The Roman-Khazar war continued to rage throughout 741. Undeterred by the defeat of his secondary army to the north, Aloysius II forged ahead with his Dacian campaign and slowly but surely defeated the Khazars in that region's western mountains. At the Battle of Tapae[1] he consciously pitted his Thessalonican Jews against the Steppe Jews of Bulan Khagan; their clash was actually inconclusive, and the battle won by the efforts of the regular legions, but the irony of one faction of Jews fighting for the Christian Emperor against the children of the African Jews exiled by said Emperor's father did not escape observers on both sides. From Tapae, the Romans marched onward to contest the ruins of Sarmizegetusa Regia and the gold mines of the land, and also fanned out eastward to the flatter eastern plains[2], where they were able to make better use of their cavalry – and so were the Khazars, producing more even battles than those in the Dacian mountains where despite their Jewish auxiliaries, the Khazars had been at a distinct disadvantage against superior Roman infantrymen & engineers.
As they marched through western and southern Dacia, the legions ran into increasing numbers of lowly settled farmers and herders who lived in villages throughout this region, and who upon questioning claimed to be the descendants of the remnants of the Daco-Roman populace who had failed to cross the Danube with Aurelian centuries prior for whatever reason. Aloysius was somewhat familiar with them – the Gepids called them
Walhaz, 'foreigners' (which readily translated into 'Vlach' or 'Wallachian' outside of their land), and had hosted a minority of these people on their lands, while the Pannonians of Lake Pelso considered them distant kin and the Thracian Slavs were convinced these people shared at least some blood with them and their former Avar oppressors. Regardless of their ethnic origin, the Emperor was more than happy to enlist additional local allies and attracted some of these men (who were alternately called 'Dacians' and 'Vlachs') to serve in his army as auxiliary scouts, foragers, light troops and recruiters of more of their kind with pay & the promise that the Romans had returned to stay for good this time – as surely as the Emperor nicknamed 'Britannicus' had once more set the dragon standard of Rome above Britain, so too now he would do the same to the very origin of that
draco, Dacia.
A Dacian or 'Vlach' archer, newly enlisted to fight for the returning Romans as a skirmisher and scout of his homeland
Up north, a new secondary army was assembled by Lake Pelso out of the remnants of the old one, joined by additional reinforcements from as far as Hispania and England (directed eastward by Leo Caesar) as well as freshly raised Pannonian and Dulebian fighters from the local area. Placed under the joint command of the Pannonian
comes Trèany (Lat. 'Trajan') ze Mogentacy[3], a distant descendant of the fifth-century double agent Orestes and by extension Attila the Hun's elder brother Bleda, and the new Dulebian
vozhd Radimir (who had hopefully learned from his father's defeat and death the year before), this force first had to beat back an attempt by Mänär Tarkhan at pre-emptively attacking them in the Battle of Gorsium[4] late in the spring before crossing the Danube themselves in mid-summer. Greater caution on the part of the Romans this time and the Khazars being less able to replenish their own losses delivered the former victories in the Battle of Resculum and then the Battle of Porolissum[5], pushing the latter into the Dacian mountains by wintertime. It was also around the time of these battles that Aloysius' only daughter Victoria traveled to Italy to marry Senator Gnaeus Arrius Aper (Italiano: 'Cneo Arrio Apro'), grandson of the
Princeps Senatus Quintus Arrius Aper (Ital: 'Quinto Arrio Apro'), so as to firm up relations between the Aloysian dynasty and the Senate whose power & credibility they had just restored; their wedding was the first officiated by the bride's brother, the slightly older Cardinal Ioannes, in his career as a cleric.
