Alternate History Vivat Stilicho!

shangrila

Well-known member
Constantine's linguistic efforts might totally backfire and "kill" the Latin language, and damage Ephesian Christianity if done poorly. I'm pretty sure that's how it happened in history, when Charlemagne tried to regulate how people pronounced Latin. Before that, Latin had worked like Middle Chinese, where everyone wrote and read the same script but pronounced when speaking as their local dialect. Regulating pronunciation made sermons incomprehensible to the masses, and forced the educated class to come up with some way to write what they speak, formally breaking with Latin to form Romance languages.

Of course, Constantine is working a century earlier than Charlemagne with a never as fragmented Roman world, so there would be presumably less to deal with and more central authority. Still, truly reuniting the Empire in language before the printing press might be impossible. No one ever did the Chinese linguistic area until the Communists after all.
 
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ATP

Well-known member
Britain really had a long period of peace, long enough for the young hotheads to know nothing but it.



Cossacks, Uskoks, Border Reivers - names change, but purpose remains the same.
1.Fear not,they would get their wars.Maybe some remnants even manage to run to America,and,becouse their brethen there are arleady cut off,find Central America with Mysterious Golden Cities?

2.True,but with neighbours like muslims you must do that.Or they take yor land piece-by-piece.

About other topics -
1.Britons in America would found tin soon.And start making bronze.I see heretical bronze kinfdom there,ruled by natives after britons married among them.

2.Caliph avoided fitna,but created Pakistan.It would be funny,if their war there lasted till 21 century!
 

ATP

Well-known member
Constantine's linguistic efforts might totally backfire and "kill" the Latin language, and damage Ephesian Christianity if done poorly. I'm pretty sure that's how it happened in history, when Charlemagne tried to regulate how people pronounced Latin. Before that, Latin had worked like Middle Chinese, where everyone wrote and read the same script but pronounced when speaking as their local dialect. Regulating pronunciation made sermons incomprehensible to the masses, and forced the educated class to come up with some way to write what they speak, formally breaking with Latin to form Romance languages.

Of course, Constantine is working a century earlier than Charlemagne with a never as fragmented Roman world, so there would be presumably less to deal with and more central authority. Still, truly reuniting the Empire in language before the printing press might be impossible. No one ever did the Chinese linguistic area until the Communists after all.


Sorry, but i could not resist.Here,emperor Constatnine teaching latin to his subjects:
 
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stevep

Well-known member
Well it sounds like the fragile survival of the British kingdom is probably coming to an end. :( The threat from Islam is likely to make the Ephesian church even more determined to 'unify' Christianity by crushing any alternative groups and viewpoints. Ditto I fear the end is coming for the Germans outside the empire. You might avoid a Charlemagne and his vicious slaughters of his victims but that conquest is also likely to be bloody at some stage or another.

Possibly the best hope for a more vibrant and variant Christianity might be new sects developing in some of the newly conquered lands and those in isolated pockets in the east.

Surprised how quickly and how far Islam has spread down the eastern coast of Africa while I think its assaults on India have started earlier and its likely that unless the Huma can discover some of their old martial vigor, as well as unite their nation more their going to be overwhelmed by Islamic conquerors. Although if the Khazars could keep the Muslims south of the Oxus that could mean the religion doesn't convert many Turks, which might mean that the Muslim conquests decline earlier as the Arabs expansion loses it early energy and without Turkish tribal inflows it ebbs earlier. On the other hand you could see new dynasties emerging possibly from Africa? The other possibility could be from Iran although that might even end up being conquered by the Khazars if that happens before widespread conversions occur.

With the split between the new Caliph and his uncles one problem for the latter is that the Caliph could end up cutting off aid which would leave one fighting pretty much alone against the Khazars and the other against the Huna.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Well it sounds like the fragile survival of the British kingdom is probably coming to an end. :( The threat from Islam is likely to make the Ephesian church even more determined to 'unify' Christianity by crushing any alternative groups and viewpoints. Ditto I fear the end is coming for the Germans outside the empire. You might avoid a Charlemagne and his vicious slaughters of his victims but that conquest is also likely to be bloody at some stage or another.

Possibly the best hope for a more vibrant and variant Christianity might be new sects developing in some of the newly conquered lands and those in isolated pockets in the east.

Surprised how quickly and how far Islam has spread down the eastern coast of Africa while I think its assaults on India have started earlier and its likely that unless the Huma can discover some of their old martial vigor, as well as unite their nation more their going to be overwhelmed by Islamic conquerors. Although if the Khazars could keep the Muslims south of the Oxus that could mean the religion doesn't convert many Turks, which might mean that the Muslim conquests decline earlier as the Arabs expansion loses it early energy and without Turkish tribal inflows it ebbs earlier. On the other hand you could see new dynasties emerging possibly from Africa? The other possibility could be from Iran although that might even end up being conquered by the Khazars if that happens before widespread conversions occur.

With the split between the new Caliph and his uncles one problem for the latter is that the Caliph could end up cutting off aid which would leave one fighting pretty much alone against the Khazars and the other against the Huna.

So,instead of united islam fighting entire world,we would get 3 muslim states - one fighting Romans,second Khazars,and third Hunas.
And you are right about turcs - without them arabs alone would be beaten,like in OTL,when they failed to win any important battle after 900AD.
China - Judge Dee would die at 700AD,so i hope,that he managed to catch some cryminals by now.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
We've hit more than one milestone with this past chapter. Besides marking the passage of an entire third century since the start of the story, it also brought the TL up to half a million words! If this keeps up I might actually hit, or at least come close to, one million by the year 1000. Great stuff all round, you guys have my thanks for your continued interest :)

I've noticed & corrected a mistake on the family tree earlier today, BTW. Got Sauromates & Germanus mixed up - the first one's dead and the second one is still alive as of 700, not the other way around.

What I can say without spoiling anything important is that, as you might guess from the generally domestic focus of this chapter, the eighth century in western Eurasia will mostly be one of (attempted, at least) internal consolidation among the big three. The Stilichians have kept Rome alive through the turmoil of the preceding centuries, Aloysius & Helena have reunited its halves: now it's down to Constantine and their other descendants to build further on that foundation, keep the empire together & construct a lasting, stable framework for imperial governance across Europe. The Hashemites of course need to entrench Islam across their conquests (where it hasn't been already) and sort out their dynastic disputes. The Khazars probably have the least to worry about in this regard right now, but something's likely to come up for them down the line too - nomadic empires aren't exactly known for remaining at perpetual peace with themselves over entire centuries. (Also as I've said before, the next chapter will be a factional overview of the reunited Roman Empire, likely to come around Christmas)

This does likely rule out big dramatic conquests - I can safely say you probably aren't going to see the (H)RE pushing all the way to the Dniepr or Finland for example, they've got plenty on their plate to sort out already. But of course that does not mean the eighth century will be a time free of external wars either, they'll just generally be more peripheral & limited in scope. The tension in Britain, for example, or the still-unstable border situation between Rome and the Arabs present flashpoints for future armed conflict.
 

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
It's incredible what yo did with this timeline, it always brightens my day when I see that you posted a new chapter.

I reckon it is best there is as much distance between Aloysious and Helena as possible right now. Once Aloysious dies she will probably try exert influence over Constantine, but he is way too independent now to give in, unlike some previous emperors. Her first advice upon him taking the purple will probably be to arrange for accidents of all his half-siblings and their descendants.

''No mother, kinslaying is completely out of question.''
''I am not saying you personally should do it, there...''
''Mother, as the Emperor, all responsibility ultimately comes to me, pretending I had nothing to do with the act will not wash the sin away. If they are guilty of something, I will deliver the punishment accordingly, but as log as they are not, it is my divine duty as their emperor to render them protection from those who seek to do them harm.''

HRE, both Holy and Roman - best timeline ever.
 
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ATP

Well-known member
We've hit more than one milestone with this past chapter. Besides marking the passage of an entire third century since the start of the story, it also brought the TL up to half a million words! If this keeps up I might actually hit, or at least come close to, one million by the year 1000. Great stuff all round, you guys have my thanks for your continued interest :)

I've noticed & corrected a mistake on the family tree earlier today, BTW. Got Sauromates & Germanus mixed up - the first one's dead and the second one is still alive as of 700, not the other way around.

What I can say without spoiling anything important is that, as you might guess from the generally domestic focus of this chapter, the eighth century in western Eurasia will mostly be one of (attempted, at least) internal consolidation among the big three. The Stilichians have kept Rome alive through the turmoil of the preceding centuries, Aloysius & Helena have reunited its halves: now it's down to Constantine and their other descendants to build further on that foundation, keep the empire together & construct a lasting, stable framework for imperial governance across Europe. The Hashemites of course need to entrench Islam across their conquests (where it hasn't been already) and sort out their dynastic disputes. The Khazars probably have the least to worry about in this regard right now, but something's likely to come up for them down the line too - nomadic empires aren't exactly known for remaining at perpetual peace with themselves over entire centuries. (Also as I've said before, the next chapter will be a factional overview of the reunited Roman Empire, likely to come around Christmas)

This does likely rule out big dramatic conquests - I can safely say you probably aren't going to see the (H)RE pushing all the way to the Dniepr or Finland for example, they've got plenty on their plate to sort out already. But of course that does not mean the eighth century will be a time free of external wars either, they'll just generally be more peripheral & limited in scope. The tension in Britain, for example, or the still-unstable border situation between Rome and the Arabs present flashpoints for future armed conflict.

Why 1000 AD? i expect HRE in space fighting muslims,Han and maybe Japan.Certainly no USA here!
Jokes aside - HRE just need to consolidate over germans ,slavs,and take Britons down.Not letting muslims take anything more.
Which means - alliance with africans.
And,re-opening Amber road,this time by sea.They really knew where Gotland was,Baltic is lake comparing to Atlantic,and prussian tribes who hold amber lands were conqered in OTL by bunch of angry german monks.HRE could do better.

It's incredible what yo did with this timeline, it always brightens my day when I see that you posted a new chapter.

I reckon it is best there is as much distance between Aloysious and Helena as possible right now. Once Aloysious dies she will probably try exert influence over Constantine, but he is way too independent now to give in, unlike some previous emperors. Her first advice upon him taking the purple will probably be to arrange for accidents of all his half-siblings and their descendants.

''No mother, kinslaying is completely out of question.''
''I am not saying you personally should do it, there...''
''Mother, as the Emperor, all responsibility ultimately comes to me, pretending I had nothing to do with the act will not wash the sin away. If they guilty of something, I will deliver the punishment accordingly, but as log as they are not, it is my divine duty as their emperor to render them protection from those who seek to do them harm.''

HRE, both Holy and Roman - best timeline ever.
Yes, i see Helen being very dissapointed in fact,that she could not rule instead of her son.It would be funny to watch.
About HRE in OTL - i do not like commies,but Marx/or Engels/ was right,when he said,that HRE was not holy,roman,and certainly was not empire.
 
Holy, Roman, and an Empire

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Wiv1ils.png

Capital: Augusta Treverorum.

Religion: Ephesian Christianity.

Languages: Latin and Koine Greek are the two official languages of the reunified (Holy) Roman Empire. Unofficially, numerous vernacular variants of Latin are spoken by the commons, while ‘proper’ Latin itself is only really spoken by the ancient Senatorial elite and the uppermost echelons of the Ephesian Church’s Roman and Carthaginian Patriarchates. Variants of Vulgar Latin/Romance, in truth more-so diverse collections of mutually intelligible dialects rather than unified languages themselves given the size of the territories they are spoken across, include:
  • Francesc (‘Frankish’ – spoken primarily in the old Germanic/Belgic provinces and the March of Arbogast)
  • Gallique[1] (‘Gallic’ – spoken primarily in Gaul)
  • Espanesco (‘Hispanic’ – spoken primarily in Hispania)
  • Italiano[2] (‘Italian’ – spoken by the commoners of Italy)
  • Afríganu[3] (‘African’ – spoken primarily in North Africa)
  • Dalmata[4] (‘Dalmatian’ – spoken along the Illyrian coast where refugees fleeing the Avars & Slavs have congregated)
  • Panóneșty[5] (‘Pannonian’ – spoken by the remaining Pannonian Roman populace living alongside the Dulebians around Lake Pelso)
  • Dacă[6] (‘Dacian’ – spoken among the Vlachs surviving in Gepid-ruled southwestern Dacia and parts of Slavic Thracia)
The spoken Greek language is also beginning to change in the Orient, although Koine Greek is still used as an exclusive liturgical language by the Eastern Patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem. Aramaic is widely spoken among the remaining Syrian & Mesopotamian population of the Empire as well as the easternmost Patriarchates of Antioch & Babylon, newly joined by Arabic and Bulgar in that region as Christian Arab refugees and Bulgar foederati are settled around them. And of course, the various Germanic and Slavic federate kingdoms not settled within the empire’s old borders (who, like the Visigoths, have since largely assimilated into the ranks of the much more numerous Romance-speaking populations living around them) have retained usage of their ancestral tongues.

