Thinking on alternate-Zanj rebellions. The big historical one was an Islamic sectarian conflict that happened to draw in lots of disenfranchised people, but there were apparently earlier slave revolts that Arab writers didn't much write on.
With a Rome strong enough enough to think about counteroffensives, and a significant orthodox Christian presence in Babylonia, Rome might be able to covertly do some preaching to the slaves, and coordinate with military offensives.
It is however a long way from actual Roman territory, which is pushed back to about the Antioch area and for political/religious reasons the primary target of any Roman offensive is likely to be Palestine - along with possibly Egypt for economic, strategic and again religious reasons.
Also unless things have changed the Caliphate at this point is still fairly tolerant of other 'people of the book' unless they have upset the authorities, which is an incentive for the local 'Ionians' to keep their heads down.
Not saying its impossible and it could be that an emperor could seek to sacrifice any such revolt as a way to distract Muslim forces enough for success in areas more important to the empire. However organising and timing such a revolt from such a distance in this time period would be difficult and very likely to go badly wrong. That would be my concerns with such an idea.
Thinking on alternate-Zanj rebellions. The big historical one was an Islamic sectarian conflict that happened to draw in lots of disenfranchised people, but there were apparently earlier slave revolts that Arab writers didn't much write on.
With a Rome strong enough enough to think about counteroffensives, and a significant orthodox Christian presence in Babylonia, Rome might be able to covertly do some preaching to the slaves, and coordinate with military offensives.
It is however a long way from actual Roman territory, which is pushed back to about the Antioch area and for political/religious reasons the primary target of any Roman offensive is likely to be Palestine - along with possibly Egypt for economic, strategic and again religious reasons.
The distance is not so far, since Rome still holds the parts of Upper Mesopotamia taken in the last war, and so could march an army down the Euphrates. Of course, that would imply going straight for Kufa and the heart of the Caliphate in a do or die type of campaign instead of the lower stakes fighting over peripheries. Heraclius won big this way, but several other Emperors lost big, so . . .
Having managed to smoothly assume the purple (unlike his late father, who had to fight a rebellion right out of his starting gate), Leo III spent 746 firmly consolidating his position and preparing to follow up on the incomplete plans of Aloysius II. Aside from immediately bestowing upon his eleven-year-old son Theodosius the honor of Caesar so as to designate him as the new imperial heir, the new Augustus also arranged betrothals for his younger daughters, both of whom had been born around the time of the victories over the Franks and Saxons which gave him his nickname: the elder, eight-year-old Victoria, was betrothed to the Visigothic prince Recaredo (not merely to shore up that powerful federate kingdom's loyalty to the Aloysians but also to pre-empt a royal match between the Balthings and the Stilichians) while the younger, six-year-old Eudocia, was betrothed to Giorgi of Georgia's son Guaram. The latter match, coupled with the new Caesar's own betrothal to a powerful Greek magnate and dux's daughter by the name of Theophano Rangabe, signaled that Leo would assuredly fight hard to defend the Holy Roman Empire's remaining eastern territories and federates against Arab and Khazar encroachment.
When not engaging in imperial matchmaking or checking in on the progress on a glagolithic alphabet in order to better facilitate the mass conversion of the Sclaveni (which was still incomplete as of this year), Leo also looked abroad for opportunities to pave the way for the latter. With some assistance from the Poles, he identified the larger Antae tribes and dispatched embassies to greet their chiefs – not to convert them (yet), merely establish friendly diplomatic & commercial ties if possible, and to generally get a sense of their position on the broader geopolitics playing out around them. It was thanks to the Polani that the Romans could start putting names to the tribes which they were about to visit, for most had at least a little passing familiarity with their best-organized neighbor to the west: those nearest to the Poles were called the Volhynians ('Volnyany'), while the tribes who would ideally form Christendom's northeastern frontline were identified as the Drevlians ('Drevlyany') and the Eastern Polans or Polianians ('Polyany'), so called for living respectively in woodland and on the plains by the Borysthenes. A fourth tribe living by the Hypanis[1], who called themselves the Buzhanians ('Buzhane') after their own name for that other river (the 'Bug' – another river by this same name existed in the lands of the Poles and Volhynians, to the Romans' confusion), were also identified and found to be well-positioned to pressure the Khazars' remaining Daco-Moesian holdings in the eventuality of another Roman-Khazar conflict.
Four teams of Roman envoys were dispatched after the late snows and rains of spring had let up, one for each tribe. They hardly needed to prod the leading men of the Drevlians, Polianians and Buzhanians to get them to start complaining about how the Khazars had long been bad neighbors, alternating between shaking them down for tribute and launching slaving raids against those who could not pay. The Volhynians who had suffered less at Khazar hands (thanks to both their relative distance away from Khazaria and the natural protection offered by the great Pripet Marshes) and engaged in the occasional dispute over exact boundaries, farmland, cattle herds and whatnot with Rome's Polish allies: but ironically they were won over by the Poles' flaunting of their own gifts from the more advanced Romans and by tales of how the legions had once aided the Poles in casting down (and even absorbing) their former Iazyges masters a century ago, inflaming envy and a desire for the same riches and power in the Volhynian elders' hearts. In all cases the ambassadors also easily impressed these wild men of the northeastern forests & swamps with gifts of Roman-manufactured fine jewelry, glass artifacts and tea, none of which would have been possible to manufacture or otherwise obtain in their own lands. All in all, they got good days' work done over the summer and autumn months, piquing the tribes' interest in allying with these mighty overlords of the West who could save their flesh from Khazar whips and their souls from damnation – and assuring the chiefs that they would be back, with much more to offer, in good time.
Kyiv, so named for its founder Vozhd Kyi, the largest Slavic fortified village (or 'gord'/'gorod') among the East Slavs and seat of the greatest Polianian chiefs
The Khazars who Rome had set up as the big boogeyman with which to gain the support of these easternmost Sclaveni, meanwhile, were entering the next stage of their civil war. Tarmaç Tarkhan, having been gradually worn down between the alliance of Simon-Sartäç Khagan and Kibar Tarkhan over the past few years, was finally cornered and killed in this one at the First Battle of Taphros[2], having apparently attempted in vain to flee to the Tauric Chersonese and turn that into some sort of bastion where he could hold out against his enemies. In any case, Kibar thanked the legitimate Khagan for saving him from destruction at Tarmaç's hands two years prior by attempting to ambush his encamped army the very night after their joint victory, but Simon-Sartäç was not nearly naïve enough to readily let his guard down and beat his last treacherous challenger's equally weary & less numerous soldiers in the Second Battle of Taphros. The loyalist Khazars spent the rest of the year harrying Kibar's dwindling partisans and mounting a headhunt for the rebel Tarkhan himself, albeit unsuccessfully as of 746's end.
Far off in the distant southeast, the conflict between Srivijaya and Sailendra was also fast approaching its climax. The latter's raja Bratisena, having managed to secure a shipment of high-quality weapons from China for his warriors (ironically transported by Srivijayan smugglers) through the Srivijayan blockade of Java, proceeded to inflict a major defeat on the Srivijayans and those Javanese vassals who had continued to support them in the Battle of Kuwu[3] – even driving the routed survivors toward a cluster of mud volcanoes where many perished. This victory and the following Sailendran naval triumph in the Battle off Kalingga[4] might have definitively shattered Srivijaya's hold on eastern and central Java, where their remaining tributaries now capitulated & switched allegiance to Sailendra so as to avoid being annihilated entirely; but the older maritime empire still had some fight left in it and repelled Bratisena's efforts to campaign against their holdings in the west, thanks in no small part to the allied Sunda Kingdom which had remained loyal to them. Nevertheless Bratisena now proudly elevated himself to the rank of Mahārāja in an overt challenge to the Srivijayan monarchs of the same name who had just proven themselves unable to stop him, and his newly-independent kingdom spanning central and eastern Java would no doubt be a thorn in Srivijaya's side for decades if not centuries to come.
King Bratisena, the founder of a new power in Southeast Asia
Over the course of 747, through their heightened contact with the Poles and the East Slavs, the Romans learned of a growing willingness among their neighbors to more deeply exploit mutual commercial opportunities to the north. Namely, the amber trade whose southernmost starting points lay in the former lands of the East Germanic Vidivarii, who had since been supplanted by peoples unrelated either to them or the Poles: collectively known as the Aesti[5] since the times of Tacitus and Claudius Ptolemy, the Romans now learned that they could be further divided into tribes going by names such as the Pomesanians ('Pameddi') and Bartians ('Barti'), and from their towns like Kaup[6] they exported the precious fossilized resin in exchange for commodities like Roman glasswares and jewelry. Emperor Leo was quite happy to intensify this trade, repairing old roads and building new ones in friendly lands to facilitate it as well as constructing forts to secure those roads and increasing the volume of Roman goods being exchanged for an equally boosted amount of amber, bringing greater prosperity to towns and peoples along its route all the way to its southern terminus at Venezia.
