Ah I thought the mother of the two current rulers was Jewish. Obviously misread/misremembered something somewhere.
Thanks for the clarification.
Alternate History Vivat Stilicho!
- Thread starter Circle of Willis
- Start date
Ah I thought the mother of the two current rulers was Jewish. Obviously misread/misremembered something somewhere.
Thanks for the clarification.Thanks for clarifying. As I said to shangrila I've obviously misread something somewhere or mixed up characters seriously.
729-732: Rome's Prodigal Son Returns, Part II
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
For the Romans, 729 was a year in which they continued to focus on internal religious & political developments while they still could. At the ongoing Council of Smyrna, the Roman episcopal delegation spearheaded by Leone (Lat.: 'Leo') di Anagni had taken over the effort to bring Carthage fully back in line with Ionian orthodoxy, counting on the historical friendship between the two main Latin Sees and a firm but more moderate & conciliatory tone to achieve success where the Britons had previously nearly gotten the African bishops to storm out of the council. The Africans in turn must have not only been outmaneuvered in the (less fiery but still fervent) debates, but also been discouraged by the realization that the other six Sees were united against them, because by 729's end they had conceded that they erred in extrapolating an explicit support of predestination from the writings of Saint Augustine. They did manage to hold their ground on the Augustinian concept of original sin having irrevocably tainted human nature, but were brought around to the more moderate (and orthodox) position that while human nature may be corrupted, it was not totally depraved; men still had enough free will to work with God in walking the road to salvation rather than being hopelessly enslaved to evil until & unless God Himself intervened to push them onto the righteous path, and Augustine himself after all never denied the free will of humans in totality.
This was not to say the Britons themselves got off much more lightly by comparison, as the rest of the Ionian bishops, who pushed them toward the orthodox synergistic concept of salvation – that is, the soteriological position that the path to salvation is walked by free-willed men hand-in-hand with God's grace, and not one where either God is doing all the work (monergism, the pitfall that the Africans had just nearly fallen into) nor where humans are able to achieve salvation entirely on their own with no direct input from God (the Pelagian position). Efforts by Íméri de Brévié and the other British clerics to rephrase the Semi-Pelagian formula to suggest that while human nature was indeed tainted from birth by the crime of Adam & Eve and thus men were incapable of simply choosing to not sin, they also were solely responsible for initiating their own search for salvation, were shut down. Instead the Romans, supported by the eastern Sees, vigorously pressed home the contention that God's grace was involved in the process from its very beginning.
One of the final rounds of debates between the Roman and Carthaginian bishops at the Council of Smyrna, with Emperor Aloysius II observing. Naturally, the victorious Roman delegation is the one depicted with halos
Having to remain at Smyrna to oversee the ongoing ecumenical council in no way hindered Aloysius II from finalizing the Senate reform plans which he had inherited from his late father. The Emperor's officials back in Rome had the legislation introduced on the Senate floor through Senators closely associated with the Aloysians (mostly of the gentes Afrania and Sollia), so as to add legitimacy to the measure by making it seem to have come from members of that esteemed chamber themselves and not the office of the Augustus Imperator. As it stood, the plan called for an increase in the size of the Senate from 600 members to 700 with the introduction of ten decuries, or groups of 10 new Senators, one from each of the major federate kingdoms considered to be the most civilized: the Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Bavarians, Thuringians, Lombards, Alemanni, Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Africans (with plans to incorporate additional Senators from the Slavic principalities and lesser federates, such as the Bretons and Celtiberians, at a later date if this experiment proved successful).
Each of these kingdoms' monarchs would nominate ten notables – younger sons, cousins and nephews, children of prominent noblemen who stood to inherit nothing from their parents, etc. – to comprise their delegation to Rome and serve as Senators for life, as per Roman tradition. They would enjoy a full share, the same as any of the 'proper' Roman Senators, in the powers and responsibilities which Aloysius had offered to restore to the chamber: chiefly the transfer of authority to draft, debate over and pass legislation would be transferred to them from the Quaestor sacri palatii (now assuming the role of an imperial attorney-general instead) – the traditional assemblies of Rome, such as the Consilium Plebis (Plebeian Council), having not only been rendered essentially powerless by the chaotic last years of the Republic & the formation of the Principate but also being abolished altogether by the third century at the latest – and also their Principate-era authority to not merely acclaim a new Augustus, but actually formally vote on whether to invest him with power over the Roman Empire, was to be revived. Finally, the Princeps Senatus would be elected by the Senators themselves, as opposed to being either appointed by the Emperor (as had previously been the case since the death of Augustus) or nominated by the Censors (no longer in existence since Diocletian's reforms).
In this manner the Aloysian Emperors could essentially receive an early assurance of their federates' loyalty before the kings swore any direct oaths of service to them, and it could also be said that he was both ordained by the wisdom of God and raised high by the will of the Roman people. Of course, said Augusti retained the power of veto over any legislation the Senate passed, as well as over the election of a Princeps Senatus; and certainly there would also exist a not-so-subtle understanding that only bad things could happen were the Senate to not play its expected role in investing the lawful heir to the legacy of Aloysius Gloriosus & Saint Jude with his God-given imperium. But considering that this represented their first chance in centuries to become more than a purely ceremonial & consultative body and to also hopefully start washing away the dark stains left on their reputation by the many plots, usurpations and assassinations (the few successful ones doing even more damage both to themselves and the Roman world as a whole than the failed ones) which got their start in the Senate chambers under the Stilichians and Aloysius I, the proposal was met with positivity upon its introduction on the Senate floor.
In addition to directly introducing bearded barbarian princes into the storied ranks of the Senate, Aloysius II also agreed to restore some actual power & privilege to the chamber, a decision which he must have hoped would not backfire for his descendants given the Senate's less than stellar record under the Stilichians
Beyond Roman borders, Bulan Khagan spent 729 amassing troops around the Tauric Peninsula and on his side of the Danube: in the latter case, his horde included numerous Avar defectors whom he had been unable to immediately reward for betraying their former overlords, but who he managed to beat back into line with a mix of promises of gains carved out from Roman territory and good old-fashioned intimidation (including the execution of the loudest or most threatening complainers). While the Khazar ruler tried to conceal his movements, his soldiers were so numerous and their intent so clearly hostile (there was no other enemy for them to fight in that region, and they certainly could not have been gathering in such numbers to pay the Romans a friendly visit!) that the sentries and villagers living on the Roman side of the border inevitably noticed them by the late summer or early fall months. Growing wary of his ally's intentions, Aloysius had the Danubian legions and their supporting Slavic auxiliaries engage in large-scale martial exercises to demonstrate their own power & numbers in an attempt to get Bulan to back down from whatever he was planning, while also doubling his efforts to finalize the canons of the Council of Smyrna and to push through his political reforms before he potentially had to lead the legions against his cousins.
730 seemed a happy year to start with for the Aloysians, as the Emperor celebrated the birth of his first grandchild all the way in Lutèce: in March Caesar Leo and his wife Æthelflæd welcomed into the world their firstborn, a daughter who was subsequently named Clotilda to honor the former's grandmother – and, no doubt, also as a signal for Aloysian plans to inherit & incorporate the Frankish realm where she was born in due time. Two months later, Leo's younger brother Ioannes began studying for priesthood under the recently-elected Pope Boniface II, though just in case he would not be ordained until a nephew was born to his brother: not only had the young Aloysian prince expressed genuine interest in religion, his sister-in-law had proven to be fertile & capable of delivering healthy children, and so shunting him off into the arms of the Roman See (with plans to raise him up to a bishopric at the first opportunity, thereby requiring him to swear an oath of celibacy) was seen as a good way to take him out of the imperial succession & keep him from challenging any future-born nephews of his. In general, a clerical career was seen as a good way for the imperial family to remove superfluous younger sons or brothers from the line of succession without killing, exiling or mutilating them and to also 'give back to God' for His blessings in a way; thus it would be practiced with increasing frequency from this point onward, such that no small number of future Caesars would tease their younger brothers about 'making them a bishop' in the centuries to come.
The Aloysian prince Ioannes studying alongside and under senior monks in preparation for a career in the Church
But following these blessings, a dreadful curse would fall upon the Holy Roman Empire in the summer months, as the Khazars finally launched their attack (in large part because not only had the weather become favorable and the last snows melted away, but because Bulan Khagan feared that he would lose the element of surprise completely if he waited much longer). After directing his brother Kayqalagh Khan to launch a raid into Islamic Khorasan (which was repelled) failed to dissuade Aloysius II from continuing to reinforce the Romans' Danubian frontier, Bulan launched his attack on June, sending an ambassador with a formal declaration of war to Smyrna so as to maintain a modicum of diplomatic grace with his cousin at the same time that he led his main horde of 30,000 to storm the Danubian crossings and his second son Busir invaded the Chersonese with a secondary army of 15,000. The former broke through a combined defending force of Roman legionaries, Serbs and Thracian Slavs in the furious Battle of Archar (as the Sclaveni called the Roman-era town of Ratiaria) as the opening blow of this new Roman-Khazar war, while the latter sacked Pantikapaion[1] and Kalos Limen[2] as they converged upon Cherson[3].
Having already become somewhat aware of the Khazars' treachery in the preceding months, upon its full manifestation Aloysius II responded as quickly as he could. Shortly after receiving Bulan's formal declaration of war (ostensibly justified by the Khazar Khagan's claiming of the Eastern Roman crown on account of his descent from the eldest daughter of Helena), he pressured the bishops to cut the Council of Smyrna short so he could leave Ionia and take command of the legions battling the Khazars to the north. Further work on & discussion of the telonia, as well as the doctrine of Purgatory growing out of it, had to be suspended for the time being. Instead the Council of Smyrna issued the following canons with the signatures of the many bishops gathered, including the African and British delegations:
Aloysius II is informed of the still-unfinished state of the doctrine of Purgatory while the agreed-upon canons of the Council of Smyrna are being read out loud, pending the final votes, signatures & oaths (sworn on the Bible) of the assembled bishops
As of the moment that Emperor Aloysius assumed personal command of his armies in the region under threat, the Khazars had torn a bloody swath through much of Macedonia and Thrace, severely impacting both the Serbian & Thracian federate kingdoms as well as Roman towns as far as Beroea[4]. Rallying the Danubian legions and federate troops which had retreated to Thessalonica to regroup, the Augustus went on to engage the Khazar division which Bulan had tasked with besieging the city while he went after Constantinople, but which had since disregarded those orders in favor of just pillaging the Macedonian countryside and easier pickings like the aforementioned Beroea. He routed them at the Battle of Amphipolis, having arrived in time to intercept them before they could carry off their booty & the enslaved citizens of that town (though not quickly enough to prevent them from putting Amphipolis itself to the torch), and then went on to march toward Constantinople. There, much like the Greek usurper before him, Bulan chose to retreat before even completing his first siegeworks rather than get pinned against the city's mighty walls by the imperial army. Mindful of Islamic excitement on his eastern frontier at the sight of their longtime enemies turning against one another and hoping to put a stop to the Khazar menace without giving the Caliph Hashim any window of opportunity to exploit, Aloysius ordered the Antiochene exercitus to remain in Syria while he tried to deal with Bulan using the regional forces he already had with him.
While their kindred who had bent the knee to the Aloysian Emperors were now beginning to contribute detachments of longbowmen for the imperial armies, the Briton Pilgrims who had insisted on braving the Atlantic and managed to not die before finally reaching their sanctuary were beginning to finally organize a new, sovereign government. Bishop Deué de Léogaré continued to play a crucial role as a mediator between the new arrivals, whose ranks included Pelagian nobles not accustomed to bowing their necks in the presence of the lower-born but more firmly established settler families, and said settlers who found it all too easy to mock the nobles who'd been driven from their homes by the sword but still thought themselves lofty enough to boss the people who'd actually been trying to make things work in the New World around. It was by his efforts that a great assembly of the colonist and newcomer Pilgrim leaders could be held, around a round table where they were all to be treated as equals and have an equal voice, in fashioning the new government.
As of Christmas Day, the gathered men had elected young Eluédh (Britt.: 'Eliwlod') de Segént[5] as King (Bry.: Rí) of their land, which they named 'Annún' after the paradisaical afterlife of the ancient Cambrians (Britt.: Annwn), on account of both his descent from a Pendragon princess (the great-aunt of Artur V) and his inoffensiveness in the eyes of both factions. Eluédh in turn had to marry Lady Seríne (Britt.: 'Seren'), the half-Wilderman daughter of the local military chief Mél (Britt.: 'Mael') de Derrére-Refuge, in order to bolster ties with the locals. The 'Second Round Table' was elevated to a permanent institution, forming the fixture of a parliament of sorts who the new king would be required to consult on any matter related to diplomacy, taxation or martial obligations; in return, by the authority newly vested in him, said kings could count on his new lords & knights (for the nobles who had come over from Britannia kept their ranks and were assigned new fiefs, while the greatest of the settlers were raised to nobility) to autonomously protect their subjects from the Wildermen or Irish and to campaign with him for forty days a year when called upon. Finally, Deué de Léogaré himself was invested as Bishop of Porte-Réial, the de facto head of the Pelagian Church in the New World. Both the political reality on the ground (neither newcomer magnate nor established local was all that inclined to allow their king anything resembling absolute power) and simple practicality, mostly to do with how remote and underdeveloped Annún was (they didn't exactly have a Roman road network connecting their sparse settlements after all), dictated that the newly risen kingdom of the British exiles would have to be a decentralized feudal realm by necessity.
Eluédh and Seríne prepare to take up rule over their gloomy, frostbitten kingdom of exiled heretics, converted Wildermen and the children of both. Grim though their prospects might be, they were determined to face it together with equally grim resolve
In western Eurasia, 731 was dominated by continued conflict between the Romans and Khazars with the Muslims looming over both. After chasing Bulan Khagan from Constantinople, Aloysius II pursued him into the Thracian hinterland and defeated him in the Battle of Arcadiopolis[6] that spring, where he led his paladins & knights into a massive cavalry engagement with Bulan's highborn lancers; the valor displayed by warriors on both sides in that sharp clash would be celebrated for ages to come by both the victorious Romans and the defeated Khazars alike. Bulan's rearguard similarly fought with such ferocity that the Romans were unable to capitalize on their victory and easily pursue the retreating Khazar horde, which regrouped to inflict a stinging defeat on Aloysius' army outside a Thracian Slav town called Versinikia[7] a few weeks later. The Khagan also took the time to recruit Braslav, the brother of the Thracian prince Boril, as his puppet ruler of that kingdom, which he was able to fully occupy in the wake of his latest victory; Boril and his loyalists responded by offering to form the vanguard of the Roman army as it worked to drive the Khazars out.
The Caesar Leo was concerned by the result of the Battle of Versinikia and offered to march to his father's aid with the Treverian exercitus, but events conspired to prevent him from doing so – namely, a major Continental Saxon uprising erupted against the Christianization of that land: the increasing number of Christian Saxon chiefs (mostly in the south and west of Saxony) benefited handsomely not only from Roman trading preferences, which made their lands and palaces the envy of their pagan neighbors, but they also called in Roman assistance in conflicts with said neighbors, more often than not turning what normally would've just been a cycle of raids into wars of conquest where they enjoyed an obvious advantage. Now the pagan chief Wichmann, going by the nickname 'Der Widukind' ('the Child of the Forest'), rallied his dwindling compatriots to elect him as the King of the Saxons and led them to war against not only their Christian cousins, but also the latter's Holy Roman backers.
Aloysius II falling back after being defeated by his cousin Bulan Khagan in the Battle of Versinikia
'Widukind' went on to first lead his warriors to victory first against the lesser Christian chiefs neighboring his territory in the north & east of the region over the spring, then defeated a more substantial allied force of the greater Christian chiefs (led by Freawine, who had built the town of Meppen around a conveniently situated Ionian mission at the confluence of the rivers Ems, Hase and Nordradde to serve as the new capital of his domain) and an 1,800-strong Roman detachment in the Battle of the Wiehen Hills that summer. This second pagan victory alarmed the Holy Roman government, which now took Wichmann's war seriously as a threat which could reverse the gains of previous Saxon wars & the centuries-long efforts by the Aloysians to try to Christianize the region, dating back to when they were still called the Arbogastings. In response to these developments, Aloysius directed his heir to instead command the Treverian army against the pagan Saxons and to crush them once & for all, incorporating Saxony as a whole into the Holy Roman Empire and finally attaining the border along the whole of the Elbe which had eluded Rome since Varus' legions were massacred in the Teutoburg Forest seven hundred years prior.
Thus did Leo duly march against the forces of Wichmann with a massive host of 35,000 (combining the Treverian exercitus with a large assortment of federate auxiliaries, including the first appearance of British longbowmen as Roman allies rather than enemies since the Great Siege of Constantinople as well as, ironically, a contingent of Anglo-Saxon heavy infantrymen come to do battle with their continental kindred) in the summer of this year), starting by relieving the siege of Meppen by the pagan forces. The Caesar was embarrassed in his first true engagement with 'Widukind', being tricked into pursuing fleeing bands of Saxon raiders with only a thousand-strong cavalry bodyguard and running into a trap where the Saxons fielded ten times his number in the Battle of Loingo[8]. However he managed to survive & fight his way out of the trap, and surely learned from the experience as he continued to press forward against Wichmann's warriors. Meanwhile, Aloysius called up elements of the Antiochene army after all to compensate for his recent losses, and in addition to other ongoing local recruitment efforts he also raised up a militia of Jewish volunteers from Thessalonica: that city's Judaic community was eager to prove that they had nothing in common with the exiled African Jews save their ethnicity & creed, and had even handed over such infiltrators from the Khazar ranks who had hoped to persuade them to betray their hometown to the Khazars for execution, in a bid to earn the Emperor's gratitude.
Continental Saxons ambushing Northern Roman legionaries in the woods outside Loingo
East of the Bosphorus, the Romans had additional difficulties to worry about. First of all, up north Cherson fell to the secondary Khazar horde under Busir Tarkhan after a six-month siege, succumbing to a night assault after a small advance party of Khazar warriors were able to scale the walls, eliminate the sentries on the city's northeastern gate and open said gate to the rest of their army. The Khazars proceeded to sack this largest outpost of Roman influence in the Tauric peninsula, carrying off the city's valuables and most of its citizenry, but Busir himself was found to have been killed while passed-out drunk in the aftermath of his celebratory feast. His Greek bedwarmer, the daughter of the city's governor, was blamed and immediately executed for the assassination; but the Tarkhan's own mother suspected Rachel bat Isaac, the Jewish wife of Bulan Khagan, of having arranged the murder to remove yet another competitor to her own son, resulting in the two women trying to poison one another within the year – Rachel's life was saved by an unfortunate food-taster, her rival was not as lucky. In any case the fortress-town of Doros, situated a ways to the east of the fallen Cherson, managed to hold out long enough to negotiate terms of surrender with the dismayed and decapitated Khazar army which didn't involve getting sacked, allowing it to temporarily eclipse its devastated counterpart for the next few decades.
Alas, the loss of the Tauric Chersonese was far from the end of Aloysius' problems in the East. The Muslims made their move this year, having used the extra time since they'd first backed down from an immediate attack after he suppressed the uprising of Anastasios the Reversionist to further (re)build up their armies: whoever lost in the war between the Romans and the Khazars, they intended to finish as the big winner. Now the aged Nusrat al-Din sprang a two-pronged invasion of Palaestina from the Transjordan & Egypt to start with, while the Banu Kalb and Ghassanids had to make do with limited support from the diminished Antiochene exercitus after no small number of its component legions had been called away to shore up the Emperor's own army on the other side of the Hellespont. The Kalbi were consequently routed in the Battle of Gaza and then the Battle of Hebron, after which their phylarch Al-Furafisa ibn Al-Asbagh fled to Ghassanid Syria with his family and left Patriarch Nicodemus of Jerusalem to lead the meager defense of that city. Aware that the Ghassanids were pooling their own army together with the rest of the Antiochene legions, the Bulgars, and smaller contributions from the Caucasian kingdoms (which kept most of their forces at home to contend with Khazar raids from the north & east), Al-Din agreed to Caliph Hashim's request that he marshal a response to cut off and push away this growing relief army while the latter took over the Siege of Jerusalem.
The Holy Roman Empire remained embattled on multiple fronts throughout 732, though it did benefit from having capable leaders and considerable resources with which to better withstand all its opponents. Going from west to east, firstly the Romans continued to build momentum in their war in Saxony. The Caesar Leo drew the Saxons into a trap of his own at Eresburg[9] this year: after occupying the fort with 5,000 legionaries and 4,000 Christian Saxon allied troops, he was able to draw Wichmann's army into attacking him with nearly three times his number, only to then have the rest of his army (split into two other divisions) converge upon them in a coordinated maneuver, the heavily equipped legionaries and knights who formed their vanguards tearing through all efforts by the Saxons to stop or delay them. The Battle of Eresburg proved a costly mistake for 'Widukind', who lost over 6,000 warriors in the bloodbath which followed his encirclement, though he realized his error and still managed to slip through the imperfections in Leo's trap with the better part of his army.
Leo Caesar marches back to camp with the Saxon prisoners gathered from his great, if also incomplete, victory at Eresburg
Following this debacle, the pagan Saxons were careful to avoid pitched battles with the Romans: instead they gradually fell back before the Roman army's advance, splitting up into smaller war parties and relying on a guerrilla strategy of harassing their larger & better-equipped opponent from the still-largely-untamed woods of their homeland. Leo, meanwhile, slowed down his own advance so as to avoid rushing headlong into any more Loingo-like traps, instead relying on the engineering and logistical expertise of his men to build a chain of castles as they marched: each such castle (at this stage, really just a large fort – always built on a hill, ridge or some other commanding terrain advantage where possible – with watchtowers & a timber-earth-and-stone rampart topped with a palisade, in the style of an ordinary fortified Roman camp) would be garrisoned by a detachment of Roman troops and local Christian Saxon auxiliaries, who could then use the castle as a base from which to respond to local pagan raids and where they could shelter friendly Saxons & themselves from a major attack until a larger Roman force came to their rescue. The Caesar also commissioned the construction of fortified churches and missions around known Saxon holy groves & trees, resisting the temptation to simply destroy these affronts to the Christian faith in favor of bending them to serve the Most High instead, most notably doing so to an especially massive sacred tree hailed by the Saxons as the Irminsul[10].
In the Peninsula of Haemus, Aloysius II was not enjoying quite as much success as his eldest son was on the latter's front, though in his defense he was also fighting a much stronger and better-organized enemy than the remaining pagan Continental Saxons. With his reinforced Danubian army the Emperor pushed back vigorously against the Khazars, driving them back from the port city of Chrysopolis[11] where he'd previously resettled the refugees from Amphipolis and badly defeating Bulan Khagan himself in the Battle of Kleidion[12] in the Orbelos Mountains[13], falling upon the Khazars while they were still marshaling for a counterattack and catching his cousin off-guard (Bulan, not expecting to stay long at Kleidion, disregarded his Thracian pawn Braslav's advice to fortify his encampment and double the ranks of his sentries in expectation of a major Roman attack).
Retreating up the Strymon and pulling the army which he had sent to once again try to besiege Constantinople back to consolidate his forces, Bulan next engaged Aloysius in a number of indecisive skirmishes and smaller battles over the summer & autumn months – beating back various Roman attempts to dislodge him from the positions he still held – before springing a surprise of his own. Come the winter, he detached two large divisions from his horde and sent them on chevauchées deeper into Roman territory, one crossing the Danube further upriver to ravage Dulebian Pannonia and the other driving straight through Serbia into the Illyrian territories of the Croats and Carantanians with an eye on breaking into Italy if they could: these columns were headed by his twin fourth and fifth sons, Mänär and Mänäs. In a twist of irony, Aloysius received word of the latter maneuver on the same day that the Senate voted in favor of his proposed reforms, right after he had also promised to build them a grand new meeting place (the Curia Julia having been leveled and replaced with a church by the Empress Tia following her husband Venantius' assassination in the previous century) no less.