It has been an exciting couple of centuries to be a Roman, to say the least: as the eighth century dawns, at first glance it may seem as though the Roman Empire has emerged from the turbulence of the fifth to seventh centuries almost utterly triumphant. The legacy of Caesar and Augustus would appear to have been reinvigorated by lineages of mostly-strong and capable Emperors who stewarded their Imperium through crises rivaling the great one of the Third Century, and who have even managed to reunite the Roman world after nearly 300 years of separation (this time, hopefully, forever) thanks to the strength of Aloysius Gloriosus and the administrative acumen of Helena Karbonopsina. The legions remain one of the mightiest fighting forces on the Earth, avoiding atrophy at home and (for the most part) total disaster abroad, and have protected the reunified Roman peoples from all sorts of barbarians, banishing the latter beyond the borders of civilization time and again. And now, with their troubles behind them at last, a new era of limitless potential stretches out before the rulers of this reunified Roman Empire.

But looks can be deceiving, and while all of the above is true to at least some extent, each truth comes with several caveats. Yes, Rome has enjoyed a streak of skilled leadership right when it needed such strong Emperors the most – but they were men of barbarian blood, not even provincial citizens like Hadrian and Trajan had been, but Romano-Germanic generals and princes whose ancestors would have been considered foreigners or threats worthy of slavery and death even by the great Augusti of the past. That the Empire was reunited by the marriage of a Romano-Frankish emperor to an empress from a dynasty of (distant) patrilineal Romano-Gothic descent seemingly marks the final eclipse of the original Roman elite. The legions still stand guard over a unified Roman people, but have undergone so much reform that they are difficult to compare to their fifth-century form, and certainly incomparable to the legions of the Empire’s old apogee under the Five Good Emperors. The barbarians they’ve been battling have not all been locked out of the Empire either – that is true of the most destructive sorts, like the Huns and Turks, but many others from the Visigoths to the Serbs have been allowed to settle within the imperial borders, establishing their own autonomous kingdoms and ironically proving instrumental to the Empire’s continued survival. And mighty foes like the Hashemite Caliphate have emerged to replace fallen threats like the Sassanids, and arrest Rome’s renewed potential along its periphery. The Italian literati (who fancy themselves the truest children of Rome) in particular lament this state of affairs, believing that for all the victories Rome’s increasingly Germanized army have won for it, the barbarians’ descendants can now repeat a line from Plautus’ play Casina as a boast: victi vincimus – conquered, we conquer.

Perhaps such radical changes are simply the way of things, however. Nations can change like the seasons and Rome is no exception: the Republic gave way to the Principate, which then transformed into the Dominate, and while each great transformation was lamented by those Romans who looked to the past they had lost, each can be said to have been necessary for the survival of the Roman state – of the Roman legacy. Aloysius and Helena, the restorers of the united Roman world, can and do boast that far from having closed the book on Rome, they have only started a new chapter. Are not a caterpillar, a pupa and a butterfly all just different stages of life for the same animal, after all? So too do the imperial couple and the partisans they have on hand to write more flattering histories believe the present Imperium Romanum, also popularly known as the Sacrum Imperium Romanum on account of its even stronger-than-usual ties to the Ephesian Church and the fact that it was borne out of a holy war against the heathen Turks, to merely be the next step in the evolution of the Roman state throughout the times. Even God may have had a hard time helping Rome survive had it chosen instead the path of snobbish provincialism which the Senate and other opponents of the Romano-Germanic dynasties favored over the inspired leadership of men like Stilicho, Eucherius I and now Aloysius.

What the duo will soon (on account of their increasingly advanced age) will leave to their son Constantine is after all indisputably Holy, having managed to uphold the unity and loyalty of all of (mainstream, or ‘orthodox’) Christendom’s recognized Patriarchs in addition to fighting off various decidedly unholy barbarian menaces; Roman, being clearly the sole inheritor of Rome’s legacy in both the Latin West and Greek East; and an Empire, which while having had to compromise with the various federate kingdoms, unquestionably remains their overlord and by extension master of almost the entirety of Christian Europe (barring the lingering heretical kingdoms in Britannia and the Sahara). Even powers as distant as China have recognized that old Rome has been reinvigorated and reformed, not destroyed: Later Han emissaries traveling along the Silk Road have reported to their Emperor Zhongzong that ‘Daqin’ and ‘Fulin’ have unified into ‘Daxi’ (‘Great West’), an entity almost equal in power & majesty to the Middle Kingdom which is governed by a wise queen and mighty king, whose union resembles the perfect balance of yin and yang (as Helena and Aloysius might have seemed in their prime).

Rome might yet endure for another thousand years, the flame of its civilization – stoked back from dying embers to a roaring blaze by the careful efforts of the Stilichians and the bombastic leadership of Aloysius Gloriosus – further intensified by the light of Christ and in turn illuminating the blades of its barbaric legionaries, who have taught the old Empire new things even as they learn much of its ways themselves. Certainly the Aloysians will try to ensure that this is the case, if only to match or exceed the deeds of their Stilichian predecessors.

A large part of the old, bureaucratic core of the post-Dominate Empire has been retained through the ages by the Stilichians and now their successors, the Domus Aloysiani or Aloysians. The most obvious change has been at the top: the Stilichians ruled well and for an extraordinarily long time, but civil war, plague and the demise of multiple capable Emperors before they could realize their full potential brought an end to their reign shortly after the midpoint of the seventh century. Their old rivals (and occasional allies) the Arbogastings have since eclipsed them and claimed the purple by way of Aloysius Gloriosus, the incumbent Emperor, who has since further built upon their achievements with his own. As of 700, the Roman Empire stands reunited after nearly 300 years of division into separate Eastern and Western halves, and Aloysius’ marriage to the Eastern Roman Empress(-consort/dowager, technically) Helena symbolizes that union. While the union’s roots were strictly political and even now it is not a particularly happy match on account of the dreadful mismatch between the duo’s personalities and the physical distance that inevitably comes with trying to manage a continent-wide empire, their commitment to the Empire’s continued unity has bound them together for almost 40 years at this point.

Despite having thoughtlessly led a dissolute life of bloodshed and worldly indulgence until very recently, when fear of death and judgment by the Most High God drove him to start making amends, the old and greying Aloysius is still due to be well-remembered as a mighty warlord with almost no defeats in his record who succeeded where so many others had failed in reuniting the Roman world, and in holding the line against various threats for decades after achieving this deed. In so doing the first unquestioned Augustus of all Rome in three centuries continues the legacy of the soldierly Romano-Germanic emperors first set by the Stilichians, who have combined the (in)famous furor Teutonicus of their ancestors with enough Roman dignity and discipline to safely steward the Empire through the crises which the ‘proper’ Roman aristocracy either caused directly or were clearly incapable of handling themselves. Great men are rarely good men, after all, and it is unlikely that a merchant who can safely travel from Barcino to Antioch to trade or a veteran legionary who Aloysius has led to one victory after another for decades will care over-much for their Emperor’s various personal failings; and even now at this late stage, the orphan being cared for at Augusta Treverorum’s foundling hospital or an impoverished beneficiary of imperial charity may hold his attempt at repentance in higher regard than the more cynical Senate historians.

For what it may be worth to the chroniclers, in spite of having led a lifestyle that seems more suited to a barbarian king, Aloysius has never thought of himself as anything but a Roman. After all, despite having long been banished to a command on the northern frontier far from the Eternal City’s warmth and riches, his family has ably served Rome for centuries – and but for a twist of fate, they may have taken the purple much earlier, had the first Arbogast been victorious over Stilicho and Theodosius I at the Frigidus a little over three hundred years ago. He certainly does not see himself as the founder of anything new or even the resurrector of the old (for how can one resurrect something that is not dead?), but rather a restorer of what-should-have-been who has stitched the two halves of the Roman world back together after a long period of division which was not even intended to be permanent in the first place, defying the best efforts of both barbarians and internal enemies to see his work undone in the process. And perhaps, given his classical education and knowledge both of high Latin (imperfect and accented as his speech in that noble language may be) and the various vulgar dialects around Augusta Treverorum, he is more cultured than his enemies would like to give him credit for.

Vtp0J1Z.jpg

Flavius Aloysius Augustus Primus 'Gloriosus' in his twilight years, accompanied by a Romano-Frankish and African guard. As he feels his mortality looming over him, the first Augustus of a united Rome in nearly 400 years – ordinarily a very worldly man – has increasingly redirected his still-considerable energy into charity, religion & infrastructure development and away from killing & feasting

His wife the Augusta Helena, for her part, will go down in history as the calmer half of the duo. While hailed as one of the great beauties of her time, she is also well-regarded as the governor of the East in all but name (being recognized by history strictly as Aloysius’ Empress-consort rather than an Imperatrix who rules in her own right), owing to her extensive connections with the Constantinopolitan Senate and elite as well as the Caucasian federate kingdoms – all of which her Western-based husband lacks and never quite cared enough to cultivate. That her administrative acumen and temperate habits also extend to her personal life (and have gone a long way to preserving her figure and good looks well into middle age) is also praised, in particular by devout Christians. And while the Empress’ cold manner is seen as off-putting by many elite historians of her time, others appreciate how she has suffered through the loss of her true love in the Georgian prince Bacurius, two less-than-ideal marriages, her first husband’s abuse and murder of her family, and her second’s various dalliances and extravagances with a commitment to her duties and a certain resolute dignity (although she has her limits, as Sauromates of Barcino would be able to tell if he were not dead).

Beneath the Empire’s ruling couple, the Senate of Rome still endures as a nominal advisory & consultative body comprised of representatives drawn from both Rome’s most ancient and prestigious families and more relevant organs of government, such as the army, despite repeatedly trying and often failing to dethrone Emperors with whom they have taken issue; they are joined now by the Senate of Constantinople, a considerably more authoritative chamber whose prestige and reputation for reliability has not been tarnished nearly as badly, and who have come to effectively represent the interests of the Greek-speaking East. Some Senators who still long for the Rome of their ancestors snidely refer to the present state of the Empire as the Imperium Romanorum et Francorum (‘Empire of the Romans and Franks’), although with a few foolhardy exceptions who have already been killed for it, they would never dare say so to their rulers’ faces. An Emperor is not officially considered legitimate until he has been acclaimed by both of the Senates in addition to the army (and then crowned by one or more of the Heptarchs, almost always the Pope and more rarely the Patriarch of Constantinople).

And the Roman military, as always, has been key to the Emperors’ rule on account of the very name of their role indicating their constitutional status as (fundamentally) military dictators with authority over the entire Empire, as well as the reality that martial might is a prerequisite for seizing and holding power in the first place. Imperator, after all, still means ‘commander’ at its roots. The Stilichians and Aloysians have so far been careful to appease their legions with payments of land, gold and plunder as well as, where possible, their own charismatic leadership (as in the case of Aloysius) to minimize the risk of a mutiny (which can very quickly spiral into a civil war) as best they can, though the former obviously have not been entirely successful and the latter haven’t been in power long enough to suffer through such an episode of strife themselves just yet.