As Venezia grew (fueled not only by the amber trade but also by many others, from silks to spices & tea to slaves) to eclipse Aquileia and other, older cities in the region which had never managed to fully recover from the devastation wrought by the Huns and Avars in past centuries, Venetian merchants increasingly came to involve themselves with the Augustus' northward embassies. For that matter so too did German and Frankish merchants, as Leo had also engaged in roadworks across the Teutonic realms to better connect them to one another and his own imperial seat at Trévere, in the process allowing budding ports like Hamburg in Saxony to become additional entrepôts on the Amber Road's Teutonic course. Mercer, missionary and envoy alike would work together to further chart out the northeastern extremes of the Romans' known world, the first of these being motivated by a desire to extend the Amber Road and feed their appetite for the 'gold of the north', which in this year would add the militant Yotvingians ('Jotvingai' – formerly identified as 'Neuri' by Claudius Ptolemy, but now Roman mapmakers would use the correct endonym for them), river-dwelling Scalvians ('Skalviai'), restless Curonians ('Kurši') and the Lithuanian peoples (who were further divided into the western Samogitians or 'Žemaitė' and eastern Aukstaitians or 'Aukštaičiai') to Roman maps.
Leo himself found these northern Balts to be quite unfriendly, receptive enough to Roman bullion but not to proselytization or serious diplomatic ties with outsiders, much less hosting outsiders in their lands for long. Furthermore, they would generally rather trade through their neighbors (including each other) than to the Romans directly. Ah well – to the Augustus, befriending the isolationist Balts was the least of his priorities, so like his father did with the Danes, he was content to leave them well enough alone and let another one of his descendants deal with them somewhere far down the road. Not only did they appear more savage than even the most distant of the Sclaveni, but they were also situated too far away from Khazaria to possibly be of any significant help in fighting the latter, and overall seemed to bring no value to Roman interests outside of being additional suppliers on the Amber Road. Perhaps the Romans would one day develop even a passing interest in their remote forest homes, but that day must still be very far away indeed.
Venezia (or simply Venice) had profited from the devastation of the Balkans & Italy by past nomadic invaders, which had created a vacuum into which it stepped in and grew to rival the hometowns of its founding refugees. Imperial patronage and growing links to larger trade networks, like the Amber and Silk Roads, would drive the city toward new commercial heights
East of the Baltic and Slavic lands which Roman cartographers were busy mapping out, the Khazars' internal struggle was nearly at an end, for now at least. Under unrelenting pressure from the loyalists of Simon-Sartäç, Kibar Tarkhan eventually found himself bereft of followers – all his remaining partisans having been hunted down or defected over the course of this year as it became apparent that he could not reverse his fortunes. He fled to the lands of the Eastern Polans, navigating his way to their largest town by the Borysthenes at Kyiv (named after its founder, the Polyane prince Kyi, from two centuries prior) and offering to lend these particular Sclaveni his aid in organizing a defense against his own kind if they would but kindly give him shelter. Unfortunately for him, not only had he been involved with Khazar slave raids on their land in the past, but they were now holding out for Roman support instead and Simon-Sartäç was offering a handsome reward for his head. Naturally, the Polianians removed said head from his shoulders and handed it to the Khagan, both to collect the reward and avoid his wrath in the short to medium term.
On the other side of the planet, the Annúnites continued to make inroads with their new neighbors. In this year they chiefly continued their ongoing work to befriend the Wilderman tribes of the Ímàmié, Míssisségé and Uendage, with whom they exchanged copper tools (made from the plentiful copper readily available further east where they had originally landed, though transporting it was difficult without roads) for the knowledge to build canoes of high quality, which would allow them to more easily traverse the Great Lakes and the Sant-Pelagé. That was not all, however: the Briton Pilgrims also sent their first embassy to treat with the better-organized and more powerful Council of Three Fires to the west, who the court of King Eluédh identified as the first real kingdom of the Wildermen they had ever encountered in this New World.
It was not easy for the men of Annún to find willing interpreters from the ranks of their friends, as the Ímàmié and most of the Míssisségé seemed to fear this western confederacy and the Uendage could not communicate with them at all. Ultimately Eluédh was able to find a few translators from Míssisségé clans who did not appear to have engaged in hostilities with the Three Fires tribes (at least not recently), but after managing to acquire a meeting with the elders of the Three Fires, they and his ambassadors found out why so few of the other Great Lakes tribes had been willing to deal with these western Wildermen. They were numerous, certainly far more numerous and mighty than their eastern neighbors, and well-assured of their power: in conduct they also appeared awfully haughty to the Pelagians, expressing scorn for the Ímàmié & Míssisségé and boasting that only they could rightly be called 'Anishinaabe' (Brit.: 'Anicinébe') – the 'good people' – not the Ímàmié who had also claimed that nomenclature.
A diplomatic incident was averted by quick-thinking missionaries among the British embassy who issued an appeal for peace in the name of the Great Spirit, gaining the interest of the Anicinébe who were surprised that outsiders knew of their supreme god, as well as merchants who offered them iron tools (pots and such) as well as ornate daggers for the greatest chiefs of the three tribes constituting this confederacy. In turn the diplomats learned the names of those three tribes, the titular Three Fires: Ogibwé[7] ('Ozhibii'iwe'), the 'Elder Brother' which seemed to be the most powerful and advanced tribe, using pictograms to keep records and assist in storytelling; Éttaué[8] ('Wadaawewinini'), the 'Middle Brother' whose territories lay closest to Annún and who seemed to be the tribe most positively disposed toward the newcomers; and the Pottuétomé[9] ('Bodéwadmi'), the 'Little Brother' living furthest away from the Britons, who appeared to have a spiritual responsibility among the tribes for actually keeping their sacred fires burning. The emissaries also returned home with some knowledge of the Anicinébe's great reverence for animal totems (Ogibwé: 'Doodem'), but overall the lesson which Eluédh took away from their report was that they absolutely were not ready for a conflict with this great kingdom around the western shores of the Great Lakes and should strive to remain on good terms with them for the foreseeable future.
Three Fires Wildermen (or 'Anicinébe' to their Briton neighbors) fishing near one of the smaller waterfalls around the Great Lakes
748 brought with it further advances in the Romans' scouting and diplomatic efforts in the east, this time in lands more relevant to their contention with Khazaria. Leo's ambassadors moved through the lands of the Antae tribes already visited to distribute additional gifts and promises of a more permanent Roman presence – the translation of the Gospels and important Ionian liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic's Glagolithic alphabet was proceeding at a good pace, and once that was done, missionary efforts east of Poland could begin in earnest while those west of & including it would be intensified. However, these diplomatic missions' real objective was to establish communications with and get a good sense of the rest of 'Sclavinia' or the Slavic world, which they accomplished by the end of the year.
Roman cartographers could now further update their maps with four more Slavic nations. Southernmost of these were the Severians ('Siveryane'), who lived east & northeast of the Polianians and could be counted among the Antaic peoples. Beyond them lay the swamp-dwelling Dregoviches ('Dryhavičy') living. And finally, lingering on the edges of 'Sclavinia' were the Kryviches ('Kryvičý') dwelling in the forests and riverlands north of the Dregoviches, and adjacent to the practically hyperborean Finno-Ugric peoples the Ilmen Slavs ('Il'menskiye Slovene') did dwell in the wintry lands utterly removed from the limits of Roman civilization. The Severians had been prey to the Khazars as the neighboring Polianians and Drevlians had been, and the southernmost of the Dregoviches had been subject to the furthest-reaching expeditions of the Khazars in the past, but the Khazars and the problem they posed were practically alien to the latter two groups.
In any case this knowledge was satisfactory to Leo III, who identified the Severians as (together with the Drevlians & Eastern Polans, as well as the Volhynians linking them to the Polish lands) the last of the East Slavic tribes who were in any position to be of use against the Khazars. Even before completing the translation of the Good Book into Slavonic, the Romans laid down serious plans for proselytization into these lands, among those of the other Slavs: by the Emperor's order the evangelizing priests were chosen (including, but not limited to, every single one of the clerics working on the translations in the first place), resources stockpiled, and arrangements for housing & the construction of at least one church sought with the tribal chiefs ahead of time.
A pagan Slavic temple, housing idols of their gods and attended to by a priest called a volkhv, in the times before Christendom came to Sclavinia
Immediately adjacent to the East Slavic lands being approached for proselytization and alignment with the Holy Roman Empire's orbit, in Khazaria there remained only one more obstacle to internal stability. Kayqalagh Khan was disappointed in the failure of the various rebel tarkhans to eliminate his nephew for him, and now began to amass his warriors to do the deed himself on account of the previous battles having still succeeded at weakening Simon-Sartäç. Hostilities were averted by the efforts of the Khagan's mother Rachel and his wife, Kayqalagh's own daughter, Esin Khatun: the two women swayed the Khagan and his uncle the Khan to attempt to hash out a peace settlement, and hopefully avoid conflict at the last minute, at a feast in Atil to mark the transition from spring to summer of this year. Both men agreed to hang up their swords together in order to demonstrate good faith and a willingness not to kill each other over the dinner table, even if their bodyguards remained armed.