The Khazars of Mänäs Tarkhan roving across Pannonia in wintertime
If the Romans were having the most victories in Saxony and finding middling success in the Balkans, they were facing nothing but defeat in the Middle East. Nusrat al-Din stole a march on the combined army of Antioch, the Bulgars and the Ghassanids and engaged them near Raphanea, falling upon the Roman host's camp by an intermittent spring which flowed only six days of the week[13]. In the resulting Battle of the Sambation (the spring's name on account of its apparent respect for the Sabbath), the Romans were soundly defeated and both the Antiochene exercitus' African general, Yesaréyu (Van.: 'Gaiseric') ey Gérta[14], and the Ghassanid king al-Harith VI ibn Sharahil were killed in the confusion of the rout (in particular, the latter confused some Muslim warriors for his own, approached them for help and was promptly shot full of arrows so that they could loot his corpse, not realizing who he even was until after they'd already offed him). Al-Harith's heir Jabalah VII and the Bulgar Kanasubigi Grod led the remnants of this army back north, but they were unable to prevent Nusrat al-Din from overrunning southern Syria and parts of Phoenicia by the end of the year, much less continuing their southward march to relieve Jerusalem.
Following the debacle at the Sambation, the demoralized defenders of Jerusalem lost all hope of relief and entered negotiations to surrender to the Caliph. Patriarch Nicodemus agreed to yield the city under the condition of religious freedom being guaranteed to the local Christians, who also would not be molested in any way, and that Christian holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would not be damaged; in exchange, of course, they had to pay a stiff jizya to the conquering Muslims. Hashim also agreed not to interfere with the appointment of the next Patriarch of Jerusalem, though he was careful not to extend this privilege to the Patriarchs of Alexandria or Babylon. Thus did the Muslims finally take Jerusalem (and with it Palaestina) again, this time with plans to stay for much longer than a few years – fortunately neither Constantine VI nor Aloysius II had moved the True Cross and other important relics back to the lost holy city after Aloysius I first had them packed off to Rome decades ago. As it was, the pressure Aloysius II was feeling to bring the war with the Khazars to a conclusion intensified greatly; the only battlefield success the Romans enjoyed against the forces of Islam this year was the repulse of a large raid into Libya by the African forces of King Yusténu and his heir Bedãdéu (Lat.: 'Venantius') in the Battle of Magomedu[15].
The defenders of Jerusalem lay down their weapons before the triumphal entry of Caliph Hashim, who went on to claim credit for this victory and used it to elevate his stature above that of Nusrat al-Din
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[1] Kerch.
[2] Chornomorske.
[3] Sevastopol.
[4] Veria.
[5] Segontium – Caernarfon.
[6] Lüleburgaz.
[7] Malomirovo.
[8] Löningen.
[9] Obermarsberg.
[10] Paderborn. The Continental Saxons seem to have had several irminsuls (holy trees or pillars dedicated to Irmin, a Germanic deity who may or may not have been their tribal god and who might also have actually just been Odin under a different name), the greatest of which was located either at Paderborn or Eresburg and historically destroyed by Charlemagne in the early 770s.
[11] Eion.
[12] Klyuch.
[13] Now known as the Fuwar ed-Deir.
[14] Cirta – Constantine, Algeria. 'Ey' is the Afríganu nobiliary particle meaning 'Of [family's hometown or seat]', equivalent to 'De' in most Romance languages or 'Von' in German, based off of the Neapolitan 'e rather than Italian di.
[15] Macomedes – Sirte.
And with this update, we're off to the first major stress test for the HRE as it fights large-scale wars across multiple fronts against enemies of comparable power (well, except the Saxons) for the first time since it was first reunified! Heads up though guys, I'll be busy this coming week so the next update might take a bit longer than usual, in fact that was why I wanted to get this one done tonight.
This was not to say the Britons themselves got off much more lightly by comparison, as the rest of the Ionian bishops, who pushed them toward the orthodox synergistic concept of salvation – that is, the soteriological position that the path to salvation is walked by free-willed men hand-in-hand with God's grace, and not one where either God is doing all the work (monergism, the pitfall that the Africans had just nearly fallen into) nor where humans are able to achieve salvation entirely on their own with no direct input from God (the Pelagian position). Efforts by Íméri de Brévié and the other British clerics to rephrase the Semi-Pelagian formula to suggest that while human nature was indeed tainted from birth by the crime of Adam & Eve and thus men were incapable of simply choosing to not sin, they also were solely responsible for initiating their own search for salvation, were shut down. Instead the Romans, supported by the eastern Sees, vigorously pressed home the contention that God's grace was involved in the process from its very beginning.
One of the final rounds of debates between the Roman and Carthaginian bishops at the Council of Smyrna, with Emperor Aloysius II observing. Naturally, the victorious Roman delegation is the one depicted with halos
Having to remain at Smyrna to oversee the ongoing ecumenical council in no way hindered Aloysius II from finalizing the Senate reform plans which he had inherited from his late father. The Emperor's officials back in Rome had the legislation introduced on the Senate floor through Senators closely associated with the Aloysians (mostly of the gentes Afrania and Sollia), so as to add legitimacy to the measure by making it seem to have come from members of that esteemed chamber themselves and not the office of the Augustus Imperator. As it stood, the plan called for an increase in the size of the Senate from 600 members to 700 with the introduction of ten decuries, or groups of 10 new Senators, one from each of the major federate kingdoms considered to be the most civilized: the Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Bavarians, Thuringians, Lombards, Alemanni, Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Africans (with plans to incorporate additional Senators from the Slavic principalities and lesser federates, such as the Bretons and Celtiberians, at a later date if this experiment proved successful).
Each of these kingdoms' monarchs would nominate ten notables – younger sons, cousins and nephews, children of prominent noblemen who stood to inherit nothing from their parents, etc. – to comprise their delegation to Rome and serve as Senators for life, as per Roman tradition. They would enjoy a full share, the same as any of the 'proper' Roman Senators, in the powers and responsibilities which Aloysius had offered to restore to the chamber: chiefly the transfer of authority to draft, debate over and pass legislation would be transferred to them from the Quaestor sacri palatii (now assuming the role of an imperial attorney-general instead) – the traditional assemblies of Rome, such as the Consilium Plebis (Plebeian Council), having not only been rendered essentially powerless by the chaotic last years of the Republic & the formation of the Principate but also being abolished altogether by the third century at the latest – and also their Principate-era authority to not merely acclaim a new Augustus, but actually formally vote on whether to invest him with power over the Roman Empire, was to be revived. Finally, the Princeps Senatus would be elected by the Senators themselves, as opposed to being either appointed by the Emperor (as had previously been the case since the death of Augustus) or nominated by the Censors (no longer in existence since Diocletian's reforms).
In this manner the Aloysian Emperors could essentially receive an early assurance of their federates' loyalty before the kings swore any direct oaths of service to them, and it could also be said that he was both ordained by the wisdom of God and raised high by the will of the Roman people. Of course, said Augusti retained the power of veto over any legislation the Senate passed, as well as over the election of a Princeps Senatus; and certainly there would also exist a not-so-subtle understanding that only bad things could happen were the Senate to not play its expected role in investing the lawful heir to the legacy of Aloysius Gloriosus & Saint Jude with his God-given imperium. But considering that this represented their first chance in centuries to become more than a purely ceremonial & consultative body and to also hopefully start washing away the dark stains left on their reputation by the many plots, usurpations and assassinations (the few successful ones doing even more damage both to themselves and the Roman world as a whole than the failed ones) which got their start in the Senate chambers under the Stilichians and Aloysius I, the proposal was met with positivity upon its introduction on the Senate floor.
In addition to directly introducing bearded barbarian princes into the storied ranks of the Senate, Aloysius II also agreed to restore some actual power & privilege to the chamber, a decision which he must have hoped would not backfire for his descendants given the Senate's less than stellar record under the Stilichians
Beyond Roman borders, Bulan Khagan spent 729 amassing troops around the Tauric Peninsula and on his side of the Danube: in the latter case, his horde included numerous Avar defectors whom he had been unable to immediately reward for betraying their former overlords, but who he managed to beat back into line with a mix of promises of gains carved out from Roman territory and good old-fashioned intimidation (including the execution of the loudest or most threatening complainers). While the Khazar ruler tried to conceal his movements, his soldiers were so numerous and their intent so clearly hostile (there was no other enemy for them to fight in that region, and they certainly could not have been gathering in such numbers to pay the Romans a friendly visit!) that the sentries and villagers living on the Roman side of the border inevitably noticed them by the late summer or early fall months. Growing wary of his ally's intentions, Aloysius had the Danubian legions and their supporting Slavic auxiliaries engage in large-scale martial exercises to demonstrate their own power & numbers in an attempt to get Bulan to back down from whatever he was planning, while also doubling his efforts to finalize the canons of the Council of Smyrna and to push through his political reforms before he potentially had to lead the legions against his cousins.
730 seemed a happy year to start with for the Aloysians, as the Emperor celebrated the birth of his first grandchild all the way in Lutèce: in March Caesar Leo and his wife Æthelflæd welcomed into the world their firstborn, a daughter who was subsequently named Clotilda to honor the former's grandmother – and, no doubt, also as a signal for Aloysian plans to inherit & incorporate the Frankish realm where she was born in due time. Two months later, Leo's younger brother Ioannes began studying for priesthood under the recently-elected Pope Boniface II, though just in case he would not be ordained until a nephew was born to his brother: not only had the young Aloysian prince expressed genuine interest in religion, his sister-in-law had proven to be fertile & capable of delivering healthy children, and so shunting him off into the arms of the Roman See (with plans to raise him up to a bishopric at the first opportunity, thereby requiring him to swear an oath of celibacy) was seen as a good way to take him out of the imperial succession & keep him from challenging any future-born nephews of his. In general, a clerical career was seen as a good way for the imperial family to remove superfluous younger sons or brothers from the line of succession without killing, exiling or mutilating them and to also 'give back to God' for His blessings in a way; thus it would be practiced with increasing frequency from this point onward, such that no small number of future Caesars would tease their younger brothers about 'making them a bishop' in the centuries to come.
The Aloysian prince Ioannes studying alongside and under senior monks in preparation for a career in the Church
But following these blessings, a dreadful curse would fall upon the Holy Roman Empire in the summer months, as the Khazars finally launched their attack (in large part because not only had the weather become favorable and the last snows melted away, but because Bulan Khagan feared that he would lose the element of surprise completely if he waited much longer). After directing his brother Kayqalagh Khan to launch a raid into Islamic Khorasan (which was repelled) failed to dissuade Aloysius II from continuing to reinforce the Romans' Danubian frontier, Bulan launched his attack on June, sending an ambassador with a formal declaration of war to Smyrna so as to maintain a modicum of diplomatic grace with his cousin at the same time that he led his main horde of 30,000 to storm the Danubian crossings and his second son Busir invaded the Chersonese with a secondary army of 15,000. The former broke through a combined defending force of Roman legionaries, Serbs and Thracian Slavs in the furious Battle of Archar (as the Sclaveni called the Roman-era town of Ratiaria) as the opening blow of this new Roman-Khazar war, while the latter sacked Pantikapaion[1] and Kalos Limen[2] as they converged upon Cherson[3].
Having already become somewhat aware of the Khazars' treachery in the preceding months, upon its full manifestation Aloysius II responded as quickly as he could. Shortly after receiving Bulan's formal declaration of war (ostensibly justified by the Khazar Khagan's claiming of the Eastern Roman crown on account of his descent from the eldest daughter of Helena), he pressured the bishops to cut the Council of Smyrna short so he could leave Ionia and take command of the legions battling the Khazars to the north. Further work on & discussion of the telonia, as well as the doctrine of Purgatory growing out of it, had to be suspended for the time being. Instead the Council of Smyrna issued the following canons with the signatures of the many bishops gathered, including the African and British delegations:
- The doctrine of original sin was clarified once and for all – it was held to be real, and to taint human nature so that no human can be said to be morally perfect at birth nor could they simply will themselves to not sin, but humanity was not rendered totally depraved by its touch and could work with God's grace to seek salvation;
- Infant baptism was held to be a valuable and meaningful sacrament which cleansed newborns of their original sin;
- The doctrine of predestination was rejected in no uncertain terms, the Africans conceding that they had misinterpreted the teachings of Augustine on the subject and that predestination (double or not) was fundamentally incompatible with the existence of human free will;
- The march to salvation was a synergistic process in which God and free-willed men worked hand in hand, one where God freely extends His saving grace to all (rather than arbitrarily withholding it from some, thereby predestining them to damnation, or forcing it onto others and thereby predestining them for salvation), and that while humans cannot initiate the process themselves they have the free choice to work with God's grace once it has been presented to them;
- And that neither faith alone (for faith without works is dead) nor good works (for one cannot 'earn' their way into Heaven with good deeds) justify salvation, but a unity of both does, as a heart filled with true faith should naturally be inclined to perform good works. In short, good Ionians can't expect God to do all the work in saving their immortal souls.
Aloysius II is informed of the still-unfinished state of the doctrine of Purgatory while the agreed-upon canons of the Council of Smyrna are being read out loud, pending the final votes, signatures & oaths (sworn on the Bible) of the assembled bishops
As of the moment that Emperor Aloysius assumed personal command of his armies in the region under threat, the Khazars had torn a bloody swath through much of Macedonia and Thrace, severely impacting both the Serbian & Thracian federate kingdoms as well as Roman towns as far as Beroea[4]. Rallying the Danubian legions and federate troops which had retreated to Thessalonica to regroup, the Augustus went on to engage the Khazar division which Bulan had tasked with besieging the city while he went after Constantinople, but which had since disregarded those orders in favor of just pillaging the Macedonian countryside and easier pickings like the aforementioned Beroea. He routed them at the Battle of Amphipolis, having arrived in time to intercept them before they could carry off their booty & the enslaved citizens of that town (though not quickly enough to prevent them from putting Amphipolis itself to the torch), and then went on to march toward Constantinople. There, much like the Greek usurper before him, Bulan chose to retreat before even completing his first siegeworks rather than get pinned against the city's mighty walls by the imperial army. Mindful of Islamic excitement on his eastern frontier at the sight of their longtime enemies turning against one another and hoping to put a stop to the Khazar menace without giving the Caliph Hashim any window of opportunity to exploit, Aloysius ordered the Antiochene exercitus to remain in Syria while he tried to deal with Bulan using the regional forces he already had with him.
While their kindred who had bent the knee to the Aloysian Emperors were now beginning to contribute detachments of longbowmen for the imperial armies, the Briton Pilgrims who had insisted on braving the Atlantic and managed to not die before finally reaching their sanctuary were beginning to finally organize a new, sovereign government. Bishop Deué de Léogaré continued to play a crucial role as a mediator between the new arrivals, whose ranks included Pelagian nobles not accustomed to bowing their necks in the presence of the lower-born but more firmly established settler families, and said settlers who found it all too easy to mock the nobles who'd been driven from their homes by the sword but still thought themselves lofty enough to boss the people who'd actually been trying to make things work in the New World around. It was by his efforts that a great assembly of the colonist and newcomer Pilgrim leaders could be held, around a round table where they were all to be treated as equals and have an equal voice, in fashioning the new government.
As of Christmas Day, the gathered men had elected young Eluédh (Britt.: 'Eliwlod') de Segént[5] as King (Bry.: Rí) of their land, which they named 'Annún' after the paradisaical afterlife of the ancient Cambrians (Britt.: Annwn), on account of both his descent from a Pendragon princess (the great-aunt of Artur V) and his inoffensiveness in the eyes of both factions. Eluédh in turn had to marry Lady Seríne (Britt.: 'Seren'), the half-Wilderman daughter of the local military chief Mél (Britt.: 'Mael') de Derrére-Refuge, in order to bolster ties with the locals. The 'Second Round Table' was elevated to a permanent institution, forming the fixture of a parliament of sorts who the new king would be required to consult on any matter related to diplomacy, taxation or martial obligations; in return, by the authority newly vested in him, said kings could count on his new lords & knights (for the nobles who had come over from Britannia kept their ranks and were assigned new fiefs, while the greatest of the settlers were raised to nobility) to autonomously protect their subjects from the Wildermen or Irish and to campaign with him for forty days a year when called upon. Finally, Deué de Léogaré himself was invested as Bishop of Porte-Réial, the de facto head of the Pelagian Church in the New World. Both the political reality on the ground (neither newcomer magnate nor established local was all that inclined to allow their king anything resembling absolute power) and simple practicality, mostly to do with how remote and underdeveloped Annún was (they didn't exactly have a Roman road network connecting their sparse settlements after all), dictated that the newly risen kingdom of the British exiles would have to be a decentralized feudal realm by necessity.
Eluédh and Seríne prepare to take up rule over their gloomy, frostbitten kingdom of exiled heretics, converted Wildermen and the children of both. Grim though their prospects might be, they were determined to face it together with equally grim resolve
In western Eurasia, 731 was dominated by continued conflict between the Romans and Khazars with the Muslims looming over both. After chasing Bulan Khagan from Constantinople, Aloysius II pursued him into the Thracian hinterland and defeated him in the Battle of Arcadiopolis[6] that spring, where he led his paladins & knights into a massive cavalry engagement with Bulan's highborn lancers; the valor displayed by warriors on both sides in that sharp clash would be celebrated for ages to come by both the victorious Romans and the defeated Khazars alike. Bulan's rearguard similarly fought with such ferocity that the Romans were unable to capitalize on their victory and easily pursue the retreating Khazar horde, which regrouped to inflict a stinging defeat on Aloysius' army outside a Thracian Slav town called Versinikia[7] a few weeks later. The Khagan also took the time to recruit Braslav, the brother of the Thracian prince Boril, as his puppet ruler of that kingdom, which he was able to fully occupy in the wake of his latest victory; Boril and his loyalists responded by offering to form the vanguard of the Roman army as it worked to drive the Khazars out.
The Caesar Leo was concerned by the result of the Battle of Versinikia and offered to march to his father's aid with the Treverian exercitus, but events conspired to prevent him from doing so – namely, a major Continental Saxon uprising erupted against the Christianization of that land: the increasing number of Christian Saxon chiefs (mostly in the south and west of Saxony) benefited handsomely not only from Roman trading preferences, which made their lands and palaces the envy of their pagan neighbors, but they also called in Roman assistance in conflicts with said neighbors, more often than not turning what normally would've just been a cycle of raids into wars of conquest where they enjoyed an obvious advantage. Now the pagan chief Wichmann, going by the nickname 'Der Widukind' ('the Child of the Forest'), rallied his dwindling compatriots to elect him as the King of the Saxons and led them to war against not only their Christian cousins, but also the latter's Holy Roman backers.
Aloysius II falling back after being defeated by his cousin Bulan Khagan in the Battle of Versinikia
'Widukind' went on to first lead his warriors to victory first against the lesser Christian chiefs neighboring his territory in the north & east of the region over the spring, then defeated a more substantial allied force of the greater Christian chiefs (led by Freawine, who had built the town of Meppen around a conveniently situated Ionian mission at the confluence of the rivers Ems, Hase and Nordradde to serve as the new capital of his domain) and an 1,800-strong Roman detachment in the Battle of the Wiehen Hills that summer. This second pagan victory alarmed the Holy Roman government, which now took Wichmann's war seriously as a threat which could reverse the gains of previous Saxon wars & the centuries-long efforts by the Aloysians to try to Christianize the region, dating back to when they were still called the Arbogastings. In response to these developments, Aloysius directed his heir to instead command the Treverian army against the pagan Saxons and to crush them once & for all, incorporating Saxony as a whole into the Holy Roman Empire and finally attaining the border along the whole of the Elbe which had eluded Rome since Varus' legions were massacred in the Teutoburg Forest seven hundred years prior.
Thus did Leo duly march against the forces of Wichmann with a massive host of 35,000 (combining the Treverian exercitus with a large assortment of federate auxiliaries, including the first appearance of British longbowmen as Roman allies rather than enemies since the Great Siege of Constantinople as well as, ironically, a contingent of Anglo-Saxon heavy infantrymen come to do battle with their continental kindred) in the summer of this year), starting by relieving the siege of Meppen by the pagan forces. The Caesar was embarrassed in his first true engagement with 'Widukind', being tricked into pursuing fleeing bands of Saxon raiders with only a thousand-strong cavalry bodyguard and running into a trap where the Saxons fielded ten times his number in the Battle of Loingo[8]. However he managed to survive & fight his way out of the trap, and surely learned from the experience as he continued to press forward against Wichmann's warriors. Meanwhile, Aloysius called up elements of the Antiochene army after all to compensate for his recent losses, and in addition to other ongoing local recruitment efforts he also raised up a militia of Jewish volunteers from Thessalonica: that city's Judaic community was eager to prove that they had nothing in common with the exiled African Jews save their ethnicity & creed, and had even handed over such infiltrators from the Khazar ranks who had hoped to persuade them to betray their hometown to the Khazars for execution, in a bid to earn the Emperor's gratitude.
Continental Saxons ambushing Northern Roman legionaries in the woods outside Loingo
East of the Bosphorus, the Romans had additional difficulties to worry about. First of all, up north Cherson fell to the secondary Khazar horde under Busir Tarkhan after a six-month siege, succumbing to a night assault after a small advance party of Khazar warriors were able to scale the walls, eliminate the sentries on the city's northeastern gate and open said gate to the rest of their army. The Khazars proceeded to sack this largest outpost of Roman influence in the Tauric peninsula, carrying off the city's valuables and most of its citizenry, but Busir himself was found to have been killed while passed-out drunk in the aftermath of his celebratory feast. His Greek bedwarmer, the daughter of the city's governor, was blamed and immediately executed for the assassination; but the Tarkhan's own mother suspected Rachel bat Isaac, the Jewish wife of Bulan Khagan, of having arranged the murder to remove yet another competitor to her own son, resulting in the two women trying to poison one another within the year – Rachel's life was saved by an unfortunate food-taster, her rival was not as lucky. In any case the fortress-town of Doros, situated a ways to the east of the fallen Cherson, managed to hold out long enough to negotiate terms of surrender with the dismayed and decapitated Khazar army which didn't involve getting sacked, allowing it to temporarily eclipse its devastated counterpart for the next few decades.
Alas, the loss of the Tauric Chersonese was far from the end of Aloysius' problems in the East. The Muslims made their move this year, having used the extra time since they'd first backed down from an immediate attack after he suppressed the uprising of Anastasios the Reversionist to further (re)build up their armies: whoever lost in the war between the Romans and the Khazars, they intended to finish as the big winner. Now the aged Nusrat al-Din sprang a two-pronged invasion of Palaestina from the Transjordan & Egypt to start with, while the Banu Kalb and Ghassanids had to make do with limited support from the diminished Antiochene exercitus after no small number of its component legions had been called away to shore up the Emperor's own army on the other side of the Hellespont. The Kalbi were consequently routed in the Battle of Gaza and then the Battle of Hebron, after which their phylarch Al-Furafisa ibn Al-Asbagh fled to Ghassanid Syria with his family and left Patriarch Nicodemus of Jerusalem to lead the meager defense of that city. Aware that the Ghassanids were pooling their own army together with the rest of the Antiochene legions, the Bulgars, and smaller contributions from the Caucasian kingdoms (which kept most of their forces at home to contend with Khazar raids from the north & east), Al-Din agreed to Caliph Hashim's request that he marshal a response to cut off and push away this growing relief army while the latter took over the Siege of Jerusalem.
The Holy Roman Empire remained embattled on multiple fronts throughout 732, though it did benefit from having capable leaders and considerable resources with which to better withstand all its opponents. Going from west to east, firstly the Romans continued to build momentum in their war in Saxony. The Caesar Leo drew the Saxons into a trap of his own at Eresburg[9] this year: after occupying the fort with 5,000 legionaries and 4,000 Christian Saxon allied troops, he was able to draw Wichmann's army into attacking him with nearly three times his number, only to then have the rest of his army (split into two other divisions) converge upon them in a coordinated maneuver, the heavily equipped legionaries and knights who formed their vanguards tearing through all efforts by the Saxons to stop or delay them. The Battle of Eresburg proved a costly mistake for 'Widukind', who lost over 6,000 warriors in the bloodbath which followed his encirclement, though he realized his error and still managed to slip through the imperfections in Leo's trap with the better part of his army.