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The Empress Helena taking from her handmaids gifts which she intends to present to the Senate of Constantinople. While disdained by some of her contemporaries as an icy and grim woman, others acknowledge that she has not exactly led a life free of suffering for one so highborn, and both accept that at least she has made a formidable co-ruler to her husband despite the troubles in their strictly-political marriage

The Ephesian Church also still stands united, and in addition to promoting the idea that the Emperors rule with God’s sanction its clerics (being literate Latin or Koine Greek-speakers by default) increasingly dominate the bureaucratic engine which keeps the candle-lights on, the army paid and the roads paved from Augusta Treverorum to Antioch. Especially in the cities, Ephesian prelates are taking prominent roles in civil administration: for instance every Pope since Lucius II (618-620) has also been the Urban Prefect of the Eternal City (a role whose responsibilities they had increasingly been quietly usurping from the actual nominal Prefects since Attila’s 450 sack of Rome anyway). And even in other large cities where the Church has yet to replicate this feat, it is not uncommon for bishops and their parish priests to still play a role in day-to-day governance as part of the urban councils working with the appointed magistrates. In the pagi[7] of the countryside, authority tends to be more broadly distributed between village elders & headmen, the monasteries which have cropped up with growing royal & imperial patronage, and the estates ranging from the great latifundia of the high aristocracy to smaller ones owned by knights, with a pagarch chosen from among the leading families or clergy of the area to collect taxes and mediate disputes in the Emperor’s name.

Despite the inevitable local conflicts that have arisen from this mashup of civil and ecclesiastical powers – for instance, where they have the authority to simply command it rather than having to first persuade the local magistrate or prefect, no small number of empowered bishops have forbidden merchants from engaging in commerce in church squares – the Aloysians and before them the Stilichians have generally found the Ephesian Church hierarchy to be reliable allies against usurpers and the Senate (when they are not one & the same). In fact the Popes were entrusted with governance of Rome itself precisely because they helped Emperor Venantius reaffirm his dynasty’s hold on the purple, for instance. It is holding the entire Church together, in spite of the massive territories it covers and the inevitable political, linguistic and religious divides that have emerged and will continue to crop up well into the future, that most concerns the Augusti: a schism after all means at least one large part of the Church will be given to sponsoring usurpers against the incumbent regime, a serious problem given not only their spiritual authority but also their newly entrenched ability to deliver entire cities into a usurper’s hands.

An outside factor exists in the form of the federate kingdoms, however. Lying entirely outside the traditional structure of Roman governance, these barbarian kingdoms have settled themselves upon Roman soil – or were otherwise made to acknowledge the Emperor as their suzerain in their own homelands after the legions came knocking – under a contract which obligates them to fight for Rome during wartime, but precious little else. If they have accepted the Gospel, adopted Roman laws and customs, taken up a local dialect of Vulgar Latin for themselves or intermarried with their civilized neighbors, they do so because it pleased them and not because the Augusti commanded it. From the Visigoths to the Lombards, even those federates who have become Romanized tend to remain quite proud of their barbaric origins and to jealously guard their autonomy, as some Stilichians have found out to their peril in the past.

For the past few decades, Aloysius has been careful to cultivate friendships with the federate leadership (quite a few of whom were his companions in boyhood) and to avoid pushing them too hard or infringing upon their traditional autonomy: in turn they have proven extremely useful to him, routinely assisting him from his seizure of power to his Zeroth Crusade and the various other wars along the reunited empire’s long borders. On the rare occasion he has elected to meddle in their affairs, he is careful to do so only in limited ways, with the greatest legitimacy and when the federate state in question is at its weakest; his arbitration of the recent Frankish succession dispute being a fine and recent example. It remains to be seen what his heirs will do after he inevitably passes away, however – whether it be upholding his accommodating policy, attempting to bring them to heel as the Stilichians tried, or perhaps charting a different course in-between these choices that no Emperor before has attempted.

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The Arbogastings' position on the far northern march of the Empire and their historically close (by necessity) relationships to the assorted Germanic federates impressed upon Aloysius from an early age the need to maintain positive friendships with these powerful vassals, and so far he has managed to avoid the issues which eventually led to the downfall of their Stilichian predecessors

As to those heirs, the imperial couple have further fulfilled their duty to the state by siring one surviving son, Constantine, widely acknowledged as the sole successor to both halves of the Empire. He has much work to do: not only must he correct & standardize the Latin language in the West as he wishes, but the federate kings are increasingly seeking to redefine their role within the Empire and acquire some decision-making power for themselves so that they will no longer merely be strictly subordinate vassals obligated to ask ‘how high?’ when their overlord the Augustus asks them to jump. The increasingly Christianized Teutonic peoples (and to a lesser extent this century, the Sclaveni as well) resent having no say in their new religious leadership and are joined by the provincial Romans in this matter, as the Popes (under whose Roman Patriarchate they have been placed) continue to be elected exclusively by and from the populace of the city of Rome itself. And on that note, tensions between the Western and Eastern Ephesian patriarchates, temporarily set aside while Roman Christendom faced serious danger during the earlier part of the seventh century, are sure to gradually resurface now that the threat of the Avars, Turks and Islam have been held back.

Fortunately, Constantine has already proven himself a reasonably capable soldier and administrator (even if his true passion is scholarship) over the past thirty years, having spent time in both of his parents’ courts and establishing working relationships with the federates (particularly the Franks). He certainly does not lack the energy, ambition and scholarly interest to try grappling with this assortment of problems before they spiral out of control: put more simply, if Aloysius represents the last step in the bridge between the Aloysians’ past as ‘Germanic warrior-kings’ and their future as ‘Roman Emperors’, Constantine has firmly planted his feet on the ‘Roman’ end of the crossing. More generally, Aloysius & Helena have left a solid foundation for their successors to build on: few dynasties have gotten to start as strongly as the Aloysians, as the Arbogastings are called after the reign of their first Emperor (though less charitable sources may dare call them the ‘Chamavi’[8] or ‘Franco-Vandalic’ dynasty, as jabs toward their barbaric heritage, in their ‘secret histories’). It remains to be seen whether Constantine, and those who come after him, can realize the full potential of what their progenitors have left to them, just as Aloysius himself has used the foundation left by the Stilichians to reunite the two Romes.

The Holy Roman Empire’s internal workings are marked by a major departure from the Roman Empire of the fifth century: the solidification of a middle class of sorts in the form of landed warriors with their own modest estates, bound by obligation to provide the legions with their fighting core. The re-emergence of this class of soldierly smallholders was originally the work of the Stilichians, who consistently relied on them to fight off various threats to the Western Empire’s integrity for over 200 years, but it is under the Aloysians that their prestige will grow to its peak and their numbers expand further. Aloysius and his successors have expanded and will continue to expand this model well outside of Italy, and elevated these soldier-smallholders in status so that they might be called the dawn of the proper European chivalry. No doubt the federates will follow soon if they haven’t already, just as they have appropriated the Roman comital and ducal titles for use within their own nobility – in many cases their nobility are mostly or all landholding warriors anyway, ‘knight’ would just be one more title to distinguish the least among those ranks from the greater and wealthier ones, or even already predates its widespread adoption by the Holy Roman Empire as not just a military rank but an indicator of social status (as is the case with the lesser juramentados or ‘oathsworn warriors’ of the Visigoths).

Knighthood is not a phenomenon limited to any ethnicity or region, either – while most chivalric families in Gaul and Germania are indeed of Germanic (chiefly but not exclusively Frankish) descent, and the imperial knights in Hispania are largely descended from the Visigoths who elected to join the Roman army than their own king’s, in Italy the caballarii of Ostrogoth blood are outnumbered by the non-Germanic descendants of Stilichian beneficiaries. Along the Danube, the number of Slavic knights is slowly growing along with the number of Slavic Christians overall. In Macedonia and Anatolia this new class is predominantly Greek for obvious reasons. In Africa the border with Hoggar is still defended primarily by Moors of strong Berber descent, the only difference being that they weren’t classified as knights until now. And from what remains of the Roman Levant there have been caballarii recruited from the Arab federate kingdoms as well. Like past Emperors, by and large Aloysius and his successors do not see color, so to speak; the divide they scrutinize most harshly is that between civilization and barbarism, in which religion plays a much bigger role than how fair or dark someone’s skin is or where they came from – a good Roman is a good Ephesian and vice-versa, regardless of whether he be a golden-haired and Teuton-blooded man from Vetera in the March of Arbogast or a Berber-blooded Moor from Thubunae[10] so dark in complexion he can be mistaken for an Aethiopian, and the Augustus would sooner hear a petition from the latter than a pagan Dane, Geat or Frisian who looks a good deal more like himself.

Among the chivalry of Europe, distinctions between the great knights or caballarii are emerging along the lines of existing military ranks. Once duces and comites referred to officers within the Roman military, with dukes commanding on the frontier and counts leading elements of the field armies: this is still the case, but as their duties and large grants of land gradually become hereditary monopolies within certain families, the titles are increasingly becoming the exclusive preserve of the growing military aristocracy’s upper crust, set above the lesser knights in both peace and war. And while the Senators have three ranks of distinction among their ranks (vir illustris, vir spectabilis and vir clarissimus) Aloysius has created two such ranks to honor his caballarii or knights – vir gloriosus (‘glorious man’) for their commanding dukes and counts[9], no doubt taking after his own nickname, and vir fortis (‘gallant man’) for the average knights, both of which are passed from father to son where possible and come with military responsibilities to the state. It is typical for the knights’ estates to be worked by more coloni than outright slaves, but regardless of how free their laborers might be, they also benefit from the martial protection their overlords provide them against raiders (these days, they could range from Saxons or Frisians to unfriendly Slavs to Avars depending on where the estate is located).

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Early Aloysian caballarii, or knights, training via mock combat by the Rhenus

The solidification of the new chivalric class also comes with a strengthening geographic divide between the North of the Empire, where this phenomenon is growing rapidly across and outward from the March of Arbogast, and its old heartland to the South, where although many of the new soldier-smallholders were raised up by Stilicho & Eucherius I were bought out by the latifundia-based economy (that is to say large agricultural estates, though they might have become less massive than they were three hundred years ago thanks to the Stilichian reforms, worked by slaves or coloni – serfs) some have still managed to persist. A key development which has allowed the Northern European chivalry to remain at least somewhat competitive against the latifundiae, unlike their Southern European counterparts who more often than not end up getting bought out by the great landowners after a few generations, is the heavy plough.

Originally brought by the Sclaveni, the wheeled iron plough or carruca has spread quickly along the Roman road network and proven useful to tilling the heavier soil of Northern Europe (where the light ard-ploughs popular in the light, sandy soil of the Mediterranean were of less use). And while the soil and/or climate up north may be unsuitable for growing products considered staples around the Mediterranean, such as olives or figs, the knights and peasants tending the soil there have been able to raise up their own bounty from nature’s hand: wheat (especially spelt) and rye, cold-weather legumes, grapes for winemaking in regions which allowed it (such as along the banks of the Mosella outside Augusta Treverorum itself), apples and pears, and so on. All Northern Europe needs now to complete its agricultural revolution and truly rival the South in productivity, besides obviously continuing the process of clearing its land of ancient forests and building dikes & irrigation systems to water the growing farms of the knights, is warmer weather.

Still, though they might have been eclipsed in martial might by and are losing their economic edge to the peoples of the provinces and frontiers, the Italo-Roman core of the Empire remain fiercely proud of their history as the original Romans (even northeastern Italy, which has been increasingly referred to as ‘Gothia’ due to it having been the base of the Ostrogothic federate kingdom and the Romanized remnants of that people still calling it home[11]). Italy’s cities remain a collection of the largest and most prestigious in the Empire overall, even if Constantinople might have a larger population (and better defenses) than any single one of them, and the Senators still take enormous pride in their ancient pedigrees and being the heart of a fading minority that can still properly speak Latin as Cicero and Augustus once spoke the language – their disdain for Aloysius is not merely because he is of Frankish extraction (and in any case his blood is well-mixed with that of ‘proper’ Romans), but because he seems to them a yokel from the wild northern frontier who struggles to speak proper Latin and observe fine courtly etiquette.

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Daily life in Rome c. 700 AD, where even the scars of Attila's sack have largely faded and the 'populus Romanus' more distinctly recall the feuding between the Blues and Greens which ultimately helped topple Stilicho's dynasty and raise up that of Aloysius

Until the Christianization of the Empire these people would suffer no king, even striking down the great Julius Caesar when they feared he might crown himself as such. Now since the victories of Constantine and Theodosius I, they may have accepted Christ the King into their hearts, but still they will not bow to any mere mortal wearing a crown, least of all men of barbaric origin – no matter that they might owe the survival of their empire to these Stilichians and Aloysians. Considering that the heir to the Empire spent most of his formative years in the Greek East where the concept of a divinely sanctioned and autocratic king (basileus) is far less problematic, and has likely taken some ideas as to how to further legitimize & entrench the imperial office from this background, further conflict between the Aloysians and the former imperial heartland is probably inevitable.

