For a month 25,000 Indo-Romans fought bitterly against Toramana’s much larger army, forcing them to break up into smaller (and thus more manageable) divisions with a constant campaign of ambushes & harassment from the mountains, and at one point even inducing a small landslide to separate Toramana’s personal corps from the rest of his horde, all while Mihirabhoja frantically tried to clear the Salang Pass to come to his father’s aid.
At the climax of this campaign, Sogdianus personally descended from his mountain hideout to lead the attack on Toramana’s isolated vanguard. On an April night they fought at a village which the former’s Paropamisadae auxiliaries called Parandeh[15], where though Toramana’s army was still larger than that of Sogdianus, they were hindered by the poor terrain and a lack of supplies. The Huna elephants spearheaded an immediate attack on the approaching Indo-Roman army, but panicked and ran amok to the detriment of their own side after Sogdianus drove a line of his own Bactrian camels – to whose backs and flanks he had bound bales of straw, which he then lit ablaze – straight at them. In the ensuing chaos
Rex Indiae challenged the
Mahārājadhirāja to single combat, which the latter gleefully accepted without regard for how poorly the battle was going for the Hunas and whether he might have to retreat, thinking that he could reverse the tide by prevailing over his opposite number; but instead Sogdianus first killed his horse from underneath him with a javelin, then slew him in a swordfight, cementing the collapse of the Huna army.
Sogdianus and his Indo-Romans pursuing Toramana II's frightened elephants as they stampede back toward the Huna lines at the Battle of Parandeh
Now Mihirabhoja had been marching through the Salang Pass after it finally cleared, but upon running into a few thousand ragged survivors who alerted him to his father’s defeat & demise, and had been harried during their entire retreat by the exultant Indo-Romans, he turned around and fell back to concentrate on securing those parts of the Caucasus Indicus which he still held in addition to bringing up reinforcements from India. Sogdianus meanwhile celebrated his great victory and divided the plunder collected off of the tens of thousands of Huna dead in the Panjshir Valley among his troops, keeping little for himself, and began to undertake preparations to retake the rest of the Caucasus Indicus from his badly bloodied (but not yet defeated) enemy.
641 was dominated by the peace talks between the Western Roman Empire and Hoggar. The defeated Hoggari agreed to cease raiding the
Limes Mauretaniae and to pay restitution for the damage caused by their previous attacks, as well as to acknowledge Kumbian control over Taghazza and its salt mines. In exchange, the Romans would dismantle the forts they had been building in the Hoggar Mountains and pull back across the Sahara, while Kumbi returned Tamentit and guaranteed that the trans-Saharan trade routes would remain open. Although it was certainly overly optimistic of Stilicho to call this treaty the ‘Eternal Peace in the Sands’ (the men of Hoggar would begin harassing Ephesian caravans and villages again before the end of the new decade), it still marked the first concrete Western Roman victory over the hated Donatists since the disasters of the turn-of-the-century, and was hailed as such when he returned to Rome – reportedly joking to his brother that the Hoggari actually agreeing to a peace deal must have been a sign of the End Times along the way. The Emperor’s own private celebrations would produce a second imperial prince, baptized as Romanus, by the last week in the year.
The trend of the Eastern Romans having misfortune piled onto their lap even as their Western counterparts went from victory to victory did not abate this year. Emperor Leo did at least have the good luck of being able to conscript a new army in Thrace, Achaea and Asia Minor in relative peace. Alas, this was only the case because Heshana Qaghan was busy consolidating his latest round of conquests – he assigned garrisons to the fallen cities of Syria and Palaestina this year, as well as civil governors (typically chosen from the ranks of local collaborators) who he could trust to work with the Turkic captains now overseeing their defenses. In Palaestina he controversially chose both a minor Ephesian cleric named Ephraim and Eleazar’s cousin Ezekiel as his joint governors, ostensibly to represent the interests of both the local Christians and Jews; but the extensive amount of bad blood between the Abrahamic communities (newly worsened even more by the sack of Jerusalem and the martyrdom of Abrisius, which attracted condemnation from as far abroad as Stilicho's court) and Ephraim being a convert from Judaism ensured this would be a fraught ‘partnership’ indeed, kept in line only by Turkic might.
Leaving Palaestina in the hands of men who despised one another but feared the consequences of engaging in infighting while the Turks were still around, Heshana next turned his attention to the Ghassanids, who – though weakened – continued to pose a threat to his rear. He would spend most of 641 fighting to bring them to heel, responding to their reliance on hit-and-run attacks on his supply lines and isolated detachments by burning their villages and rushing their camps wherever they tried to gather. By late autumn of this year, the Turks had razed the Ghassanid capital at Bostra and left the region, satisfied that these Arab federates could no longer pose a threat or even serious irritation to their rear as they prepared for further operations against the Eastern Romans. Most of the Lakhmids were detached from Heshana’s army at this point to occupy their rivals’ land & further suppress lingering Ghassanid resistance, which was being led by their new king Hisham ibn Al-Aiham out of the southeastern Syrian deserts close to the northern boundary of the Hashemite Caliphate.