Far off in the distant east, trouble was beginning to stir and shake up the
status quo of East & Southeast Asia around the midpoint of the eighth century. The first to feel tremors was not China, which by far was the great power most responsible for upholding said
status quo, but the maritime empire which had been the only other power in that region to fight them to a standstill: the Srivijayans were faced with serious competition on one of their flanks, for the first time in a very long time, in the form of the emergent kingdom of the Sailendra ('Kings of the Mountain') on Java. Beginning with the great Bratisena, who proclaimed the new state on Gunung Tidar (a small inland mountain where Javanese tradition held that the gods nailed Java to the Earth, so that it would never sink) and from it derived the name of his dynasty, the line of the Sailendra kings were dynamic and full of energy where their counterparts in Srivijaya were starting to grow complacent in the wake of their peace treaty with China and a prior lack of challengers to their commercial & maritime dominance. Starting from this year Bratisena rapidly expanded from his power-base in the Kedu Plain to swallow up or subjugate several neighboring Srivijayan vassal principalities in Central & East Java, then resoundingly defeated a Srivijayan punitive expedition shortly after the latter had landed at the fishing village of Pekalongan.
The Javanese kingdom of Sailendra had, by this point, sufficiently grown in power & wealth to challenge the Sumatra-based Srivijayans for hegemony over Southeast Asia, and certainly to disrupt the latter's hold on their home island
On the other side of the world, the Annúnites continued to establish themselves along the shores of Lakes Branoíne and Bran, and to strive to understand their new surroundings. From extensive conversations with the locals they came to learn that the majority of the Wildermen they had encountered here, the so-called eastern Anicinébe, were not actually a singular people but a collection of tribes distinct from one another, much less the western Anicinébe with whom they did not get along. Since none of these tribes employed a writing system, instead passing their traditions down from generation to generation through oral storytelling, it fell to the Britons to physically record what they had learned using parchment or even clay tablets. Broadly speaking the eastern Anicinébe could be divided into the great tribes of Ímàmié[6] ('Omàmiwinini') who lived to the north and east, and the more populous southern-based Míssisségé[7] ('Misi-zaagiing'), the latter of whom had been the ones to impart unto them the gift of the 'three sisters'.
The Uendage bore no relation to either of these peoples and were viewed as strangers by them (a sentiment they reciprocated), so the Pilgrims rapidly filled the niche of middleman between them, steadily earning the trust of these peoples as traders, translators and negotiators. Pelagian priests also undertook an effort to study the faith of these pagan Wildermen, both to get a better understanding of their traditions in general and to more easily convert them to the Gospel: to their delight they found from the sages, or 'medicine men', of the tribes revered Gigé-Manítou (Algonquian: 'Gichi-manidoo'), the 'Great Spirit', as the creator of the world and giver of life. It was easy enough for them to draw a comparison to the Christian God, as it was for them to connect His alternative name Gigé-Ogíté (Alq.: 'Gichi-ojichaag') to the Holy Spirit and the broader Wilderman concept of spirits (lesser
manitou) to both angels/demons and the folkloric tradition of the fair folk which they had inherited from their Celtic forebears, although the idea that Gigé-Manítou lived on the Earth with them on the back of a 'Great Turtle'[8] and not in an unseen Heaven above was a bit of a sticking point early on.
A Pelagian missionary trying to preach to the Great Lakes Wildermen who will hear him, and to persuade them that in fact the Most High God and their 'Great Spirit' are one and the same
The highlight of 742 was surely Aloysius II's grand push against the Khazars, for having by now secured most of the Gepid homeland and trans-Danubian footholds both in the north and south, he now moved to seek a decisive resolution to this war with his cousin. He himself focused on locking down the Dacian gold mines in the west, while a division under the Frankish
comes Émellan (Lat.: 'Aemilian') de Tóngere[9] including most of the newly-raised Dacian volunteers fought to secure the land of plains and thickets which the latter called 'Muntenia', and Trèany ze Mogentacy & Radimir of the Dulebians pushed southward to join their forces with the Emperor. The main imperial army united with its secondary division in time to inflict a major defeat on the Khazars' own secondary force at the Battle of Napoca[10] in the early summer, where the Dulebes mounted a seemingly reckless attack and then retreated to give Mänär Tarkhan the hope of repeating his victory at Ziridava two years prior; of course, this was not to be and Aloysius took the chance to occupy the hills surrounding the long-ruined Roman settlement while Radimir, Trèany and his reserve force kept the Khazars occupied on the low ground.