Speaking of which, the Ephesian Church has emerged from the seventh century mostly triumphant. Aloysius drove the Turks and Avars back in part thanks to the financial support and organizational assistance of the Church, and in so doing has begun to inflame the spirit of religious militancy among the Ephesians which will only increase in fervor and relevance over the next few centuries – let heathens and heretics alike beware. True, they have lost the Patriarchal seats of Alexandria and Babylon to heathens, but Roman Christendom has weathered the attacks of numerous barbarian invaders and managed to hold on to five out of the Heptarchy’s seven seats, including the holy city of Jerusalem and of course the two seats of greatest importance: Rome and Constantinople. Of the two losses, Babylon is the one that stings less; Alexandria had been the home of many great Church Fathers like Cyril, celebrated for his defense of orthodox doctrine against the Nestorians, and Egypt had not only been one of the two great breadbaskets of the Empire alongside Africa, but its loss to Islam has disrupted the once-absolute Roman mastery over Mare Nostrum and made it possible for Muslim pirates to begin needling away at Roman trade in the eastern Mediterranean, even if they are still too weak and the Roman navy too mighty by comparison to pose any more than a nuisance at this point in time.

That growing spirit of militant fervor incidentally has created a natural bridge between the Ephesian Church on one hand, and the growing ranks of European chivalry being fostered by the Aloysians on the other. While there are still many centuries to go before a true chivalric code of conduct will be formalized, the Christian teachings have formed the basic nucleus of the morals which even the roughest of knights is supposed to abide even in this early age. The so-called habiti (‘habits’) expected to regulate knightly behavior include not only the fundamentals which are natural to want one’s elite warriors to have – loyalty to their Emperor and his bloodline unto death, bravery in the face of hardship, and maintaining good physical health – but also a staunch Christian piety (in fact being an Ephesian Christian is mandatory for knighthood in the Holy Roman Empire, and their oaths are sworn on a Bible as much to God as to the Augustus) and an extension of Saint Augustine’s just-war theory.

In general knights are advised not to go around picking fights, causing chaos and breaking the Emperor’s laws for no good reason, but to instead defend the true faith and all who practice it, and to only draw their swords against the wicked while still lamenting the fact that violence is a necessity in the fallen world. That knights should also engage in charitable almsgiving and sponsor the works of the Church as best as their income will allow like any other good (Ephesian) Christian, from the crafting of religious icons to the construction of hospitals and even willing slices of their estate away to monasteries, goes almost without saying. Honor further demands that the caballarii respect the rules of religious sanctuary, show mercy to a defeated worthy foe, and avoid abusing those weaker than themselves in favor of protecting and justly stewarding over them: to breach these rules is to place themselves outside of any code of honor’s protection, and invites the sort of punishment that Aloysius Gloriosus himself meted out to the Amalings for ruthlessly murdering the last male Great Stilichian prince after he sought refuge in a church. Of course, with all this comes the implicit assumption that the habiti primarily apply to fellow good Christians, not to heretics and heathens; especially those who engage in the persecution of Ephesians and/or employ dishonorable tactics against the legions of Rome, and thus by their own actions place themselves into the category of ‘wicked men’ against whom war is by default just.

However with the barbarian tide kept at bay, old tensions which had been set aside so that the united Church might turn its full might against these external threats now have room to resurface once more. Christian losses in the East are beginning to alter the balance of power between the Patriarchates in favor of Rome, even with Carthage having also been promoted to Patriarchal status alongside Babylon in the sixth century, and Constantinople in particular is concerned that Rome (already the first-among-equals between the seven) may soon grow overmighty, especially given the closeness of the last two imperial dynasties (for after all the Emperors remain the nominal heads of the Ephesian Church with authority to assemble ecumenical councils, as the first Constantine did) and with the probable addition of the Teutonic and Slavic lands to its jurisdiction. The increasing prominence of the filioque (mentioning in the Nicene Creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not just the Father) in the West, where it first emerged from the thought of the great Latin Fathers, while the East continues to reject it as an error and potentially even a pseudo-Arian invention to appease & sway the once-heretical Goths, Vandals, etc. to Ephesianism, is likely to be at least one major lightning rod for future controversy.

Said Teutons and Slavs are not guaranteed to go along with such a measure themselves, either. In fact, despite Rome’s reach now extending to the Upper Albis and the Carpathian Mountains, the Popes are still exclusively elected by and from the ranks of the Roman clergy and citizenry (as in, the city of Rome itself), and in general the uppermost echelons of the Ephesian Church in the West are staffed mostly with prelates of strictly Italian origin – a situation that has increasingly irritated not just the barbarian federates, but also citizens in the other Western provinces. The Greeks have their own Patriarchate in Constantinople, for example, and the Arabs and Syriacs have theirs in Antioch; as they become more entrenched in Romanitas it is likely that the Teutons and Slavs all will ask for either their own patriarchate as well (perhaps reviving the idea of a Patriarchate of Augusta Treverorum, which had been rejected at a previous church council) or else seek some means of greater representation within the Roman See, an endeavor in which they are also increasingly supported by the provincial landowners, city magistrates and even bishops. After all, it is not lost on the elites and prelates of the provinces that the last time they had a non-Italian Pope was almost 400 years ago.

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That they have virtually no say in electing the Pope, despite the importance of the Ephesian Church to not just spiritual needs but also daily governance, is something which has increasingly troubled the bishops and nobles under the Papacy's jurisdiction – a geographically widespread and ethnically heterogeneous lot (especially given how much the Greek half of the Roman world has shrunk over the seventh century)

In the provinces, despite the continued survival of the Empire the strain of warfare (either civil or in the form of barbaric invasions), economic disruption and sheer distance have led to the increasing fragmentation of the Latin language itself, with regional dialects growing further apart from the written standard until they now threaten into entirely distinct ‘Romance’ languages. Now while all written communication in the Occident is still done in Latin, when what has been written down is spoken aloud it is done in a manner that most certainly does not match the words on vellum (except perhaps in the halls of Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Senate chambers), whether the speaker be a merchant negotiating a trade agreement or a priest giving a sermon: the written Latin saeculum (century) for example would be pronounced as siecle in Gaul, sieglo in Hispania, and ségulu in Africa.

Around and within Augusta Treverorum where the Aloysians have made their home, the dominant Romance dialect (or perhaps it is a language already?) is Francesc – ‘Frankish’ – which is distinguished from neighboring ‘Gallique’ (Gallo-Romance) by its rougher, Teuton-influenced sound and simultaneously managing to both incorporate a considerable amount of Germanic vocabulary from its speakers while also remaining closer to Latin pronunciation thanks to its proximity to a major imperial center. For example, blanc (originating from Old Frankish blank/Teutonic blankaz) has become the Francesc word for ‘white’ where Gallique uses candide, derived from the Latin candidus; and Caesar (pronounced ‘kai-sar’ in the original Latin) has transitioned into César (pronounced ‘se-zar’) in the softer tongue of the Gallo-Romans, but is rendered Chésar (pronounced ‘kay-sar’) in Francesc. For his part, while Aloysius’ own name would only ever be written down in Latin as ‘ALOISIVS’ and the clergy & high officials of the Empire would have referred to him as such, his friends would have called him ‘Aloys’ (the Francesc rendering of his name) in informal conversation. Below is a chart comparing a number of originally Latin terms to how they would be uttered by various provincial denizens of the Holy Roman Empire, ironically including even Italy itself where the commons similarly no longer speak as the Romans of the first century would have.

LatinFrancescGalliqueItalianoEspanescoAfríganu
Exercitus (army)ExèrciteEsèrciteEsercitoExércitoEshértziu
Fides (faith)FideFoiFedeFeFidi
Comes (count)ComtComteConteCondeGome
Caballarius (knight)ChavalerChevalierCavaliereCaballeroGaballeru
Victoria (victory)VitorieVetoireVittoriaVictoriaBéddoréa

The Roman army has gotten its latest round of reforms just in time for the end of the seventh century. Emperor Aloysius has abolished the old distinction between the limitanei (border garrisons) and comitatenses (field armies), the former having been rendered superfluous by the construction of a human ‘wall’ of federates along the Empire’s borders, so that as of 700 all of Rome’s organized armies are properly field armies comprised of professional soldiers (exercitus praesentales, pl. exerciti). Based in major metropoles close to but not directly situated atop the front-lines with various major threats, these armies have the responsibility of quickly marching along the Roman road network to respond to threats which the federates on the aforementioned borders cannot withstand on their own.

Each exercitus is ideally supposed to comprise 30-40,000 men, divided into vexillationes ('banners') which are themselves further broken down into legiones (‘legions’, with infantrymen following the traditional aquila or ornamental eagle-standard of Rome into battle while the cavalry use the Dacian and Sarmatian-derived draco or dragon-standard instead). The Holy Roman foot legions tend to be larger than the legions of the Dominate period but still smaller than those of the Principate, numbering 2,000 men divided into four cohorts of five centuries (500 men total) apiece according to the seminal military text Virtus Exerciti. The cavalry legions retain their smaller Dominate-era numbers: 1,000 men organized into three cunei (‘wedges’, singl. Cuneus) of 300, each comprised of three alae (‘wings’, squadrons of cavalry), plus one independent ala. These are however the paper strengths of the new exerciti, and they are only ever perfectly met in the Emperors’ dreams – units being understrength is not exactly an unheard-of phenomenon, and on rarer occasion they are over-strength as well. In keeping with Constantinian-era military tradition, both the foot and mounted legions are led by military counts (comes), while the cohorts and wings beneath him are commanded by centurions (now styled centenarius, pl. centenarii – except the commander of the first cohort, who is instead styled primicerius or ‘primarch’) with each centurion having a second-in-command called the biarchus (or ‘biarch’, formerly optio), and the higher-up vexillationes comprised of anywhere between two to four legions are commanded by duces (dukes).

Of the two, the mounted legiones are by far the more important, despite being fewer in number than the infantry, as can be expected from an army whose focus is on mobility. Their core and most prominent element are comprised of the caballarii, or knights: the social class of hereditary, quasi-aristocratic soldier-smallholders who have sprouted from the seeds planted by the Stilichian reforms and are set to fully flourish under the Aloysians. These imperial knights are as a rule well-equipped, most being armed with a lance (contus) & longsword (spatha) as well as a round shield painted in the colors of their vexillatio, and armored in a coat of mail (lorica hamata), scales (lorica squamata) or both (lorica plumata) over a padded coat (subarmalis) and sometimes also with the addition of a skirt of pteruges (leather strips). In exchange for the right to hold land and tenants, they are responsible for the upkeep of their equipment (originally provided to them by the fabricae or military manufactories) and horses, as well as to keep themselves in battle-ready physical condition and participate in routine military exercises – a bridge between the hippika gymnasia of the old legions and the famously lavish tourneys of future centuries – so that they can fight when the Emperor commands it.

The heavy caballarii are further supported by salaried, much more lightly-equipped fighters of common birth such as the equites sagittarii (horse archers) and exploratores (scouts), as well as assorted mounted auxiliaries drawn from Rome’s federates to cover their shortcomings and bolster their strengths (more on them later). As well the wealthier caballarii who can afford additional armor, horses & weapons for their younger sons or other kinsmen may even have the latter enlist as caballarii pueri (‘young horsemen’, medium-to-heavy supporting cavalry and precursors to the squires of later ages) – they are more likely to carry javelins rather than lances into battle, where they will fling these throwing spears to soften up enemy ranks ahead of their fathers' charge, but can and often are eager to hold their own in close combat as well.