While Stilicho was praying for the safe delivery of his second son in the Occident, Heshana had refocused his attention onto Egypt by the year’s end. The Qaghan and most of his horde amassed at Gaza in preparation to cross the Sinai, leaving 15,000 men under his second & third sons Baghan and Tulan to defend the north against any Eastern Roman counterattack that might emerge from Antioch. For his part Leo celebrated his wedding to Anna of Galata, a Senator’s daughter, before departing Constantinople with his new army of 20,000 at the year’s end, hoping to hit the Turks from behind and relieve the inevitable pressure on Egypt that way. However, a disaster that neither side could have foreseen began to strike on the very last day of the year: a trading vessel departing from Muslim-controlled Muza, which unbeknownst to even its crew carried diseased rats on board, had docked in Constantinople, causing a renewed outbreak of the dreaded bubonic plague for the first time in a century since the Plague of Sabbatius[16]…
After a century's respite, it was once more time for a handful of rats to upset the ambitions and hopes of everyone living around the Mediterranean basin
On the other side of the vast and still-growing Southern Turkic realm, the Romans’ Indic cousins were going on the offensive against the Hunas. Sogdianus followed up his remarkable victory in the Five Lions Campaign by counterattacking through the Salang Pass, hoping to retake as much of his realm as possible from Mihirabhoja’s claws before the Hunas moved a large number of reinforcements into the region. Mihirabhoja was driven from the ruins of Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus and then Kophen, but in the latter half of the year he did succeed in moving enough fresh troops over the Indus to grind Sogdianus’ counteroffensive to a halt before he lost Alexandria-in-Opiana[17] or Alexandria-in-Arachosia. In effect, the Hunas remained in control of the southern third of Sogdianus’ kingdom, and their new
Mahārājadhirāja remained no less determined to finish his fathe’s job & avenge his death in the years to come than Sogdianus was to drive the invaders out at spearpoint once and for all.
Last of all in this momentous year, the Chinese Dragon had begun to grow satisfied with the reordering of its den and was looking outward once more. As China itself continued to stabilize and recover from the turmoil of the Eight Dynasties and Four Kingdoms, Emperor Renzong felt he could start taking on large construction projects and duly ordered the building of a great canal which would connect Luoyang, his capital, to the Yellow River and the Yellow River to the Huai, from where he sought to build upon his father’s work and expand a second, older canal linking the Huai to the Yangtze (which his grandfather and father had used to help them besiege then-Great-Qi-held Jiankang). Work on these canals proceeded slowly but steadily, taking decades to accomplish, as Renzong felt no pressing need to rush these projects and in any case would soon be distracted with foreign affairs[18]: his eye was drawn to the Turkic frontier, where the Tegregs had never quite been able to recover from their bouts of mutual bloodletting with their southern cousins and were increasingly losing their grip on powerful vassal tribes such as the Karluks & Khazars. The Emperor accordingly began to plan to bring down the Northern Turkic Khaganate, and in secrecy dispatched envoys to the lesser khans of the steppe to gauge their willingness to help him overthrow their masters.
Once they were completed toward the end of the seventh century, the canals of the Later Han would go a long way to facilitating the transport of goods and peoples between northern and southern China
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[1] Bechilga.
[2] Sour El-Ghozane.
[3] Nur Mountains.
[4] Ruins of Khoros, near Azaz.
[5] The Blue Nile Falls, downstream from Bahir Dar/Giyorgis.
[6] Dessie.
[7] Soqota.
[8] Most of the modern Amhara Province, plus northwestern parts of Oromia and the entirety of Benishangul-Gumuz, which after all border Sudan/Nubia.
[9] Ai-Khanoum.
[10] Bizaah.
[11] Carchemish.
[12] The Greco-Roman name for the Swahili Coast – a region stretching from the shoreline of modern Kenya to that of northern Mozambique.
[13] Bagram.
[14] Beit Guvrin.
[15] Now part of Bazarak.
[16] Historically, the bubonic plague resurfaced multiple times in Europe between the Plague of Justinian and the mid-eighth century. The earliest instance was the Roman Plague of 590, but notably additional outbreaks crippled the Sassanids right at the end of Khosrau’s war with Heraclius (the ‘Plague of Sheroe’), paved the way for the Umayyad takeover of the Ummah (the 638 ‘Plague of Emmaus’) and devastated Britain in 664.
[17] Ghazni.
[18] Historically, these canals formed part of the Grand Canal which would link Beijing to Nanjing centuries later. The Sui worked on them in a hurry, building the first canal in just five months but at the cost of half of the laborers they conscripted for the job, which (coupled with defeats in Korea and a slew of other massive, and massively costly, building projects) contributed to the rapid collapse of their dynasty.