The feast itself went off without a hitch, and lasted an entire week without either Simon-Sartäç Khagan or Kayqalagh Khan trying to kill each other. Unfortunately, despite seemingly managing to remain on cordial terms with each other (at least for this event), the two men were unable to actually reach a lasting agreement for peace. Even more unfortunately, both men fell badly ill almost immediately after the celebration ended and Kayqalagh left Atil: he died of bad bowels a few days later, while Simon-Sartäç seemed to be on death's door by the same point but managed to recover. Obviously, accusations of poisoning began to spread, but who poisoned who was the question – the two men did drink from the same chalice of Tauric wine as a final public gesture of reconciliation & kinship (with Kayqalagh going first, and thus having an opportunity to slip something into the drink before handing it off to Simon-Sartäç) shortly before it turned out they couldn't actually reach any accommodation for peace, after all.
The living Khagan managed to blame Kayqalagh, pointing to the latter's demise and his own survival as a sign of divine favor toward the intended victim, which impressed and seemed to make sense to most observers; but inevitably some suspicion lingered as to his mother having poisoned the drink and kept an antidote for her son, although Simon-Sartäç's partisans argued that if this were the case she would surely have given it to him long before it looked as though the poison would actually kill him. Alternatively it may have been the case that Kayqalagh really did poison the drink, and Simon-Sartäç drank the poison knowing of both the plot and the antidote being in his mother's hands. In any case, Kayqalagh's sons did not have the same fiery ambitions he did and bowed to their cousin, finally bringing a close to years of infighting among the Khazars.
Kayqalagh Khan invites his not-so-dear nephew to drink with him
749 brought with it the earnest beginnings of religious reformation in the Hashemite Caliphate and Khazaria both, following on the heels of the evolution of Ephesian Christianity into its Ionian form. In the Islamic lands, Caliph Hashim had spent the past years in close consultation with sages and scientists gathered from every corner of his vast domain into the newly-completed House of Wisdom, and now felt that their efforts had borne fruit in the shape of a codified standard for 'Ilm Islam. This new theological school, melding Arab traditions with Greco-Syrian thought (especially of a Platonic bent) and Persian mystical influences, contended that 'aql – reason – and the titular 'ilm – knowledge – naturally proceeded from God and had been provided by Him to His devotees as means through which they could understand His creation. And not merely its physically observable aspects, which could be understood through empirical observation & testing, but also the intangible spiritual ones, such as the concepts of good & evil.
The 'Ilmi identified Allah with the Neoplatonic concept of 'the One', or 'the Monad' – that is, the singular supreme principle predating and underpinning the entirety of creation, who was beyond mortal understanding. Where they differed was that they affirmed Allah was a benevolent (and the only) God who created the world rather than an ineffable and impersonal 'thing' from which the rest of creation emanated as all Muslims do, and that even in accepting that as lowly mortals they could never fully understand Allah, they contended they could understand His creations with the aforementioned gifts of reason and knowledge. For example, because Allah is all-benevolent, the 'Ilmi argued that it was only logical that He could not order evil acts, so that all evil must ultimately stem from human hands willingly carrying such acts out, thereby meaning that (akin to Zoroastrian thought, and by accident, Pelagian thought as well) He created all humans with free will and the ability to choose between doing good or evil. By extension, since the Quran was not uncreated, neither was sharia (Islamic law) – and that meant the latter was not wholly set in stone, but if its codes should contradict 'aql and 'ilm then the Hashemite Caliph (as the successor of the Prophet and the man best positioned to interpret God's will) could, nay, was obligated to alter it for the better, with the assistance of a shura council of the most learned scholars in the realm of course. For another example, the 'Ilmi also argue that the Quran could not have possibly been uncreated and co-eternal with the Almighty, because logically He must have preceded His own revelations to Muhammad.
Of course, despite its emphasis on human reason and logic, 'Ilm Islam was in no way a secular or strictly materialistic belief system. Intense meditation (including study and recital of the Quran) to draw closer to and improve one's limited understanding of Allah, or murāqabah, emerged as a prominent 'Ilmi practice inspired by similar Neoplatonic meditative concepts. All exchanges and gathering of knowledge was seen as not merely an exercise in scholarship or something to indulge in for the sake of personal satisfaction when there is nothing else to do, but a religious imperative to acquire a better understanding of Allah's creation. Inevitably the 'Ilmi also firmly bound themselves to the rule of the senior Hashemite branch of which Hashim al-Hakim was the incumbent head at the time of their sect's formulation, acknowledging them as the only legitimate heads of the Islamic world and (being the descendants of God's final prophet) the people best-positioned to lead the rest of humanity into harmony with and greater understanding of Allah's design; furthermore the 'Ilmi also acknowledge the validity of the hadith, but recognize the blood of the Prophet as the ultimate authority on which hadiths are truly valid, for who is better suited to record and interpret his words & deeds in life than his own kin? Hashim in turn accepted that it was his and his heirs' responsibility to act in line with Allah's will at all times, and that they had to live virtuous, moderate and scholarly lives so as to be an appropriate murshid (spiritual guide) for the rest of the House of Submission to follow.
Hashim al-Hakim, depicted with a halo as is common for Hashemites in 'Ilmi art, in his House of Wisdom with the first-generation 'Ilmi ulema
While 'Ilm Islam's foundations were codified, and inevitably ginned up opposition in the form of rival sects belonging to a more fundamentalist and anti-Hashemite bent which saw its extreme emphasis on human reason & intellectualism (and the conclusions it derived from that perspective, like the createdness of the Quran) to be hubristic errors and its position on the Hashemites' right to & authority within the Caliphate to be borderline or actually idolatrous, up north Simon-Sartäç Khagan was using his first year at peace to not only consolidate his position through more conventional means – bribes, promotions for his followers, the apportionment of loot from the final stages of the (admittedly failed) war with the Romans and what had been seized from his defeated enemies, and so on – but also religiously. Determined not to be left in the dust by his Roman cousins or the Muslims now, he convened the Jewish, Buddhist and Tengriist sages at his court who had managed to get along so far and hosted one forum after another for them to debate among themselves, with the hope of finding sufficient common ground to build syncretic links between the triad on.
In India, it was the southern Hindus' turn to move toward consolidation, so that they might rival both the ascendant Muslims who had seized much of the northwest and the fading Hunas who, nevertheless, still stood – however shaky their legs might be now – to safeguard Buddhism in the northeast. Through carefully arranged marriages and military pressure the Later Salankayanas of Andhra absorbed the Chalukyas to their west, who in turn had already subsumed the weaker Jainist Western Gangas in much the same way themselves, thereby uniting the Kannadas and the Telugus under one dynasty. The man who had achieved this feat, Mahadeva I, next turned his attention to the remaining major Hindu powers with whom he had to share control over southern India up to this point: the Lāṭa rajputs to the north, who dominated most of the Hindu lands directly bordering the new Islamic invaders, and the Chera-Chola-Pandya triarchy of the Tamils to the south.
Mahadeva targeted the Gujaratis first, catching their king Gongiraja off-guard on account of the latter having dedicated most of his life and resources (as his predecessors had) to guarding the northern frontier with Dar al-Islam. Salankanaya forces marched upon his capital of Bharuch and seized it with hardly a fight while he was still frantically pulling his own armies together, on the promise that Mahadeva would not harm the defenders or those they were defending and that he would grant Gongiraja's family the honorable treatment which their rank demanded. When Gongiraja did descend to fight for his kingdom, Mahadeva did not hold his family hostage in an effort to extort his submission but instead made arrangements for a battle before Bharuch, which Gongiraja agreed to – of course, since Mahadeva got to choose the battlefield and prepare accordingly, he prevailed. The Lāṭa rajputs were made to bow before Mahadeva and accept him as their suzerain in the aftermath of the Battle of Bharuch, and in turn he elevated himself to Samrat of India with the especially fervent support of the brahmin sages and kshatriya warrior caste, who viewed him as the best chance they had of defending the Vedic traditions against both the Buddhists and Muslims in centuries.
Mahadeva Salankayana, the newest Samrat in India, receiving the surrender of the Gujarati rajputs
750 brought with it the completion of the translation of the Gospels and other relevant liturgical materials into Old Church Slavonic and its attendant glagolithic alphabet, itself based on the tongue of the South Slavs who were already inside the Holy Roman Empire. The work of Aloysius II was now finished, albeit more than a few years since his death; now the work of Leo III had to begin, in the form of missionaries taking these translated works and putting them to good use in spreading the true faith to those Sclaveni who have yet to hear. For the South Slavic federates, fully trained & ordained priests from the ranks of their own Christian populations had been chosen to undertake this mission: Anton of Celje was selected to lead the Carantanian mission, Domagoj of Knin headed the Croat one, Mutimir of Blatnograd[10] led the Dulebian mission, Sava of Ras captained the mission to his fellow Serbs, and Kiril of Preslav was to lead the Thracian mission.