Leo Caesar marches back to camp with the Saxon prisoners gathered from his great, if also incomplete, victory at Eresburg
Following this debacle, the pagan Saxons were careful to avoid pitched battles with the Romans: instead they gradually fell back before the Roman army's advance, splitting up into smaller war parties and relying on a guerrilla strategy of harassing their larger & better-equipped opponent from the still-largely-untamed woods of their homeland. Leo, meanwhile, slowed down his own advance so as to avoid rushing headlong into any more Loingo-like traps, instead relying on the engineering and logistical expertise of his men to build a chain of castles as they marched: each such castle (at this stage, really just a large fort – always built on a hill, ridge or some other commanding terrain advantage where possible – with watchtowers & a timber-earth-and-stone rampart topped with a palisade, in the style of an ordinary fortified Roman camp) would be garrisoned by a detachment of Roman troops and local Christian Saxon auxiliaries, who could then use the castle as a base from which to respond to local pagan raids and where they could shelter friendly Saxons & themselves from a major attack until a larger Roman force came to their rescue. The Caesar also commissioned the construction of fortified churches and missions around known Saxon holy groves & trees, resisting the temptation to simply destroy these affronts to the Christian faith in favor of bending them to serve the Most High instead, most notably doing so to an especially massive sacred tree hailed by the Saxons as the Irminsul[10].
In the Peninsula of Haemus, Aloysius II was not enjoying quite as much success as his eldest son was on the latter's front, though in his defense he was also fighting a much stronger and better-organized enemy than the remaining pagan Continental Saxons. With his reinforced Danubian army the Emperor pushed back vigorously against the Khazars, driving them back from the port city of Chrysopolis[11] where he'd previously resettled the refugees from Amphipolis and badly defeating Bulan Khagan himself in the Battle of Kleidion[12] in the Orbelos Mountains[13], falling upon the Khazars while they were still marshaling for a counterattack and catching his cousin off-guard (Bulan, not expecting to stay long at Kleidion, disregarded his Thracian pawn Braslav's advice to fortify his encampment and double the ranks of his sentries in expectation of a major Roman attack).
Retreating up the Strymon and pulling the army which he had sent to once again try to besiege Constantinople back to consolidate his forces, Bulan next engaged Aloysius in a number of indecisive skirmishes and smaller battles over the summer & autumn months – beating back various Roman attempts to dislodge him from the positions he still held – before springing a surprise of his own. Come the winter, he detached two large divisions from his horde and sent them on chevauchées deeper into Roman territory, one crossing the Danube further upriver to ravage Dulebian Pannonia and the other driving straight through Serbia into the Illyrian territories of the Croats and Carantanians with an eye on breaking into Italy if they could: these columns were headed by his twin fourth and fifth sons, Mänär and Mänäs. In a twist of irony, Aloysius received word of the latter maneuver on the same day that the Senate voted in favor of his proposed reforms, right after he had also promised to build them a grand new meeting place (the Curia Julia having been leveled and replaced with a church by the Empress Tia following her husband Venantius' assassination in the previous century) no less.
The Khazars of Mänäs Tarkhan roving across Pannonia in wintertime
If the Romans were having the most victories in Saxony and finding middling success in the Balkans, they were facing nothing but defeat in the Middle East. Nusrat al-Din stole a march on the combined army of Antioch, the Bulgars and the Ghassanids and engaged them near Raphanea, falling upon the Roman host's camp by an intermittent spring which flowed only six days of the week[13]. In the resulting Battle of the Sambation (the spring's name on account of its apparent respect for the Sabbath), the Romans were soundly defeated and both the Antiochene exercitus' African general, Yesaréyu (Van.: 'Gaiseric') ey Gérta[14], and the Ghassanid king al-Harith VI ibn Sharahil were killed in the confusion of the rout (in particular, the latter confused some Muslim warriors for his own, approached them for help and was promptly shot full of arrows so that they could loot his corpse, not realizing who he even was until after they'd already offed him). Al-Harith's heir Jabalah VII and the Bulgar Kanasubigi Grod led the remnants of this army back north, but they were unable to prevent Nusrat al-Din from overrunning southern Syria and parts of Phoenicia by the end of the year, much less continuing their southward march to relieve Jerusalem.
Following the debacle at the Sambation, the demoralized defenders of Jerusalem lost all hope of relief and entered negotiations to surrender to the Caliph. Patriarch Nicodemus agreed to yield the city under the condition of religious freedom being guaranteed to the local Christians, who also would not be molested in any way, and that Christian holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would not be damaged; in exchange, of course, they had to pay a stiff jizya to the conquering Muslims. Hashim also agreed not to interfere with the appointment of the next Patriarch of Jerusalem, though he was careful not to extend this privilege to the Patriarchs of Alexandria or Babylon. Thus did the Muslims finally take Jerusalem (and with it Palaestina) again, this time with plans to stay for much longer than a few years – fortunately neither Constantine VI nor Aloysius II had moved the True Cross and other important relics back to the lost holy city after Aloysius I first had them packed off to Rome decades ago. As it was, the pressure Aloysius II was feeling to bring the war with the Khazars to a conclusion intensified greatly; the only battlefield success the Romans enjoyed against the forces of Islam this year was the repulse of a large raid into Libya by the African forces of King Yusténu and his heir Bedãdéu (Lat.: 'Venantius') in the Battle of Magomedu[15].
The defenders of Jerusalem lay down their weapons before the triumphal entry of Caliph Hashim, who went on to claim credit for this victory and used it to elevate his stature above that of Nusrat al-Din
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[1] Kerch.
[2] Chornomorske.
[3] Sevastopol.
[4] Veria.
[5] Segontium – Caernarfon.
[6] Lüleburgaz.
[7] Malomirovo.
[8] Löningen.
[9] Obermarsberg.
[10] Paderborn. The Continental Saxons seem to have had several irminsuls (holy trees or pillars dedicated to Irmin, a Germanic deity who may or may not have been their tribal god and who might also have actually just been Odin under a different name), the greatest of which was located either at Paderborn or Eresburg and historically destroyed by Charlemagne in the early 770s.
[11] Eion.
[12] Klyuch.
[13] Now known as the Fuwar ed-Deir.
[14] Cirta – Constantine, Algeria. 'Ey' is the Afríganu nobiliary particle meaning 'Of [family's hometown or seat]', equivalent to 'De' in most Romance languages or 'Von' in German, based off of the Neapolitan 'e rather than Italian di.
[15] Macomedes – Sirte.
And with this update, we're off to the first major stress test for the HRE as it fights large-scale wars across multiple fronts against enemies of comparable power (well, except the Saxons) for the first time since it was first reunified! Heads up though guys, I'll be busy this coming week so the next update might take a bit longer than usual, in fact that was why I wanted to get this one done tonight.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
I just hope Carthagian bishopric will not use these calamities as a proof that they were right and god's wrath is upon HRE.
Well one good thing is that Aloysius or possibly Leo isn't as brutal as Charlemagne was in his conquest of the Saxon's but I fear that such tolerance won't last long, especially since its technically illegal under the law of the empire.
Their having more difficult with their real enemies in the Khazars and the Caliphate - albeit that it sounds like the latter is going to be split by religious divisions itself shortly. Whether that will help the empire against their primary enemy to the SE remains to be seen. I recall that Aloysius I's 'crusade' against the earlier Caliphate attack which conquered Jerusalem wasn't named as such but marked as setting an example. As such I wonder whether Aloysius II will be calling the 1st formally named crusade - or possibly his pope? If so and depending on circumstances it could well succeed and should with the overwhelming power the empire possesses unless something goes seriously adrift.
The Pelagian state in exile is starting to form but has little long term future unless for whatever reason the HRE failed to ultimately support their subjects in suppressing them. Their trapped in a fairly barren wilderness and would need to expand southwards into better territory.
Their having more difficult with their real enemies in the Khazars and the Caliphate - albeit that it sounds like the latter is going to be split by religious divisions itself shortly. Whether that will help the empire against their primary enemy to the SE remains to be seen. I recall that Aloysius I's 'crusade' against the earlier Caliphate attack which conquered Jerusalem wasn't named as such but marked as setting an example. As such I wonder whether Aloysius II will be calling the 1st formally named crusade - or possibly his pope? If so and depending on circumstances it could well succeed and should with the overwhelming power the empire possesses unless something goes seriously adrift.
The Pelagian state in exile is starting to form but has little long term future unless for whatever reason the HRE failed to ultimately support their subjects in suppressing them. Their trapped in a fairly barren wilderness and would need to expand southwards into better territory.
Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
@Circle of Willis Good timeline. Keep up the good work!
I always found it interesting how Islamic schisms all started as political disputes that only developed doctrinal differences later, sometimes centuries later, while Christianity was the opposite. Islam here avoided the big political dispute on the succession to Muhammad that led to the Sunni and Shia, but now the Caliph and warlord situation might be coming to a boil. It's reading a bit like the situation between Nader Shah and the last ruling Safavid, where the latter's attempts to prove himself a military leader equal to Nader Shah led to disaster and losing all his dynasty's power.
Good chapter.Saxons would be defeated/local slavic rulers should help in it - especially this TL poles./
Khazars - they could be repelled,but not destroyed.Infrantry would never manage to catch calvary,if calvary is not interested in battle.
@Circle of Willis ,you could adopt what polish King Jan III Sobieski made to counter Tatars - mix of heavy,medium and light calvary with dragoons fighting on foot,but using horses.
As dragoons use british archers.
Britis in America - they should found copper mines there/natives used it/,and since there was tin,too,made bronze.
Muslims - they are doing well,but it is matter of time till turkish sultan would replace arab caliph.Not without war,i belive.
Ottomans 500 year earlier? why not?
Please continue.
Khazars - they could be repelled,but not destroyed.Infrantry would never manage to catch calvary,if calvary is not interested in battle.
@Circle of Willis ,you could adopt what polish King Jan III Sobieski made to counter Tatars - mix of heavy,medium and light calvary with dragoons fighting on foot,but using horses.
As dragoons use british archers.
Britis in America - they should found copper mines there/natives used it/,and since there was tin,too,made bronze.
Muslims - they are doing well,but it is matter of time till turkish sultan would replace arab caliph.Not without war,i belive.
Ottomans 500 year earlier? why not?
Please continue.
733-736: Germanicus, Part I
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
733 saw the Romans continuing to strive mightily against their various foes across three fronts: the German one where they sought to finish off the Continental Saxons who still defied Christ and Emperor, the Danubian one against the Khazars which was rapidly threatening to turn into a Greco-Italian front instead, and the Levantine front where the Muslims had just overrun Palaestina and were now moving against Syria in full force. As before, with the Saxons of Wichmann 'der Widukind' being by far the least menacing of these opponents, it was in the westernmost theater that the Holy Roman legions and their allies saw the greatest success. The Caesar Leo slowly but inexorably pushed his army forward through the woods of Saxony, fighting off pagan ambushes and resisting the temptation to bite at the bait set for him by the rebel chief while building a growing number of castles with which he and the Christian Saxons loyal to Rome could lock down one region at a time.
Exhibiting both the statesmanlike wisdom of his grandfather Constantine and the conciliatory & honorable conduct for which his father was known, Leo induced many defections from the rebel ranks by showering those Saxons who turned coat (or even were simply neutral before) with gifts, Roman protection from reprisal and – of course, an opportunity to assist his army in despoiling the lands of their former comrades-turned-enemies, even as he continued to visit the sword or the chains of slavery upon said recalcitrant enemies. He also encouraged the cultivation of friendly ties between those Christian Saxons who had been loyal to Rome from the beginning and the newer crop of defectors, while also making a habitual example out of any double agents who thought they could make a second Varus out of him. Most notably in the spring of this year, the Eastphalian rebel warlord Sigward 'the Sly' seemingly defected to the Christian cause under orders from Wichmann himself, aiming to gain the confidence of the Caesar and lure him into a surprise attack at the source of the River Ohre; but Leo uncovered the plot with the aid of actual Christian converts in Sigward's inner circle and played along until he got around to ambushing the ambuscade, after which the Roman imperial heir returned to the traitor's holdfast with his head on a lance, razed it to the ground and built a fortified church in its place, around which the town of Gandersheim would sprout over the succeeding decades & centuries.
Sigward the Sly and his household are made an example of as to why one should not fake either conversion to Christianity nor loyalty to Rome with treacherous intent
By the autumn of this year Wichmann's position had become truly desperate, as the whole of Angria and Eastphalia had submitted to Roman suzerainty and his Wendish neighbors to the east, the Obotrites, had not failed to notice the weakness of the remaining pagan Saxons' position. In a final attempt to beat the overwhelming odds, the rebel chief took a 2,500-strong warband to water from the marshes of Hadeln, sailed the North Sea so as to bypass Leo's army altogether, and navigated his way to the mouth of the River Ems before proceeding to rove through the Romans' rear in an attempt to inflict enough damage & acquire enough hostages to force the Caesar to negotiate. Not only did Leo rebuff all attempts at negotiation however, but he personally led twice Wichmann's number in paladins & knights to stop the audacious raid dead in its tracks, which he did in the Battle of Minda[1]. The Saxons were surprised by the alacrity with which the Romans had come to engage them, and despite forming a shield-wall & putting up a valiant fight for hours, they were ultimately defeated and routed with the survivors being pinned against the Roman castle-town of Porta Westfalica to the south and massacred there. Wichmann himself was not among these unfortunates however, having managed to slip away into the woods & riverlands to the west with fewer than ten retainers; he resurfaced in the winter by bloodlessly seizing the monastery at Deventer in a surprise attack, and using the captive abbot as a hostage he finally managed to secure an audience with his younger adversary.
The war with the Khazars was going less swimmingly for the Holy Roman Empire than the one they were waging against the Saxons. Bulan's twins had struck at a very inopportune time for the Romans and their federates; as it seemed that Aloysius II had successfully contained the Khazars in the summer & autumn of the previous year, the federate kings of the South Slavs had sent home the majority of their warriors for the harvest season (and the ones who were still battle-ready were the ones left with his army in Macedonia & Thrace), and the winter made it difficult to recall & reorganize them. The elder twin, Mänär Tarkhan tore a swath across the lands of the Dulebes, only failing to sack the well-fortified towns of the Pannonian Romans (now also swamped with Dulebian refugees) around Lake Pelso, before moving into Bavaria and laying waste as far as Passau (former Roman Boiotro). Mänäs Tarkhan meanwhile stampeded out of the lands of the Gepids, which (as the only trans-Danubian federate) had been the first to fall to the Khazars, and westward across now-Slavic Illyria; in the spring he overcame the combined strength of the refugee Gepids, the Croats and the Carantanians (the latter two having failed to fully assemble their war-hosts in time for this clash) at the Battle of Gradiška[2] before storming toward Italy. Mänäs ironically used the Romans' own roads, namely the Via Gemina, to cross the Julian Alps in haste and lay waste to Sonti[3] that summer, before beginning to push across northern Italy.
The Khazars of Mänäs Tarkhan stampeding through Gepid and South Slavic opposition at the Battle of Gradiška
Aloysius II badly wanted to respond to these far-reaching raids, especially the one targeting Italy, but Bulan Khagan of course ensured he could not with a series of renewed attacks into Macedonia & Thrace. The Augustus and the Khagan clashed seven times this year – Heraclea in Lycestis[4] (a Khazar victory), the Loudias River[5] (a Roman victory), Pulcheriopolis[6] (Roman victory), Adrianople (Roman victory), the Achelous River (Khazar victory), Bizye (Khazar victory) and Kainophrurion (Roman victory). The Khazars had begun with attacks in the west, but drifted eastward after being frustrated by the Roman defense and ended up marching down the coast of the Black Sea to nearly threaten Constantinople itself once more before being repulsed by the Emperor in a seventh bloody battle at Kainophrurion. Though the Romans won four out of the seven major battles fought in the east this year, Bulan not only kept enough of his force intact to continue to pose a major threat but also achieved his strategic goal of keeping Aloysius from sending reinforcements to Dalmatia or Italy by sea, compelling the Emperor to write to his son to wrap up the war with the Saxons in a hurry and come down south to stop Mänär & Mänäs with all due haste.
The war in the Middle East continued to fail to develop to Rome's advantage, to put it lightly. Having already routed the Banu Kalb of Palestine (to the point where they did not try to defend their capital, Tiberias, for lack of strength) and snapped up Jerusalem, the Caliph Hashim and his generalissimo Nusrat al-Din marched onward to do the same to the Ghassanids of Syria in this one – a task made considerably easier by the latter's smashing victory over the Antiochene exercitus and its attached auxiliaries, most of whom were Ghassanid Arabs, at the Battle of the Sambation in the previous year. With what armies were still left to them Jabalah VII ibn al-Harith and Grod, Kanasubigi of the Bulgars, tried and failed to check the two-pronged Muslim advance on Damascus at the Battle of Bosra in the south and the Battle of Qaryatayn in the east. By the end of 733, Damascus had fallen after a Syriac Miaphysite revealed a weak section of the wall – imperfectly repaired in the years after the chaos brought on by Heshana Qaghan's Turks and then the first Islamic invasion had died down – which the Muslims were able to bring down with the aid of engineers trained by Egyptian Copts and Babylonian Jews, and most of the defenders of Phoenicia had also yielded soon after rather than try holding out in the mountains of Lebanon. And certainly, if Hashim and al-Din had anything to say, even these would still not be the end of the Aloysians' losses on this front come the next few years.
The leaders of the Banu Tanukh, predecessors of the Ghassanids who had long ago become their vassals, surrendering to Caliph Hashim
734 saw this final great Saxon War reaching its dramatic, if also surprisingly not-all-that-bloody, denouement in the west. In the early winter months Leo Caesar negotiated the surrender of the remnants of the Saxon war party occupying Deventer, pledging to allow a ceasefire and to let them go home if they would just release the captive monks unharmed; of course he had no intention of letting Wichmann go free after causing all this trouble for Rome, and intended to capture him the instead he'd released the abbot from custody. The Roman prince's scheming was for naught however, as he soon found out that the rebel chieftain had expected treachery all along and left Deventer before he even got there – leaving his ornate armor behind for his lieutenant to wear as a disguise. Having gotten away in this manner, he managed to make his way through enemy lines back to Nordalbingia even with the Roman army searching for him and Christian Saxon and Frisian sailors assigned to watch the North Sea coast for him, which genuinely impressed the heir to the Holy Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for the Child of the Woods, he found his remaining holdings to be in an utterly untenable position by the time he returned to them. On one side, the Romans continued to steadily tie the noose around the Saxons' necks; on the other, the Obotrites had openly invaded, easily brushing their way past the badly battered Saxon hosts which were still standing to pillage towns and capture slaves almost all the way to the mouth of the Elbe. Wichmann himself led his remaining warriors to victory against the Obotrites in the Battle of the Bille that spring, but was resoundingly defeated by the better part of their war-host under their vozhd Budivoj a few weeks later in the Battle of the Stör. All the while, the legions did not cease their advance out of the west and were making preparations to cross the Elbe, with the intent of ending this Saxon revolt once and for all. Out of options and with his doom fast approaching, Wichmann chose to throw himself at the mercy of the opponent who had shown he had any to spare and re-entered peace talks with Leo, for real this time.
In turn, Leo offered moderate terms, not only to end the fighting before the Obotrites could completely conquer what remained of the 'free' Saxons but also to appease his own Saxon allies who expected much reward for their services. The whole of Saxony was to be reorganized into a new federate kingdom, bound to serve its new suzerain under the same terms as all the others; as the most prominent leader of the Christian Saxons who had not broken faith with Rome, Freawine of Meppen was the natural candidate for its first king, and duly raised up as such on the shields of the Saxon auxiliaries who had fought for Rome up until this point. The Romans did insist on the full Christianization of Saxony as a mandatory condition, so Wichmann and all who followed him had no choice but to submit to baptism if they wanted to retain their lives, much less any future in the new Saxony. The defeated insurgents also had to pay recompense under traditional Saxon custom to their neighbors for having destroyed their property, taken their kinsmen's lives/limbs and carried their womenfolk or children off as slaves; on top of immediately releasing said slaves, this usually came in the form of weregild payments or becoming bonded laborers to the victim's family until they had paid off the weregild value of the person(s) they had killed.
Freawine, newly-minted king (or 'kuning') of the Continental Saxons, overseeing the construction of a new church with the aid of his Anglo-Saxon kindred from across the sea
However, because Freawine had no sons, his eldest daughter Theodrada was married to – of all people – Wichmann's own eldest son Ethelhard (in a Christian ceremony of course), thereby reconciling the family line of the staunchest Saxon loyalists with that of the most determined insurgents. Ethelhard and his brother Frithuwald were both recruited into Leo's comitatus to ensure their father's continued loyalty, while Theodrada was given an honored place in the princely household as a new lady-in-waiting for the Anglo-Saxon Caesarina Æthelflæd. Wichmann did still have reason to be unhappy at his new overlords besides their simply besting him on the field of war, after all; Leo intimidated the Obotrites into fleeing from Nordalbingia just by parading the still-considerable power and majesty of his legions, but declined to actually chase after Budivoj & company (and thereby recover the plunder & slaves they had stolen from Nordalbingia) due to there being other, more pressing concerns for the Romans[6].
Most obvious among those pressing concerns stood the twin sons of Bulan Khagan, who were still aggressively raiding deep into the Empire's core. Leo answered his father's summons to drive them back, leaving behind a few thousand soldiers to help garrison the Saxon castles (which he turned over to the loyal Christian chiefs as a reward); to protect Christian missions, for the Caesar did invite the Roman See (especially the Church in England) to intensify their efforts to proselytize across the whole of Saxony; and to also assist in engineering tasks, especially digging new roads to better connect Saxon settlements to one another, their Teutonic neighbors and Roman Germania. The majority of his troops accompanied him on the march south to respond to the Khazar threat, the Bavarian contingent being especially eager to expel the interlopers from their homeland, though Leo himself and a small retinue did undertake a short diversion to the capital to greet his wife, both to try to allow Theodrada to join her retinue and to conceive a son with her (this time, successfully). After Aloysius received news of how he'd resolved the Saxon problem and expressed pleasant surprise at how he managed to bring Wichmann into the fold, Leo not only expressed that he'd learned from his father but also boasted, "Have I not destroyed my foes when I make them into my friends?"
Father and son alike spent the summer and autumn contending with the Khazars. In the north, Leo defeated Mänär Tarkhan in the Battle of Deggendorf, recovering some of the booty and slaves captured by the raiders; however, Mänär managed to flee with the majority back across Pannonia & over the Danube, defeating a cavalry detachment sent to pursue him at Kamenec[7]. The Caesar meanwhile moved through the eastern Alpine passes to intercept Mänär Tarkhan, who was beginning to retreat in the face of reinforcements from both the Carthaginian exercitus and the African royal army under the latter's crown prince Bedãdéu, newly arrived at Rome in the absence of any renewed Islamic thrust against Africa this year. Leo stormed down the Via Claudia Augusta through the Rhaetic Alps and got the drop on Mänäs, who ended up being pinned against the oncoming Africans by the northern Roman forces and promptly lost the 'Battle of the Princes' near Vicenza; unlike his twin, he barely escaped the disaster with his life and with hardly any of the loot he had collected, certainly not the enslaved Italians or South Slavs who Leo released to return to their homes. As for the Augustus, Bulan continued to evade him (while applying just enough pressure to keep him from pulling away to deal with the twins himself) for most of the year, but Aloysius II did ultimately manage to draw Bulan's host into a major engagement at Philippi and dealt them a resounding defeat there. Alas, he was unable to close the trap he'd planned out, and thus the victory was not as decisive as intended. Compounding Bulan's misfortunes, his mother Irene – from whom he derived his blood claim to the crown of the Roman Orient – died at the age of 74 in the winter of this year.