Most of the encircled Khazars did not survive the ensuing bloodbath, including Mänär himself who understood the futility of trying to surrender after raiding so deeply into the Holy Roman Empire during the war's first phase and launched a suicidal charge into the legionary lines to try to go out in a blaze of glory instead. However, the score was evened soon after by Mänär's infuriated father – Bulan Khagan had gathered additional reinforcements of his own over the spring and now furiously descended on the tertiary Roman division in Muntenia. Count Émellan tried to withdraw back over the River Olt, which Latin cartographers still recorded as the Altus, but was intercepted and his army routed in the Battle of the Vedea River. He attempted to yield to the Khazar Khagan, but unfortunately for him, by this time Bulan had heard about his eldest and penultimate surviving son's demise and was in no mood to take prisoners. It fell to one of the Dacian captains, a man coincidentally also named Traianu (Lat.: 'Trajan'), to gather the survivors and alter the course of their retreat northward in the hope of losing their pursuers in the mountains and linking up with Aloysius II.
Traianu the Dacian, one of the few natives of that land who could afford the equipment to stand out as the closest thing they had to the legions. Clearly, he and his fellow 'legionarii' would need a lot of work before they could really compare themselves to the actual legions of the Holy Roman Empire
Bulan Khagan was undeterred in his rage and aggressively harried the Romano-Dacian division as it fell back, but the forward-most elements of his army engaged in this pursuit were defeated after the
Augustus did indeed come to the aid of his beleaguered subjects in the Battle of Apulum[11]. Having mauled the other, both combatants now amassed for a final climactic clash, which was to take place by the river once known to Greek & Roman mapmakers as the Ordessos – and now, to the Dacians who watered their herds by its banks, the Argeș. It was not long after Aloysius and his men had descended from the high mountains that they found their way back south blocked by the Khazar horde, which was assembling for combat in the Argeș river valley[12], and the Emperor – eager to bring this conflict, which had cost the Romans much in the east and continued to cost them while the Muslims sat pretty & grew stronger still, to an end – gladly took up his cousin's challenge.
Aloysius arranged his army of approximately 22,000 men into three divisions plus a reserve: a strong right under his own command, Count Trèany and the African prince Bedãdéu in his center, and a fairly weak left (mostly comprised of the remaining local federate forces, the Poles and the Jews of Thessalonica) under the Gepid king Munderic, with the last of these having their own left flank covered by the river to compensate for their comparatively small numbers. Bulan divided his own army of about 23,000 in much the same way, and barely waited for the Roman skirmishers (including the remaining Dacians under Traianu, whose name caused some confusion with his commander Trèany) to engage his own missile troops before kicking off the battle proper with a massive charge in hopes of breaking his cousin's lines before they could fully form up. The Khazars swept away the Roman left with their sheer force, but the Roman center bravely held and the right under Aloysius' own command first checked, then broke the Khazar left in turn with support from their reserves. A brief lull in the fighting as both sides caught their breath and tried to have their cavalry maneuver around the other's flanks gave way to a renewed melee late in that August day, and after he called in his own reserve it seemed Bulan had the advantage, but Munderic managing to rally his forces and bring them back to the field proved a fatal distraction for the Khazars.
While Bulan directed additional troops to push back the returning Roman left, Emperor Aloysius had reformed his paladins into an offensive wedge and launched a deadly counter-charge straight at the Khagan's position, tearing through all opposition in their way in their battle-fury. To his credit, despite his advanced age the Khazar Khagan stood his ground and prepared to engage the
Augustus in single combat. The slightly younger (at 51 years) and fitter Aloysius prevailed in the clash of arms which followed, dealing his cousin a mortal wound; however, he himself was badly injured by a lance-thrust into his side by one of the Khagan's bodyguards, and while he immediately struck that man down the latter's comrades were able to bear their old monarch away before he could finish off Bulan. The apparent flight of the Khagan put a panic in the hearts of his soldiers, who were consequently routed and pursued with great slaughter by the vengeful Romans & their allies, though the latter were themselves too bloodied and disorganized to completely destroy the enemy army.