To the West Slavs the missionary chiefs were thus: the brothers Slavibor and Slavomír of Velehrad would preach to the Bohemians and Moravians, who had already been made to bend before the Holy Roman Emperors; to Rome's Polish allies went their neighbor Svatopluk; to the Wendish Lutici went Rastislav of Předhradí[11]; Jaromír of Malá Divina[12] would go to the Obotrites, who had been sufficiently awed by their brief confrontation with Leo's legions in Nordalbingia more than a decade ago to let him preach; and Jesek of Blatnica was assigned to preach to the Pomeranians. As for the East Slavs, the Ionians dispatched the Dulebian Ioakim of Střegom[13] to proselytize to the Volhynians; twins Valens and Vitalian of Doros, Greco-Goths who had been preaching among the Thracians when they received news of their Tauric homeland's fall to the Khazars, had volunteered to spread the Good News to the Polianians and Drevlians respectively; and to the Severians went Bozidar of Silistra, the first student of the twins.
Collectively these fifteen men would be canonized soon after their deaths (some of which would come sooner for them than others, on occasion with a martyr's crown, in others simply brought on by disease or old age or sheer unfortunate accident) as the 'Apostles to the Slavs'. Once they and their teams had been dispatched from Aquileia and Constantinople where they'd first been gathered, Leo prayed for their success and waited for them to sow the seeds which would, hopefully, grow into additional Ionian churches stretching from the Adriatic to the Baltic and from the Elbe to the Dnieper. Of course, he would assist that growth when and where he could through the judicious deployment of Roman commercial wealth, cultural prestige, and when necessary – especially as he expected he might have to defend the easternmost of the Sclaveni from the Khazars one of these days, should Simon-Sartäç Khagan grow so alarmed as to rouse himself from his own efforts at internal religious reformation to assail them – legions. No missions were sent to the Balts or the northernmost East Slavs in this century for the Augustus did not remotely rank them among his priorities unlike the Sclaveni who actually were his neighbors, the Khazars' neighbors, or inside the Empire already.
Speaking of missions, the Africans continued to strive mightily to push theirs southward and westward. It was in 750 that African surveyors discovered the site of ancient Carthaginian Gader by the Atlantic, which King Bedãdéu had been searching for for quite some time: of course, he immediately reclaimed the ruins for Rome & the Stilichians, and began working on a new colony atop them. West of there the Moorish missions to the Canaries were thriving, and sailors had also definitively charted smaller, idyllic but uninhabited islands to the north which they duly identified with the 'Blessed Isles' (Afr.: Ésulas Benedéddés). Furthermore the Dominus Rex's subjects, mostly those rural-dwelling southerners of thick Berber blood who were poetically referred to as the 'Sons of Massinissa' in African writings, had been migrating into the former Donatist strongholds to the south and colonizing those ruins, rebuilding old settlements which had been cleansed of the heretics' taint and building entirely new ones on a firmly Ionian foundation. In these efforts they were encouraged and increasingly directly sponsored by Bedãdéu, who also took the opportunity to shore up diplomatic & commercial ties with the Christian men of Kumbi far to the south.
An African fortified town in one of the Hoggar range's valleys, where an oasis provides enough water to grow some crops and the Donatists have long since been chased away or annihilated
This growth in Stilichian power inevitably alarmed Leo III, and though the Emperor was wary of picking a fight with the mightiest of his federates, he looked for more covert ways to constrain their surging power. His brother the Cardinal Ioannes tried and failed to advocate for the Roman See to 'help' their Carthaginian brethren in spreading the Gospel southward, to which the Carthaginian Patriarchate had insisted they were doing that just fine – quite splendidly even – and were thankful for the offer of assistance but did not require it, thank you very much. The Augustus did however know that the Kumbians had grown mighty off the lucrative gold & salt trades, gobbling up much of the defeated Donatists' southern holdings & former areas of influence, and were exerting such power of their own over other 'Aethiopian' tribes to their south & west that they were on the verge of proclaiming themselves the 'Ghana Empire'. It occurred to Leo that he ought to send another embassy to hail the Kaya Maghan, or 'King of Gold', and to delineate a Saharan border between the Roman world and that of their Blackamoor allies – in other words, a hard limit on just how far south the Africans could extend themselves.
While the Romans were dispatching missionaries to bring the light of Ionian Christianity to the Slavs, the Khagan of the Khazars continued work on syncretizing those religions already present in his own land. As he had expected, Buddhism and Tengriism were the easiest of the triad to reconcile: of the 99 tngri (ancestral gods) ultimately ruled by Tengri, the great Blue Heaven himself, the 55 benevolent or 'white' ones would be reinterpreted as buddhas and bodhisattvas who had already partly or wholly attained enlightenment and were working to help others, while the 44 malevolent or 'black' ones were recast as lost and confused devas in need of enlightenment rather than outright demonized. Efforts were also made to syncretize the ancient shamanic practices of the Khazars with Buddhist monasticism and rituals, especially mystical recitations. Judaism and Buddhism were harder to reconcile: it did help that the Buddhists technically did not acknowledge or deny any god (as such, the hypothetical Jewish Buddhist could claim to worship only God while practicing Buddhist rituals), and Simon-Sartäç strove to reconcile the concept of the Messiah with that of Maitreya Buddha, the Jewish prophets with the bodhisattvas and the Five Precepts of Buddhism with some of the Ten Commandments.
However the concept of reincarnation in Judaism (gilgul) was held by only a minority of esoteric mystics and other Buddhist concepts, such as their prohibition on intoxicating materials (most certainly including alcohol) or use of meditation, were also difficult sells to the Judaic community to say the least. And Judaism and Tengriism in particular seemed nigh-impossible to reconcile, for the Tengriists believed in 99 gods in addition to Tengri himself while the First Commandment prohibited worship of any deity but God. Certainly the Jews found Tengriist practices, such as shamanic communication with the spirits of one's ancestors or animal sacrifices & ceremonial libations, to be abhorrent – and the Tengriists felt much the same way about Jewish beliefs & practices such as circumcision or the idea that all the deceased would end up in the same underworld, Sheol, regardless of their deeds in life (whereas they had heavenly Uçmag and hellish Tamag for afterlifes). Clearly, the Khagan still had many more years to go before he would have anything resembling a coherent belief system in his hands – probably more than all the years the Aloysians had spent on church councils to refine the Ionian teachings, or those spent by Hashim al-Hakim on formulating the foundation of 'Ilm Islam.
Far to the south and east, Mahadeva now turned his eyes to Tamilakam and campaigned to subjugate the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas to Salankayana overlordship. These kingdoms had been gutted by the Hunas in past invasions, but they had always managed to survive and recover; qualities which the Samrat admired and hoped to incorporate into his own Hindu empire, so that he took a similarly light touch to the Tamil kingdoms as what he'd previously applied to Gujarat. With the Hunas clearly in no shape to take a leading role in the conflicts against Islam which lay ahead, Mahadeva also strove to establish diplomatic contact with the Indo-Romans and firm up an alliance with them which could pressure their mutual Alid enemies on two fronts. To this end he even arranged the marriage of one of his daughters, Srimahadevi, to the Belisarian prince Strategius: in order to avoid the Muslims she had to loop through the Huna lands and the southern Himalayas before reaching the safety of Indo-Roman Kasperia[14], a difficult journey made all the more exhausting by the need to move quickly before wintertime made the mountains impassable.
1. Holy Roman Empire
2. Praetorian Prefecture of the Orient
3. Burgundians
4. Alemanni
5. Visigoths
6. Celtiberians
7. Aquitania
8. Bavarians
9. Frisians
10. Continental Saxons
11. Thuringians
12. Lombards
13. Czechs & Moravians
14. Dulebians
15. Carantanians
16. Croats
17. Serbs
18. Thracians
19. Gepids
20. Dacians
21. Armoricans
22. Romano-British
23. Anglo-Saxons
24. Africa
25. Georgia
26. Armenia
27. Cilician Bulgars
28. Ghassanids
29. Dál Riata
30. Picts
31. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta & Connachta
32. Poles
33. Wendish tribes of the Obotriti, Lutici & Pomerani
34. Denmark
35. Dar al-Islam
36. Alids
37. Khazars
38. Prussians
39. Baltic tribes of the Scalvians, Curonians, Samogitians & Aukstaitians
40. Volhynians
41. Drevlians
42. Buzhanians
43. Polianians
44. Severians
45. Dregoviches
46. Kryviches
47. Ilmen Slavs
48. Kumbi
49. Nubia
50. Indo-Romans
51. Kimeks
52. Karluks
53. Oghuz Turks
54. Tibet
55. Gujarat
56. Later Salankayanas
57. Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas & Pandyas
58. Anuradhapura
59. Hunas
60. Later Han
61. Silla
62. Yamato
63. Champa
64. Chenla
65. Srivijaya
66. Sailendra
67. New World Irish
68. Annún
69. Council of Three Fires
So Hashim's ideal of Islam is closer to some strains of Suffism than what we know as Sunni Islam? I can imagine that will cause a lot of resistance amongst some elements, something that Alids might seek to exploit, if they don't get surprised by their enemies working in concert for once.