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Northern Roman legionaries outside a watch-tower on the border with the Continental Saxons c. 700 AD, including two knights in the back (one mounted, one dismounted)

Naturally, in pitched battles the primary role of the caballarii (being the iron fist of the Aloysian Emperors) is to deliver the decisive charge into an enemy’s flank or rear to break said foe, aided by the stirrup technology absorbed from the Avars, as well as to protect their army’s own flanks from enemy cavalry. As those tend to also be the elite warriors of the opposing side, knights (especially the younger and more hot-blooded ones) rarely need prodding to seek them out, ever hoping that by felling such worthy opponents in glorious combat they will rise in the esteem of their peers and superiors – after all, with glory comes riches and promotions. The usual formation of the caballarii is a deep offensive wedge, hence the name given to their units; however if it is necessary to present a broader front they can easily take up a line formation instead, and when defending or on ground unsuitable for horses they can even dismount to fight as heavy infantry (milites descensi), giving a rude shock to any foe who expects them to be hapless tortoises when not in the saddle.

While the caballarii form both a social and military elite, there still remain distinctions between the greater and lesser among their number, and this is not limited merely to the divide between the officers who give orders and the men who must follow them. Under the old title of scholae palatinae, Aloysius has assembled (so far) three larger regiments of about 2,000 men each, selected for their extraordinary courage & fighting prowess and hosted separate from any of the exerciti at Augusta Treverorum, Ravenna and Antioch. These all-cavalry units commanded by a comes palatinus (count-palatine) constitute his most elite fighting formations, being both a reserve of last resort (or alternatively, the spearhead for a major offensive action) in battle and capable of independent operation regardless of whether the army as a whole is on campaign: performing reconnaissance in force, seeking out and engaging raiding parties who have managed to slip or break through the border defenses, etc.

While they do come from the knightly class, the soldiers of the scholae are younger sons or brothers who are not due to inherit their family’s land from their fathers, instead being salaried warriors on the Emperor’s own payroll to ensure their absolute loyalty to him (and not their own provincial interests). The proper title for the individual soldiers is scholares, as it was in the past, these days it is more common for them to be referred to as palatini (‘palace troops’) instead – which is to say, paladins. Further, the first & foremost of the three existing scholae are Aloysius’ most trusted bodyguards (comitatenses fideles or ‘faithful companions’) and easily identified by their bright white cloaks, from which they have gained the additional nickname candidati (similar to the elite bodyguards of past emperors, who however tended to be rather fewer in number).

While the infantry are decidedly less prestigious than the cavalry, they still form the majority of the exerciti’s ranks and continue to play a core role in Rome’s battles. Unlike the landed chivalry, the common footsoldiers of the Holy Roman Empire are almost always landless men recruited from the cities and countryside alike, fighting for a steady salary (once more made of actual gold & silver, mined from Hispania and more recently the recovered portions of Dacia) and three hot meals a day rather than the opportunity to bring glory to their family name and expand the estates they already (don’t) have – the men who were given land by the Stilichians or Aloysians having since ‘graduated’ to almost exclusively fighting as knights. In those battles where they cannot simply attain victory on their own by weight of numbers, their firm discipline and the high quality of their mass-manufactured arms, it is their duty to at least pin the enemy down so the cavalry can crush their flanks; and obviously, it falls to the infantry to do almost all the heavy lifting in sieges as well.

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An Italian or African infantryman, of the sort who would be seen in the foot-legions based around Ravenna or Carthage. Note that his equipment seems much more alike those of 3rd-7th century Roman regulars than that of the legions of the north

The role of light infantry has generally been outsourced to auxiliary units, with the exception of a few specialized regiments such as the praeventores (foot scouts). Instead much of the Holy Roman Empire’s fighting strength on foot are heavy infantrymen following in the footsteps of past legionaries, attired in a helmet and lorica hamata/squamata. Their officers – the counts, primarchs and biarchs of the infantry legions – may optionally also wear manicae (segmented arm-guards). In terms of arms, their equipment does not greatly differ from the past: they bear spathae (longswords), round shields, and a number of plumbatae, the lead-weighted dart having completely replaced the javelin by Aloysius’ time (a legionary could carry five or six plumbatae instead of just one or two pila thanks to the former’s much small ersize & lighter weight, and the plumbatae also outrange the pila considerably on account of the same factor). To more effectively combat mounted threats like the Avars, for every two or three swordsmen there is usually one spearman in the Roman ranks, armed with a long spear called the lancea (originally a term applied to a type of javelin used by auxiliary troops in the past) – consequently they are known as the lanciarii to distinguish them from the spatha-armed regulars recorded as legionarii or plumbatarii (the prestigious title spatharii, singl. Spatharius, belonging instead to the Emperors’ personal sword-bearers[12]).

Aside from the heavy infantry and its limited number of light scouts/skirmishers, the Roman infantry also encompasses its missile troops, who primarily use either traditional bows or manufactured crossbows (arcuballista). Most of these men are given only a helmet or even enter battle totally unarmored, since things must have gone dreadfully wrong indeed if they find themselves stuck in close combat, save for a number of elite cohorts of sagittarii graves (‘heavy archers’) spread out through the most reliable and prestigious legions. In terms of support elements, as always the Romans pride themselves on sophisticated engineering which few of their rivals can match: while every legionary still carries a set of basic engineering tools (spades, mattocks, etc.) to dig defensive ditches and roads, the exerciti also retain trained specialists for duties that the common legionaries lack the knowhow to effectively execute, such as building dams or assembling & operating siege machinery. As of 700 the Romans have replaced the onager with the faster-loading mangonel, which they have adopted from the Avars like their horsemen’s stirrups, but still make prolific use of the ballista and scorpio both as heavy siege weapons and as mobile cart-mounted light artillery (carroballistae).

As well, there are the auxilia palatina (‘palace auxiliaries’) to consider. These are the federate soldiers considered both sufficiently capable and loyal to be worth attaching to the imperial field armies, organized into their own regiments but operating under the authority of imperially-appointed counts and dukes. Generally Aloysius prefers to recruit the sort of auxiliaries who can cover his heavy legions’ weaknesses and enhance their strengths: naturally this means that light skirmishers and archers, either on foot or horseback, are in high demand regardless of whether they come from the Banu Ghassan & Banu Kalb, Africa, Cilician Bulgaria, the Sclaveni kingdoms or Celtiberia and the Basque lands. Additional supporting troops of prominence include Frankish (and more generally Central Germanic, ie. Thuringian or Lombard) heavy infantry, Gothic and Armenian heavy cavalry, and South Slavic spearmen, varying from regional army to regional army.

The arms and armor of the legions are consistently produced by the fabricae, military factories based in major metropoles such as Augusta Treverorum and Ravenna, though as is the case with the knights the legionaries are responsible for their maintenance. However, the manufactoring process has inevitably been influenced by the influx of Germanic smiths in the north, who have lent a distinct flair to the equipment churned out in Augusta Treverorum and the other Northern Roman fabricae. This has set up the most obvious visual difference between the legions of Aloysius and those of Constantine I or even Stilicho & Eucherius I, as recorded in art depicting martial figures from the late seventh & eighth centuries onward: a proliferation of mostly Frankish-influenced equipment among said legions, such as simpler spangenhelms and morion-like kettle hats in the place of the more traditional ridge helmet. By contrast, the fabricae of Italy and Africa still hew closely to the older Roman designs, so until & unless the Aloysians get around to making the ‘northern’ style of equipment standard, the legions recruited & based in those regions still continue to strongly resemble those of the fourth to early-seventh centuries.

Finally, the Roman navy remains of great importance – perhaps greater than it has had in a very long time – in protecting maritime trade, now that the forces of Islam have managed to conquer Egypt and break into the Mediterranean. The old liburnae war-galleys, once the smallest class of warship in the Roman fleet and the only one necessary in the long centuries of peace across Mare Nostrum, have evolved into monoremes and biremes with lateen, or triangular, sails (called dromons in the Greek East) which are a good deal longer and larger. Their primary tactic remains closing in on and boarding enemy ships, for which each vessel carries a complement of armored marines (milites muscularii) who hang their shields on pavesades along either side of the ship, giving the deck crew a measure of protection until they get near boarding range.

All that said, they do have ranged weapons with which to assail enemy ships outside of boarding distance: the traditional light scorpio, of course, but also ‘Greek fire’ – the napalm-like substance invented by Eastern Roman alchemists and engineers in the last years of the reign of Helena’s father Constantine IV, deployed as a lethal secret weapon against both the Turks and more recently Muslims. What its composition truly is remains a closely guarded state secret, so much so that the Muslims have had to invent their own equivalent in naphtha rather than copying it wholesale. While Aloysius would love to deploy Greek fire on land as well so as to more easily destroy his enemies, the solution is still too unstable to be used in such a manner and in any case, the Romans are still far from inventing any device that could safely (for the wielder) throw this liquid fire at their foes on land.

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A Holy Roman bireme reminds the Saracens opposing them at the Battle off Gauda, 687 AD why, despite their recent occupation of Egypt, their masters still boast that the Mediterranean is 'Mare Nostrum' – 'our sea' – with a blast of Greek fire

====================================================================================

[1] Comparable to Old Gallo-Romance/French, minus much of the Frankish influence which has gone to Francesc instead. Gallique would be even closer to its Gaulish and Latin/Romance roots instead, and thus missing many words with a Germanic origin (refer to the candidus/candide and blankaz/blanc example under ‘Economy & Society’). Its relationship to Italo-Romance (Italiano) would be one of the strongest among the emergent Romances.

[2] Comparable to early Italo-Romance, as seen in the Veronese Riddle or the Placiti Cassinessi. With Italy remaining a single cohesive unit within the WRE/HRE, a unified Italian language would probably have evolved much sooner out of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Italy, instead of the latter fragmenting into various Italian languages without a unified tongue for the peninsula even existing until the 14th century.

[3] African Romance – spoken by the Romanized Christian population of the African provinces be they of primarily Punic, Italo/Hispano-Roman, Berber or Vandal descent. It is a close relative of the Sardinian language, as was reportedly the case historically. As can be seen though, the p/v->b, c->g and t->d sound changes observed in other Romance languages are even more pronounced here than in Espanesco or Italiano.

[4] The Dalmatian language, which historically survived until 1898 when it died with the death of its last native speaker, Tuone Udaina.

[5] Pannonian Romance historically seems to have survived, primarily concentrated around Lake Pelso/Balaton, at least as late as the Magyar invasion (the Pannonians, described as pastores Romanorum or ‘shepherds of the Romans’, were distinguished as a separate people from the Slavs, Bulgars and Vlachs also living in the pre-Hungarian Carpathian Basin by the Gesta Hungarorum).

[6] Not actually the Dacian language, despite using the Romanian name for it. This refers to the Proto-Romanian language, which is considered to have been the common ancestor of both Romanian and the other surviving Eastern Romance languages today (Aromanian, Megleno- and Istro-Romanian).

[7] The plural form of pagus, the Late Roman term for the lowest-level rural subdivision within their provinces.

[8] It’s not on his English Wikipedia page, but on Arbogast’s French page you can find his ‘Family’ section and tree describing his probable relations to the royal family of the Frankish Chamavi tribe, making him either the nephew (through Bauto, the Romano-Frankish general traditionally considered to be his father) or even son of the Chamavi king Nebigast. In contrast, his rival Stilicho seems to have risen from much humbler origins – his Vandal father appears to have been just a warrior of no great lineage.

[9] Historically, the rank of vir gloriosus was an Eastern Roman/Byzantine invention dating to the sixth century, created to further distinguish the highest rank of government officials after the Senate-based three ranks of ‘great men’ (vir illustris, vir spectabilis and vir clarissimus) lost their value due to the Emperors handing them out too freely to too many men.

[10] Tobna.

[11] While ‘Lombardy’ ITL roughly refers to the area of our Saxony, a part of northern Italy still manages to carry the name of a Germanic people who settled and (much more) briefly ruled the peninsula from there ITL anyway.

[12] Equivalent to the Byzantine spatharioi, which similarly was the preserve of some of the Emperor’s elite attendants and eventually became an entirely honorary title.

Merry Christmas dear readers, I present this last update of the year as my gift! It’s a massive one BTW, actually the longest chapter I’ve written to date – thank God for the spoiler system helping to chop it up somewhat, so you can take breaks in-between each section :LOL: I also forgot to mention this previously, but I did add a threadmark for the intro chapter after all this time, kept forgetting I could do that. Anyway I intend to start the new century on New Year’s, with a change in topography – going forward I’ll refer to places within the HRE with their local Romance name rather than strictly trying to use Latin as I’ve been doing, with the Latin version (if there is one) joining the RL modern one in the footnotes.
 