Mänäs Tarkhan struggling to flee past the African lines of Prince Bedãdéu at the Battle of the Princes
While the Romans subjugated the Continental Saxons and got some hits in against the Khazars, they continued to lose ground to the Muslims. Nusrat al-Din seemed unstoppable as he pushed ever forward against the weakening defenses of the Romans and their federates on this front, while the Ghassanids in turn did not even dare face him on the field any longer. The Banu Kalb tried to pool their remaining strength with the Banu Ghassan, who in turn essentially absorbed them as vassals, but even combined they were clearly horribly outmatched by their Islamic counterparts; they, the Bulgars, and the tatters of the Antiochene exercitus could barely slow Al-Din down. In this year Aleppo and Hama both fell before the power of Islam in rapid succession, driving the aforementioned Ghassanids into the great fortresses of Upper Mesopotamia and further reducing the Roman presence in Syria to just Antioch & its environs, and Berytus (known to the Arabs as Beirut) also surrendered, ending Rome's presence in Phoenicia altogether. As it became clear that city was Al-Din's next objective, Aloysius felt an acute pressure to try to bring hostilities with the Khazars to an end, thereby freeing him to turn east and counter the Islamic threat which had managed to seize nearly the entirety of the old Diocese of the Orient.
Come 735, the Caesar received some good news. The first was that the reconstruction of the Augustus-era fort of Treva, which would serve as a wedding gift to and new capital for the newly-minted dux Wichmann of Nordalbingia, was proceeding apace; in due time, the port town which grew around it would be named 'Hamburg' by the locals. The second was that Æthelflæd had given birth to their second child, and it was a son this time – one duly baptized as Theodosius, once more continuing the tradition of alternating through the names used by Eastern and Western Emperors among the heirs of the Aloysian dynasty (while the Theodosians survived a good deal longer in the Orient than in the Occident, the first Theodosius did after all hail from Hispania). However Leo had no time to take his son into his hands, as the ongoing war with the Khazars called him to the Danube.
Another development in the Occident which took place this year, and not one particularly positive for the Romans, also marked the first entry of the Danish people into Roman histories as something more than a curious footnote. Over the preceding centuries the Danes of Sjælland had filled the vacuum left by the migration of the Angles and Jutes to the old provinces of the Roman Empire in northern Britannia, and by the mid-eighth century they had come to establish a kingdom of some renown (indeed, the only organized Nordic kingdom of any significant size at this point in history) around the Kattegat complete with well-situated trading ports such as Aros[9], Ribe and Heiðabýr[10]. It was from the last and newest of these that their king in this day – a prudent and watchful man named Holger who belonged to the Skjöldungar (or 'Scylding') clan which claimed descent from Odin the All-Father himself – observed the Romans subjugating his Saxon neighbors to the south, and with the enthusiastic aid of the latter's cousins from across the western sea no less. Fearing Denmark would be the next target for Roman encroachment, King Holger began construction on a great network of earthworks & fortifications spanning the neck of Jutland, building on the works raised up by his ancestors to keep the Continental Saxons at bay: to this defensive line he aptly gave the name 'Danavirki', or 'earthworks of the Danes', though the Romans themselves felt more amusement than anything at the thought that such crude defenses could possibly stop them if they ever did feel like marching further north.
The Danish king Holger and his family observe the construction of their Danavirki, the so-called 'great wall of the Danes', on their new border with the Holy Roman Empire
Now with the Roman Caesar marching to join his father and bringing with him an entire second army, it began to dawn on Bulan Khagan that his mother may not have given him the best advice. He attempted to leave the Macedonian theater to engage Leo in the lands of the Sclaveni, but then came Aloysius' turn to pin him down with an attack from behind; while the Khazars won the Battle of Velissos[8], not only did they fail to inflict significant casualties on the Emperor's own army, but they lost valuable time and ended up in a position where the army of the Caesar was fast closing in on them from the northwest while that of the Augustus was rallying to the southeast. The twins and their combined forces (really just the tattered survivors of the attack on Italy in Mänäs' case) had swung through Khazar-occupied Dacia and over the lower Danube to reinforce their father, but even so they could not relieve the difficulty of his situation.
It was in that context that Bulan first offered terms to the Romans. He expressed a willingness to renounce his claim on the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire, which clearly wasn't going to happen between his mother's death and his inability to break through into Thessalonica or Constantinople, but insisted on keeping all of his territorial gains, which extended to some territories on the Roman side of the Danube – bridgeheads which would be useful for a future contention with the Romans, no doubt. Naturally, Aloysius bluntly rebuffed these terms and pressed on with a pursuit of the Khazar horde as it sought to extricate itself from Roman Thrace & Macedonia. Linking his forces with those of his son, the Holy Roman Emperor did ultimately manage to force an engagement with the retreating Khazars at Nicopolis, coming up on the treacherous invaders before they could move all of their forces over the Danube. Mänäs Tarkhan, eager to redeem himself after the disastrous conclusion of his earlier Italian campaign, fought a ferocious rearguard action to buy his father and twin time to escape with the majority of the Khazar army (down to some 20,000 men at this point) and ultimately succeeded in this objective – at the cost of his own life and that of all 7,000 Khazar warriors who stayed with him.
The final charge of Mänäs Tarkhan against overwhelming Roman forces in the woods outside Nicopolis
The temptation to pursue Bulan Khagan over the Danube must have been overpowering, given that he had not only upended the profitable decades-long alliance between his people and the Holy Roman Empire but also done considerable damage to lands as distant as Italy & Bavaria and still sat upon Gepidia and the Tauric Chersonese. However, the situation in the Middle East was approaching a crisis point and a response to it could no longer be delayed on the part of Aloysius II. It was in 735 that the Caliph Hashim joined Nusrat al-Din outside Antioch, laying siege to that last great Roman metropolis east of the Bosphorus, and while the Romans could keep the city supplied by sea the Muslims not only constantly tested its defenses with their own siege engines & probing attacks but also did not limit themselves to just one target. Ghazw mounted extensive chevauchées deep into Bulgarian Cilicia, Greek Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, taking full advantage of the Roman military presence in the East having been effectively crippled over the last few years, and other war parties also kept the remaining Ghassanids & Kalbi trapped in their Upper Mesopotamian fortresses, checking every attempt they made to sally forth and needle the besiegers of Antioch.
On the other side of the world, Eluédh of Annún had weathered enough grim winters to conclude that the kingdom of the Pilgrims had to find warmer weather & more fertile ground, or else they wouldn't survive the century. Since the Irish had made sailing south to new and more pleasant lands impossible, he instead assembled additional ranging parties of the most intrepid and desperate voyagers among the settlers, supported by Pelagian missionaries and friendly Wilderman or half-Wilderman guides, and sent them west- and southward to chart out additional lands for settlement which would hopefully be much more hospitable than those presently occupied by the British exiles. Over the coming months and years, those who survived reported back with news of a vast and verdant woodland bounded by great lakes where the weather was slightly less bitterly cold and the Wildermen did not live as wandering nomadic hunters & gatherers, but actually settled down in farming villages.
This was fantastic news to Eluédh, who urged the movement of British settlers and their families further inland (though he did want to keep a presence in eastern Annún, where copper & good rock were easy to find, obviously nobody could eat those for sustenance). He also sought to shore up contacts with the settled Wildermen in hopes of not only absorbing their villages into his kingdom, but also acquiring easier crops to grow on a large scale than the weed-like New World 'crops' they'd encountered so far which could barely sate their hunger or European crops which struggled to take root in the poor and oft-frozen soil of their trans-Atlantic refuge. Not that the first Pilgrim King could have foreseen it at the time, but by directing his people's expansion south- and westward into the land of Great Lakes, he also set them on a collision course with the northernmost of the great Wilderman civilizations which were beginning to form on the other side of said lakes in this century…
Among other tricks they would pick up from their indigenous neighbors to the south, the New World Britons also adopted the design of the Wilderman longhouse for their own use
In the early winter of 736, as it became apparent that Bulan still had enough troops to effectively contest the crossings of the Danube while the Muslims continued to apply enormous pressure to the Roman East, Aloysius II grudgingly agreed to reopen peace talks. While he theoretically could have defeated Bulan's remaining forces in the field, the Emperor had correctly surmised that doing so would (barring a miraculous stroke of luck) cost him enough that he wouldn't be able to push the Muslims back from Antioch. Ultimately the Augustus and the Khagan could not actually reach a lasting peace – Bulan was too unwilling to give up his limited territorial gains or the rather less limited collection of booty and slaves he & his son had managed to get over the Danube – but they did manage to settle for a few years' truce, which played to both men's advantage: the Romans got time to deal with the Muslims, and the Khazars got time to divert reinforcements toward the Danubian front and reorder their remaining forces.
Aloysius assured his Slavic and Germanic federates (including the Gepids, whose territory remained under Khazar occupation for the time being) that he would restart hostilities and get revenge for Bulan's treachery against them all in short order – he himself was still positively seething at the damage his cousin had done, not just directly to his southeastern European domains but also indirectly by opening the Levant up to Islamic conquest – but first, he needed to put a stop to the Muslim invasion before Antioch fell. With this temporary ceasefire in place, the Roman army moved across the Hellespont and hurried on toward what remained of their presence in the Levant, where Hashim and Nusrat al-Din were still investing their Syrian bastion. In response to the recent developments in the northwest and the failure of their most recent assault on Antioch's defenses, old Al-Din resolved to march against the Romans with 30,000 of their men, leaving Hashim to keep the Antiochenes under siege with 8,000; he believed that he could once more eclipse his master in prestige if he were the one to deal a decisive defeat to the Romans, and that the force left behind was insufficient to force Antioch to surrender (thereby allowing Hashim to once more claim credit for taking a major city, as he had previously done with Jerusalem).
Aloysius and Leo confronted Al-Din's army in Bulgar territory, specifically near old Hierapolis on the Cilician Plain[11], almost immediately northwest of Antioch itself. Since both armies were roughly even in size (the Roman one having been reinforced on the road by newly-raised Anatolian Greek recruits and Caucasian troops freed up with the cession of Khazar attacks on Georgia & Armenia), the resulting engagement promised to be the bloodiest and fiercest of the Emperor's career yet, comparable to the titanic clashes which his grandfather and namesake was famous for. The Romans formed up into three divisions: the Augustus took command of the right, the Caesar held the center and the Armenian king Gosdantin ('Constantine') Mamikonian was assigned to lead the left, which also included the majority of the Caucasian reinforcements. Al-Din divided his own host into four, keeping a substantial reserve force hidden in the rear to seal the trap he was hoping to spring against the Romans.
The Battle of Hierapolis commenced with an exchange of missiles between the Roman and Arab skirmishers, after which the latter retreated back to ward their lines in a hurry with Leo's division surging forth in pursuit. This had proceeded according to Al-Din's design (as far as he could tell), and he closed the trap by directing the vast majority of his army to encircle and destroy the Roman central division. However, in so doing he had walked into the Romans' own trap: Leo had hoped to repeat the victories he'd won against the Saxons by baiting them into attacking him after seemingly placing himself in an unfavorable position while keeping unseen reserves of his own nearby, but on a larger scale, and advised his father to let him pull the Muslims into attacking him en masse while exposing their own flanks to the actual offensive thrusts of the Roman left and right wings. The Roman center was accordingly comprised of the most trusted veteran heavy infantrymen and knights of the imperial army, so that it would be able to withstand and pin down the full fury of the Islamic adversary while Aloysius' and Gosdantin's contingents maneuvered around them.
Roman knights assembling for battle on the Cilician Plain
The trap would have worked swimmingly and quite possibly led to the destruction of Al-Din's army had it not been for the Turkic generalissimo's fourth reserve division, which now had to be committed to the fight not to seal their encirclement of the Romans but to break up the Romans' own trap around the main body of the Islamic war-host. Both sides had gone in with plans to set up a battle of annihilation against the other, but those plans had not survived the earliest stages of the fighting and so they now found themselves fighting a furious, roughly evenly matched and certainly extremely sanguinary engagement on the Cilician Plain instead. If any benefit could be found to a dramatic engagement of this scale, it was that it gave many heroes on both sides the opportunity to distinguish themselves.
Standing out on the Roman side were the Saxon brothers Ethelhard and Frithuwald (the latter of whom died taking an Islamic lance intended for Leo Caesar, removing any lingering Roman doubts about continued Saxon loyalty), Bedãdéu of Africa (who was sufficiently skilled at arms to get through the entire battle unscathed), the Georgian prince Giorgi 'the Glorious' (who succeeded, and immediately avenged, his father King Gurgen on the battlefield after the latter was struck down by an Arab arrow to the eye) and his Croat counterpart Zvonimir Svetoslavić (noted for leading his contingent, placed under the division of Aloysius II, in pulling back from and charging into the Muslim ranks no fewer than six times). On the Islamic side Al-Din's youngest personal ward of fighting age – another ghulam named Mansur al-Din – won fame for fatally wounding the Frankish king Childéric IV and then challenging his nephew, the heir to the Holy Roman Empire to a duel before being separated by the tide of combat, while the Caliph's brother-in-law Farid ibn Asfar of the Shahanshahvands proved that some of the valor of the long-fallen Sassanids still survived in his Persian contingent and the originally Coptic ghulam Imad al-Din became the first Islamic slave-soldier of Christian birth to earn a mention in the histories by ably taking up command of the reserve division after his commander was accidentally thrown from the saddle & broke his neck.
Ultimately, this great battle was settled by nothing less than the demise of Nusrat al-Din himself: in an attempt to break the stalemate the old general and his bodyguards charged into the thick of combat to rally the men for one great push, but age had been less kind to him & his once-formidable martial stature than it had been to the first Aloysius. Soon after beginning to truly push the Romans' left and right wings back under re-intensified pressure, he was first wounded by a spear-thrust from one of Leo's paladins, and though he killed that first attacker, he was then injured again (fatally this time) after his horse was killed and fell atop him in death. Catastrophe was averted only by the work of Mansur al-Din and Farid ibn Asfar, who respectively fought a difficult rearguard action to keep the Romans off their backs and managed an orderly retreat back to the south and over the Pyramos River[12], which the Arabs called the Jihun. Though victorious, the Romans themselves were left so badly bloodied (having suffered some 6,000 dead & wounded, or about a fifth of their army, compared to the Arabs' 9,000) and in such disarray that they could not effectively pursue the retreating Arabs themselves.
The best-laid strategies of both sides' commanders having failed to survive collision with each other early on, by its conclusion the Battle of Hierapolis had degenerated into a massive, swirling melee which left about 15,000 men dead in total
Now most monarchs would have panicked at the news of such a serious defeat and the loss of their greatest general, but to Hashim, the circumstances of the Battle of Hierapolis presented nothing short of a miraculous opportunity: his nearest rival for power over the whole Caliphate had been killed by an external enemy, which by turn was now left utterly exhausted in victory, and he still had the resources to hold his gains in the western Levant. When the weary Aloysius II, who still had half his mind on the resumption of hostilities with the Khazars in the short term, approached Antioch, the Caliph greeted him in a friendly manner and opened negotiations for a more lasting peace with him. Though Hashim obviously insisted on holding Syria & Palestine, he offered to not only back off from Antioch & the Mesopotamian fortresses but also to release the slaves taken in recent raids on Anatolia and the Caucasus (though pointedly not to return any of the inanimate loot nor slaves acquired in earlier conquests & raids, who in any case had long since been dispersed to slave-markets elsewhere); to forbid additional raids into Roman territory for a good ten years; and to relax the jizya on Ionian Christians within the Caliphate, including those who had just come under his rule. He also pledged not to harass any Christian who wished to move back over the new border, nor to force them to stay.
If Aloysius refused and insisted on trying to reconquer the rest of the Levant, he would be welcome to try against the surviving Muslim army, whose still-somewhat-considerable ranks Hashim paraded around Antioch. With the Khazar threat still looming and the Muslims apparently still strong enough to maintain an intimidating defensive posture, the Emperor resolved not to take his chances and potentially get bogged down in the Mideast for longer than his truce with Bulan would hold, and accepted these terms. Thus it could be said that the Muslims were the great victor of the Roman-Khazar war, and the Hashemites in particular: with this coup Hashim had not only managed to get rid of Nusrat al-Din in a manner in which he could not possibly be blamed (and indeed he would take the lead in honoring the latest great 'martyr' in the struggle against Rūm), but also to do what not even his great-great-grandfather Qasim ibn Muhammad, the very Son of the Prophet himself, could not – conquer, and then actually hold, Syria & Palestine for the first time in Islamic history – and certainly Al-Din was too dead to contest his claiming all the credit for pulling a significant victory from the jaws of dire defeat. For this triumph the fourth Caliph would be hailed as the first Hashemite mujaddid, or 'renewer', not only of Islam's fortunes after a very rough start to the eighth century but also of the Banu Hashim's legacy.
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[1] Minden.
[2] Stara Gradiška.
[3] Pons Sonti – Gradisca d'Isonzo.
[4] Bitola.
[5] Berat.
[6] Historically, Charlemagne had to ally with the Obotrites to finally crush the Continental Saxons once & for all. Here, not only is the HRE operating from a position of even greater strength than the Carolingians but the Arbogastings/Aloysians have already been influencing the Continental Saxons and occasionally thrashing them in battle for centuries (well before actually seizing the purple), so there was no need for them to form the Obotrite alliance to achieve their final victory.
[7] Szombathely.
[8] Veles.
[9] Aarhus.
[10] Hedeby.
[11] Kırmıtlı.
[12] The Ceyhan River.
Exhibiting both the statesmanlike wisdom of his grandfather Constantine and the conciliatory & honorable conduct for which his father was known, Leo induced many defections from the rebel ranks by showering those Saxons who turned coat (or even were simply neutral before) with gifts, Roman protection from reprisal and – of course, an opportunity to assist his army in despoiling the lands of their former comrades-turned-enemies, even as he continued to visit the sword or the chains of slavery upon said recalcitrant enemies. He also encouraged the cultivation of friendly ties between those Christian Saxons who had been loyal to Rome from the beginning and the newer crop of defectors, while also making a habitual example out of any double agents who thought they could make a second Varus out of him. Most notably in the spring of this year, the Eastphalian rebel warlord Sigward 'the Sly' seemingly defected to the Christian cause under orders from Wichmann himself, aiming to gain the confidence of the Caesar and lure him into a surprise attack at the source of the River Ohre; but Leo uncovered the plot with the aid of actual Christian converts in Sigward's inner circle and played along until he got around to ambushing the ambuscade, after which the Roman imperial heir returned to the traitor's holdfast with his head on a lance, razed it to the ground and built a fortified church in its place, around which the town of Gandersheim would sprout over the succeeding decades & centuries.
Sigward the Sly and his household are made an example of as to why one should not fake either conversion to Christianity nor loyalty to Rome with treacherous intent
By the autumn of this year Wichmann's position had become truly desperate, as the whole of Angria and Eastphalia had submitted to Roman suzerainty and his Wendish neighbors to the east, the Obotrites, had not failed to notice the weakness of the remaining pagan Saxons' position. In a final attempt to beat the overwhelming odds, the rebel chief took a 2,500-strong warband to water from the marshes of Hadeln, sailed the North Sea so as to bypass Leo's army altogether, and navigated his way to the mouth of the River Ems before proceeding to rove through the Romans' rear in an attempt to inflict enough damage & acquire enough hostages to force the Caesar to negotiate. Not only did Leo rebuff all attempts at negotiation however, but he personally led twice Wichmann's number in paladins & knights to stop the audacious raid dead in its tracks, which he did in the Battle of Minda[1]. The Saxons were surprised by the alacrity with which the Romans had come to engage them, and despite forming a shield-wall & putting up a valiant fight for hours, they were ultimately defeated and routed with the survivors being pinned against the Roman castle-town of Porta Westfalica to the south and massacred there. Wichmann himself was not among these unfortunates however, having managed to slip away into the woods & riverlands to the west with fewer than ten retainers; he resurfaced in the winter by bloodlessly seizing the monastery at Deventer in a surprise attack, and using the captive abbot as a hostage he finally managed to secure an audience with his younger adversary.
The war with the Khazars was going less swimmingly for the Holy Roman Empire than the one they were waging against the Saxons. Bulan's twins had struck at a very inopportune time for the Romans and their federates; as it seemed that Aloysius II had successfully contained the Khazars in the summer & autumn of the previous year, the federate kings of the South Slavs had sent home the majority of their warriors for the harvest season (and the ones who were still battle-ready were the ones left with his army in Macedonia & Thrace), and the winter made it difficult to recall & reorganize them. The elder twin, Mänär Tarkhan tore a swath across the lands of the Dulebes, only failing to sack the well-fortified towns of the Pannonian Romans (now also swamped with Dulebian refugees) around Lake Pelso, before moving into Bavaria and laying waste as far as Passau (former Roman Boiotro). Mänäs Tarkhan meanwhile stampeded out of the lands of the Gepids, which (as the only trans-Danubian federate) had been the first to fall to the Khazars, and westward across now-Slavic Illyria; in the spring he overcame the combined strength of the refugee Gepids, the Croats and the Carantanians (the latter two having failed to fully assemble their war-hosts in time for this clash) at the Battle of Gradiška[2] before storming toward Italy. Mänäs ironically used the Romans' own roads, namely the Via Gemina, to cross the Julian Alps in haste and lay waste to Sonti[3] that summer, before beginning to push across northern Italy.
The Khazars of Mänäs Tarkhan stampeding through Gepid and South Slavic opposition at the Battle of Gradiška
Aloysius II badly wanted to respond to these far-reaching raids, especially the one targeting Italy, but Bulan Khagan of course ensured he could not with a series of renewed attacks into Macedonia & Thrace. The Augustus and the Khagan clashed seven times this year – Heraclea in Lycestis[4] (a Khazar victory), the Loudias River[5] (a Roman victory), Pulcheriopolis[6] (Roman victory), Adrianople (Roman victory), the Achelous River (Khazar victory), Bizye (Khazar victory) and Kainophrurion (Roman victory). The Khazars had begun with attacks in the west, but drifted eastward after being frustrated by the Roman defense and ended up marching down the coast of the Black Sea to nearly threaten Constantinople itself once more before being repulsed by the Emperor in a seventh bloody battle at Kainophrurion. Though the Romans won four out of the seven major battles fought in the east this year, Bulan not only kept enough of his force intact to continue to pose a major threat but also achieved his strategic goal of keeping Aloysius from sending reinforcements to Dalmatia or Italy by sea, compelling the Emperor to write to his son to wrap up the war with the Saxons in a hurry and come down south to stop Mänär & Mänäs with all due haste.
The war in the Middle East continued to fail to develop to Rome's advantage, to put it lightly. Having already routed the Banu Kalb of Palestine (to the point where they did not try to defend their capital, Tiberias, for lack of strength) and snapped up Jerusalem, the Caliph Hashim and his generalissimo Nusrat al-Din marched onward to do the same to the Ghassanids of Syria in this one – a task made considerably easier by the latter's smashing victory over the Antiochene exercitus and its attached auxiliaries, most of whom were Ghassanid Arabs, at the Battle of the Sambation in the previous year. With what armies were still left to them Jabalah VII ibn al-Harith and Grod, Kanasubigi of the Bulgars, tried and failed to check the two-pronged Muslim advance on Damascus at the Battle of Bosra in the south and the Battle of Qaryatayn in the east. By the end of 733, Damascus had fallen after a Syriac Miaphysite revealed a weak section of the wall – imperfectly repaired in the years after the chaos brought on by Heshana Qaghan's Turks and then the first Islamic invasion had died down – which the Muslims were able to bring down with the aid of engineers trained by Egyptian Copts and Babylonian Jews, and most of the defenders of Phoenicia had also yielded soon after rather than try holding out in the mountains of Lebanon. And certainly, if Hashim and al-Din had anything to say, even these would still not be the end of the Aloysians' losses on this front come the next few years.