Great chapter,as always.
We would have:
1.slavic ritual - good for more convert,in OTL germans stopped that.
2.Koran in final form - in OTL it happened after 800AD,and as a result we do not knew how oryginal looked like.
Some claim it started as heretical psalter,other that it was made by some heretical jews.
Nobody knew,and till we find something/impossible with Sauds ruling/ we would not knew.
3.Khazars united pagans and buddhist/possible/ and try mix it wioth judaism.Sorry,mission impossible.
4.Contacts wigh major slavic and Balt tribes - also possible.Good idea to not care about balts - they /with exception of lithuania/ never united,so they would not unite now.
5.Kiev friendly to HRE - which mean,that vikings would not take it.Poor vikings,all they have to raiding is Ireland and North America.Everybody else would kick them out.
6.Kumbi recognized by HRE,and Ghana christian empire there.
7.Berbers sailing on Atlantic,and discovering/or re-discovering/ Carribeans and Brasil.
8.United Hindu South India.
9.Logical Islam - i see many cyvil wars in future,and burned books.
So Hashim's ideal of Islam is closer to some strains of Suffism than what we know as Sunni Islam? I can imagine that will cause a lot of resistance amongst some elements, something that Alids might seek to exploit, if they don't get surprised by their enemies working in concert for once.
It looks to be a direct translation of Mu'tazilism, a mostly extinct branch currently mainly used as a pejorative by fundamentalist Sunni. It was the state religion under 3 Caliphs during the Islamic golden age, but was consistently opposed by the Ulema as a whole and collapsed under Al-Mutawakkil.
So Hashim's ideal of Islam is closer to some strains of Suffism than what we know as Sunni Islam? I can imagine that will cause a lot of resistance amongst some elements, something that Alids might seek to exploit, if they don't get surprised by their enemies working in concert for once.
It looks to be a direct translation of Mu'tazilism, a mostly extinct branch currently mainly used as a pejorative by fundamentalist Sunni. It was the state religion under 3 Caliphs during the Islamic golden age, but was consistently opposed by the Ulema as a whole and collapsed under Al-Mutawakkil.
You're both right - for much of 'Ilm Islam's basis I had in mind Mu'tazilite rationalism. However the mystical elements, like the emphasis on personal meditation and such, I lifted from Sufism (no whirling dervishes though...at least not yet). Other aspects are grounded in Shi'ism, some spiritual and others statist - the 'Ilmi are still carrying over certain Shi'a-derived practices mentioned in past chapters like reverence for saints, and on top of that they're treating the Caliph more like Shi'ite Imams (divinely guided leaders from the family of Muhammad, and a very specific branch of descent from him at that) and ascribing to him a degree of divinely-bestowed infallibility (ismah, again mainly a Shi'ite concept to my understanding) so great that they believe he can amend sharia to be better in line with his, and by extension God's, irrefutable logic & reason.
You're both right - for much of 'Ilm Islam's basis I had in mind Mu'tazilite rationalism. However the mystical elements, like the emphasis on personal meditation and such, I lifted from Sufism (no whirling dervishes though...at least not yet). Other aspects are grounded in Shi'ism, some spiritual and others statist - the 'Ilmi are still carrying over certain Shi'a-derived practices mentioned in past chapters like reverence for saints, and on top of that they're treating the Caliph more like Shi'ite Imams (divinely guided leaders from the family of Muhammad, and a very specific branch of descent from him at that) and ascribing to him a degree of divinely-bestowed infallibility (ismah, again mainly a Shi'ite concept to my understanding) so great that they believe he can amend sharia to be better in line with his, and by extension God's, irrefutable logic & reason.
Well,arabs would not like it.
Aside from that - slavic tribes basically do not have pagan schrines before meeting Christians.
Western slavs started it after they meet christianed germans,poles have one small which was destroyed before we christaned ourselves,and in Russia case there is no proofs that they bulded anything before meeting ERE.
Religion: Ionian Christianity is still practiced by the Indo-Roman core of the ruling elite, as well as small numbers of additional converts in the capital and other Indo-Roman cities along the Silk Road. However, the great majority of their kingdom's population are still Hindus, Buddhists or local pagans, such as the Paropamisadae worshipers of the solar god Zhūn near Kophen itself.
Language: Bactrian, as the sole Indo-Iranian language conveniently written using an adapted Greek script, stands as the official language of the Indo-Roman kingdom. Usage of the Greek language still survives among the elite, reinforced by periodic diplomatic & commercial contact with the Holy Roman Empire. Outside of Bactria itself, their subjects still communicate in their own native tongues: Sogdian, Tocharian, Khotanese Sakan, Sanskrit and the various Apabhraṃśa descendants of the older Prakrit languages (themselves deformations of Sanskrit) such as Kashmiri & Punjabi.
A most unusual state spans the mountains of Bactria & Sogdia, the sands of the Tarim Basin and the headwaters of the great Indus. Here the illustrious general and governor Flavius Belisarius was cut off from the rest of the Roman world in the mid-sixth century, when the Eastern Roman Empire had to retreat from the vast but fragile Persian conquests it had wrenched from the grasp of the Hepthalites under pressure from its Tegreg Turkic ally-turned-rival immediately after the death of the great Emperor Sabbatius, as was his family and those of the few thousand soldiers he still had with him. In order to survive in this distant land Belisarius laid the foundation for an independent kingdom – a multicultural and multiconfessional patchwork of Paropamisadae tribes, Sogdian and Bactrian merchant towns, Tocharian kings and Indian rajputs – and though he insisted he was but a humble servant of the Roman Emperor in Constantinople to his dying day, his son (also the grandson of the aforementioned Sabbatius) immediately accepted the reality on the ground (particularly the obvious fact that the Romans wouldn't be coming back for them anytime soon) by proclaiming himself an independent king.
By the nigh-superhuman efforts of the Belisarians and several miraculous instances of good fortune, this kingdom of the Indo-Romans (Greek: Indorhomaioi, Sanskrit: Raumaka, distinguishing them from the earlier Indo-Greeks or Yavana) has managed to endure into the mid-eighth century. Given its delicate founding roots and its geographic situation at the crossroads between empires vastly mightier than itself, ranging from the fading Hunas to the ascendant newcomer Muslims and the Chinese who had marched to wage a war for 'heavenly horses' here in ages past, had the Belisarian kings been any less able or lucky they would surely have been swept into the dustbin of history a long time ago. Yet here they and their easternmost outpost of Christianity & Roman civilization still stand, and by another miracle theirs is a kingdom that has remained relatively calm and ordered even as the broader region around them was thrown into increasing turmoil between the decline of the Hunas, the arrival of Islam and the Later Han flexing their muscles after reunifying China; meanwhile they've been growing rich off the Silk Road and yet never grew so complacent (indeed, never being able to afford to grow in such a negative direction) as to become easy prey for their neighbors or to fall apart at their own seams.
As of 750 AD, this state of affairs still persists, as the Indo-Romans continue to valiantly swim against the tide of history and defy the odds to survive and even thrive. By putting up an impressive fight against the rising Dragon from the East, before ultimately bowing to the Middle Kingdom anyway, the Basileia tōn Indorhōmaiōn has not only managed to avoid annihilation at said Dragon's claws but actually earned the protection of the Later Han against the more hostile Muslims to their west – at the price of constant tribute of course, but the Belisarians deem that well worth not dying. The kings in Kophen have since witnessed the collapse of Huna power to the south and its replacement by said Muslims, with whom they have to trade to secure the continuous prosperity (and by extension, internal harmony) of their kingdom when they aren't fighting to fend off an active Islamic invasion. The incumbent king, Hippostratus III (Gre.: 'Hippóstratos'), has just arranged a marriage alliance with the growing Hindu empire of the Later Salankayanas which he hopes (in addition to continued Chinese overlordship) will be sufficient to secure the continued survival of his kingdom against the Muslim threat which now flanks it to the south as well as the west, or maybe even help him take the fight to Islam at a later date.
At the pinnacle of the Indo-Roman state sits the Basileios Basileōn or Þaonano-Þao: King of the Kings, descendant of the mighty Flavius Belisarius (Gre.: 'Flávios Belisários'), who carries in him the same Sabbatic blood which flows in the veins of the Holy Roman Emperors and on his back the weight of the Indo-Romans' survival. By necessity the high king in Kophen rules less like an absolute sovereign and more like a first-among-equals, helping shape a consensus among his vassals on how to approach most domestic & diplomatic matters such as taxation, martial responsibilities and whether or not to go to war. However he always has the last word, especially when it comes to his primary area of responsibility – warfare, in which the Þaonano-Þao is always expected to lead armies into battle against his enemies with courage and prudence in equal measure. The Ionian Bishops of Kophen, who nominally fall under the authority of the Patriarchate of Babylon but function autocephalously in practice due to the remoteness of the Indo-Roman state and the Muslims cutting them off from the rest of Christendom, invariably count among the Belisarian kings' chief advisors.