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
Constantine will be given both solid foundation and pile of troubles to work with in the future. It will be interesting to see how he and his descendants will weather currents and storms of history.

It has been an exciting couple of centuries to be a Roman

And we were all very excited to read about it.

they are joined now by the Senate of Constantinople, a considerably more authoritative chamber whose prestige and reputation for reliability has not been tarnished nearly as badly

Given the record of Roman Senate, that's a really low bar to clear.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Thanks,and Merry Christas to all here,too.
Plumbata had 30m range compared to 10/20m of pilum.Much better choice.
I once read,that at some point all legionares in late Roman army get sling as long-range weapons.Forget source,as usual.

But here,i remember - Rodney Stark in his excellent "The Victory of Reason",book about catholic Church creating Europe,
wrote about 4-crop rotation introduced among many other things in those times.
Here,it could happen earlier.

Popes - we could have Cardinals 400 years earlier,too.

P.S i knew,that i am boring,but Romans REALLY should re-open amber road,take Baltic,and Gothland with other islands.
Prussian lands with amber there,too - they could not stop bunch of monks in OTL,so what they do against united Rome?

Carribean are possible,too - many roman and greek wrote about Paradise islands there,soe even claimed that somebody get there.Since searoad started at Canaries,they could easily do that.

Too late for circling Africa and discovering Madagascar - they would meet muslim King Julian there !;)
 

gral

Well-known member
Intersting, Espanesco looks like(as far as I can see from 5 words) a middle-road between Portuguese and Spanish, but without the written idiosyncrasies of Gallician, which serves this role in OTL.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Forget about maces and axes as primary weapons for soldiers.Their enemy armour was usually mail,so maces would be better against it.
I once read,that for dude hit by mace it is not important if he had mail,or not - he is crushed anyway.
 

ATP

Well-known member
@Circle of Willis ,i accidentally discovered,that near Chad lake existed cyvilizationbelonging to sao culture from at least 500BC.
They never united,byt have city-states in 700AD.
Here:
They were conqered by muslims till 16th century,but here they could become christians instead.
About 700 AD nomads made Kanem Empire which fought them.They becoed emuslims in 9th century.

You could use both cultures.
 

stevep

Well-known member
@Circle of Willis ,i accidentally discovered,that near Chad lake existed cyvilizationbelonging to sao culture from at least 500BC.
They never united,byt have city-states in 700AD.
Here:
They were conqered by muslims till 16th century,but here they could become christians instead.
About 700 AD nomads made Kanem Empire which fought them.They becoed emuslims in 9th century.

You could use both cultures.

Interesting find :( and a good point. They could become either Ephesian or pick up the religion from the remnants of the Donatism or possibly even fleeing populations from Axum or Nubia although those last two are unlikely. Of course it would also be only a short step then for the religion in some form to start spreading to the Gulf of Guinea and the coastal states.

Mind you the way things are going their likely, along with non-Christian neighbours to suffer from frequent Muslim slave raids.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Interesting find :( and a good point. They could become either Ephesian or pick up the religion from the remnants of the Donatism or possibly even fleeing populations from Axum or Nubia although those last two are unlikely. Of course it would also be only a short step then for the religion in some form to start spreading to the Gulf of Guinea and the coastal states.

Mind you the way things are going their likely, along with non-Christian neighbours to suffer from frequent Muslim slave raids.

Indeed.They in OTL succumbed to slave raids,or to be precise - agree to be muslims in 16th century.
Fun thing - according to wiki,some Historians think,that they were descendents of ancient Hyksos cyvilization who run there.
@Circle of Willis could use it,if it help his story.
 
701-705: Changing of the Guard

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
701 seemed a quiet enough start to the new century in western Eurasia. Aloysius arrived in Antioch early in the year, but found that the Hashemite Caliphate had yet to tear itself asunder like he and Helena hoped. Unwilling to commit immediately to war when the conditions had not become as favorable as originally planned for, the Augustus instead worked closely with the local federate kings of the Caucasian and Arab kingdoms, as well as the Kanasubigi of the Cilician Bulgars, to raise and drill additional troops – as well as recruiting some of each kingdom’s most promising fighters into the auxilia palatina corps of his Antiochene and Thessalonican standing armies. While in the East Aloysius also took the time to suppress a new heresy emerging on the Armenian-Mesopotamian frontier with Islam, where the scars of Heshana’s rampage had not even begun to heal when the armies & raiders of Qasim and then Abd al-Rahman stormed in: so-called the ‘Aragatsians’ because they originated from the vicinity of Mount Aragats or ‘Sempadians’ because the sect was founded by a man called Smbat (translated into ‘Sempad’ by Latin chroniclers) of Agarak, they rejected Trinitarianism and believed in the Docetist teaching that the Romans and Jews had merely crucified an illusory specter of Jesus (who, as an entity of pure spirit indistinct from God, never actually died in their reckoning).

The Armenian king Gurgen, son and successor of the late Arsaber who had helped defend Constantinople against Heshana Qaghan and fought in the eastern Caucasus for the Romans, may have been inclined to ignore these heretics and focus on the bigger fish to fry to his south for the time being had they limited their theological dispute to Christological issues. However, the Sempadians were also fervent iconoclasts – Smbat taught that the Turks and Arabs had been sent by God as a punishment to chastise the Ephesian Christians for making & venerating icons – and opposed the feudal system entrenched in Armenia, where much of the nobility (the high nakharars and lesser ishkhans alike) and their traditional demesnes predated Roman dominance in the region, in favor of communal living and an Apostolic sharing of all possessions. They had translated these convictions into action at the turn of the century: attacking Ephesian churches around Mount Aragats, inciting peasants to revolt against or at least flee from their overlords, and sabotaging the construction of the fortress of Amberd on its slopes.

Worried that these heretics would form a fifth column in case of another war with the Muslims, Gurgen called upon his suzerain to intervene and support his ongoing efforts to track down the offending sect. Aloysius did just that by contributing troops to a manhunt for Smbat, who he personally suspected to be a Muslim spy on account of his sect’s iconoclasm and the fact that their actions aided the forces of Islam; ultimately the family Smbat was staying with was bribed into hand him over in the middle of a July night, after which he was condemned to be burned at the stake for not just treason but also willfully persisting in his heretical beliefs. Other Sempadians who were captured and recanted were allowed to live, but had to help repair the damage they had caused to Amberd and the local churches. The Augustus believed his job was done with that, but the heresiarch’s family and close associates escaped his wrath with the aid of Armenian rivals of the ruling Mamikonian clan and – regarding Smbat himself as a martyr – resolved to pester the Romans and their local Armenian allies for so long as they still drew breath.

800px-The_imperial_army_besieges_Samosata.jpg

A party of Sempadian saboteurs are caught trying to damage the defenses of Amberd by Roman, Armenian and Ghassanid Arab troops

Caliph Abdullah meanwhile was not in a good position to make use of the Sempadians, who at this time lacked the numbers to be anything more than a nuisance to the Holy Roman Empire anyway. The great-grandson of the Prophet was more concerned with contending with his uncles, having come to increasingly regret his decision to entrench their excessive power and autonomy with each passing day. While hoping Ali would get killed by the Hunas, he turned to the long-suffering Persians (particularly what had remained of their nobility) in his search for allies against al-Abbas, who was staunchly supported by the Arab military aristocrats who’d begun settling and carving out fiefdoms for themselves in Persia under the older Hashemite prince’s aegis. Abdullah slowly began to build up support with the indigenous Persians, promising to restore them to a state resembling their former Sassanid-era glory and that he would not allow them to be eclipsed by the Arab settlers; that said, superficially he and al-Abbas did have a common enemy in the Mazdakites still holding out in the Zagros Mountains, who they jointly battled without mercy.

Ali meanwhile had returned to the front in Al-Hind and immediately went on the offensive against the Hunas, who had done what they could to rebuild their own armies and prepare in the interim. Huna forces had some success in resisting the Islamic advance toward Gujarat, as the Arabs had difficulty maneuvering in the Rann of Kutch when the monsoon season flooded its salt marshes. They were not as successful in dealing with Ali’s eastward thrust out of the Thar Desert, as the latter’s small Arab army managed to confound and defeat a larger Huna host at the Battle of Mandore; the senapati (general) Kambujiya, one of Pravarasena’s nephews, was among the casualties, having abandoned his men to flee for the safety of the Rann only to be caught and killed by Islamic pursuers at Jabalipura[1]. Ali and his sons next surged toward Indraprastha, but before they could come into sight of the Huna capital the Mahārājadhirāja managed to beat them back at the Battle of Khoh[2] this year, thanks in no small part to the support of the local Hindu kshatriya clan of Bargujar. While typically reluctant to support the Hunas, the Bargujars (like many other Hindus) had come to deem the violently iconoclastic Muslims a greater evil than their slightly less destructive Buddhist overlords.

SPpMUz8.jpg

Mahārājadhirāja Pravarasena's second son Salanavira about to kill a downed enemy at the Battle of Khoh

Further still to the east, in the wake of the Srivijayans managing to fight the Later Han to a stalemate, at least one of their vassals – seeing that they were no longer invincible – thought this the right time to rise in rebellion. The nobility of northern Korea rallied to Buyeo Yung, a distant kinsman of their long-fallen royal dynasty, and proclaimed him King Hyeongbeon of a restored Baekje which would be independent of both Silla and Chinese overlordship. When King Somyeong of Silla marched to restore his authority, he was dealt a stinging defeat by the Baekje restorationists at the Battle of Jinnae-gun[3] and had to appeal for Chinese intervention. Zhongzong, who now felt vindicated in his concerns that his vassals might start to get antsy after witnessing China’s first defeat (however limited) abroad since the foundation of the Later Han and eager to remind them that his dynasty’s position was in fact still unassailable, agreed and began to amass a large expeditionary force north of the Yalu.

Come 702, while the Sempadians remained underground and licked their wounds, Aloysius busied himself with the organization of large counter-raids into the Muslim portions of Syria and the Levant. While he did not lead these attacks personally (a rarity for the Emperor, normally a bombastic dynamo who led his men from the front – most likely he considered raids like these to be a dishonorable necessity, and thus beneath him), the Augustus did have a hand in directing and coordinating the Ghassanid, Banu Kalb and Cilician Bulgar forces which were involved in this chevauchée, as well as in selecting their targets. The larger Ghassanid-Bulgar expedition of about 5,000 struck first, sweeping southward from their forward-base at Edessa to scorch the land as far as old Emesa, now called ‘Homs’ by its new occupants, before looping westward to return to the safety of the former’s federate kingdom through the Gap of Emesa[4].

The Ghassanids were especially eager to settle scores with their rivals among the Adnanite tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu ‘Amir: while the action in this campaign primarily consisted of skirmishes, the Christian and Muslim forces did fight an actual pitched battle near the ruins of Raphanea (one of many Syrian towns destroyed by the Turks, very briefly resettled by the Romans and then abandoned again after the Arab conquest) where neither they nor the enemy Adnanites showed quarter, with nearly 800 of the latter choosing to fight to the death after it became clear that the Christians had won the day. The Banu Kalb meanwhile had launched a much more modest expedition half the size of their northern neighbor’s out of Jerusalem, primarily targeting Muslim caravans and isolated villages from Jerash (formerly Gerasa) to ancient, nearly-abandoned Petra before looping back toward southwestern Palaestina and defeating a mounted party of guzat trying to intercept them & retake their loot at a large skirmish near Rafah (as the Arabs called Raphia).

Zanati-khalifa.png

Islamic engraving depicting combat between a Ghassanid raider and a Muslim ghazi

These raids assuredly infuriated the Muslims, who were used to being the ones doing the raiding. Abdullah authorized a large punitive expedition into Roman territory and began to amass volunteers & supplies for it, but he was reluctant to commit to an all-out war for fear that his uncle Al-Abbas might either overthrow him or use the conflict as a chance to boost the prestige of his own branch of the Hashemite family (and then overthrow him). The Caliph allocated a not-insignificant amount of resources to the expansion of his own ghilman corps this year, lavishly outfitting a new class of mostly Turkic, Kurdish and Abyssinian slaves with heavy arms and armor in hopes of cultivating an army which would be fanatically loyal to him alone and more than capable of crushing both the Romans and his rival kindred on the field of battle.