Bulan did not long survive Aloysius' lethal sword-stroke, dying six days after the Battle of Argeș. With all of his elder sons removed (one way or another) over his wars with the Avars and Romans, the path had been cleared for his child by the Jewish lady Rachel bat Isaac, Sartäç Tarkhan – now in his early twenties – to succeed him. Taking on the additional name Simon (no doubt intended as a stab at the Africans who drove his mother & grandfather from their homes, for they held up Saint Simon the Zealot as their patron), the first Jewish Khagan of the Khazars had the unenviable task of spending the very first days of his reign negotiating a peace settlement with the Romans in the wake of his father's final defeat at Argeș. While bedridden for weeks on account of his own wounds, which also shaved no small number of years off of his remaining hold on life, Aloysius II was able to secure the retreat of the Khazars not only from Gepidia[13] and their dropping of any pretense to the purple (as Bulan himself had offered a few years prior), but also expel them from much of the rest of old Dacia & the Muntenian plain by the end of 742, reducing Khazar holdings west of the Dniester to Scythia Minor (which hadn't been Roman since the Avar invasions); most of the lands once held by the 'Free Dacians' before those disappeared under the pressure of the Hun-driven migrations four centuries ago; and the easternmost parts of the former Roman province of Dacia Porolissensis[14]. Roman-Georgian gains in the east were also recognized, a failed Khazar incursion which was repelled in the Battle of Java[15] that autumn serving only to solidify the conquests of Giorgi II, although the Romans were unable to recover their Tauric possessions.
Psalter depicting Aloysius II launching his final charge against Bulan Khagan, who appears either so utterly unimpressed or so utterly exhausted tired as to not even try to move out of his way
Come 743, Aloysius II found himself having to begin consolidating the administration of the Dacian lands clawed back from the Khazars even as his old war wound kept him in chronic pain – better on some days, worse on others, and sure to kill him slowly either way. The Gepids were restored and their lands expanded a ways to the north & east as recompense for their recent suffering; the majority of old Dacia and trans-Danubian Moesia, however, posed a different question. Nearly all semblance of Roman civilization had broken down in the near-500 years since Aurelian abandoned these territories – the old Roman cities and fortresses laid in ruins, the roads were overgrown and the Dacian people themselves, who managed to preserve a living flicker of that Roman heritage in their Romance language, had been reduced to a nation of impoverished shepherds and tillers living in scattered villages (alongside newer Slavic settlers) which had oft been at the mercy of passing nomadic conquerors from the Huns to the Khazars. The overwhelming majority were not even Christian, having been left behind by Aurelian decades before the Christianization of the Empire and finding the Constantinian occupation of the Danube's northeast bank a few decades later to be ephemereal.
Considering that the Dacian frontier now represented Rome's northeasternmost front line and was in no state to repel a Khazar invasion if their empires should ever come to blows again anytime soon, the Emperor's first order of business was to militarize it and organize the locals to the point where they could defend themselves, at least long enough for the Danubian legions stationed around Thessalonica to come to their rescue. Roads were repaired, not just to facilitate better communication & trade between Dacian settlements and the rest of the Empire but also to reconnect the gold mines of Dacia to imperial markets as the former were brought back to life, and castles built to secure the region much as had been done in Saxony. Some of the locals, such as Traianu, were raised up to the rank of
comes or
dux and put in charge of these new forts, where they were to reside, enlist & train (with the assistance of legionary veterans stationed to stiffen their defenses) as many volunteers as could be found from the ranks of their fellow Vlachs; in Traianu's case he was made the first Count of Sucidava[16], on the Thracian border and mercifully distant from Khazaria. In other cases existing noblemen like Émellan de Tóngere's son, who shared his name, were assigned to these Dacian estates instead.
To instill the Christian faith and rejuvenate
Romanitas in this land, Aloysius also took the advice of his second son Ioannes and the bishops of the Roman See to sponsor the construction of fortified churches and monasteries across Roman Dacia, from where the Church could safely direct its missionary efforts throughout the land. Of these the churches built at Argeș and Alba, as the former Apulum was known (its Slavic name, Bălgrad, going unused by the Roman clergy who preferred a Latin approximation intelligible to the Dacians instead), were the most prominent; Ioannes also took the initiative and pulled enough strings to get some of his handpicked friends assigned to these churches, with Stefano di Gaeta among these eventually ascending from the first parish priest of the rebuilt Alba to the first Dacian bishop over the next few decades. Roman wealth, prestige, protection and engineering would steadily attract large numbers of Vlachs to flock to these castles and churches (and to a lesser extent, the gold mines where no small number of the locals would find employment, such as Alburnus Maior[17]), forming the first real towns in Dacia since the third century. It would be quite some time before Dacia could rise to the level of a federate kingdom in its own right, so for now, the Aloysians had to hope that this growing patchwork of militarized duchies/counties and prince-bishoprics would be enough to contain the Khazar threat before it crossed the Danube again.