Acclamation of the incumbent Indo-Roman king, Hippostratus III, by way of being raised on the shields of his soldiers immediately preceding his coronation
Beneath the Belisarian Þaonano-Þao spans a patchwork of tribes, pretty principalities and city-states, all of them fiercely protective of their autonomy and so wary of their neighbors that they never would have deigned to count themselves part of the same state were it not for the efforts of the Belisarians. The most fractious and disorganized of these vassals are without doubt the Paropamisadae, descendants of the Pakthās of Indian myth. Divided into tribes and clans governed by a strict code of honor, which they call 'Pashtunwali' in their own tongue, the Paropamisadae are expected to provide warriors for the royal army in times of crisis and little else, on account of being perhaps the prickliest and most primitive of the Þaonano-Þao's subjects. In exchange for their military service the Belisarians generally leave them alone to herd goats & gather pine-nuts in their mountain homes or pursue traditional blood feuds as they please: it is rare even for the most centralist-inclined Indo-Roman kings to willingly stick their head into the hornet's nest that is Paropamisadae internal politics, and they will not do so without first being invited by one or more of the tribes to intervene at a simite[1] (great tribal summit) so as to minimize the chance of offending the proud and extremely warlike chiefs & elders of these people right out of the gate.
The urbanized Bactrians and Sogdians living to the north and west are an overwhelming contrast to the Paropamisadae who can mostly be found east and south of Kophen. Those particular East Iranian peoples dwell in fortified cities and towns along the Silk Road, such as Marakanda, and are primarily a mercantile people concerned with the trade of silk & other luxuries between the Indo-Romans' Chinese overlords and the Muslims, Romans and Khazars to the west. They have their own princes, called ikhshid ('ruler') in Sogdia and xoadeo ('lesser king') or bago ('lord') in Bactria, many of whom come from bloodlines more ancient and esteemed than that of Belisarius, and of these lords the Þaonano-Þao ask mostly for gold and silver rather than manpower. It is better, in the Belisarians' estimation, to let these ingenious merchants live longer and generate the wealth with which they can fuel their armies rather than to ask them to risk themselves on the battlefield, when they can easily find others more able and willing to undertake that job (such as the Paropamisadae). Due to the proliferation of Bactrian mercers, the Bactrian language is the best positioned of all the tongues spoken in the Indo-Roman kingdom to serve as a lingua franca, so the Belisarians also extensively recruit Bactrians (and to a lesser extent the neighboring Sogdians) to serve as administrative officials and diplomats, both to treat with foreigners and the various factions constituting their realm.
A Bactrian noblewoman en route to marrying her Indo-Roman fiancé, sealing a customary alliance which has become a fairly frequent occurrence between their peoples
The Tocharians of the Tarim Basin (of whom the western Kucheans are largely under Indo-Roman overlordship, while most of the Agnean easterners directly answer to the Son of Heaven in Luoyang) are alike to the Bactrians and Sogdians, their settlements being concentrated around oases not only for their own survival but also to facilitate the Silk Road trade, but are more warlike, more consolidated and – being further removed both from Kophen and the Islamic threat – traditionally also more reluctant to follow the Belisarians' lead. Growing pressure from the north and west in the form of Turkic tribes with less loyalty to their shared Chinese overlord, such as the Uighurs and Karluks, is beginning to change that however, by giving the Þaonano-Þao a stronger external enemy with which to justify the need for his 'protection' over their lands. Their few principalities are governed by men bearing the title of kamartike ('lord') or lánt ('king') depending on the size & wealth of their respective capitals – Kucha being the largest and grandest of the Tocharian petty-kingdoms under Belisarian suzerainty – and recognize the Indo-Roman sovereign as their nátäk, or 'master' (cognate to the Greek wanax/anax, the old pre-basileus term for king). To him they pay tribute in gold, silver and horses, and when war makes it necessary the Tocharians can often be found fighting as horsemen in the Indo-Roman army.
The Indians living beyond the mountains of the Paropamisadae are not quite so numerous as to outnumber the rest of the Þaonano-Þao's subjects combined, the ravages of the Huna and Islamic invasions having done quite a bit of damage to their lands, but do still constitute a plurality of the Indo-Roman kingdom's population. Indeed one of its names, Raumakarajya, and the term 'Raumaka' being used to describe these Roman newcomers both come from them. The rajas of the Indo-Roman Punjab and Kasperia tend to be the most enthusiastic and vengeful advocates of renewed hostilities against the Muslims, for the wounds inflicted by the Alids are fresher and deeper here than anywhere else in the Raumakarajya, and to that end they can be counted on to contribute large contingents of warriors to the Þaonano-Þao's armies when needed even as Bactro-Sogdian and Tocharian commerce works to revive their devastated towns and kingdoms. Their lobbying was also a primary internal driver of Hippostratus' effort to build an alliance with the rising power of the Later Salankayanas to the south, culminating in the marriage of his heir Strategiu (Gre.: 'Strategiós') to the latter's princess Srimahadevi. The Belisarians have little cause for complaint, as the Indians can furnish his ranks with elephants in addition to still-significant numbers of able fighters, and their fear and hostility of the Muslims makes them more loyal subjects than most.
Though they may be overlords of the Paropamisadae, Bactrians, Sogdians, Tocharians and northwestern Indians, the Indo-Romans do have an overlord of their own in the form of the Later Han dynasty, who refer to them as the 'Houyuan' or 'Later Ionians' in succession to the long-gone Dayuan (Greco-Bactrians) on account of their original generation having been mostly Greek-speakers from the Eastern Roman Empire. It has been almost a century since the first Hippostratus bowed to the Chinese, despite having managed to defeat them in battle every time they came to blows; a move which, in light of more recent developments, demonstrated not only humility but also great strategic foresight on his part, as not only could he not have kept his winning streak up indefinitely in the face of the Later Han's far vaster resources, but Chinese protection has since proven invaluable in protecting the Indo-Romans from Islamic incursions. Of course such protection comes with a cost: every Þaonano-Þao has had to travel to Luoyang to kowtow before the Emperor on the Dragon Throne, and to cough up tribute (an area where the taxes they collected from their wealthier, more settled subjects in Bactria, Sogdia & Tocharia come in handy). But better this, the Belisarians have reasoned, than to be buried beneath the weight of Chinese arms as the Tibetans and Northern Tegregs had been, or else to be swept away by the Muslims whose ghazi raiders even now needle their frontiers.
Hippostratus' father & predecessor Gondophares on his way to Luoyang where he will prostrate himself before the Chinese Emperor, protected by a mixed guard of his own Indo-Roman cataphracts and elite Turkic lancers supplied by the Later Han
The Indo-Roman state is a multiethnic and multiconfessional one, with a well-integrated elite of Ionian Christian descendants of Belisarius' legionaries working together with their Dharmic and pagan local counterparts in order to govern their shared subjects with any measure of effectiveness. Despite being the most reliable supporters (and contributors to the elite forces) of the Belisarians with whom they share roots, these Indorhomaioi are a minority even in their own capital city, Kophen, much less the rest of their kingdom: necessity has compelled them – with the Belisarians themselves leading by example – to not only learn the local customs well and to engage in extensive intermarriage with the regional nobility of Bactria, Sogdia, Tocharia and India, but also to exercise a measure of religious tolerance unthinkable to the Aloysians in the far west. It is impressive enough that they have managed to hold on to the Ionian Christian faith of their ancestors in this remote land, which would be completely cut off from the distant Roman homeland if they ever engaged in hostilities with the Muslims (as they already have in the past and no doubt will again), without syncretizing to the point of becoming unrecognizable to and falling out of communion with the rest of the Heptarchy.
This is not to say that the Christianity of the Indo-Romans has managed to completely insulate itself from any non-Christian local influences whatsoever (in spite of being wholly surrounded by said majority locals) for the past 200 years, of course. Certain Buddhist practices such as meditation and vegetarianism have been incorporated into the daily habits of at least some Belisarian dynasts and Indo-Roman aristocratic households, typically with Christian justifications (respectively to privately draw closer to God and to practice an absolute abstention from harming any of God's creations which have done nothing wrong to them, in these two cases), and Buddhist and Hindu terminology have made their way into locally-produced Ionian sutras with the intention of more easily converting the locals to the newcomer faith – theirs is a small, but growing community mostly centered in Kophen and other Silk Road cities where Belisarian governance is most strongly felt. Culturally this 'Indo-Roman' elite, already mostly Greek in origin on account of Belisarius' legionaries having hailed from the Eastern Roman Empire, has also largely assimilated into the high court culture of their immediate Bactrian neighbors: a few families (and fewer every generation) still may speak Greek in private, but most speak and write in Bactrian, and their fashion, cuisine, etc. is thoroughly Bactrian with only some residual Greco-Roman influences (such as the exclusive usage of purple robes by the Belisarian royals as a status marker).