While the Syrian frontier continued to heat up, Ali was falling back on a strategy of raids in al-Hind himself. Finding that the Hunas were too strong and well-entrenched in Gujarat and around their capital, the younger of the Caliph’s uncles sought to weaken them with a pair of great razzias, and if possible provoke Pravarasena into recklessly coming after him onto favorable terrain. After the monsoon season passed and the great Rann of Kutch dried up in places, he and his sons tore a bloody swath toward Indraprastha and deposited six large bags of severed heads (one for each of the Hashemite princes involved) within sight of the city’s towers before retreating with as much plunder as they could carry; meanwhile his eldest son Idris led the attack on Gujarat, sacking Vardhmanpur[5] before unexpectedly moving east to avoid stiffening Indian resistance to the south and putting Dasapura[6] to the torch. These brutal and audacious attacks had the desired result, compelling Pravarasena to assemble a huge army of around 70,000 at Indraprastha at the cost of emptying many garrisons and further sapping the strength of his other frontiers’ defenses in the hope of finally putting the Islamic invasion to an end with overwhelming force in the next year.

Off in the uttermost east, Zhongzong’s army of 140,000 moved to crush the Baekje rebellion. Hyeongbeon frantically tried to stop this behemoth host on the Yalu, but with less than a fifth of their strength, he was inevitably overwhelmed and put to flight in the Battle of Uiju (which the Chinese called Yizhou), where his plan to destroy a dam and drown the Chinese army as it crossed the river was foiled by a contingent of Turkic horsemen who cut down his engineers and the detachment of infantry he’d posted to guard them. Talks to secure support from the Yamato and compel their Emperor Jomei to rebel against Chinese overlordship fell through after this debacle, leaving the men of Baekje to face their doom on their lonesome.

Spurning a Chinese offer to yielded and be treated with leniency which he suspected to be a ruse, Hyeongbeon talked most of his remaining 6,000 men into mounting a heroic but assuredly futile last stand against the insurmountable odds presented by the combined Later Han-Silla army at the Battle of Song’ak[7] in July of 702: a tenth of their number chose to surrender anyway, and the sight of their heads on the Later Han’s lances proved the truth of Hyeongbeon’s words to his remaining followers. The Korean rebel chief himself rode off to his death on the point of a Turkic mercenary’s lance, confounding all efforts to capture him despite Zhongzong offering a reward to do so – certainly not out of mercy, but so that he might be subjected to a more humiliating traitor’s death – and the orders of the Chinese commander Yuan Dan, who was himself the grandson of a Tegreg noblewoman. While many generations of independence-minded Koreans would celebrate this feat into the future, in the more practical terms of the present his defeat and the annihilation of his army spelled a definitive end to Baekje, which would be permanently annexed by Silla and never managed to rise again. Ironically, Baekje’s demise thus also definitively united the Korean peninsula under one kingdom’s banner for the first time in history.

xA0u9UU.jpg

Turkic heavy cavalry in Emperor Zhongzong's employ rapidly bearing down on Hyeongbeon's Korean rebels at the Battle of Song'ak

703 saw the Muslims launch their counter-chevauchée, numerous small raiding parties aggressively surging into the lands of the far-eastern Roman federates from the remains of Upper Mesopotamia to Palaestina and living off the land as they attacked trading caravans & undefended or lightly defended settlements, bypassed or skirted around fortifications, and avoided the inevitable response of the Roman army and its auxiliaries wherever they could. The Ghassanids and Banu Kalb requested & received permission from the Augustus to disperse their own armies to counter the Muslim attackers, but this played right into the hands of Abdullah (or more accurately his chief strategist, the slightly older Turkic ghulam Nusrat al-Din – Aloysius accurately assessed the new Caliph to not be his predecessors’ martial equal, but at the time was unaware of the talent of his newly promoted lieutenant). In particular, the Ghassanid king Al-Aiham II ibn Al-Harith was lured into an ambush north of Cyrrhus and killed when three Islamic raiding parties simultaneously descended on his isolated detachment.

The demise of one of his vassals compelled Aloysius to take the field himself, and understanding that he could not hope to catch the raiders with a lumbering host at its full strength, he took with him only the 2,000-strong schola based in Antioch and five hundred additional Ghassanid, Kalb and Cilician Bulgar auxilia palatina. The old Emperor lured the Arabs into a trap of his own, establishing a fortified camp on a hill near the headwaters of the River Eleutherus[8] with seemingly only 700 of his faithful paladins for company: unable to resist the temptation to cut the head off the Roman snake in one apparently easy blow, half a dozen ghazi captains massed their raiders into a 3,500-strong force and descended upon Aloysius’ position on a cool August night. Of course, then the rest of his army rushed to the fray – alerted by the massive signal fire Aloysius had prepared, as the Muslims had fortunately attacked on a day with neither rain nor fog – and the Muslims were soundly defeated in the melee which followed.

f7Xsgr2.jpg

Aloysius' paladins and their auxiliaries overpowering the surprised Muslims at the Battle of the Eleutherus

While the Romans and Muslims to the west continued to intensify their quasi-war, Ali was fighting a decidedly not-quasi-war’s climactic battle in the east. He pulled his armies together to face the grand host of Pravarasena, but even with all his strength and reinforcements reluctantly sent by his nephew, he had mustered a total of only some 15,000 men against the 70,000 very angry Indians descending upon him. The Muslims withdrew down the Luni River, which the Hunas thought to be a sign of cowardice before their impending doom, but in truth Ali hoped to bring to bear river-boats transporting naphtha throwers supplied by his nephew and needed to fight the battle along the riverbanks, during the monsoon season where the river and the Rann of Kutch in general had flooded sufficiently for those boats to sail upriver, to do so.

The Battle of Balotra followed Ali’s decision to turn and face the Hunas with his riverine support finally at the ready. The Hunas’ overwhelming advantage in numbers was blunted by the terrain, turned to the Muslims’ advantage by seasonal flooding & rains, and Ali spooked Pravarasena’s war elephants with his liberal usage of fire arrows. The Islamic naphtha-throwers added to the mounting panic in the huge but unwieldy Huna host by flinging their fiery pots at whatever Indians they could reach from the Luni either by hand or with slings, while Ali’s main body of battle-hardened and zealous warriors held their ground against one furious but disorderly Huna assault after another. Ultimately the Hunas routed in the face of a forceful Islamic counterattack, leaving some twenty thousand dead including Pravarasena himself; the Mahārājadhirāja was thrown from his panicking elephant after an enterprising naphtha-armed ghulam came ashore and managed to set the great beast ablaze at the cost of his own life. Alas, old Ali did not get to enjoy his greatest triumph for long – he was wounded by two Indian arrows during the fighting and, while apparently well enough to participate in his army’s celebrations immediately after the battle (where he boasted that he finally got to kill an emperor after all), died of an infection two weeks later.

On the other side of the planet, 703 was the year in which Saint Brendan’s Monastery really began to come into its own as the primary power on Tír na Beannachtaí. In response to another round of increasingly destructive fighting between the Gaelic petty-kings who had established themselves on the island only to bring their old warlike habits from the Old World with them, the incumbent Abbot Áedán mac Ainmere – himself a former adventurer who had himself tonsured and exiled himself over the Atlantic after the rest of his fian were wiped out in one of many meaningless skirmishes between kings back in the Emerald Isle – took to organizing both the monastery’s actual tenants and refugees from the villages torched by the kings’ warbands into a militia. He drilled the commoners and ordered the smithy to start forging spears (as well as straightening the blades of those peasants who owned scythes, thereby turning their tools into war-scythes fit for combat) where before Saint Brendan’s had only ever forged religious relics or farming implements, so that they might more effectively defend themselves. And of course, to both provide additional training and a solid fighting core to the small army he was assembling, Áedán also expended some of the monastery's wealth (indeed they were probably the single greatest repository of riches on the island) to hire adventuring fianna as well.

zkzqlXm.jpg

An armed New World Irish peasant, one of hundreds of such rabble who decided monastic rule had to beat the endemic raiding and warfare of the Gaelic kings in the decades after any memory of co-operation against the heretical British had faded

When he took to the field, acting through captains elected by this new militia so as to avoid directly staining his own hands with blood, Abbot Áedán was able to defeat all opposition over the course of the summer & autumn and force them to the peace table by sheer weight of numbers. His militiamen comfortably outnumbered any of his opponents’ warbands, and possessed both discipline and zeal enough (as well as hope of returning to their homes without further molestation by roving ‘foragers’ and fianna) to stand their ground in battle – their hopes were realized indeed when the good Abbot and his monks sent the feuding kings home after first compelling them to swear holy oaths to cease fighting and return whatever loot and captives they had stolen off one another’s lands. Following in the example he had just set, the monks of Saint Brendan’s took upon themselves the duty of being Tír na Beannachtaí’s peacekeepers, mediators and eventually – temporal governors in all but name.

In 704, the biggest source of ‘excitement’ for the Romans came from within. A clique of Frankish magnates dissatisfied at the power which the Caesar Constantine wielded as Mayor of the Palace and the trust which their king Dagobert placed in him reached a boiling peak this year, for in yet more signs of deepening Aloysian influence over the ruling Merovingian branch, Dagobert agreed to betroth his and Queen Ingeltrude’s daughter Himiltrude to Constantine’s own son Aloysius Junior on top of relying almost exclusively on his advice in matters of state and ceding the responsibility of investing bishops & abbots to the incumbent Pope Sergius. Clotaire (Old Frankish/Frenkisk: ‘Chlothar’) of Bavay and Childebert of Reims, Dagobert’s kinsmen who had contended with him for the throne until Aloysius Senior arbitrated an end to the Frankish succession crisis, now returned to the pages of history as rebels against the Frankish and Roman thrones in the summer of this year, denouncing their cousin as a hopeless Roman lapdog and roi fainéant (Gallique: ‘do-nothing king’) who was frittering away the ancient power of the House of Merovech for no good reason. They agreed that Clotaire should be king in Dagobert’s place, having a slightly closer relation to the previous king Théodebert III, but that Childebert’s son would marry his daughter and be named his heir in turn.

The rebels seemed to have the upper hand at first, apparently stealing a march on the royalist & imperialist forces to pluck Constantine from his villa in the countryside near Mantes. They soon realized it was they who had been tricked, however: the man they had seized at swordpoint turned out to be a body double, recruited on his mother’s order as part of the tightening of Constantine’s security measures in the aftermath of his suspicious brush with death years prior, and in truth the Caesar was multiple steps ahead of them. In truth, Constantine’s own spies among Clotaire’s servants had alerted him to the rival princes’ plotting and he had spirited himself away to Trévere, while also sending his family to Rome on a pilgrimage to greet Pope Sergius. Aloysius had been kept well-informed of his son’s counter-scheme through Helena, and authorized a substantial element of the first imperial army at the capital to follow Constantine into battle once the rebels moved into the open: ten legions of infantry and four banners of cavalry, for a total of 14,000 men. Dagobert too was prepared, and taking his friend’s advice to lead troops into battle to prove that he was no less a warrior than his ancestors, assembled an army of 5,000 at his own capital of Lutèce[9].

Clotaire and Childebert sensed the danger they were in, soon to be trapped between Dagobert’s army in the south and that of Constantine bearing down upon them from the north, and scrambled to try to eliminate their enemies separately before they got crushed between the royal and imperial armies. They rushed to do battle with the smaller host of the King at Pontoise (which Constantine would have still have preferred to call by its Latin name, Pontisara) and there prevailed, having more than twice his number; Dagobert proved himself a valiant but still inexperienced leader in war, and had to retreat behind the Seine & the walls of Lutèce. However he defended those walls quite ably, often marching along them with his retinue to impress his remaining troops and personally distributing relief to his subjects as the rebels erected siegeworks around the city, and ultimately personally fighting to throw back the one assault his kinsmen were able to launch before Constantine arrived on the scene.