An African legionary and his Italian friend in Dacia, where they have been stationed to help defend and train the locals
Speaking of the Khazars, Simon-Sartäç Khagan had no small amount of work to do to consolidate his hold over Khazaria, which was immediately threatened in the wake of his father's final defeat by several tarkhans of the Khazar army as its survivors returned from the battlefields of Dacia. In this regard the young new ruler of the Khazars could expect no assistance from his uncle and father-in-law Kayqalagh, who while unwilling to directly move against his nephew so long as his favorite daughter Esin Khatun was married to Simon-Sartäç, was clearly quite content to sit back and wait for the other usurpers to do his work for him & eliminate said nephew before he made his own move. Simon-Sartäç sought to disappoint his uncle, who after all had already previously tried and failed to contend for rulership of the Khazars with his father, and to rise to the challenge: late in 743, after being embarrassingly routed in his first real engagement with the usurper Yabghu Tarkhan at the Battle of the Lower Aq-su[18], he rallied to catch his now-overconfident opponent off-guard with a large night assault and inflicted a sharp defeat on the usurper at the Battle of the Rapids[19], driving a panicked Yabghu to flee into the great Borysthenes[20] where he drowned.
The future course of religious reform which Simon-Sartäç also intended to embark upon had begun to germinate in these very early and turbulent days of his rule, as well. As his regnal name suggested, he was a child of two worlds – a Tengriist father and a Jewish mother – and his own marriage was another, considering that his wife Esin was a Buddhist. While it was not as though no Tengriists whatsoever supported his claim, and the Khazars were by default the most tolerant of the 'big three' dominating western Eurasia in keeping with the tradition of the nomadic empires (Ashina, a not using religion as the foundation and legitimator of their rule in the same way that Ionian Christianity was for the Aloysians or Islam was for the Banu Hashim also helped), his rivals like Yabghu Tarkhan were quite happy to use appeals to tradition and denunciations of his embrace of his mother's foreign religion against him, while his mother's people were his most fervent partisans.
Now Simon-Sartäç held the supremely ambitious hope of syncretizing all three religions so as to secure religious harmony on the steppes and unity among his subjects for future conflicts with Christendom & Islam. Theoretically, the erudite Khagan believed Judaism and Buddhism were not incompatible since the latter revered no gods (if it had, it would have been in conflict with the former's First Commandment) and the Buddha lived just before the era of
Nevu'ah (authentic Jewish prophecy) ended, and that Buddhism could also serve as a bridge between Judaism and Tengriism. As a man with a personal interest in esoteric mysticism, he was also drawn to Buddhist meditative practices and hoped to find some way of connecting the Jewish mystical tradition of the
merkabah (wheeled chariot) to Buddhist symbolism, particularly the
dharmachakra or Dharmic wheel.
How he intended to go about accomplishing this syncretic project with any measure of success, however, was a question which would have to wait until after he'd stabilized his domestic situation. For now the best he could do was add Jewish sages, Buddhist monks and Tengriist shamans to his court (the Buddhist spiritual advisors being specially requested by his wife) & company as he campaigned – the ones who could stand to be around one another, anyway.