The Christians too have left their own mark on the Dharmic religions practiced in the lands where they hold sway, such as the popularization of the concept of a universal bodhisattvayana (inspired by Christian sainthood, and where before the orthodox Buddhist schools that had dominated since Huna times taught that the path to becoming a bodhisattva was not for everyone but rather the preserve of a few rare individuals of great intellect & moral fiber) and prayer beads (the 108-bead japamala) being inspired by their own monks' usage of the 150-bead Pater Noster cord to recite the Psalms in addition to the Lord's Prayer. As had once occurred with the Hellenistic Greeks who ruled in the subcontinent, the Indo-Romans have also lent more general artistic & architectural influences unto their subjects, such as the addition of engravings to noble sarcophagi (just depicting Buddhist or Hindu imagery rather than Christian ones), the erection of triumphal columns & arches to commemorate notable victories, and newer palaces being designed to resemble Roman basilicas. In general the banner of the Indo-Romans is a sign of the interfaith dynamics of their kingdom: the Dharmic wheel representing the vast majority of their subjects might take up a good deal more space on it, but it spins wholly around the Babylonian cross – representing both the Indo-Roman descendants themselves and their Christian faith – situated at its heart.
A pagoda which was part of an Indo-Roman church in Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus, no doubt an element incorporated from the local Buddhists
Of the Indo-Romans' non-Christian subjects, the Buddhist Bactrians, Sogdians and Tocharians are without a doubt the most influential, even if the influx of northwestern Indian territories has ensured that they will no longer comprise the majority of the Raumakarajya's population. It's their cities which surround Kophen, after all, and of all the Indo-Roman peoples they contribute the most financially and culturally to the Belisarian mosaic. As has been mentioned before, they are a mercantile and sophisticated people, accustomed to dwelling in fortified cities fed by the well-watered farms, orchards and vineyards surrounding them and to traveling great distances so that they might trade to the Chinese and Romans alike goods which they would have found exotic. It is from these peoples, considered the most alike to the old Romans, that the Belisarians draw their diplomats and administrators, and with whom they have most heavily intermingled: most Indo-Roman queens to date have been of Bactrian, Sogdian or Tocharian stock, including the incumbent Hippostratus III's wife Roxana (Bactrian: 'Rokhshana').
While quite a bit of time (and more than a few ruinous invasions) have passed through their lands since it could have been described as the 'land of a thousand golden cities', the Belisarians have done what they can to restore and maintain the infrastructure of these lands – chiefly qanats and roads. In order to shore up their loyalty many a Þaonano-Þao has also contributed to the upkeep and security of their Buddhist temples and monasteries, and although they have obviously not actually built any such monasteries themselves (since they aren't Buddhists), the Belisarians have recruited Bactrian/Sogdian/Tocharian architects and builders to work on those Christian churches and monasteries which they have erected, lending an oriental flair to these structures not seen in their Holy Roman counterparts. Meanwhile most Ionian converts in Indo-Roman lands come from these three interconnected peoples, and have done much to further spread the faith along the Silk Road as far as China; on the other hand, the Buddhist majority has not escaped Christian influence either, and between not only Belisarian overlordship but also heightened contact with Chinese Buddhists and the fading memory of Huna rule in these lands, are increasingly leaving the Theravada school of their ancestors in favor of the emerging Mahayana sect (which, on account of its greater emphasis on laity activity and good works in pursuit of becoming a bodhisattva, seem more comprehensible to the Belisarians than the older Theravada teachings).
The Paropamisadae represent the majority of the 'pagan' subjects of the Þaonano-Þao. They do not dwell in cities for the most part, but rather live in tribes (further broken down into extended families of varying sizes) across the countryside of eastern & southern Bactria and the northwestern Punjab (thereby called 'Paropamisus'[2] (Gre. Parapámisos) by the Indo-Romans after the vanquished Persians' ancient name for the region), headed by chieftains who must always consult the tribal elders (or even all adult clansmen of the tribe) at a conference called a sabhā before undertaking major decisions. That this is reflected in the simite of the Belisarian kings is about their only major contribution to the organization of the Indo-Roman state, as in most other aspects, they are too barbaric, disorganized and uncontrollable for the Belisarians to emulate or even get particularly close to.
The Paropamisadae tribes are a proud, prickly and generally quite insular bunch, preferring to be left alone as they tend to their herds in the mountains of their ancestors, and governed by the ancient code of Pashtunwali they harbor their own collection of ancient friendships and vendettas, which the Belisarians only rarely dare to meddle with in the most extreme of cases (as in, cases which threaten to spill out of Paropamisadae lands). They follow their own gods, of which Zhūn is the most prominent: this solar god has been likened to the the Romano-Persian Mithras, the Zoroastrian Zurvan or the Hindu Surya and Shiva, but the Paropamisadae insist that he is none of these in a guise, and worship him on a sacred mountain in the region of Arachosia, south of Kophen. Few Paropamisadae have converted to Buddhism or Hinduism, much less Ionian Christianity, which they regard as a curiosity at best and which their nominal overlords know better than to try to forcefully push on them. Even if a thousand more years should pass and all vestiges of the Belisarian legacy fade from this land, the Belisarians themselves believe the Paropamisadae will still be living much as they are now, uncaring toward and frankly unconcerned with any changes in the world around them.
A nobleman of the Paropamisadae, dressed in a rather dour and austere manner compared to his much more colorful Bactrian & Sogdian neighbors
The Indians of the Punjab and Kasperia are the newest additions to the Indo-Roman kingdom, and represent both an addition to the Buddhist component of the kingdom and a new Hindu plurality. Their lands have suffered much under the Hunas, the Turks and the Muslims, so the survivors left standing are certainly of a martial bent and not inclined to yield another inch to outsiders if they can avoid it. Hippostratus III and his predecessors have put in a good deal of effort to gain their trust, purging their land of brigands and securing the border against the attacks of Islamic ghazw as best they can; and also sponsoring roadworks, digging wells & building dikes, rebuilding farms' irrigation channels and engaging in other infrastructure projects, up to and including even supporting repairs to Hindu temples (though, as is the case with the Buddhists, they have refrained from building new ones – if the Hindus want those, they must construct them with their own hands).
Due to their sheer numbers, despite being relative latecomers to the Indo-Roman mosaic the Punjabis and Kashmiris have had an outsized and immediate impact. One of the most popular alternate names of the kingdom, Raumakarajya, comes from them after all. The Belisarian kings have become aware of the enormous agricultural potential of the lands around the Indus' headwaters, and seek to improve the productivity of Indian cultivators of all sorts of crops: staple cereals such as wheat and rice, to be sure, but also cotton for textile manufacturing, more exotic fruits and above all – sugarcane, a sweetener which has rapidly become one of the Indo-Romans' most lucrative exports, especially to their Roman cousins to the west and, when peace has made trade possible, even the Muslims who hope to grow it in their new Mesopotamian plantations. As for mountainous Kasperia (or 'Kashmir' as it's called by the local Indians), the Indo-Romans find three of the region's products more valuable than any other: silver (especially in dealing with the Chinese), saffron (both as a spice for consumption and a dye for coloring), and cashmere wool (especially the finest grade, for luxury clothes).
The Indians have their own noble rulers, some pre-Huna rajas and others rajputs with much of the blood of that wave of invaders in their veins, who the Belisarians govern with a light hand – as they do generally all their subject princes – in exchange for their fealty, military support in war and various precious exports in peace. However this non-intrusive rule has required the Indo-Romans to tolerate practices and rituals which they find deeply unsavory, such as the caste system (which has reasserted itself with a vengeance in the Hindu principalities, as part of a general traditionalist revival against both Huna-associated Buddhism and Islam) and sati, a much more recent practice of ritual suicide-by-immolation of widows following the demise of their husbands which has emerged among the rajputs of this land in the wake of the collapse of the Guptas and Hunas. Though repulsive to the Christian sensibilities of the Belisarians and Indo-Roman elites, they dare not push hard against these habits for fear of sparking a rebellion they cannot afford.
The best the Belisarians can do thus far (on top of facilitating connections between the Bactrians and Buddhist Indians, strengthening the latter in the long term) is promote Christian evangelism in the Punjab and Kasperia, where the recent centuries of devastation and the return of repressive traditions or the emergence of new ones make for fertile ground for the Good News to spread: the rejection of castes in Christian teaching is attractive to the lower orders of Indian society for much the same reason Islam and Buddhism are, and Ionian churches are willing to take in Indian infants who would otherwise have been left to die by impoverished parents lacking the resources to care for them (or who simply wanted a child of a different sex). This must be carefully limited in pace and balanced with great restraint, however, as the Dharmic followers of these lands are suspicious at best of any new religion showing up after the Alids (and before them the Hunas) had rolled through. By way of their growing links to the Later Salankayanas, the Indo-Romans have also come to reinforce contact with the Nasrani of southern India, and are excited to have found that Saint Thomas' mission succeeded in establishing a lasting Christian community in the subcontinent; however, doctrinal differences and sheer distance has prevented them from doing much more with the latter beyond establishing commercial ties and making gestures of friendship.