The leaders of the Banu Tanukh, predecessors of the Ghassanids who had long ago become their vassals, surrendering to Caliph Hashim
734 saw this final great Saxon War reaching its dramatic, if also surprisingly not-all-that-bloody, denouement in the west. In the early winter months Leo Caesar negotiated the surrender of the remnants of the Saxon war party occupying Deventer, pledging to allow a ceasefire and to let them go home if they would just release the captive monks unharmed; of course he had no intention of letting Wichmann go free after causing all this trouble for Rome, and intended to capture him the instead he'd released the abbot from custody. The Roman prince's scheming was for naught however, as he soon found out that the rebel chieftain had expected treachery all along and left Deventer before he even got there – leaving his ornate armor behind for his lieutenant to wear as a disguise. Having gotten away in this manner, he managed to make his way through enemy lines back to Nordalbingia even with the Roman army searching for him and Christian Saxon and Frisian sailors assigned to watch the North Sea coast for him, which genuinely impressed the heir to the Holy Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for the Child of the Woods, he found his remaining holdings to be in an utterly untenable position by the time he returned to them. On one side, the Romans continued to steadily tie the noose around the Saxons' necks; on the other, the Obotrites had openly invaded, easily brushing their way past the badly battered Saxon hosts which were still standing to pillage towns and capture slaves almost all the way to the mouth of the Elbe. Wichmann himself led his remaining warriors to victory against the Obotrites in the Battle of the Bille that spring, but was resoundingly defeated by the better part of their war-host under their vozhd Budivoj a few weeks later in the Battle of the Stör. All the while, the legions did not cease their advance out of the west and were making preparations to cross the Elbe, with the intent of ending this Saxon revolt once and for all. Out of options and with his doom fast approaching, Wichmann chose to throw himself at the mercy of the opponent who had shown he had any to spare and re-entered peace talks with Leo, for real this time.
In turn, Leo offered moderate terms, not only to end the fighting before the Obotrites could completely conquer what remained of the 'free' Saxons but also to appease his own Saxon allies who expected much reward for their services. The whole of Saxony was to be reorganized into a new federate kingdom, bound to serve its new suzerain under the same terms as all the others; as the most prominent leader of the Christian Saxons who had not broken faith with Rome, Freawine of Meppen was the natural candidate for its first king, and duly raised up as such on the shields of the Saxon auxiliaries who had fought for Rome up until this point. The Romans did insist on the full Christianization of Saxony as a mandatory condition, so Wichmann and all who followed him had no choice but to submit to baptism if they wanted to retain their lives, much less any future in the new Saxony. The defeated insurgents also had to pay recompense under traditional Saxon custom to their neighbors for having destroyed their property, taken their kinsmen's lives/limbs and carried their womenfolk or children off as slaves; on top of immediately releasing said slaves, this usually came in the form of weregild payments or becoming bonded laborers to the victim's family until they had paid off the weregild value of the person(s) they had killed.
Freawine, newly-minted king (or 'kuning') of the Continental Saxons, overseeing the construction of a new church with the aid of his Anglo-Saxon kindred from across the sea
However, because Freawine had no sons, his eldest daughter Theodrada was married to – of all people – Wichmann's own eldest son Ethelhard (in a Christian ceremony of course), thereby reconciling the family line of the staunchest Saxon loyalists with that of the most determined insurgents. Ethelhard and his brother Frithuwald were both recruited into Leo's comitatus to ensure their father's continued loyalty, while Theodrada was given an honored place in the princely household as a new lady-in-waiting for the Anglo-Saxon Caesarina Æthelflæd. Wichmann did still have reason to be unhappy at his new overlords besides their simply besting him on the field of war, after all; Leo intimidated the Obotrites into fleeing from Nordalbingia just by parading the still-considerable power and majesty of his legions, but declined to actually chase after Budivoj & company (and thereby recover the plunder & slaves they had stolen from Nordalbingia) due to there being other, more pressing concerns for the Romans[6].
Most obvious among those pressing concerns stood the twin sons of Bulan Khagan, who were still aggressively raiding deep into the Empire's core. Leo answered his father's summons to drive them back, leaving behind a few thousand soldiers to help garrison the Saxon castles (which he turned over to the loyal Christian chiefs as a reward); to protect Christian missions, for the Caesar did invite the Roman See (especially the Church in England) to intensify their efforts to proselytize across the whole of Saxony; and to also assist in engineering tasks, especially digging new roads to better connect Saxon settlements to one another, their Teutonic neighbors and Roman Germania. The majority of his troops accompanied him on the march south to respond to the Khazar threat, the Bavarian contingent being especially eager to expel the interlopers from their homeland, though Leo himself and a small retinue did undertake a short diversion to the capital to greet his wife, both to try to allow Theodrada to join her retinue and to conceive a son with her (this time, successfully). After Aloysius received news of how he'd resolved the Saxon problem and expressed pleasant surprise at how he managed to bring Wichmann into the fold, Leo not only expressed that he'd learned from his father but also boasted, "Have I not destroyed my foes when I make them into my friends?"
Father and son alike spent the summer and autumn contending with the Khazars. In the north, Leo defeated Mänär Tarkhan in the Battle of Deggendorf, recovering some of the booty and slaves captured by the raiders; however, Mänär managed to flee with the majority back across Pannonia & over the Danube, defeating a cavalry detachment sent to pursue him at Kamenec[7]. The Caesar meanwhile moved through the eastern Alpine passes to intercept Mänär Tarkhan, who was beginning to retreat in the face of reinforcements from both the Carthaginian exercitus and the African royal army under the latter's crown prince Bedãdéu, newly arrived at Rome in the absence of any renewed Islamic thrust against Africa this year. Leo stormed down the Via Claudia Augusta through the Rhaetic Alps and got the drop on Mänäs, who ended up being pinned against the oncoming Africans by the northern Roman forces and promptly lost the 'Battle of the Princes' near Vicenza; unlike his twin, he barely escaped the disaster with his life and with hardly any of the loot he had collected, certainly not the enslaved Italians or South Slavs who Leo released to return to their homes. As for the Augustus, Bulan continued to evade him (while applying just enough pressure to keep him from pulling away to deal with the twins himself) for most of the year, but Aloysius II did ultimately manage to draw Bulan's host into a major engagement at Philippi and dealt them a resounding defeat there. Alas, he was unable to close the trap he'd planned out, and thus the victory was not as decisive as intended. Compounding Bulan's misfortunes, his mother Irene – from whom he derived his blood claim to the crown of the Roman Orient – died at the age of 74 in the winter of this year.
Mänäs Tarkhan struggling to flee past the African lines of Prince Bedãdéu at the Battle of the Princes
While the Romans subjugated the Continental Saxons and got some hits in against the Khazars, they continued to lose ground to the Muslims. Nusrat al-Din seemed unstoppable as he pushed ever forward against the weakening defenses of the Romans and their federates on this front, while the Ghassanids in turn did not even dare face him on the field any longer. The Banu Kalb tried to pool their remaining strength with the Banu Ghassan, who in turn essentially absorbed them as vassals, but even combined they were clearly horribly outmatched by their Islamic counterparts; they, the Bulgars, and the tatters of the Antiochene exercitus could barely slow Al-Din down. In this year Aleppo and Hama both fell before the power of Islam in rapid succession, driving the aforementioned Ghassanids into the great fortresses of Upper Mesopotamia and further reducing the Roman presence in Syria to just Antioch & its environs, and Berytus (known to the Arabs as Beirut) also surrendered, ending Rome's presence in Phoenicia altogether. As it became clear that city was Al-Din's next objective, Aloysius felt an acute pressure to try to bring hostilities with the Khazars to an end, thereby freeing him to turn east and counter the Islamic threat which had managed to seize nearly the entirety of the old Diocese of the Orient.
Come 735, the Caesar received some good news. The first was that the reconstruction of the Augustus-era fort of Treva, which would serve as a wedding gift to and new capital for the newly-minted dux Wichmann of Nordalbingia, was proceeding apace; in due time, the port town which grew around it would be named 'Hamburg' by the locals. The second was that Æthelflæd had given birth to their second child, and it was a son this time – one duly baptized as Theodosius, once more continuing the tradition of alternating through the names used by Eastern and Western Emperors among the heirs of the Aloysian dynasty (while the Theodosians survived a good deal longer in the Orient than in the Occident, the first Theodosius did after all hail from Hispania). However Leo had no time to take his son into his hands, as the ongoing war with the Khazars called him to the Danube.
Another development in the Occident which took place this year, and not one particularly positive for the Romans, also marked the first entry of the Danish people into Roman histories as something more than a curious footnote. Over the preceding centuries the Danes of Sjælland had filled the vacuum left by the migration of the Angles and Jutes to the old provinces of the Roman Empire in northern Britannia, and by the mid-eighth century they had come to establish a kingdom of some renown (indeed, the only organized Nordic kingdom of any significant size at this point in history) around the Kattegat complete with well-situated trading ports such as Aros[9], Ribe and Heiðabýr[10]. It was from the last and newest of these that their king in this day – a prudent and watchful man named Holger who belonged to the Skjöldungar (or 'Scylding') clan which claimed descent from Odin the All-Father himself – observed the Romans subjugating his Saxon neighbors to the south, and with the enthusiastic aid of the latter's cousins from across the western sea no less. Fearing Denmark would be the next target for Roman encroachment, King Holger began construction on a great network of earthworks & fortifications spanning the neck of Jutland, building on the works raised up by his ancestors to keep the Continental Saxons at bay: to this defensive line he aptly gave the name 'Danavirki', or 'earthworks of the Danes', though the Romans themselves felt more amusement than anything at the thought that such crude defenses could possibly stop them if they ever did feel like marching further north.
The Danish king Holger and his family observe the construction of their Danavirki, the so-called 'great wall of the Danes', on their new border with the Holy Roman Empire
Now with the Roman Caesar marching to join his father and bringing with him an entire second army, it began to dawn on Bulan Khagan that his mother may not have given him the best advice. He attempted to leave the Macedonian theater to engage Leo in the lands of the Sclaveni, but then came Aloysius' turn to pin him down with an attack from behind; while the Khazars won the Battle of Velissos[8], not only did they fail to inflict significant casualties on the Emperor's own army, but they lost valuable time and ended up in a position where the army of the Caesar was fast closing in on them from the northwest while that of the Augustus was rallying to the southeast. The twins and their combined forces (really just the tattered survivors of the attack on Italy in Mänäs' case) had swung through Khazar-occupied Dacia and over the lower Danube to reinforce their father, but even so they could not relieve the difficulty of his situation.
It was in that context that Bulan first offered terms to the Romans. He expressed a willingness to renounce his claim on the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire, which clearly wasn't going to happen between his mother's death and his inability to break through into Thessalonica or Constantinople, but insisted on keeping all of his territorial gains, which extended to some territories on the Roman side of the Danube – bridgeheads which would be useful for a future contention with the Romans, no doubt. Naturally, Aloysius bluntly rebuffed these terms and pressed on with a pursuit of the Khazar horde as it sought to extricate itself from Roman Thrace & Macedonia. Linking his forces with those of his son, the Holy Roman Emperor did ultimately manage to force an engagement with the retreating Khazars at Nicopolis, coming up on the treacherous invaders before they could move all of their forces over the Danube. Mänäs Tarkhan, eager to redeem himself after the disastrous conclusion of his earlier Italian campaign, fought a ferocious rearguard action to buy his father and twin time to escape with the majority of the Khazar army (down to some 20,000 men at this point) and ultimately succeeded in this objective – at the cost of his own life and that of all 7,000 Khazar warriors who stayed with him.
The final charge of Mänäs Tarkhan against overwhelming Roman forces in the woods outside Nicopolis
The temptation to pursue Bulan Khagan over the Danube must have been overpowering, given that he had not only upended the profitable decades-long alliance between his people and the Holy Roman Empire but also done considerable damage to lands as distant as Italy & Bavaria and still sat upon Gepidia and the Tauric Chersonese. However, the situation in the Middle East was approaching a crisis point and a response to it could no longer be delayed on the part of Aloysius II. It was in 735 that the Caliph Hashim joined Nusrat al-Din outside Antioch, laying siege to that last great Roman metropolis east of the Bosphorus, and while the Romans could keep the city supplied by sea the Muslims not only constantly tested its defenses with their own siege engines & probing attacks but also did not limit themselves to just one target. Ghazw mounted extensive chevauchées deep into Bulgarian Cilicia, Greek Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, taking full advantage of the Roman military presence in the East having been effectively crippled over the last few years, and other war parties also kept the remaining Ghassanids & Kalbi trapped in their Upper Mesopotamian fortresses, checking every attempt they made to sally forth and needle the besiegers of Antioch.
On the other side of the world, Eluédh of Annún had weathered enough grim winters to conclude that the kingdom of the Pilgrims had to find warmer weather & more fertile ground, or else they wouldn't survive the century. Since the Irish had made sailing south to new and more pleasant lands impossible, he instead assembled additional ranging parties of the most intrepid and desperate voyagers among the settlers, supported by Pelagian missionaries and friendly Wilderman or half-Wilderman guides, and sent them west- and southward to chart out additional lands for settlement which would hopefully be much more hospitable than those presently occupied by the British exiles. Over the coming months and years, those who survived reported back with news of a vast and verdant woodland bounded by great lakes where the weather was slightly less bitterly cold and the Wildermen did not live as wandering nomadic hunters & gatherers, but actually settled down in farming villages.
This was fantastic news to Eluédh, who urged the movement of British settlers and their families further inland (though he did want to keep a presence in eastern Annún, where copper & good rock were easy to find, obviously nobody could eat those for sustenance). He also sought to shore up contacts with the settled Wildermen in hopes of not only absorbing their villages into his kingdom, but also acquiring easier crops to grow on a large scale than the weed-like New World 'crops' they'd encountered so far which could barely sate their hunger or European crops which struggled to take root in the poor and oft-frozen soil of their trans-Atlantic refuge. Not that the first Pilgrim King could have foreseen it at the time, but by directing his people's expansion south- and westward into the land of Great Lakes, he also set them on a collision course with the northernmost of the great Wilderman civilizations which were beginning to form on the other side of said lakes in this century…
Among other tricks they would pick up from their indigenous neighbors to the south, the New World Britons also adopted the design of the Wilderman longhouse for their own use
In the early winter of 736, as it became apparent that Bulan still had enough troops to effectively contest the crossings of the Danube while the Muslims continued to apply enormous pressure to the Roman East, Aloysius II grudgingly agreed to reopen peace talks. While he theoretically could have defeated Bulan's remaining forces in the field, the Emperor had correctly surmised that doing so would (barring a miraculous stroke of luck) cost him enough that he wouldn't be able to push the Muslims back from Antioch. Ultimately the Augustus and the Khagan could not actually reach a lasting peace – Bulan was too unwilling to give up his limited territorial gains or the rather less limited collection of booty and slaves he & his son had managed to get over the Danube – but they did manage to settle for a few years' truce, which played to both men's advantage: the Romans got time to deal with the Muslims, and the Khazars got time to divert reinforcements toward the Danubian front and reorder their remaining forces.
Aloysius assured his Slavic and Germanic federates (including the Gepids, whose territory remained under Khazar occupation for the time being) that he would restart hostilities and get revenge for Bulan's treachery against them all in short order – he himself was still positively seething at the damage his cousin had done, not just directly to his southeastern European domains but also indirectly by opening the Levant up to Islamic conquest – but first, he needed to put a stop to the Muslim invasion before Antioch fell. With this temporary ceasefire in place, the Roman army moved across the Hellespont and hurried on toward what remained of their presence in the Levant, where Hashim and Nusrat al-Din were still investing their Syrian bastion. In response to the recent developments in the northwest and the failure of their most recent assault on Antioch's defenses, old Al-Din resolved to march against the Romans with 30,000 of their men, leaving Hashim to keep the Antiochenes under siege with 8,000; he believed that he could once more eclipse his master in prestige if he were the one to deal a decisive defeat to the Romans, and that the force left behind was insufficient to force Antioch to surrender (thereby allowing Hashim to once more claim credit for taking a major city, as he had previously done with Jerusalem).
Aloysius and Leo confronted Al-Din's army in Bulgar territory, specifically near old Hierapolis on the Cilician Plain[11], almost immediately northwest of Antioch itself. Since both armies were roughly even in size (the Roman one having been reinforced on the road by newly-raised Anatolian Greek recruits and Caucasian troops freed up with the cession of Khazar attacks on Georgia & Armenia), the resulting engagement promised to be the bloodiest and fiercest of the Emperor's career yet, comparable to the titanic clashes which his grandfather and namesake was famous for. The Romans formed up into three divisions: the Augustus took command of the right, the Caesar held the center and the Armenian king Gosdantin ('Constantine') Mamikonian was assigned to lead the left, which also included the majority of the Caucasian reinforcements. Al-Din divided his own host into four, keeping a substantial reserve force hidden in the rear to seal the trap he was hoping to spring against the Romans.
The Battle of Hierapolis commenced with an exchange of missiles between the Roman and Arab skirmishers, after which the latter retreated back to ward their lines in a hurry with Leo's division surging forth in pursuit. This had proceeded according to Al-Din's design (as far as he could tell), and he closed the trap by directing the vast majority of his army to encircle and destroy the Roman central division. However, in so doing he had walked into the Romans' own trap: Leo had hoped to repeat the victories he'd won against the Saxons by baiting them into attacking him after seemingly placing himself in an unfavorable position while keeping unseen reserves of his own nearby, but on a larger scale, and advised his father to let him pull the Muslims into attacking him en masse while exposing their own flanks to the actual offensive thrusts of the Roman left and right wings. The Roman center was accordingly comprised of the most trusted veteran heavy infantrymen and knights of the imperial army, so that it would be able to withstand and pin down the full fury of the Islamic adversary while Aloysius' and Gosdantin's contingents maneuvered around them.
Roman knights assembling for battle on the Cilician Plain
The trap would have worked swimmingly and quite possibly led to the destruction of Al-Din's army had it not been for the Turkic generalissimo's fourth reserve division, which now had to be committed to the fight not to seal their encirclement of the Romans but to break up the Romans' own trap around the main body of the Islamic war-host. Both sides had gone in with plans to set up a battle of annihilation against the other, but those plans had not survived the earliest stages of the fighting and so they now found themselves fighting a furious, roughly evenly matched and certainly extremely sanguinary engagement on the Cilician Plain instead. If any benefit could be found to a dramatic engagement of this scale, it was that it gave many heroes on both sides the opportunity to distinguish themselves.
Standing out on the Roman side were the Saxon brothers Ethelhard and Frithuwald (the latter of whom died taking an Islamic lance intended for Leo Caesar, removing any lingering Roman doubts about continued Saxon loyalty), Bedãdéu of Africa (who was sufficiently skilled at arms to get through the entire battle unscathed), the Georgian prince Giorgi 'the Glorious' (who succeeded, and immediately avenged, his father King Gurgen on the battlefield after the latter was struck down by an Arab arrow to the eye) and his Croat counterpart Zvonimir Svetoslavić (noted for leading his contingent, placed under the division of Aloysius II, in pulling back from and charging into the Muslim ranks no fewer than six times). On the Islamic side Al-Din's youngest personal ward of fighting age – another ghulam named Mansur al-Din – won fame for fatally wounding the Frankish king Childéric IV and then challenging his nephew, the heir to the Holy Roman Empire to a duel before being separated by the tide of combat, while the Caliph's brother-in-law Farid ibn Asfar of the Shahanshahvands proved that some of the valor of the long-fallen Sassanids still survived in his Persian contingent and the originally Coptic ghulam Imad al-Din became the first Islamic slave-soldier of Christian birth to earn a mention in the histories by ably taking up command of the reserve division after his commander was accidentally thrown from the saddle & broke his neck.
Ultimately, this great battle was settled by nothing less than the demise of Nusrat al-Din himself: in an attempt to break the stalemate the old general and his bodyguards charged into the thick of combat to rally the men for one great push, but age had been less kind to him & his once-formidable martial stature than it had been to the first Aloysius. Soon after beginning to truly push the Romans' left and right wings back under re-intensified pressure, he was first wounded by a spear-thrust from one of Leo's paladins, and though he killed that first attacker, he was then injured again (fatally this time) after his horse was killed and fell atop him in death. Catastrophe was averted only by the work of Mansur al-Din and Farid ibn Asfar, who respectively fought a difficult rearguard action to keep the Romans off their backs and managed an orderly retreat back to the south and over the Pyramos River[12], which the Arabs called the Jihun. Though victorious, the Romans themselves were left so badly bloodied (having suffered some 6,000 dead & wounded, or about a fifth of their army, compared to the Arabs' 9,000) and in such disarray that they could not effectively pursue the retreating Arabs themselves.
The best-laid strategies of both sides' commanders having failed to survive collision with each other early on, by its conclusion the Battle of Hierapolis had degenerated into a massive, swirling melee which left about 15,000 men dead in total
Now most monarchs would have panicked at the news of such a serious defeat and the loss of their greatest general, but to Hashim, the circumstances of the Battle of Hierapolis presented nothing short of a miraculous opportunity: his nearest rival for power over the whole Caliphate had been killed by an external enemy, which by turn was now left utterly exhausted in victory, and he still had the resources to hold his gains in the western Levant. When the weary Aloysius II, who still had half his mind on the resumption of hostilities with the Khazars in the short term, approached Antioch, the Caliph greeted him in a friendly manner and opened negotiations for a more lasting peace with him. Though Hashim obviously insisted on holding Syria & Palestine, he offered to not only back off from Antioch & the Mesopotamian fortresses but also to release the slaves taken in recent raids on Anatolia and the Caucasus (though pointedly not to return any of the inanimate loot nor slaves acquired in earlier conquests & raids, who in any case had long since been dispersed to slave-markets elsewhere); to forbid additional raids into Roman territory for a good ten years; and to relax the jizya on Ionian Christians within the Caliphate, including those who had just come under his rule. He also pledged not to harass any Christian who wished to move back over the new border, nor to force them to stay.
If Aloysius refused and insisted on trying to reconquer the rest of the Levant, he would be welcome to try against the surviving Muslim army, whose still-somewhat-considerable ranks Hashim paraded around Antioch. With the Khazar threat still looming and the Muslims apparently still strong enough to maintain an intimidating defensive posture, the Emperor resolved not to take his chances and potentially get bogged down in the Mideast for longer than his truce with Bulan would hold, and accepted these terms. Thus it could be said that the Muslims were the great victor of the Roman-Khazar war, and the Hashemites in particular: with this coup Hashim had not only managed to get rid of Nusrat al-Din in a manner in which he could not possibly be blamed (and indeed he would take the lead in honoring the latest great 'martyr' in the struggle against Rūm), but also to do what not even his great-great-grandfather Qasim ibn Muhammad, the very Son of the Prophet himself, could not – conquer, and then actually hold, Syria & Palestine for the first time in Islamic history – and certainly Al-Din was too dead to contest his claiming all the credit for pulling a significant victory from the jaws of dire defeat. For this triumph the fourth Caliph would be hailed as the first Hashemite mujaddid, or 'renewer', not only of Islam's fortunes after a very rough start to the eighth century but also of the Banu Hashim's legacy.
====================================================================================
[1] Minden.
[2] Stara Gradiška.
[3] Pons Sonti – Gradisca d'Isonzo.
[4] Bitola.
[5] Berat.
[6] Historically, Charlemagne had to ally with the Obotrites to finally crush the Continental Saxons once & for all. Here, not only is the HRE operating from a position of even greater strength than the Carolingians but the Arbogastings/Aloysians have already been influencing the Continental Saxons and occasionally thrashing them in battle for centuries (well before actually seizing the purple), so there was no need for them to form the Obotrite alliance to achieve their final victory.
[7] Szombathely.
[8] Veles.
[9] Aarhus.
[10] Hedeby.
[11] Kırmıtlı.
[12] The Ceyhan River.
Well its a pity the Saxon's went down in such a brutal way, although virtually inevitable given the nature of their foes and the Danes are right to start bolstering their border. Its cost the empire however as the conquest of Saxony diverted forces that could have been used to stem the Khazars earlier or similarly countering the Muslims more successfully. Its surprising given the planned treachery of Leo that Wichmann finally trusted him enough to surrender even if he had to give up everything important to him.
I do remember reading that the OTL slaughter of the Saxons was a possible trigger for the Viking age raids to begin. It left the assorted Nordic people as the last real 'pagan' people in the region knowing their facing a bitterly hostile threat and also possibly some of the early raiders being surviving Saxon's who had fled north. Given how powerful and aggressive the empire is now this however may not happen here, especially. Also their route to the far west is already occupied by the Irish. Possibly there might be a greater move east but that would run into a still powerful Khazar empire and the OTL Rus, despite support from the OTL eastern empire struggled against horse nobles.
Good that the exiles are moving south. It is their only real hope of surviving in the longer term, although it means that their basically given up on further exiles escaping from Britain. Sounds like their going to be clashing with a powerful local state - would it be the Mississippi culture component of the Mound Builders?