Simon-Sartäç Khagan in his youth, when he was still too busy fighting his father's lieutenants (and distant Ashina kindred) to seriously attempt his project at a major religious reformation & synthesis
Come 744, while the Roman world reverted to peacetime and Aloysius II divided his remaining lifespan between continuing the consolidation of Rome's half of Dacia and ensuring Leo would not have to face any rebellion upon ascending to the throne as he once did, Simon-Sartäç continued the struggle to unify the Khazars. Having eliminated Yabghu Tarkhan the year before and pardoned his surviving followers in exchange for their joining his ranks, the Khagan next moved to see off a challenge by Kibar Tarkhan and Tarmaç Tarkhan – two junior commanders of his father's who had never quite seen eye to eye. Simon-Sartäç exploited this rivalry for his own gain, striking up an alliance with the weaker Tarmaç so that they might grind Kibar (who had previously been battling Tarmaç as fiercely as he had the partisans of Simon-Sartäç, and not without considerable success) down between their armies over the course of this year.
Also outside the Roman world, Hashim al-Hakim took another step to shore up the prosperity of his expanded realm by intensifying agriculture in southern Mesopotamia. Since the collapse of the Sassanid Empire centuries prior, large parts of this land had been abandoned and degenerated into salty, decidedly infertile marshland (which the Arabs called
Al-Batihah, the 'Great Swamp') owing to the devastation brought on by multiple warring empires, both to its populace and infrastructure; the Romans had tried to restore some of its glory during their comparatively brief stay, but those gains had long since been reversed and swept away. In more recent decades, the Arabs who settled in the region and carved out fiefdoms for themselves had achieved some limited success in reclaiming the salt marshes, and the Caliph was convinced that with a big push and more resources they could really exploit the underlying economic potential & convert Lower Mesopotamia – or
Al-Sawad, the 'arable land', as he would have called it – back into the breadbasket it once was in his wife's tales of the past.
Accordingly, it was from this point onward that the Hashemites made a truly enormous effort to restore productivity to the region. The
Batihah shrank under the pressure of numerous infrastructure projects as Arab and Persian engineers restored the canals, aqueducts and weirs left by the latter's ancestors or erected new ones, all of which had the dual benefit of not only draining the swamps but also providing a steady water supply for the Arab cities & farms still growing across the region, including the capital of Kufa. The results were obvious and undeniable: over the years the Arabs set up massive, and massively profitable, plantations engaged in intensive agriculture to grow huge quantities of crops ranging from cereals such as wheat & rice, to textiles such as cotton & hemp, to fruits such as dates and the citrus family, as well as great assortments of herbs, flowers and plants such as henna (for dyes). The intellectual energies which Caliph Hashim harnessed also produced several innovations to further improve agricultural productivity in
Al-Sawad, namely multiple waterwheel designs, and even the high salinity of the marshes played to his advantage since those left behind great salt flats for mining after the draining process was completed.
Now of course,
somebody had to do the hard and unpleasant work of actually, well, doing all the work to make the above possible. And while Hashim and the late Nusrat al-Din had captured a significant number of slaves in their conquest of the Levant and raids into Anatolia, even if the former hadn't had to return some of these, they weren't nearly sufficient in number to get a reclamation project as intensive and far-reaching as what Hashim had in mind done. The Khazars could be counted on to sell slaves from the north (overwhelmingly of Slavic, Caucasian or Finno-Ugric stock, with a recent influx of Greeks) but only when their empires were at peace, which the Caliph knew was not guaranteed to last forever even after the breakdown of the Roman-Khazar alliance. Similarly the Romans were not exactly reliable trading partners either, considering how often their empires had gone to war in just this century. To find the 'fuel' for the agricultural engine they were building, the Hashemites turned to East Africa: they had previously established trading outposts and ports along the Swahili Coast, but now they really began to lean on their local connections and send raiding parties of their own inland to gather a much greater number of slaves for transport to
Al-Sawad, where they labored in miserable conditions to reclaim and then work the land. Now obviously these Bantu-speaking, ebon-skinned slaves (or
Zanj) resented their masters and dreadful working conditions, but for the time being, the Caliphate was strong enough to stomp out any attempts at an uprising with extreme prejudice.