The negotiations between the rival parties were brief, as Constantine & Dagobert were certain in their impending victory and offered only to show leniency by way of exile to a newly-established monastery near the Frisian border if the rebel chiefs surrendered. Clotaire led a dramatic charge against the imperial army while Childebert stayed behind near Lutèce’s gates with the rearguard to hold back any attempt at a sally on Dagobert’s part. The Caesar met Clotaire’s attack with a (considerably larger) counter-charge of his own and decisively crushed the Frankish usurper in a manner his father would be proud of, although unlike Aloysius Senior would have done, he did not actually seek out the enemy leader and cut him down in glorious single combat – instead it was one of several thousand imperial knights, Marche (Francesc for ‘Mark’) de Sablones, who relieved Clotaire of his head and would be rewarded for bringing it to Constantine (safely directing the flow of battle from the rear in the traditional Roman fashion) with promotion to the rank of count. Childebert too died fighting soon after, crushed between Dagobert’s sallying men and Constantine’s own after the rout of Clotaire’s contingent, neutralizing the primary forces of resistance to Dagobert and Constantine within Francia.

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Having overwhelmed and broken the rebel cavalry in the first half-hour of battle, the imperial Roman cavalry promptly went on to roll up Clotaire's and Childebert's infantry, most of whom yielded after only token, hopeless resistance

Aloysius congratulated his son from all the way over in Antioch, where he and Helena were trying to further undermine the Caliphate ahead of turning their quasi-war with Abdullah into a real one by directly inciting Al-Abbas to revolt. Al-Abbas seemed receptive to the idea until he discovered that the courtiers advising him to rise against his nephew were actually spies on the Romans’ payroll, at which point he had them beheaded instead – while he held Abdullah in contempt, he still hated the Romans even more, both for repeatedly holding back the advances of Islam and martyring his brother Abd al-Fattah. In any case the scheme would not have borne fruit even if Al-Abbas had agreed, for the second son of Qasim died in his sleep before the year was out: he was seventy-two, and last of the great princes of the third Hashemite generation after the Prophet. That fact did balance out whatever relief Abdullah may have felt at the departure of his last troublesome uncle from this world with a profound sense of loss, and besides Al-Abbas was succeeded by his three sons Jalil, Ismail and Khalil, who had inherited their father’s antipathy toward their cousin.

In al-Hind Ali’s death was rapidly leading to a breakdown in his army’s unity of command, as his own eldest son Al-Azad was challenged for command by his own four younger brothers. The five brothers from the third Hashemite branch did manage to stay united long enough to capitalize on their father’s shattering final victory and march on Indraprastha, sacking the Huna capital after Pravarasena’s eldest son and Mahasenapati Rudrasimha fled well ahead of their arrival & left his would-be subjects to fend for themselves. But they violently squabbled over the plunder and slaves, and exposed themselves to destruction had Islam’s lucky streak not quite run out just yet – Rudrasimha’s own brother Salanavira and several other of his kinsmen among the Eftal dynasty also rose to challenge him for the throne of the Hunas, cursing him as a craven and an incompetent unworthy of their ancestors’ legacy.

Abdullah took advantage of this disorder among his cousins to sign a treaty with Rudrasimha, who the Caliph recognized as the lawful new Mahārājadhirāja, limiting Islamic expansion to the east at the Luni River. The sons of Ali were ordered to content themselves with feudatories carved out of their father’s conquests, a settlement which they all resented – but before they could turn their swords against their cousin or disregard whatever words he wrote on papyrus and continue pushing against the vulnerable Hunas, first they had to determine the pecking order among themselves. The Hunas, for their part, soon found that they did not just have the Muslims or one another to worry about, as the Kannada and Telugu Hindu kingdoms sensed opportunity and began mounting probing attacks against their crumbling realm’s southern flank before the end of 704 as well.

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Al-Azad ibn Ali leading his brothers in sacking the Huna capital of Indraprastha after it was cravenly abandoned by Pravarasena's own heir. His triumph was fleeting however, for this would turn out to be the last time in which his younger kin were willing to heed his commands

Come 705, Aloysius lost patience with his wife’s strategy to try to undermine Islamic unity and exploit tensions between the branches of the Banu Hashim which had grown increasingly distant from one another, believing that Al-Abbas’ execution of their spies the year before was a sign that such efforts were doomed to fail. Instead, he opted for a blunt approach and decided that if they could neither cause the Muslims to start hostilities or fall into a civil war, he would start the next great war between the Romans and Arabs himself, with an eye on securing the Sinai to split Egypt apart from the rest of the Caliphate and also expanding his buffer space on the Syro-Mesopotamian frontier, on top of signing off on the Africans' request to put the resources stockpiled & troops gathered in Carthage to use in an invasion of Hoggar (from where, despite the respite won at Dimmidi in 698, Donatist raiding parties had only become ever larger and more aggressive over the last decade). However the Augustus never got a chance to realize these designs himself – on June 30 of this year he personally participated, as he often did, in the strenuous martial games & exercises of his army (over much of a hot summer day no less) as it assembled in Antioch for the opening strike, but complained of chest pains soon after dismounting his newest warhorse. While he initially tried to laugh it off, ‘it’ soon turned out to be a fatal heart attack, and the Emperor did not survive the night; the end had come for Aloysius Gloriosus, successor of the Stilichians and reunifier of Rome, who passed away at the age of sixty-three.

The news was greeted with mourning across the Empire as it traveled westward, for in spite of Aloysius’ numerous personal failings and bitter conflict with the Roman Senate, not even the latter could deny his martial triumphs and the role he played in stitching the Occident and Orient back together after centuries of separation (and the near-fall of the East to the Turks). The planned offensive against the Caliphate in the Levant had to be suspended as the Emperor’s body was transported overland first to Constantinople, then Rome, and finally Trévere – publicly borne through the streets of each capital in solemn processions so that the citizens might respectively mourn the man who saved their city, the man who restored their empire, and the man who was to that day the greatest of their native citizens – and once returned to his hometown and primary seat of power, was sealed in a porphyry sarcophagus and definitively laid to rest in the Aloysian family mausoleum just outside the city following the funeral liturgy & a eulogy delivered by his son at Trévere’s High Cathedral[10].

Following Aloysius’ funeral, Constantine moved quickly to formally succeed his father and consolidate power as the second Aloysian Augustus of the Holy Roman Empire. Having secured his influence in Gaul just the year before, he was hailed & uplifted on the paladins’ shields as his father’s successor by the army in Trévere, then took a south-westerly route into Italy from the capital through eastern Gaul and Arles. In Rome he was acclaimed as Emperor by the Senate on September 17, not that they had much choice in the matter, and then immediately crowned by Pope Sergius. In the first decision of his reign, Constantine had to consider whether this was sufficient – that having been acclaimed by the original Senate and crowned by the first-among-equals of the Heptarchs, he was indeed already Emperor of the Romans and scarcely needed to do all of that again – or to humor the East and their traditions by traveling to Constantinople to repeat these exact proceedings, but with the Eastern Senate and the Patriarch of the Second Rome instead. For his mother’s sake and that of imperial unity he chose the latter course, setting aside pride and the notion of the Occident’s supremacy as the cradle of both the Empire itself and its male restorer to ensure that there would be no room for resentful usurpers to rise in the Orient by receiving full Eastern recognition of his ascent to the purple on November 15.

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Funeral procession of Aloysius I through the streets of Trévere, surrounding by lamenting crowds – for who else would have themselves transported in a gilded mobile mausoleum before being laid to rest in their actual mausoleum? Still, for all his enormous pride and other personal flaws, it could not be denied that Aloysius had done enough for Rome to define the entire latter half of the seventh century and, indeed, the course of middle-to-late Roman history

Even in the lands of the Caliphate Aloysius’ demise made some waves, for his passing so soon after the dawn of the new century also marked the definitive passing of the generation (unless one counts the now-Empress-Dowager Helena as an equal co-combatant alongside her husband) which had shaped the Middle Eastern borders that Roman, Arab and Khazar alike would be fighting over for centuries to come: Heshana Qaghan, Caliph Qasim ibn Muhammad (and all his sons) and Kundaç Khagan had predeceased him by years or decades already, after all. Abdullah was certainly glad that he didn’t have to deal with an immediate Roman invasion this year, for in addition to his contention with his cousins, he was trying to besiege a major Mazdakite fortress on Mount Alvand at the time of the Emperor’s death. His ghulam proved their worth once more in this battle, a score of their mightiest and most intrepid fighters infiltrating the great redoubt through the mountain’s cave system (having to bypass or, much more rarely, silently eliminate Mazdakite guards along the way) and opening its gates to the rest of the Islamic army.

No sooner had Abdullah captured the Alvand fortress, exterminated the Buddhist die-hards holed up within and sent customary condolences to Constantinople did he have another problem to deal with: Khalil ibn Al-Abbas claimed Mount Alvand lay within the boundaries of the realm apportioned to his father and passed down to him. The Caliph was not about to give up this foothold in the Zagros, which his men had fought and died for while those of the Abbasids were of little to no help, nor would he further compromise his authority by giving in to the demand no matter the results. Said results were, of course, rebellion – Khalil claimed that his cousin was going back on the accord struck with his father (and his other uncle Ali) now that the latter was deceased. The fitna or inter-Muslim strife, which Abdullah had struggled mightily to put off for years, had finally arrived – though the Caliph believed he was in a much better position than when his uncles first threatened him with conflict, so much so that he expected to quickly defeat his cousins and consolidate the authority of the senior Hashemites before the Romans could attack. Ironically Aloysius’ death had motivated Abdullah into taking the decision which would cause the very civil war which the former had been waiting for & Helena had tried to instigate, but which had eluded them up to this point, as the Caliph did not fear Constantine half as much as he had feared the late glorious Emperor who had repeatedly beaten or at least fought to a stalemate his own father & grandfather.

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Then-Caliph Abd al-Rahman and his son & eventual successor, Abdullah (or properly Abd-'Allah) in happier times. With the preceding generation dying off around the start of the eighth century, Abdullah no longer had to contend with his uncles, but neither could he ask for their guidance if he needed it. And he most certainly would come to need it, for his contention with the rival Hashemite branches sprouting from their expanding family tree would not be the only source of issues in his reign

Further still to the east, the Alids were too busy squabbling among themselves or going on their own adventures to pay much attention to the goings-on closer to the heart of their civilization, and indeed did not learn about the outbreak of fitna between their elder cousins until late in the year. The second and fourth sons of Ali, Abduljalil (or Abdul-Jaleel) and Hussain, had lashed out at foreign adversaries while their eldest brother Al-Azad was butting heads with their other brethren. Abduljalil invaded the Huna realm again in a blatant and uncaring contravention of the treaty Abdullah had signed with Rudrasimha, hoping to prove himself the most fit successor of his father by carving out additional Indian conquests, while Hussain turned his blade against the Indo-Romans to the north.

By the end of the year, both brothers seemed to have attained some success against their chosen opponents. Abduljalil had conquered as far as Chitrakut[11] and raided even further, pillaging down to Avantika[12], while Hussain had pushed through the Bolan Pass and devastated the city of Jaguda[13], whose majority-Buddhist populace had up till then thrived under the protection and tolerant stewardship of the Belisarians. However, their enemies had not been caught entirely off-guard (for it was fairly obvious from their previous actions that the Muslims had come to that area as conquerors and destroyers, rather than traders or even just missionaries with benign intent) – Salanavira diverted time and resources from his fratricidal conflict with Rudrasimha and the other Huna princes to prove that he was better-suited to driving away the Islamic threat than any of them, while King Zamasphes of the Indo-Romans had amassed more than 15,000 warriors at Kophen to drive Hussain from his lands.

====================================================================================

[1] Jalore.

[2] East of modern Jaipur.

[3] Geumsan.

[4] The Homs Gap.

[5] Wadhwan.

[6] Mandsaur.

[7] Kaesong.

[8] The Nahr al-Kabir.

[9] Lutetia.

[10] Trier’s original fourth-century cathedral, built by the first Emperor Constantine, which never would have been abandoned to ruin & decay for centuries ITL.

[11] Chittorgarh.

[12] Ujjain.

[13] Ghazni.

Happy New Year, all! :) And with this new year, we're also starting the new century in earnest.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Great chapter,as always,BUT - it was not meaningles skirmishes in Ireland,it was about CATTLE! .
Jokes aside - when we have some warrior-monks there?
And when somebody beaten by China instead of dying use Kuro-sivo to go to North America?
 

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