The Khazars are blooded and have earned the enmity of the emperor but their core territories are of some distance from the empire's territories and would be difficult and dangerous for the empire to reach. That could raise questions about what Aloysius decides to do.
I do remember reading that the OTL slaughter of the Saxons was a possible trigger for the Viking age raids to begin. It left the assorted Nordic people as the last real 'pagan' people in the region knowing their facing a bitterly hostile threat and also possibly some of the early raiders being surviving Saxon's who had fled north. Given how powerful and aggressive the empire is now this however may not happen here, especially. Also their route to the far west is already occupied by the Irish. Possibly there might be a greater move east but that would run into a still powerful Khazar empire and the OTL Rus, despite support from the OTL eastern empire struggled against horse nobles.
Good that the exiles are moving south. It is their only real hope of surviving in the longer term, although it means that their basically given up on further exiles escaping from Britain. Sounds like their going to be clashing with a powerful local state - would it be the Mississippi culture component of the Mound Builders?
The Khazars are blooded and have earned the enmity of the emperor but their core territories are of some distance from the empire's territories and would be difficult and dangerous for the empire to reach. That could raise questions about what Aloysius decides to do.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Hashim seems like a prudent ruler, with fresh conquest and calm borders he has good opportunity to solidify his position as actual ruler and co-opting Al-Din's network, though he will probably have to deal with some who might think the can take Al-Din's role of holding his strings.
Next round between the Empire and Khazars is imminent, but Aloysious must make sure border with Caliphate is strong enough for Hashim not to be tempted with an easy land grab.
Next round between the Empire and Khazars is imminent, but Aloysious must make sure border with Caliphate is strong enough for Hashim not to be tempted with an easy land grab.
Obodrites in OTL helped Charlemagne,but never become christians - or,to be precise,only their kings become
Which was good pretext for saxons to conqer them in OTL.
Funny thing - it could happen here,too.
Smart Caliph - he could wait for new roman-khazar war.
And stupid Khazars who are now fighting for muslims.
Danes - they would not invade WRE,but both slavic people and irish are fair target.WRE could use it as pretext to take over both slavic tribes and irish.
Britons in america - they would win eventually,and what next? live on lakes,or go to Pacyfic?
In the same time - it is matter of time till irish go South and meet Toltec,africans could go to Carribean,too.
Which was good pretext for saxons to conqer them in OTL.
Funny thing - it could happen here,too.
Smart Caliph - he could wait for new roman-khazar war.
And stupid Khazars who are now fighting for muslims.
Danes - they would not invade WRE,but both slavic people and irish are fair target.WRE could use it as pretext to take over both slavic tribes and irish.
Britons in america - they would win eventually,and what next? live on lakes,or go to Pacyfic?
In the same time - it is matter of time till irish go South and meet Toltec,africans could go to Carribean,too.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
To be fair to the Romans, the Continental Saxons were up to their share of shady tricks in this final round too. And to also be fair to the Saxons, they didn't really have a choice since the overwhelming disparity in power made defeating the Romans the honorable way impossible, not that the underhanded way worked out in the end anyway. I pictured Leo's conquest being less bloody than Charlemagne's was historically - as the footnotes indicate, the Arbogastings/Aloysians had a ~200 year head start with which to convert large numbers of Saxons & get them aligned with Rome, so much so that Wichmann's rising was more of a desperate last-minute gambit to overturn the table before the Romans & Christian Saxons could set down the cake (which they'd already finished baking) and eat it - but, once that last domino started falling, no campaign of conquest was ever going to be entirely bloodless & clean. Such is the way of wars.
My understanding is that the Viking Age was primarily driven by a demographic boom in Scandinavia, itself caused by the Little Ice Age of Late Antiquity coming to an end ~200 years after the devastating volcanic eruption of 536. The Romans can't do a whole lot about the weather or Norse fertility rates, so there's not much reason to expect that to change ITL. That said, this HRE is of course able to throw around a lot more weight than the fractured Carolingian kingdoms of RL history, so while I don't want to spoil too much about the Vikings' future, I can say that it would definitely be the smarter & less dangerous play for them to seek out new frontiers far away from any area of great Roman influence (much less direct control). It might not be as immediately profitable but there'd be less risk of annoying future Emperors, who otherwise would be occupied with the much bigger threats presented by the Muslims & now the Khazars, into thinking they ought to go for the 'Normannicus' achievement that way.
As for the New World, the Mississippian peoples are indeed the best positioned out of all the North American natives of this time to get a major civilization going. Cahokia (neighboring modern St. Louis) was actually already settled by around 600 AD IIRC, they just haven't gotten around to erecting their famous mounds yet (that started around the 9th century). However, the settled Wildermen the Annun Britons have started interacting with this past chapter are actually the more advanced Algonquian peoples who have recently come to settle directly around the Great Lakes (Ojibwe, Ottawa, Mississauga, etc.) - even the northernmost of the aforementioned Mississippians are living a bit further south and west.
As to everything else, especially how the Romans intend to deal with the Khazars - that is a definite spoiler. But not one you'll have to wait a very long time to uncover, their anti-Khazar strategy will be an important element introduced in just a few more chapters.
My understanding is that the Viking Age was primarily driven by a demographic boom in Scandinavia, itself caused by the Little Ice Age of Late Antiquity coming to an end ~200 years after the devastating volcanic eruption of 536. The Romans can't do a whole lot about the weather or Norse fertility rates, so there's not much reason to expect that to change ITL. That said, this HRE is of course able to throw around a lot more weight than the fractured Carolingian kingdoms of RL history, so while I don't want to spoil too much about the Vikings' future, I can say that it would definitely be the smarter & less dangerous play for them to seek out new frontiers far away from any area of great Roman influence (much less direct control). It might not be as immediately profitable but there'd be less risk of annoying future Emperors, who otherwise would be occupied with the much bigger threats presented by the Muslims & now the Khazars, into thinking they ought to go for the 'Normannicus' achievement that way.
As for the New World, the Mississippian peoples are indeed the best positioned out of all the North American natives of this time to get a major civilization going. Cahokia (neighboring modern St. Louis) was actually already settled by around 600 AD IIRC, they just haven't gotten around to erecting their famous mounds yet (that started around the 9th century). However, the settled Wildermen the Annun Britons have started interacting with this past chapter are actually the more advanced Algonquian peoples who have recently come to settle directly around the Great Lakes (Ojibwe, Ottawa, Mississauga, etc.) - even the northernmost of the aforementioned Mississippians are living a bit further south and west.
As to everything else, especially how the Romans intend to deal with the Khazars - that is a definite spoiler. But not one you'll have to wait a very long time to uncover, their anti-Khazar strategy will be an important element introduced in just a few more chapters.
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Romans could not ally with muslims,but buddhist Khazars are another animal.They could change sides and come back ro alliance with romans.
Or,just ask another nomads for come and help.
Maybe wait for vikings to take over Kiev? in OTL,those vikings finished off Khazars.
Or,even better,hire vikings now for taking Kiev.Town there should arleady exist.
Or,just ask another nomads for come and help.
Maybe wait for vikings to take over Kiev? in OTL,those vikings finished off Khazars.
Or,even better,hire vikings now for taking Kiev.Town there should arleady exist.
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I agree that by this time the Saxons had a pretty much hopeless position, although the sheer amount of resistance that they showed to the conquest demonstrates that they were still a substantial force in their own lands. However its a war that the empire could have avoided if it had been less hostile to them and it has suffered from that distraction. Also its an example that has been noticed by others, most noticeably the Danes.
That is probably the primary factor but that's not too far ahead and other issues could have an influence as well. The sheer power and size of the empire would make invasions of it daunting although a lot would depend on relative naval technology and raids could still be attractive if/when it comes to conflict. [Which is likely given the attitude to non-Christians by the empire which makes peaceful contacts very difficult.
However agree that if/when the surge comes its more likely that the primary directions will be away from the empire, at least unless the latter suffers serious internal problems which sounds unlikely in the near term in TTL. This could mean Britain and Ireland and also possibly taking over control of Iceland while any peaceful contact with the empire will mean that they would know of the existence of at least some substantial lands to the far west. If 'Viking' naval technology has the flexibility and advantage it seems to have had OTL this could be an option for a lot more settlers than OTL and likely some lasting presence in N America. Which would complicate the politics in that area as well as the reactions of others players, such as an undistracted empire or possibly also the Britons.
The other option for those further east is a greater presence in what became Russia, or at least its northern parts although how far this could go depends on what happens with the Khazars and any successor nomadic state in the region.
OK thanks for clarifying. What was the technological level of those cultures, probably especially in terms of metaullagy? Famously iron seems to have been unknown in the Americans prior to 1492 and I think also bronze to any great degree so that is a significant limitation in their abilities. Plus a lot might depend on how far ahead of the settlers have the assorted pandemics spread?
Have to see what you come up with.
In OTL,when white people come,indians there still used copper knives.
I even read article about some culture from 600AD which made bronze spearheads,unfortunatelly forget title,name and where exactly they lived.
But... @Circle of Willis could made them where he need them!
I even read article about some culture from 600AD which made bronze spearheads,unfortunatelly forget title,name and where exactly they lived.
But... @Circle of Willis could made them where he need them!
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
On the subject of Native American metallurgy, @ATP is right that copper-working was known to the Mississippians at least. They left behind a good number of copper artifacts from Florida to the Midwest. The Great Lakes Algonquians seem to have been more primitive, comparable to sedentary Neolithic farmers and making use of stone or wooden weapons & tools (example). IIRC bronze was more-so the Mesoamericans' and Andeans' thing, alongside gold of course.
I read about Incas commanders using bronze axes capable of cutting spanish helmet in twice.
But only them - dunno if they could not made more,or gave only to commanders for some reasons.
Also read about their elite units getting some kind of copper armour,but not bronze weapons.
Speaking about armour - indians near Big Lakes used wood&bone armour,but dropped it after they faced muskets.
Forget which tribe,unfortunatelly.
737-740: Germanicus, Part II
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
737 was a busy year for the Romans, even though they had just reached a peace settlement with the Muslims and the truce with the Khazars was still holding. Aloysius II's first order of business was to leave enough troops behind to garrison what remained of the Levantine frontier against the Hashemite Caliphate, in addition to dispatching reinforcements to Georgia alongside that kingdom's new monarch Giorgi II and the Armenian king Gosdantin in preparation for a secondary offensive against the Khazars' Caucasian holdings once the ceasefire with his cousin inevitably broke down sometime in the next few years. After completing these tasks and also overseeing the resettlement of the captives released from slavery & returned by Hashim per the terms of the Treaty of Antioch, Aloysius moved back over the Hellespont and to the Danubian frontier, which he worked to reinforce in anticipation of the resumption of hostilities with the Khazars.
However, Leo would not be joining him on the front line, for the demise of the childless Frankish king Childéric IV at the Battle of Hierapolis had left his kingdom's succession in a vacuum – one which both the Aloysians and lesser Merovingian cadet branches were now scrambling to fill. The Roman Caesar was his heir, legally and by proximity of blood, on account of both his will stating as much and being the eldest son of his sister the Augusta Himiltrude: unlike the Stilichians' failed rush-job at usurping the Visigothic crown which set off the disastrous Aetas Turbida for them last century, this was a development representing the fruition of almost 400 years' worth of carefully cultivated ties between the Aloysians and the Merovingians, dating back to the first Arbogast and his cousin Théodomer I (the grandfather of Merovech, namesake of the latter Frankish dynasty). Yet just as Wichmann 'der Widukind' had emerged in a last-ditch attempt by the Saxons to prevent Rome from plucking the fruit which it had grown in their land for 200 years, so too now did rival Merovingians move to defend their patrimony against the Aloysians whose scheme to acquire it for themselves was finally coming to fruition.
Aloysius and Leo were expecting a fight, so the latter marched back to Francia with not only his late uncle & mentor's body in tow but also no fewer than 15,000 soldiers: including those Frankish warriors who had accompanied Childéric IV and now raised the Caesar up on their shields as the new King of the Franks out of respect for his will, to be sure, but mostly imperial legions – the Emperor and his heir did not think it wise to involve any of the other federates in this conflict if they could avoid it, for they doubted that incorporating the kingdom of the Franks into the Empire directly and thereby empowering the overlord of them all was on any of said federates' agenda. Opposing them, no fewer than three Merovingian cousins of the late king had declared the Aloysian succession to the crown of their ancestors illegal on grounds of ancient Salic Law (revisions & a pragmatic sanction in the lifetime of Childéric notwithstanding) forbidding inheritance by or through women, and instead claimed rule over Francia for themselves: Théodebald in Orléans, Childebert in Soissons and Dagobert in Reims.
Dagobert is raised up on a shield and acclaimed King of the Franks by his warriors soon after news of Childéric IV's demise reached Reims, in keeping with Frankish tradition
The bad news for Leo was that the three of them came to control large parts of Francia (the capital of Lutèce, where Leo had spent most of his adolescent years, being the largest exception in this regard); the good news was that they could not agree on who between them should be King of the Franks, and had already come to blows by the time he crossed back into the kingdom in the autumn. Now by this time, generally speaking the Salian Frankish nobility had so thoroughly Romanized and intermixed with their Gallo-Roman neighbors that they'd become indistinguishable from one another, as had also occurred with (for example) their Ripuarian cousins around the imperial court in Trévere or the Gothic nobility & their own Hispano-Roman neighbors in Hispania – so their choices in loyalty depended much less on their ethnic background and more on whether they believed in the legitimacy of Leo's claim or that a Merovingian agnate (even if not the closest blood relative of the late Childéric IV) must always rule the Salii, and whether they thought they had more to gain from direct Aloysian rule or continued Merovingian autonomy.
Acting quickly before the onset of winter could end his campaigning season before it even began, Leo committed to an immediate attack on the claimant Théodebald, whose lands laid furthest to the south and were the closest to his own forward base at Yèvron[1]. Under the misguided belief that the Caesar had arrived with a third of the men he actually had at his disposal, fueled by imperfect scouting and false intelligence offered up by spies in Leo's service, Théodebald left Orléans with 6,000 warriors to engage the imperial army at Blois, south of his seat. The resulting battle was an easy victory for Leo: the Merovingian claimant tried to retreat upon realizing how badly outmatched he actually was, only to be captured in Leo's immediate charge and consequently forced to order the rest of his army to surrender. After gaining entry to Orléans, Leo wintered there while the remaining Merovingian claimants set a time & place for their own great battle in a bid to quickly determine who between them should lead the Frankish resistance. Not to be left behind by his brother, it was also around the Christmas of 737 that the younger imperial prince Ioannes was installed as cardinal-priest of the Basilica of Saint Sabina in Rome, doubtless with an eye on eventually ascending to the Chair of Saint Peter in several decades' time.
Caesar Leo surrounded by loyal Frankish guards and courtiers on the eve of his quest to assert his rights to his uncle's throne
While the Aloysians were preparing to contend with the Khazars once more or else working to bring their remaining Frankish kindred firmly under their rule once & for all, and the Khazars too were making their own preparations to do battle with the Romans again, their Hashemite enemies to the east were busy digesting their new conquests. The Caliph Hashim had no intention of risking the loss of Syria & Palestine so soon after snatching them away, which if it had occurred would have been the second time such conquests had proven ephemereal in Islamic history. Instead, he parlayed his relaxation of the jizya on the shoulders of Ionian Christians (one of the measures which he agreed to in his negotiations with Aloysius II) into a conciliatory measure to get his newest subjects on board with peaceable living under Islamic rule, while also appointing primarily the local heretics – Miaphysites and Nestorians alike – to high regional offices and opening 'al-Sham' and 'Filastin' both to mass Arab settlement, made all the easier by the migration of no small number of Ghassanids and Kalbi to rejoin their kin in Mesopotamia (and the submission & conversion of those who chose to stay), to entrench long-term Islamic rule.
Since Hashim did not have to return any plunder to the Romans outside of the last batches of slaves captured in Nusrat al-Din's far-reaching raids, after paying off his warriors, the Caliph began to invest those riches he kept for himself into two great projects which had long occupied his mind. The first, of course, was a grand religious monument on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which he intended to both express gratitude to Allah for finally delivering the holy city into the hands of His Prophet's lineage and to signify the permanence of Islamic rule over Filastin: thanks to the great round dome surmounting it (then made of wood), it would naturally be named the 'Dome of the Rock'. The second was the construction of a massive private library attached to his palace in Kufa, to be filled with books (covering a wide array of subjects from astrology to history to medicine) gathered both from the western provinces conquered from the Holy Roman Empire and from the eastern provinces which comprised his wife's Persian homeland (whatever had survived the ravages of the Eftals and Turks anyway).
The Caliph brought a large number of artisans from the formerly Roman Levant to further beautify his capital with materials like Lebanese cedars, and dragged along with them scholars and translators. Becoming a translator of Greek or Latin works into Arabic at the new 'House of Wisdom' (Ara.: Bayt al-Hikmah) could be a lucrative job even for Ionian Christians, despite the Hashemites' generally chilly attitude toward them, so it was one sought out by no small number of learned men from the former Syria & Palaestina who might otherwise be lacking in career prospects, feeling the weight of the jizya tax on their shoulders, and were unwilling or unable to move to Roman-controlled territory for whatever reason. For having demonstrated both great scholarly interest and an equally greatly prudent approach to politics, Hashim ensured he would go down in history as Al-Hakim – 'the Wise' – and indeed the Islamic answer to Constantine VI, the previous Holy Roman Emperor who also bore the same nickname in the tongues of the Occident.
The inquisitive and scholarly-inclined Caliph Hashim al-Hakim sought to collect knowledge, and the knowledgeable, on everything that can be known to man into a single grand library in Kufa. One wonders how he might have gotten along with the second Aloysian Emperor if the latter had lived longer, and if they hadn't headed rival empires & creeds
The early winter of 738 saw the dueling Merovingian claimants engage in their pre-planned battle to determine who should lead and who should follow in the conflict with the Aloysians, while said Aloysian heir was content to watch from the warmth and comfort of Orléans. Childebert and Dagobert butted heads at the Battle of Rethel on February 10, and their armies (actually numbering fewer than a thousand champions & retainers each, since they had sent their levies home for the harvest & winter season) wrestled in the snow for several hours until the former yielded after being unhorsed and having a dagger held to his throat. As Dagobert was victorious, he received his cousin's submission and oath to serve him as the 'true' King of the Franks, after which they marched together against Lutèce and the Caesar. Leo, for his part, crossed the Loire once the weather permitted and received a festive welcome in the Frankish capital, where he also added the civic militia to his ranks for the coming fight, before proceeding northward to see off the final challengers to his assumption of the Frankish crown.
The two armies collided in the hills near Creil, a ways north of Lutèce, in late April. Though the Romans held a numerical advantage (fielding about 16,000 men to the insurgents' 11,000), the Franks put up a good fight, assembling into a stout shield-wall on the high ground with one of their flanks was covered by the Oise to further hinder Roman maneuvering. Leo opted to bait the rebels out of their strong defensive position with a feigned retreat, which nearly turned into a real one after the Merovingians seized the opportunity to launch an all-out counterattack downhill and swept away the front ranks of the Roman army. The Caesar led his own substantial reserve into the fray, stemming the tide at the head of his paladins and reordering his cavalry to envelop the now-exposed Franks. Ultimately, the Romans won the day after fighting hard for another two hours to break the remaining Frankish resistance: they had suffered some 1,500 dead and wounded, and so did the Franks, yet not only could the smaller rebel army less easily afford such casualties but another 5,000 surrendered or simply deserted & melted away back to their homes over the ensuing rout.
The rebel Franks are routed by Leo's loyalists and legionaries at the Battle of Creil
Left with less than half of his original army and with the Romans in pursuit, Dagobert was at a loss as to how to salvage the situation and seriously considered surrendering at this point. Childebert was of no help to his cousin, since he took the opportunity to murder the latter while he was at his lowest point and then (on account of Dagobert's children still being toddlers in Reims) usurp control of the remaining Frankish rebel army. How he intended to turn the situation around and decisively secure kingship over the Franks was a mystery, presumably involving retreating to his lands in far northwestern Gaul and building a new army there, but Leo would not give the twice-traitor any chance to catch his breath, much less raise additional forces with which to challenge Rome.
Childebert was still in the middle of negotiating & issuing payments to Dagobert's captains (hoping to buy their loyalty in the aftermath of their liege's assassination) at Clermont-de-l'Oise when his sentries reported the approach of the imperial army, forcing the remaining rebels to scramble and form ranks in preparation for combat. The still-confused and demoralized Frankish rebels, by now numbering fewer than 4,000, mounted a number of uncoordinated charges against the Romans and loyal Franks, who weathered each such offensive before sweeping all resistance aside in their furious counterattack; the rebel army, half of whose loyalty to Childebert was still uncertain at best, fell apart as most of the pro-Dagobert contingents yielded or simply ran away. The last Merovingian chief still standing again escaped the site of his defeat, this time in the guise of a common soldier, but was mistaken for a bandit while foraging away from his few remaining retainers and lynched by local peasants a few days later – his killers had no idea how valuable he really was until they presented his corpse to Leo's knights, expecting a small reward, but instead receiving enough gold & silver to lift their families from poverty for having unknowingly killed the last Merovingian usurper.
Leo moved quickly to consolidate his victory, proceeding to Reims where he was anointed and crowned by that city's bishop in keeping with the tradition followed by all Frankish monarchs since the first Clovis. He incorporated the children of the vanquished Childebert & Dagobert into his household as hostages, but did his best to maintain continuity of government and reassure the Frankish elites that little would change with the future Holy Roman Emperor now ruling over them as their king; in this regard it certainly helped that the Franks were, after the Visigoths (and discounting the thoroughly assimilated Vandals), probably the second most Romanized of the federate kingdoms. While some Merovingians were banished to monasteries or outposts far away from Gaul for proving to be utterly unwilling to cooperate with the new regime, others were kept around and confirmed in their possession of estates & titles as the Caesar hoped to finish the integration of the Salian Frankish elite into the Roman power structure, including Théodebald who was titled the first hereditary Count of Blois (Comes Blesensis).
On the left, the Holy Ampulla (Gallique: 'Sainte-Ampoule') said to have been brought to the baptism of Clovis I by a dove – guided by the Holy Spirit – and miraculously filled with heavenly chrism, invariably used to anoint Frankish kings since him. On the right, Bishop Hilduin of Reims prepares the relic for use in the coronation of Leo the Roman as the first (and probably last) non-Merovingian King of the Franks in keeping with this hallowed tradition
While the Aloysians were solidifying their internal situation and the Hashemite Caliph consolidated his conquests, Bulan Khagan and the Khazars were undertaking their own measures to prepare for the resumption of hostilities. Previously he had leaned on the Bulgars whose chose to live along the middle length of the Volga rather than flee to the Danube (and eventually end up in Roman Cilicia), longtime Khazar tributaries, to contribute warriors; in this year, to further fill out his ranks he turned to the settled Jews of the mouth of Volga. From Tamantarkhan and Tana the Khagan recruited companies of heavily armored infantrymen (described as gibborim, or 'mighty ones', by the Jews themselves), foot archers, slingers and most importantly engineers – these would form an important fixture in the Khazar army as its only meaningful foot contingent and siege warfare experts. It is also from 738 onward that the overall leader of the Jewish community on the steppes (at this time Bulan's brother-in-law Joseph bar Isaac, his father having passed away from old age two years prior) would no longer be titled simply tudun, or the mayor of a city, but elteber – a vassal king in his own right, like the one for the Volga Bulgars.
Come 739, both the Romans and the Khazars continued to build up their forces in preparation for the imminent end of their ceasefire. While the Khazars acquired reinforcements from their tributaries and the Jewish community on the steppes, Aloysius II raised additional legions of his own, called back two-thirds of the troops he had sent with his son to Francia and also reached out to his Polish allies for support. When the Emperor issued his call to activate their old alliance, the Polish king Siemomysl answered and contributed a thousand-strong warband to support the Roman army as it mustered. While the Polish kingdom itself was still too small and disorganized to contribute a force of truly game-changing size and power at this point, all help was appreciated, and more importantly the Polans' presence also got the Augustus to consider Christianizing other Slavic kingdoms further to the east and bringing them into the Roman orbit – namely the Antae tribes bordering Khazaria.