Hashim al-Hakim's great agricultural project would turn Mesopotamia into a breadbasket to rival Egypt for quite a few centuries
Elsewhere, Emperor Guangzong of Later Han perished in his sleep at the advanced age of ninety-one, and with him died that dynasty's golden era where they unquestionably bent the whole of East Asia and powers as distant as the Indo-Romans to their will. However, the reassertion of the late stages of the dynastic cycle which the Later Han (in a case of hubris or at best, clearly misplaced optimism) had thought would never befall them did not make itself immediately apparent. Guangzong's death did not instantly lead to a civil war nor was it heralded by some crisis or other: indeed he was peaceably succeeded by his chosen heir, a great-grandson by the name of Hao Yonghuang who had inherited the traditional Later Han heir's title of 'Prince of Han' from his father (who in turn had inherited it from
his father, Guangzong's eldest son), a man who would go down in history as Emperor Chongzong ('Lofty Ancestor'). The new
Huangdi was not even a particularly cruel or unintelligent man, merely (as his tutors often lamented) supremely lazy and prone to indulging in his arbitrary whims. The Later Han began to stagnate under his rule, although his predecessors had amassed enough riches and glory for him to get by on sheer inertia for quite some time, and one of the few initiatives Chongzong undertook was to support the rising power of Sailendra against Srivijaya in hopes of weakening this old maritime rival of the Middle Kingdom.
745 brought with it the demise of Aloysius II, who accidentally exacerbated his old war wound while overconfidently sparring in the autumn and expired after a week of progressively worsening pain in bed. He was fifty-four, the same age as his father when the latter died after overworking himself. Nevertheless the Emperor, true to his good-natured self to the end, went to the grave thanking God for giving him time enough to set his affairs in order and write to his family before calling him up for judgment. The third Aloysian
Augustus was widely mourned, perhaps more widely than either his father or even his grandfather: a competent administrator (even if not as intellectually gifted as Constantine VI) and soldier (though not as formidable as Aloysius I), he was nonetheless celebrated for being a considerably better man than the latter – one whose martial ability was tempered with a healthy sense of chivalry & humility, known to be honest in his dealings with prince and pauper, pagan and Saracen and Jew alike, and one of a few Aloysian Emperors never recorded as having taken a mistress or sired bastards – and for having restored Roman rule to both Britain and (about half of) Dacia.
The legacy of the second Aloysius was unfortunately tainted by the loss of the Holy Land having happened on his watch, setting up the famed and increasingly heated clashes between his descendants and those of Hashim al-Hakim over the next few centuries. Still, said descendants did not believe it fair to allow that calamity to completely overshadow the finer qualities and genuine achievements of 'Europe's first knight' on other fronts, and so consider him the last in the triad of original Aloysian Emperors who they hold up as role models to follow: the common belief within the
Domus Aloysiani was that their ideal monarchs should harness the might and valor of Aloysius I, the patience and wisdom of Constantine VI, and the courage and honor of Aloysius II. Christendom as a whole held a similar view, as the Ionians would elevate this Aloysius to sainthood sooner than his namesake and the progenitor of his dynasty.
The
Caesar and Frankish king Leo naturally rose to succeed his father in the purple, having been informed of the bad news and ordered to move to Rome in preparation for his anointing by Aloysius II himself as the latter felt the Reaper closing in on him. The new Emperor had already proven himself to be a cunning man, prone to intrigue and trickery, but also capable of statesmanlike diplomacy and of winning old enemies over when the need arose if his conduct in Saxony and Francia was any indicator; war was but a means for this man, an extension of politics and not his first resort at that. Indeed he started his reign by highlighting these qualities once more, incorporating the relics of the Frankish kings (chiefly the Holy Ampulla) into his second coronation as Holy Roman Emperor at the hands of Pope Boniface II and granting Roman citizenship to the Salian Franks as his first act in the imperial office. In so doing, the new
Augustus closed the book on the Frankish kingdom and finalized the total integration of that people into the Roman order without firing an arrow – he had already loosed all the arrows he needed to in the war to secure the Frankish crown, anyway, and considered the affair more akin to simply placing the capstone on the generational achievements of past Aloysians who had done most of the work in closely interweaving the future of the Franks with the Roman state.
Flavius Leo Augustus Tertius 'Germanicus', having already been anointed with chrism from the Sainte-Ampoule a second time, receiving the Roman imperial crown from Pope Boniface near the end of 745. To him falls the task of following through on his father's plans, especially the gambit to convert the Slavs to Christianity, as surely as Aloysius II had finished his grandfather Constantine's Senatorial reforms
While the Aloysians mourned the passing of Aloysius II and celebrated his life, and the Khazars continued wrestling among themselves, the Stilichians were hard at work on Rome's southernmost frontier. Bedãdéu had succeeded his father Yusténu as the King of Africa shortly after the conclusion of the recent Roman-Khazar War, and sought to pursue the schemes which the latter had planned to further empower their house in manners which, while unlikely to not raise Aloysian suspicion, would hopefully be so unimpeachably founded in the Christian religion that their overlords would be no less able to stop them than the Stilichians could stop Leo III from snapping up the Frankish crown years before. The first was the southwestward expansion of the African kingdom beyond Mount Atlas and as far as the length of the Sus River[21], where African scouts & traders had found a fertile valley conveniently shielded from the Saharan heat by the Anti-Atlas Mountains, over the coming decades.
Many of the Berbers native to this land were already familiar with the Africans, on account of African merchant caravans moving through the area on their path to trade for gold and other exotic goods further south, and no small number of them had already been converted to Christianity by Ionian missionaries long before they even exchanged the 'Ephesian' moniker for the new one: so they needed little persuasion to swear fealty to the Lord-King in Cartàginu who they already considered a good friend, source of riches and protector against more hostile (whether pagan or Donatist-inclined) Berber tribes from the east in the past. Those who did not yet fall into this category, the king strove to win over with gifts and Christian missions. Bedãdéu used Anfa[22] as his expeditions' base and rebuilt the abandoned Romano-Punic settlement at Asama[23] for the same purpose, though his real aim was the long-ruined Carthaginian colony at Gader[24] further to the south, and while sending his new vassals to Rome he also assured the Emperor that he was just bringing the Gospel and Roman civilization to neighbors who would have it.
Perhaps even more importantly in the long term, Bedãdéu also strengthened contact with the Berbers of the Fortunate Isles this year, sending emissaries and missionaries with lavish gifts to present before the native chiefs who'd already engaged in limited trade with the Romans. This first embassy met with success, satisfying Bedãdéu who was under the impression that the Africans and islanders shared distant ties of kinship, and they were thus followed by the establishment of missions on each island over the following years, from where the Ionian Africans would trade with and proselytize to the locals – the latter almost immediately ran into problems deeper than the locals' reverence for mountain gods though, as the pagans of these islands considered suicide an honorable act and their practices included animal & human sacrifice, an unwelcome reminder of what the Africans' own ancestors had been up to before being defeated by Rome. As they once more definitively added these islands to Roman maps, African cartographers revived the nomenclature originally assigned by the ancient Numidian king Juba II: collectively they were referred to as the
Canariae Insulae (Afri.:
Ésulas Ganarés) or simply the Canary Islands, the 'Islands of the Dogs'.
The Canarians were a rather primitive people, wearing goat hides and wielding weapons made of fire-hardened wood, but they proved friendly enough to deepen commercial ties with the Africans and welcome mainland visitors to live among them
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[1] Zeicani, part of modern Sarmizegetusa, which itself is about 40 kilometers away from the historical Dacian capital.
[2] The Muntenia region.
[3] Mogentiacum – Keszthely.
[4] Tác.
[5] Zalău.
[6] The Algonquin people of northeast Ontario/far southwest Quebec, not to be confused with the Algonquian language group in general.
[7] The Mississauga people of southern Ontario.
[8] Mackinac Island.
[9] Atuatuca Tungrorum – Tongeren.
[10] Cluj-Napoca.
[11] Alba Iulia.
[12] Around modern Curtea de Argeș.
[13] Oltenia, southwestern Transylvania and the Hungarian Banat.
[14] Approximating to the Dobruja region, the entirety of Moldavia and eastern Transylvania. Naturally, this leaves the HRE in control of Wallachia and western Transylvania.
[15] Dzau.
[16] Corabia.
[17] Roșia Montană.
[18] The Southern Bug.
[19] Near the island of Khortytsia, south of the Dnieper's ninth cataract.
[20] The Dnieper River.
[21] The Sous River.
[22] Casablanca.
[23] Azemmour.
[24] Agadir.