Having sent the majority of his army back east to rejoin his father, Leo needed loyal supporters of his own in Francia to govern it, at least until he ascended to the purple and could finalize its annexation into the Holy Roman Empire (with the benefit of finally restoring direct Roman control over the whole of Gaul). Still, he parlayed his years living at the Frankish court and the connections he had carefully cultivated into finding such loyalists (mostly from Gallo-Roman houses and Frankish families of lesser stature than the Merovingians themselves) who would help him secure his hold on the Frankish kingdom. And while the other federate kings were set on edge by the sight of one of their number being inexorably absorbed into the Roman Empire, they were mollified by the Senatorial reforms of Aloysius II and the insistence of both him and his heir that this was a special case which would never be repeated (though most grew careful enough not to ever get as tangled up with their overlords as the Merovingians had).
Even setting aside how Leo really was Childéric IV's closest surviving male relative and had been named his heir in his will, the Aloysians were Franks by blood and related to the Merovingians; the Franks themselves had been Romanizing and strengthening their already close ties to the dynasty for 400 years; and every effort had been made to build an ironclad case for the legitimacy of Leo's ascent to the kingdom's throne (no doubt to be followed with imminent annexation when he should succeed his father). In short, the Aloysians had taken note of every mistake made by their Stilichian predecessors in regards to the Visigoth kingdom in the early seventh century and did the opposite to bring the Franks into the fold. For his success in taming both the Continental Saxons and Franks, Leo was nicknamed 'Germanicus', the second imperial heir in Roman history to be bestowed with such an honor.
A mosaic of Leo Caesar, or Léon to his Gallo-Roman and Salian Frankish subjects, during his time as the King of the (Salian) Franks
North of the Romans and the Khazars, the Danes received their first Christian embassy this year. Work on the Danevirke had not gone unnoticed by their new neighbors, and with hostilities still being limited to the periodic border skirmish on the Danube, it was in this year that the Romans decided to send a diplomatic mission to the hall of King Holger in Hleiðr[2], both to dissuade him from finishing the construction of his border defenses and to try to either convert him to Christianity directly, or to acquire his permission to preach the Gospel in Denmark. While Holger received the envoys & priests cordially and exchanged gifts with them as a token of diplomatic goodwill, he firmly rebuffed all their requests, neither believing that the Romans would either come in peace or stay at peace with his people for long nor was he willing to open his doors to religious subversion, especially after witnessing no small number of Saxons standing with the Romans against those kin of theirs who had remained faithful to the old gods. When the Roman mission returned to relay news of their failure, Aloysius was displeased but paid the news little mind, figuring the Danes could not possibly menace the Holy Roman Empire as badly as the Khazars or Muslims had done and that his successors would have plenty of time to crack such resistance on his northern frontier one way or another.
An ocean away from these goings-on, the Britons of Annún were making important inroads southwestward, toward the warmer and more fertile land they had found situated between a growing number of especially large lakes, of which their explorers counted three so far (later expanded to five): these they named after characters from the myths left behind by their Celtic forefathers – the otherworldly queen Ríenon[3] (Britt.: 'Rhiannon'), her son Peredur[4] ('Pryderi'), her second & more famed husband Ménuidan[5] ('Manawydan'), and the latter's siblings Bran[6] and Branoíne[7] ('Branwen'). Not only was it easier to grow crops in this region, but the aforementioned lakes were teeming with fish, helping to diversify the settlers' diet. King Eluédh commissioned the construction of a new capital town by the last of these lakes, which he creatively dubbed Cité-Réial[8] ('City of the King', or 'Royal City'). Most importantly he also strove to establish good relations with the Wildermen of this region, sending his own Wilderman and half-Wilderman subjects out to introduce Annún to its new neighbors, form trading ties with their villages and find sites for the construction of their own farms & towns near the Wilderman settlements, and even proselytize to them; he also invited their chiefs to visit him, or else offered to visit them at their longhouses himself, and was always ready to exchange iron or copper items to them as gifts.
Unfortunately virtually every time the Britons made new friends, many or even most of said new friends would soon perish from exposure to diseases to which they had no immunity, which continued to baffle and horrify the British as it did their Irish rivals to the southeast – they did not have the medical knowledge to understand what was happening and even if they did, they probably would not have been able to prevent it. Inevitably many of the survivors grew cold to the strangers who had inadvertantly brought not only strange gifts but also strange plagues to their land. Those survivors who did remain friendly rather than flee or even start harassing the newcomers, however, imparted vital survivalist knowledge to them: it was from the Wildermen most willing to continue trading and even living with them that the Pilgrims learned of how to tap maple trees and boil their sap down to a sweet syrup, and even more importantly, of the secret of the 'three sisters'. The Wilderman farmers of the Lakes grew corn, beans and squash (which the Britons of Annún had already gained some familiarity with as they crept up the Sant-Pélage River) together, for the three crops complemented each other – the cornstalks provided the beans with a natural trellis to climb, the beans enriched the soil and the squash's leaves kept said soil moist and free of weeds. As a set of crops which could readily be grown on a large scale in the soil of northern Aloysiana, these 'three sisters' would prove an absolute lifesaver to the kingdom of the Pelagian exiles, and indeed would serve as the crucial element which allowed them to survive (or even thrive) in the New World rather than die out in a few generations.
Maize, beans and squash: the secret ingredients to surviving in northern Aloysiana, newly revealed to the Briton Pilgrims by the sedentary Wilderman farmers of the Great Lakes
The spring of 740 brought with it the breakdown of the temporary truce between the Holy Roman Empire and the Khazar Khaganate, as both sides felt sufficiently rested to resume hostilities with a good chance at victory once more. Since the Khazars were the ones still occupying Roman territory, it fell to Aloysius II to strike first, which he did by sending an advance-guard of Gepids, Serbs, Thracian Slavs and Thessalonican Jews to secure his bridgehead over the Danube; the Gepids because their land was the largest bit of territory still under Khazar control and liberating it was the Empire's first priority for this trans-Danubian campaign, the easternmost South Slavs because they had volunteered in hopes of getting revenge for the despoiling of their frontline kingdoms, and the Jews because the Emperor wanted to see how they would perform against their own kind (now known to be marching in the Khazar ranks, not just passively supporting their nomadic overlords) & whether their performance would be enough to allay the suspicions of their allegiance still running rampant in the Empire's Balkan possessions. This force of about 4,000 managed to hold out against over twice their numbers in Khazars at the Battle of Dierna[9] long enough for the main Roman army to cross the Danube, though the boats & wooden bridges they used to do so were (due to constraints on their resources and especially time) of course not as grand or permanent a means of crossing as the Bridge of Trajan destroyed by Aurelian almost 500 years before.
After commending the survivors for their courage, Aloysius could begin the hard work of actually campaigning in Dacia. The Romans won multiple hard-fought successes in the southern woodlands, retaking the site of another long-abandoned fortress town at Drobeta soon after their crossing of the Danube and gradually securing the southern Dacian shores of the Danube over the course of this year, culminating in Aloysius' triumph over Bulan himself in the Battle of Argidava[10]. However, the hinterland mountains proved a much more difficult nut for the Romans to crack, and it was there was Bulan's own Jewish troops were able to distinguish themselves in the favorable terrain. Worsening matters, a secondary push over the middle Danube in Pannonia ended poorly in the late summer of this year at the Battle of Ziridava[11], where Mänär Tarkhan exploited the vindictive Dulebian contingent's over-eagerness to get revenge on him for sacking their homeland by baiting them into a massacre and then rolling up the rest of the Roman force in the north.
The resumption of hostilities was not limited to the Danube. Beyond the Bosphorus, marines from Constantinople and the Pontic coast attempted an amphibious attack into the Tauric Chersonese with the intention of recapturing the peninsula from the Khazars, but this operation proved abortive in the face of Khazar spies providing the defenders with advance warning and consequently determined Khazar resistance at the Battle of Güzliev[12] (as they called Kerkinitis, near which the Romans had tried to land). The Romans were more successful in the Caucasus, where they aided the Georgians under Giorgi II 'the Glorious' in routing the Khazars at the Battle of Sebastopolis[13] and ultimately reconquering Abasgia – a territory originally conceded to the Khazars by Aloysius I and Helena Karbonopsina for aiding them in fighting off the Turks and Muslims decades before – late in 740. After following up by retaking the ruined sites of Anakopia[14] & Nitica[15] shortly before the onset of winter, these Abasgian lands were annexed into Georgia as a new duchy, extending Tbilisi's governance beyond the northwesternmost limits of old Lazica for the first time (and by extension, also indirectly restoring Roman overlordship over these lands).
Giorgi II of Georgia, who earned his nickname with his heroics at the Battle of Hierapolis and now by extending Georgian rule further north than ever before, here seen outside Sebastopolis (which he rebuilt as 'Tskhoumi') with the wolf's-head helm passed down through the Khosrovianni dynasty since Vakhtang I of Iberia
Even as Aloysius II was battling the Khazars on one front, on another he was sowing the seeds for a much longer-term strategy with their containment or even ruin as the ultimate objective. Evangelizing among the Sclaveni had been a slower process than he liked, considerably slower than among the Teutons, even within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire; to change this, the Augustus had signed off on a plan proposed by some of the more innovative Greek bishops and the Carantanian clergy to translate the Gospel into the tongue of the Slavs. Of course, to do that they first had to construct a standard Slavic dialect in the first place, which they judged would be less time-consuming than translating the Good Book into every single one of the various Slavic languages so as to convert each kingdom individually – a standard that would be known to future historians as '(Old) Church Slavonic'. In addition to accelerating the conversion of both the Sclaveni already settled within imperial borders and the allied Polani, Aloysius also had two other major goals in mind: first, converting the fractious Wendish tribes living between the Elbe and the Oder; and second, converting the Antaic East Slavs and helping them organize into additional friendly kingdoms on the model of the Poles.
On the first count, Wendish disunity (those tribes were clearly not unified into a single kingdom like that of the Danes, even the Obotrites who his son Leo had already crossed paths with were actually a confederation of tribes rather than a singular people) and Polish support was thought to make conversion and eventual incorporation into the Empire a more plausible prospect than it was with the unified and wary Danes (if one group of Wends rebuffed the Ionians' approach as Holger did, they could just move on to the next village or tribe over), even if the grudges borne between the frontier Germanic federates (especially the Lombards and the newly incorporated Saxons) and said Wends might complicate things. On the second, Aloysius did not believe it was wise or even feasible to march the legions out onto the wild and untamed steppes which the Scythians, Sarmatians and Huns had once trodden over: instead, the construction of allied Slavic polities in that area would allow Rome to indirectly project power against the Khazar heartland through locals whose homes had been built right up against Khazaria, and who could be counted on to autonomously oppose the nomadic foe (who had scornfully treated them as little more than insignificant tributaries or even a 'farm' from which to gather slaves) as part of their local interests.
Of course, standardizing a singular 'Slavonic' language and translating the Gospel into it was likely to take years if not decades, and converting scores of wildly differing tribes across a massive geographic area stretching from the Pontic Steppe to the banks of the Elbe and the shores of the Adriatic to the True Faith would surely take centuries; but Aloysius was more than happy to play this (extremely) long game, considering the dividends it had finally paid off in regards to the Saxons & Franks just now. The Emperor's former hostage & pageboy Cestmir, who had by now become a man grown and succeeded his father Ctibor as the high chief of the Sorbs, was the first major Wendish chieftain to welcome Roman traders and missionaries in the region of 'Germania Slavica' which laid between the Elbe and the Oder, starting a pattern of warmer Roman-Sorbian relations (even though he was never baptised himself).
Ionian scribes hard at work on a standard 'glagolitic' alphabet, one big step in their project to make the Gospel comprehensible to the Sclaveni
While the Romans and Khazars had gone back to killing each other, Caliph Hashim was content to further consolidate his position and also indulge in his scholarly hobbies. He did not immediately promote Mansur al-Din to succeed the latter's late mentor Nusrat as his chief general, instead appointing an older and less able but more reliable ghulam named Yahya ibn Turki to that position and making the still relatively youthful Mansur his deputy, so as to keep the military better under control. At the same time he made his brother-in-law Farid ibn Asfar, the other major Islamic protagonist of the Battle of Hierapolis, the first recorded Grand Vizier in Hashemite history, and with his guidance & the resources freed up by or acquired from his victories in the west, undertook the beginnings of a major multi-generational effort to restore Mesopotamia and especially Persia to their former glory after centuries of increasing devastation by assorted nomadic invaders (with only a brief interval of relative calm under Roman rule) as well as the recent fitnas. The Muslims restored old roads and dug new ones, repaired qanats, purged bandits and encouraged the resettlement of villages.
Hashim's court also increasingly took on elements from both Persian and Syro-Greek cultures. The former enjoyed something of a renaissance under his patronage, as the Caliph strove mightily to please his Persian chief wife Farah: it was around this time that he not only sponsored an increasing number of Persian poets, storytellers and musicians at his court but also added a massive Persian-styled charbagh or quadrilateral 'paradise garden' to the Qasr al-Qasimi, as well as building an expensive yakchal (Persian ice pit) so his cooks could serve up his consort's favorite sorbets on demand regardless of season. The heightened cultural contact between Arabia and Persia which he fostered in Kufa would eventually lead to the addition of the story of Sinbad the (Arabic) Sailor and his seven journeys into the broader Middle Eastern canon of the One Thousand and One Nights. As for the latter, not only did Hashim bring intellectuals from the western provinces together with the bright minds of the east at his (still-under-construction) House of Wisdom, but he also personally expressed an interest in (which would in time deepen into admiration for) Western philosophers of a rational bent such as Pythagoras and Plato; his growing efforts to use reason (Ara.: 'aql) to try to understand Allah and His principles would lay the foundation for 'Ilm al-Haqq ('Knowledge/Science of the Truth') or simply 'Ilm Islam', the Islamic theological school/sect which would come to be associated with the senior Hashemite branch in particular…
A fanciful depiction of Farah bint Asfar, the first Persian consort of a Hashemite Caliph, celebrated by her people for playing an instrumental role in altering the fortunes of Persia & Persian culture after centuries of devastation by various foreign conquerors
Back across the Atlantic, the Annúnites were busy moving en masse from their old holdings down the great Sant-Pélage (leaving only small communities of fishermen & copper-miners, who also had the duty of opposing the Irish and keeping the passageway open for any other Briton who might seek to migrate to these new western shores for as long as they could) and building new towns to the southwest, engaging in much more intensive farming & fishing with Old World techniques and often absorbing nearby Wilderman settlements (or their remnants) in the process through either diplomacy or said Wildermen having died off from disease. More than that, they also sought to properly identify & take stock of their new neighbors. From their explorers and friendly Wildermen these New World Britons learned that there were at least two broad groups of settled indigenous farmers in the area: those living to the north & west who were at least somewhat mutually intelligible with their old friends from the northeast and the half-Wildermen in their ranks, and those to the south who were not.
The former they called 'Anicinébe' (after their name for themselves, 'Anishinàbemiwin'[16]) and the latter they called 'Uendage' (for they called themselves 'Wendat'[17] and their homeland 'Wendake') – for the latter, British explorers and missionaries had to live among them to learn their language, which was completely unintelligible to their own Wilderman friends and kindred. Most of these peoples lived in a comparatively primitive and 'barbaric' society to British eyes, with no stratum of government above the clan & village level. They lived in small villages, growing the 'three sisters' during the summer and hunting game in the winter while also consistently supplementing their diet with fish & maple syrup, and obeyed their village elders who also invariably doubled as lore-keepers and storytellers. This was not to say they had nothing to teach the Pilgrims – aside from introducing the secret of the 'three sisters' and maple-tapping, these Wildermen were also experts at building and rowing canoes, and the Britons consequently copied their design for the purpose of fishing & traveling along the lakes. More intriguing, and concerning, to the Britons was the knowledge of an apparently better-organized and more powerful coalition of Wilderman tribes to the west, who confusingly also called themselves 'Anishinaabe' and insisted that they were truer to that name than those living east of their lands. As far as the newcomers could tell, this confederacy was called the 'Council of Three Fires'[18] and seemed to dominate the lands around the western Great Lakes; as they were still trying to find their footing, Eluédh and his people hoped to avoid conflict unless absolutely necessary, and thus sought to build peaceful relations with this stronger Wilderman confederacy if they could.
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[1] Avaricum – Bourges. The river which gave it its original name, the Avara (to Gaulish 'Avaricon'/Latin 'Avaricum'), has since become the Yèvre, hence the transition to 'Yèvron'.
[2] Lejre.
[3] Lake Superior.
[4] Lake Huron.
[5] Lake Michigan.
[6] Lake Erie.
[7] Lake Ontario.
[8] Kingston, Ontario.
[9] Orșova.
[10] Vărădia.
[11] Pecica.
[12] Yevpatoria.
[13] Sukhumi.
[14] New Athos.
[15] Gagra.
[16] Eastern Anashinaabe peoples like the Algonquin and Mississauga.
[17] The Huron, who have yet to migrate to northwest Ontario (where the French found them in the 17th century historically). They also represent the first Iroquian people encountered by the Annúnites, a contrast to all the other natives they've met up to this point who were Algonquian-speakers.
[18] Representing the Ojibwe, Ottawa and Pottawatomi peoples living in Michigan & western Ontario.
However, Leo would not be joining him on the front line, for the demise of the childless Frankish king Childéric IV at the Battle of Hierapolis had left his kingdom's succession in a vacuum – one which both the Aloysians and lesser Merovingian cadet branches were now scrambling to fill. The Roman Caesar was his heir, legally and by proximity of blood, on account of both his will stating as much and being the eldest son of his sister the Augusta Himiltrude: unlike the Stilichians' failed rush-job at usurping the Visigothic crown which set off the disastrous Aetas Turbida for them last century, this was a development representing the fruition of almost 400 years' worth of carefully cultivated ties between the Aloysians and the Merovingians, dating back to the first Arbogast and his cousin Théodomer I (the grandfather of Merovech, namesake of the latter Frankish dynasty). Yet just as Wichmann 'der Widukind' had emerged in a last-ditch attempt by the Saxons to prevent Rome from plucking the fruit which it had grown in their land for 200 years, so too now did rival Merovingians move to defend their patrimony against the Aloysians whose scheme to acquire it for themselves was finally coming to fruition.
Aloysius and Leo were expecting a fight, so the latter marched back to Francia with not only his late uncle & mentor's body in tow but also no fewer than 15,000 soldiers: including those Frankish warriors who had accompanied Childéric IV and now raised the Caesar up on their shields as the new King of the Franks out of respect for his will, to be sure, but mostly imperial legions – the Emperor and his heir did not think it wise to involve any of the other federates in this conflict if they could avoid it, for they doubted that incorporating the kingdom of the Franks into the Empire directly and thereby empowering the overlord of them all was on any of said federates' agenda. Opposing them, no fewer than three Merovingian cousins of the late king had declared the Aloysian succession to the crown of their ancestors illegal on grounds of ancient Salic Law (revisions & a pragmatic sanction in the lifetime of Childéric notwithstanding) forbidding inheritance by or through women, and instead claimed rule over Francia for themselves: Théodebald in Orléans, Childebert in Soissons and Dagobert in Reims.
Dagobert is raised up on a shield and acclaimed King of the Franks by his warriors soon after news of Childéric IV's demise reached Reims, in keeping with Frankish tradition
The bad news for Leo was that the three of them came to control large parts of Francia (the capital of Lutèce, where Leo had spent most of his adolescent years, being the largest exception in this regard); the good news was that they could not agree on who between them should be King of the Franks, and had already come to blows by the time he crossed back into the kingdom in the autumn. Now by this time, generally speaking the Salian Frankish nobility had so thoroughly Romanized and intermixed with their Gallo-Roman neighbors that they'd become indistinguishable from one another, as had also occurred with (for example) their Ripuarian cousins around the imperial court in Trévere or the Gothic nobility & their own Hispano-Roman neighbors in Hispania – so their choices in loyalty depended much less on their ethnic background and more on whether they believed in the legitimacy of Leo's claim or that a Merovingian agnate (even if not the closest blood relative of the late Childéric IV) must always rule the Salii, and whether they thought they had more to gain from direct Aloysian rule or continued Merovingian autonomy.
Acting quickly before the onset of winter could end his campaigning season before it even began, Leo committed to an immediate attack on the claimant Théodebald, whose lands laid furthest to the south and were the closest to his own forward base at Yèvron[1]. Under the misguided belief that the Caesar had arrived with a third of the men he actually had at his disposal, fueled by imperfect scouting and false intelligence offered up by spies in Leo's service, Théodebald left Orléans with 6,000 warriors to engage the imperial army at Blois, south of his seat. The resulting battle was an easy victory for Leo: the Merovingian claimant tried to retreat upon realizing how badly outmatched he actually was, only to be captured in Leo's immediate charge and consequently forced to order the rest of his army to surrender. After gaining entry to Orléans, Leo wintered there while the remaining Merovingian claimants set a time & place for their own great battle in a bid to quickly determine who between them should lead the Frankish resistance. Not to be left behind by his brother, it was also around the Christmas of 737 that the younger imperial prince Ioannes was installed as cardinal-priest of the Basilica of Saint Sabina in Rome, doubtless with an eye on eventually ascending to the Chair of Saint Peter in several decades' time.
Caesar Leo surrounded by loyal Frankish guards and courtiers on the eve of his quest to assert his rights to his uncle's throne
While the Aloysians were preparing to contend with the Khazars once more or else working to bring their remaining Frankish kindred firmly under their rule once & for all, and the Khazars too were making their own preparations to do battle with the Romans again, their Hashemite enemies to the east were busy digesting their new conquests. The Caliph Hashim had no intention of risking the loss of Syria & Palestine so soon after snatching them away, which if it had occurred would have been the second time such conquests had proven ephemereal in Islamic history. Instead, he parlayed his relaxation of the jizya on the shoulders of Ionian Christians (one of the measures which he agreed to in his negotiations with Aloysius II) into a conciliatory measure to get his newest subjects on board with peaceable living under Islamic rule, while also appointing primarily the local heretics – Miaphysites and Nestorians alike – to high regional offices and opening 'al-Sham' and 'Filastin' both to mass Arab settlement, made all the easier by the migration of no small number of Ghassanids and Kalbi to rejoin their kin in Mesopotamia (and the submission & conversion of those who chose to stay), to entrench long-term Islamic rule.
Since Hashim did not have to return any plunder to the Romans outside of the last batches of slaves captured in Nusrat al-Din's far-reaching raids, after paying off his warriors, the Caliph began to invest those riches he kept for himself into two great projects which had long occupied his mind. The first, of course, was a grand religious monument on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which he intended to both express gratitude to Allah for finally delivering the holy city into the hands of His Prophet's lineage and to signify the permanence of Islamic rule over Filastin: thanks to the great round dome surmounting it (then made of wood), it would naturally be named the 'Dome of the Rock'. The second was the construction of a massive private library attached to his palace in Kufa, to be filled with books (covering a wide array of subjects from astrology to history to medicine) gathered both from the western provinces conquered from the Holy Roman Empire and from the eastern provinces which comprised his wife's Persian homeland (whatever had survived the ravages of the Eftals and Turks anyway).
The Caliph brought a large number of artisans from the formerly Roman Levant to further beautify his capital with materials like Lebanese cedars, and dragged along with them scholars and translators. Becoming a translator of Greek or Latin works into Arabic at the new 'House of Wisdom' (Ara.: Bayt al-Hikmah) could be a lucrative job even for Ionian Christians, despite the Hashemites' generally chilly attitude toward them, so it was one sought out by no small number of learned men from the former Syria & Palaestina who might otherwise be lacking in career prospects, feeling the weight of the jizya tax on their shoulders, and were unwilling or unable to move to Roman-controlled territory for whatever reason. For having demonstrated both great scholarly interest and an equally greatly prudent approach to politics, Hashim ensured he would go down in history as Al-Hakim – 'the Wise' – and indeed the Islamic answer to Constantine VI, the previous Holy Roman Emperor who also bore the same nickname in the tongues of the Occident.
The inquisitive and scholarly-inclined Caliph Hashim al-Hakim sought to collect knowledge, and the knowledgeable, on everything that can be known to man into a single grand library in Kufa. One wonders how he might have gotten along with the second Aloysian Emperor if the latter had lived longer, and if they hadn't headed rival empires & creeds
The early winter of 738 saw the dueling Merovingian claimants engage in their pre-planned battle to determine who should lead and who should follow in the conflict with the Aloysians, while said Aloysian heir was content to watch from the warmth and comfort of Orléans. Childebert and Dagobert butted heads at the Battle of Rethel on February 10, and their armies (actually numbering fewer than a thousand champions & retainers each, since they had sent their levies home for the harvest & winter season) wrestled in the snow for several hours until the former yielded after being unhorsed and having a dagger held to his throat. As Dagobert was victorious, he received his cousin's submission and oath to serve him as the 'true' King of the Franks, after which they marched together against Lutèce and the Caesar. Leo, for his part, crossed the Loire once the weather permitted and received a festive welcome in the Frankish capital, where he also added the civic militia to his ranks for the coming fight, before proceeding northward to see off the final challengers to his assumption of the Frankish crown.
The two armies collided in the hills near Creil, a ways north of Lutèce, in late April. Though the Romans held a numerical advantage (fielding about 16,000 men to the insurgents' 11,000), the Franks put up a good fight, assembling into a stout shield-wall on the high ground with one of their flanks was covered by the Oise to further hinder Roman maneuvering. Leo opted to bait the rebels out of their strong defensive position with a feigned retreat, which nearly turned into a real one after the Merovingians seized the opportunity to launch an all-out counterattack downhill and swept away the front ranks of the Roman army. The Caesar led his own substantial reserve into the fray, stemming the tide at the head of his paladins and reordering his cavalry to envelop the now-exposed Franks. Ultimately, the Romans won the day after fighting hard for another two hours to break the remaining Frankish resistance: they had suffered some 1,500 dead and wounded, and so did the Franks, yet not only could the smaller rebel army less easily afford such casualties but another 5,000 surrendered or simply deserted & melted away back to their homes over the ensuing rout.
The rebel Franks are routed by Leo's loyalists and legionaries at the Battle of Creil
Left with less than half of his original army and with the Romans in pursuit, Dagobert was at a loss as to how to salvage the situation and seriously considered surrendering at this point. Childebert was of no help to his cousin, since he took the opportunity to murder the latter while he was at his lowest point and then (on account of Dagobert's children still being toddlers in Reims) usurp control of the remaining Frankish rebel army. How he intended to turn the situation around and decisively secure kingship over the Franks was a mystery, presumably involving retreating to his lands in far northwestern Gaul and building a new army there, but Leo would not give the twice-traitor any chance to catch his breath, much less raise additional forces with which to challenge Rome.
Childebert was still in the middle of negotiating & issuing payments to Dagobert's captains (hoping to buy their loyalty in the aftermath of their liege's assassination) at Clermont-de-l'Oise when his sentries reported the approach of the imperial army, forcing the remaining rebels to scramble and form ranks in preparation for combat. The still-confused and demoralized Frankish rebels, by now numbering fewer than 4,000, mounted a number of uncoordinated charges against the Romans and loyal Franks, who weathered each such offensive before sweeping all resistance aside in their furious counterattack; the rebel army, half of whose loyalty to Childebert was still uncertain at best, fell apart as most of the pro-Dagobert contingents yielded or simply ran away. The last Merovingian chief still standing again escaped the site of his defeat, this time in the guise of a common soldier, but was mistaken for a bandit while foraging away from his few remaining retainers and lynched by local peasants a few days later – his killers had no idea how valuable he really was until they presented his corpse to Leo's knights, expecting a small reward, but instead receiving enough gold & silver to lift their families from poverty for having unknowingly killed the last Merovingian usurper.
Leo moved quickly to consolidate his victory, proceeding to Reims where he was anointed and crowned by that city's bishop in keeping with the tradition followed by all Frankish monarchs since the first Clovis. He incorporated the children of the vanquished Childebert & Dagobert into his household as hostages, but did his best to maintain continuity of government and reassure the Frankish elites that little would change with the future Holy Roman Emperor now ruling over them as their king; in this regard it certainly helped that the Franks were, after the Visigoths (and discounting the thoroughly assimilated Vandals), probably the second most Romanized of the federate kingdoms. While some Merovingians were banished to monasteries or outposts far away from Gaul for proving to be utterly unwilling to cooperate with the new regime, others were kept around and confirmed in their possession of estates & titles as the Caesar hoped to finish the integration of the Salian Frankish elite into the Roman power structure, including Théodebald who was titled the first hereditary Count of Blois (Comes Blesensis).
On the left, the Holy Ampulla (Gallique: 'Sainte-Ampoule') said to have been brought to the baptism of Clovis I by a dove – guided by the Holy Spirit – and miraculously filled with heavenly chrism, invariably used to anoint Frankish kings since him. On the right, Bishop Hilduin of Reims prepares the relic for use in the coronation of Leo the Roman as the first (and probably last) non-Merovingian King of the Franks in keeping with this hallowed tradition
While the Aloysians were solidifying their internal situation and the Hashemite Caliph consolidated his conquests, Bulan Khagan and the Khazars were undertaking their own measures to prepare for the resumption of hostilities. Previously he had leaned on the Bulgars whose chose to live along the middle length of the Volga rather than flee to the Danube (and eventually end up in Roman Cilicia), longtime Khazar tributaries, to contribute warriors; in this year, to further fill out his ranks he turned to the settled Jews of the mouth of Volga. From Tamantarkhan and Tana the Khagan recruited companies of heavily armored infantrymen (described as gibborim, or 'mighty ones', by the Jews themselves), foot archers, slingers and most importantly engineers – these would form an important fixture in the Khazar army as its only meaningful foot contingent and siege warfare experts. It is also from 738 onward that the overall leader of the Jewish community on the steppes (at this time Bulan's brother-in-law Joseph bar Isaac, his father having passed away from old age two years prior) would no longer be titled simply tudun, or the mayor of a city, but elteber – a vassal king in his own right, like the one for the Volga Bulgars.
Come 739, both the Romans and the Khazars continued to build up their forces in preparation for the imminent end of their ceasefire. While the Khazars acquired reinforcements from their tributaries and the Jewish community on the steppes, Aloysius II raised additional legions of his own, called back two-thirds of the troops he had sent with his son to Francia and also reached out to his Polish allies for support. When the Emperor issued his call to activate their old alliance, the Polish king Siemomysl answered and contributed a thousand-strong warband to support the Roman army as it mustered. While the Polish kingdom itself was still too small and disorganized to contribute a force of truly game-changing size and power at this point, all help was appreciated, and more importantly the Polans' presence also got the Augustus to consider Christianizing other Slavic kingdoms further to the east and bringing them into the Roman orbit – namely the Antae tribes bordering Khazaria.
Having sent the majority of his army back east to rejoin his father, Leo needed loyal supporters of his own in Francia to govern it, at least until he ascended to the purple and could finalize its annexation into the Holy Roman Empire (with the benefit of finally restoring direct Roman control over the whole of Gaul). Still, he parlayed his years living at the Frankish court and the connections he had carefully cultivated into finding such loyalists (mostly from Gallo-Roman houses and Frankish families of lesser stature than the Merovingians themselves) who would help him secure his hold on the Frankish kingdom. And while the other federate kings were set on edge by the sight of one of their number being inexorably absorbed into the Roman Empire, they were mollified by the Senatorial reforms of Aloysius II and the insistence of both him and his heir that this was a special case which would never be repeated (though most grew careful enough not to ever get as tangled up with their overlords as the Merovingians had).
Even setting aside how Leo really was Childéric IV's closest surviving male relative and had been named his heir in his will, the Aloysians were Franks by blood and related to the Merovingians; the Franks themselves had been Romanizing and strengthening their already close ties to the dynasty for 400 years; and every effort had been made to build an ironclad case for the legitimacy of Leo's ascent to the kingdom's throne (no doubt to be followed with imminent annexation when he should succeed his father). In short, the Aloysians had taken note of every mistake made by their Stilichian predecessors in regards to the Visigoth kingdom in the early seventh century and did the opposite to bring the Franks into the fold. For his success in taming both the Continental Saxons and Franks, Leo was nicknamed 'Germanicus', the second imperial heir in Roman history to be bestowed with such an honor.
A mosaic of Leo Caesar, or Léon to his Gallo-Roman and Salian Frankish subjects, during his time as the King of the (Salian) Franks
North of the Romans and the Khazars, the Danes received their first Christian embassy this year. Work on the Danevirke had not gone unnoticed by their new neighbors, and with hostilities still being limited to the periodic border skirmish on the Danube, it was in this year that the Romans decided to send a diplomatic mission to the hall of King Holger in Hleiðr[2], both to dissuade him from finishing the construction of his border defenses and to try to either convert him to Christianity directly, or to acquire his permission to preach the Gospel in Denmark. While Holger received the envoys & priests cordially and exchanged gifts with them as a token of diplomatic goodwill, he firmly rebuffed all their requests, neither believing that the Romans would either come in peace or stay at peace with his people for long nor was he willing to open his doors to religious subversion, especially after witnessing no small number of Saxons standing with the Romans against those kin of theirs who had remained faithful to the old gods. When the Roman mission returned to relay news of their failure, Aloysius was displeased but paid the news little mind, figuring the Danes could not possibly menace the Holy Roman Empire as badly as the Khazars or Muslims had done and that his successors would have plenty of time to crack such resistance on his northern frontier one way or another.
An ocean away from these goings-on, the Britons of Annún were making important inroads southwestward, toward the warmer and more fertile land they had found situated between a growing number of especially large lakes, of which their explorers counted three so far (later expanded to five): these they named after characters from the myths left behind by their Celtic forefathers – the otherworldly queen Ríenon[3] (Britt.: 'Rhiannon'), her son Peredur[4] ('Pryderi'), her second & more famed husband Ménuidan[5] ('Manawydan'), and the latter's siblings Bran[6] and Branoíne[7] ('Branwen'). Not only was it easier to grow crops in this region, but the aforementioned lakes were teeming with fish, helping to diversify the settlers' diet. King Eluédh commissioned the construction of a new capital town by the last of these lakes, which he creatively dubbed Cité-Réial[8] ('City of the King', or 'Royal City'). Most importantly he also strove to establish good relations with the Wildermen of this region, sending his own Wilderman and half-Wilderman subjects out to introduce Annún to its new neighbors, form trading ties with their villages and find sites for the construction of their own farms & towns near the Wilderman settlements, and even proselytize to them; he also invited their chiefs to visit him, or else offered to visit them at their longhouses himself, and was always ready to exchange iron or copper items to them as gifts.
Unfortunately virtually every time the Britons made new friends, many or even most of said new friends would soon perish from exposure to diseases to which they had no immunity, which continued to baffle and horrify the British as it did their Irish rivals to the southeast – they did not have the medical knowledge to understand what was happening and even if they did, they probably would not have been able to prevent it. Inevitably many of the survivors grew cold to the strangers who had inadvertantly brought not only strange gifts but also strange plagues to their land. Those survivors who did remain friendly rather than flee or even start harassing the newcomers, however, imparted vital survivalist knowledge to them: it was from the Wildermen most willing to continue trading and even living with them that the Pilgrims learned of how to tap maple trees and boil their sap down to a sweet syrup, and even more importantly, of the secret of the 'three sisters'. The Wilderman farmers of the Lakes grew corn, beans and squash (which the Britons of Annún had already gained some familiarity with as they crept up the Sant-Pélage River) together, for the three crops complemented each other – the cornstalks provided the beans with a natural trellis to climb, the beans enriched the soil and the squash's leaves kept said soil moist and free of weeds. As a set of crops which could readily be grown on a large scale in the soil of northern Aloysiana, these 'three sisters' would prove an absolute lifesaver to the kingdom of the Pelagian exiles, and indeed would serve as the crucial element which allowed them to survive (or even thrive) in the New World rather than die out in a few generations.
Maize, beans and squash: the secret ingredients to surviving in northern Aloysiana, newly revealed to the Briton Pilgrims by the sedentary Wilderman farmers of the Great Lakes
The spring of 740 brought with it the breakdown of the temporary truce between the Holy Roman Empire and the Khazar Khaganate, as both sides felt sufficiently rested to resume hostilities with a good chance at victory once more. Since the Khazars were the ones still occupying Roman territory, it fell to Aloysius II to strike first, which he did by sending an advance-guard of Gepids, Serbs, Thracian Slavs and Thessalonican Jews to secure his bridgehead over the Danube; the Gepids because their land was the largest bit of territory still under Khazar control and liberating it was the Empire's first priority for this trans-Danubian campaign, the easternmost South Slavs because they had volunteered in hopes of getting revenge for the despoiling of their frontline kingdoms, and the Jews because the Emperor wanted to see how they would perform against their own kind (now known to be marching in the Khazar ranks, not just passively supporting their nomadic overlords) & whether their performance would be enough to allay the suspicions of their allegiance still running rampant in the Empire's Balkan possessions. This force of about 4,000 managed to hold out against over twice their numbers in Khazars at the Battle of Dierna[9] long enough for the main Roman army to cross the Danube, though the boats & wooden bridges they used to do so were (due to constraints on their resources and especially time) of course not as grand or permanent a means of crossing as the Bridge of Trajan destroyed by Aurelian almost 500 years before.
After commending the survivors for their courage, Aloysius could begin the hard work of actually campaigning in Dacia. The Romans won multiple hard-fought successes in the southern woodlands, retaking the site of another long-abandoned fortress town at Drobeta soon after their crossing of the Danube and gradually securing the southern Dacian shores of the Danube over the course of this year, culminating in Aloysius' triumph over Bulan himself in the Battle of Argidava[10]. However, the hinterland mountains proved a much more difficult nut for the Romans to crack, and it was there was Bulan's own Jewish troops were able to distinguish themselves in the favorable terrain. Worsening matters, a secondary push over the middle Danube in Pannonia ended poorly in the late summer of this year at the Battle of Ziridava[11], where Mänär Tarkhan exploited the vindictive Dulebian contingent's over-eagerness to get revenge on him for sacking their homeland by baiting them into a massacre and then rolling up the rest of the Roman force in the north.
The resumption of hostilities was not limited to the Danube. Beyond the Bosphorus, marines from Constantinople and the Pontic coast attempted an amphibious attack into the Tauric Chersonese with the intention of recapturing the peninsula from the Khazars, but this operation proved abortive in the face of Khazar spies providing the defenders with advance warning and consequently determined Khazar resistance at the Battle of Güzliev[12] (as they called Kerkinitis, near which the Romans had tried to land). The Romans were more successful in the Caucasus, where they aided the Georgians under Giorgi II 'the Glorious' in routing the Khazars at the Battle of Sebastopolis[13] and ultimately reconquering Abasgia – a territory originally conceded to the Khazars by Aloysius I and Helena Karbonopsina for aiding them in fighting off the Turks and Muslims decades before – late in 740. After following up by retaking the ruined sites of Anakopia[14] & Nitica[15] shortly before the onset of winter, these Abasgian lands were annexed into Georgia as a new duchy, extending Tbilisi's governance beyond the northwesternmost limits of old Lazica for the first time (and by extension, also indirectly restoring Roman overlordship over these lands).
Giorgi II of Georgia, who earned his nickname with his heroics at the Battle of Hierapolis and now by extending Georgian rule further north than ever before, here seen outside Sebastopolis (which he rebuilt as 'Tskhoumi') with the wolf's-head helm passed down through the Khosrovianni dynasty since Vakhtang I of Iberia
Even as Aloysius II was battling the Khazars on one front, on another he was sowing the seeds for a much longer-term strategy with their containment or even ruin as the ultimate objective. Evangelizing among the Sclaveni had been a slower process than he liked, considerably slower than among the Teutons, even within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire; to change this, the Augustus had signed off on a plan proposed by some of the more innovative Greek bishops and the Carantanian clergy to translate the Gospel into the tongue of the Slavs. Of course, to do that they first had to construct a standard Slavic dialect in the first place, which they judged would be less time-consuming than translating the Good Book into every single one of the various Slavic languages so as to convert each kingdom individually – a standard that would be known to future historians as '(Old) Church Slavonic'. In addition to accelerating the conversion of both the Sclaveni already settled within imperial borders and the allied Polani, Aloysius also had two other major goals in mind: first, converting the fractious Wendish tribes living between the Elbe and the Oder; and second, converting the Antaic East Slavs and helping them organize into additional friendly kingdoms on the model of the Poles.
On the first count, Wendish disunity (those tribes were clearly not unified into a single kingdom like that of the Danes, even the Obotrites who his son Leo had already crossed paths with were actually a confederation of tribes rather than a singular people) and Polish support was thought to make conversion and eventual incorporation into the Empire a more plausible prospect than it was with the unified and wary Danes (if one group of Wends rebuffed the Ionians' approach as Holger did, they could just move on to the next village or tribe over), even if the grudges borne between the frontier Germanic federates (especially the Lombards and the newly incorporated Saxons) and said Wends might complicate things. On the second, Aloysius did not believe it was wise or even feasible to march the legions out onto the wild and untamed steppes which the Scythians, Sarmatians and Huns had once trodden over: instead, the construction of allied Slavic polities in that area would allow Rome to indirectly project power against the Khazar heartland through locals whose homes had been built right up against Khazaria, and who could be counted on to autonomously oppose the nomadic foe (who had scornfully treated them as little more than insignificant tributaries or even a 'farm' from which to gather slaves) as part of their local interests.
Of course, standardizing a singular 'Slavonic' language and translating the Gospel into it was likely to take years if not decades, and converting scores of wildly differing tribes across a massive geographic area stretching from the Pontic Steppe to the banks of the Elbe and the shores of the Adriatic to the True Faith would surely take centuries; but Aloysius was more than happy to play this (extremely) long game, considering the dividends it had finally paid off in regards to the Saxons & Franks just now. The Emperor's former hostage & pageboy Cestmir, who had by now become a man grown and succeeded his father Ctibor as the high chief of the Sorbs, was the first major Wendish chieftain to welcome Roman traders and missionaries in the region of 'Germania Slavica' which laid between the Elbe and the Oder, starting a pattern of warmer Roman-Sorbian relations (even though he was never baptised himself).
Ionian scribes hard at work on a standard 'glagolitic' alphabet, one big step in their project to make the Gospel comprehensible to the Sclaveni
While the Romans and Khazars had gone back to killing each other, Caliph Hashim was content to further consolidate his position and also indulge in his scholarly hobbies. He did not immediately promote Mansur al-Din to succeed the latter's late mentor Nusrat as his chief general, instead appointing an older and less able but more reliable ghulam named Yahya ibn Turki to that position and making the still relatively youthful Mansur his deputy, so as to keep the military better under control. At the same time he made his brother-in-law Farid ibn Asfar, the other major Islamic protagonist of the Battle of Hierapolis, the first recorded Grand Vizier in Hashemite history, and with his guidance & the resources freed up by or acquired from his victories in the west, undertook the beginnings of a major multi-generational effort to restore Mesopotamia and especially Persia to their former glory after centuries of increasing devastation by assorted nomadic invaders (with only a brief interval of relative calm under Roman rule) as well as the recent fitnas. The Muslims restored old roads and dug new ones, repaired qanats, purged bandits and encouraged the resettlement of villages.
Hashim's court also increasingly took on elements from both Persian and Syro-Greek cultures. The former enjoyed something of a renaissance under his patronage, as the Caliph strove mightily to please his Persian chief wife Farah: it was around this time that he not only sponsored an increasing number of Persian poets, storytellers and musicians at his court but also added a massive Persian-styled charbagh or quadrilateral 'paradise garden' to the Qasr al-Qasimi, as well as building an expensive yakchal (Persian ice pit) so his cooks could serve up his consort's favorite sorbets on demand regardless of season. The heightened cultural contact between Arabia and Persia which he fostered in Kufa would eventually lead to the addition of the story of Sinbad the (Arabic) Sailor and his seven journeys into the broader Middle Eastern canon of the One Thousand and One Nights. As for the latter, not only did Hashim bring intellectuals from the western provinces together with the bright minds of the east at his (still-under-construction) House of Wisdom, but he also personally expressed an interest in (which would in time deepen into admiration for) Western philosophers of a rational bent such as Pythagoras and Plato; his growing efforts to use reason (Ara.: 'aql) to try to understand Allah and His principles would lay the foundation for 'Ilm al-Haqq ('Knowledge/Science of the Truth') or simply 'Ilm Islam', the Islamic theological school/sect which would come to be associated with the senior Hashemite branch in particular…
A fanciful depiction of Farah bint Asfar, the first Persian consort of a Hashemite Caliph, celebrated by her people for playing an instrumental role in altering the fortunes of Persia & Persian culture after centuries of devastation by various foreign conquerors
Back across the Atlantic, the Annúnites were busy moving en masse from their old holdings down the great Sant-Pélage (leaving only small communities of fishermen & copper-miners, who also had the duty of opposing the Irish and keeping the passageway open for any other Briton who might seek to migrate to these new western shores for as long as they could) and building new towns to the southwest, engaging in much more intensive farming & fishing with Old World techniques and often absorbing nearby Wilderman settlements (or their remnants) in the process through either diplomacy or said Wildermen having died off from disease. More than that, they also sought to properly identify & take stock of their new neighbors. From their explorers and friendly Wildermen these New World Britons learned that there were at least two broad groups of settled indigenous farmers in the area: those living to the north & west who were at least somewhat mutually intelligible with their old friends from the northeast and the half-Wildermen in their ranks, and those to the south who were not.
The former they called 'Anicinébe' (after their name for themselves, 'Anishinàbemiwin'[16]) and the latter they called 'Uendage' (for they called themselves 'Wendat'[17] and their homeland 'Wendake') – for the latter, British explorers and missionaries had to live among them to learn their language, which was completely unintelligible to their own Wilderman friends and kindred. Most of these peoples lived in a comparatively primitive and 'barbaric' society to British eyes, with no stratum of government above the clan & village level. They lived in small villages, growing the 'three sisters' during the summer and hunting game in the winter while also consistently supplementing their diet with fish & maple syrup, and obeyed their village elders who also invariably doubled as lore-keepers and storytellers. This was not to say they had nothing to teach the Pilgrims – aside from introducing the secret of the 'three sisters' and maple-tapping, these Wildermen were also experts at building and rowing canoes, and the Britons consequently copied their design for the purpose of fishing & traveling along the lakes. More intriguing, and concerning, to the Britons was the knowledge of an apparently better-organized and more powerful coalition of Wilderman tribes to the west, who confusingly also called themselves 'Anishinaabe' and insisted that they were truer to that name than those living east of their lands. As far as the newcomers could tell, this confederacy was called the 'Council of Three Fires'[18] and seemed to dominate the lands around the western Great Lakes; as they were still trying to find their footing, Eluédh and his people hoped to avoid conflict unless absolutely necessary, and thus sought to build peaceful relations with this stronger Wilderman confederacy if they could.
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[1] Avaricum – Bourges. The river which gave it its original name, the Avara (to Gaulish 'Avaricon'/Latin 'Avaricum'), has since become the Yèvre, hence the transition to 'Yèvron'.
[2] Lejre.
[3] Lake Superior.
[4] Lake Huron.
[5] Lake Michigan.
[6] Lake Erie.
[7] Lake Ontario.
[8] Kingston, Ontario.
[9] Orșova.
[10] Vărădia.
[11] Pecica.
[12] Yevpatoria.
[13] Sukhumi.
[14] New Athos.
[15] Gagra.
[16] Eastern Anashinaabe peoples like the Algonquin and Mississauga.
[17] The Huron, who have yet to migrate to northwest Ontario (where the French found them in the 17th century historically). They also represent the first Iroquian people encountered by the Annúnites, a contrast to all the other natives they've met up to this point who were Algonquian-speakers.
[18] Representing the Ojibwe, Ottawa and Pottawatomi peoples living in Michigan & western Ontario.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Looks like this Rome-Khazar war will be a long one and far from conclusive.