Indian art depicting an Indo-Roman or 'Raumaka' king negotiating with a Muslim delegation, notably protecting the Indians situated behind him. While the Belisarians are seen as foreign oddballs following a strange Western religion, the Indians of the far northwest have little cause to complain against their restrained & tolerant rulership, which they find preferable to brutal Huna rule or even more brutal and intolerant Islamic subjugation
When reason and diplomacy fail, the Belisarian kings must remove their silk glove and wield the iron fist beneath to defend themselves in combat, an area in which their illustrious progenitor has set a formidable example for his descendants to follow. To that end they have harnessed their diverse subjects into an equally versatile army, compensating for the comparatively small numbers they are able to field versus the Chinese, Indian and Islamic juggernauts they have had to contend with in the past with a broad array of arms, clever strategems and the blessing of favorable terrain, especially in the form of the high mountains and narrow passes surrounding their capital at Kophen. Being situated at the crossroads of multiple mutually hostile empires, the Indo-Romans have no choice but to fight for their survival on more than a few occasions and had to do so superbly in order to survive as long as they have already.
The descendants of Belisarius' original legionaries form not only the social elite of the kingdom but also the fighting elite of his heirs' army. Though few in number, these men are intensively trained to ride, fight and lead from a young age by their fathers and older brothers (mirroring the chivalric tradition developing in the Holy Roman Empire), passing their martial skills down generation from generation with the sort of attention and zeal that can only come from knowingly living surrounded by peril, and still march into battle beneath the banners of their forefathers' original legions (variations of which have more or less become early heraldic standards with which the Indo-Roman houses distinguish themselves from one another). No expense is spared on their equipment, including carefully maintained swords or even (more rarely) pieces of armor passed from one generation to the next, nor their warhorses: it is customary for the Belisarians to step in if one among their martial aristocracy is for some reason unable to afford the upkeep of or a replacement for their fighting gear with the rents from their estates around Kophen.
In one of the rare instances of Greek being preserved in official Indo-Roman communication these men are hailed as the Ekatontamáchoi or 'hundred-man fighters'; a name first bestowed as an honor on their ancestors by Belisarius himself in thanks for their service, and which they strive to earn by maintaining said predecessors' reputation as some of the fiercest and most dependable soldiers east of Rome. Not unlike the Roman chivalry they are a multi-purpose fighting elite, equally adept at fighting as cataphracts in the saddle with lance and sword and mace as they are when dismounting to fight on foot as heavy infantry. More importantly than their gleaming weapons and armor or their strict training regimens however, the Ekatontamáchoi are also the most disciplined fighters in the ranks of the Indo-Roman army, obedient to their commanders and not prone to rash action on the battlefield. Their organization still recalls Roman lines and uses Greek nomenclature, being divided into tourmai with a paper strength of 500 (akin to the two-thousand-man legions still in use by the Holy Roman army) further divided into hundred-man centuries called droungoi, and those are broken down into ten-man squadrons called banda: the tourmai are capable of independent action, and usually one's enough to serve as the core of a force (augmented with local militias) tasked with thwarting Islamic ghazi raiders or nomads from the north, but on larger campaigns they are oft combined with one another to form a larger meros or division.
Ekatontamáchoi of the Indorhomaioi on the offensive. While they still fly an eagle standard inspired by those borne by their ancestors, they visibly cannot be mistaken for those same ancestors any more than a Germanic-influenced Northern Roman knight could
As to the aforementioned 'local militias', first and foremost the Bactrian, Sogdians and Tocharians furnish the Indo-Roman army with its most reliable indigenous fighters, and also its heaviest. The nobles of these lands & their retainers march to fight with their Indo-Roman overlords and in-laws attired in fine mail, scale or lamellar armor and wielding the same broad array of weapons they once wielded in the Sassanid armies – bows, lances, maces and axes, as well as the occasional exotic fare such as long poleaxes. They serve the Þaonano-Þao well as heavy cavalry and horse-archers, and their usual fanciful, brightly colored clothing which they prominently display beneath their armor always makes for a striking sight on the battlefield, though the Belisarians have noted that these men tend to be less disciplined and flexible than their prized Ekatontamáchoi.
If the wild tribes of Paropamisus can be said to excel at anything, it is at fighting, so it is only natural that they should contribute blood more than any gold or silver to the Indo-Roman kingdom. Their warriors actually tend to form a majority, or now (following the addition of much of the Punjab and Kasperia) at least a plurality, of the Indo-Roman armies owing to both the simplicity of their equipment and the sheer number of overly, enthusiastically violent men with little to lose who can be found in their mountains and are already plenty happy to shed blood over even slight insults; the opportunity for plunder and to find glory in contests of arms against overwhelming opponents just serves to sweeten the deal. Paropamisadae warriors typically fight with bows, javelins, spears and long knives, but with the exception of their mailed lords, wear little to no armor – they are excellent skirmishers and light infantry, useful as support troops or in flanking a pinned enemy and particularly excelling in using the hostile terrain of their mountain homes to their advantage, but woefully underequipped for a head-to-head confrontation with the likes of Islamic ghilman or Sino-Turkic lancers. Not that that will necessarily stop them from trying anyway, for as the Belisarian kings have found, these contentious people make for fearless – and reckless – warriors.
A lower-class archer-spearman of Paropamisus, for whom honor and testicular fortitude will have to compensate for actual armor
The newcomer Indians can be counted on to supply their Indo-Roman protectors with a mix of both light and ultra-heavy forces, occupying a role that neither the settled men of the mountains and the Tarim nor the lightly-equipped Paropamisadae can reliably fill. The Hindu and Buddhist rajputs alike fight as heavy horsemen, something they have adopted from their past Huna conquerors and forefathers (another lesson from said forebears being to completely abandon the war chariot), but the majority of the warriors they take to the battlefield with them are not so heavily armored – those who do not fight bare-chested simply wear quilted cotton jackets for protection – and thus function as light to medium infantry, at least those who aren't dedicated longbowmen.
Said longbowmen are fast becoming the go-to missile arm of the Indo-Roman kings, but their role in the Indian contingents has understandably been eclipsed by the war elephant corps, without a doubt the most iconic Indian contribution to the Belisarian armies. The Belisarians prefer their elephants fully armored beneath great iron sheets or scales for maximum survivability, and to bear howdahs full of archers and spearmen; correctly used these great beasts can win battles for their new master, though said masters also know well from the Romans' long history of battling Sassanid war elephants that reckless or ill-considered usage of the creatures can result in them being turned against their own army and lead to disaster.
An armored Indo-Roman war elephant with his Punjabi mahout
[1] Predecessor to the Afghan jirga, along with the sabhā mentioned later.
[2] Basically an early Greco-Roman term for Pashtunistan.
Happy Easter, folks With this chapter we're now halfway through the 8th century, so please enjoy this factional overview of the Indo-Romans – who I consider to be one of the stranger and more precariously placed, but also more interesting, factions to have cropped up in the TL so far – before we return to our regular timeline-progression chapters.
Exile states are always interesting. It's too bad there's such fragmentary evidence of the Indo-Greeks, as the rare state in double exile.
Are the Indo-Romans technically listed as a Federate state in Roman records? Do they still pretend some sort of affiliation when merchants and ambassadors show up?
Exile states are always interesting. It's too bad there's such fragmentary evidence of the Indo-Greeks, as the rare state in double exile.
Are the Indo-Romans technically listed as a Federate state in Roman records? Do they still pretend some sort of affiliation when merchants and ambassadors show up?
Good question. My gut says there's probably no formal federate relationship, since the Indo-Roman kingdom proper started with Belisarius' son renouncing his allegiance to the ERE to have himself crowned as an independent king and everyone involved knows that there would be no pragmatic purpose to the Indo-Roman state recognizing Roman overlordship beyond putting on airs (especially with the Chinese actually being their overlord). But there's unlikely to be any serious hostility still lingering from that, since the ERE has long since been absorbed to form the HRE and the latter are probably more surprised than anything that the Belisarian kingdom hasn't fallen yet.
That said, as Ionians in good standing, the Christian Indo-Romans would still acknowledge the Emperors as the head of their church and the Heptarchy's church councils as the ultimate authority on their religious doctrine, on top of their more general respect for their Greco-Roman & Christian cultural & religious heritage. So it can be said that while the Indo-Romans aren't a federate state in the same way that Stilichian Africa (for example) is, in a sense they still owe fealty to the Holy Roman Emperor as their 'spiritual liege', if you'll excuse the WH40K meme reference.
This must be a master class of both internal and external balancing.
Such intricate act can be only done by a really good leader so the line of Beliasaurius is only one mediocre or even just unlucky leader from losing it all. However they have been acing it so far, despite playing on Ultrahard difficulty level.
751 was a quiet year in Rome, as the Ionian missions to the Slavs were well underway: Emperor Leo prayed for their success, but he understood that their work would take time – perhaps even more time than he had left on the Earth – and that he had to trust in God & his selection of 'Apostles to the Slavs' now that the latter had flown the coop. Instead Leo busied himself with affairs on the other side of the Mediterranean, namely his scheme to contain African expansion by using the emergent power of Kumbi as a proxy. The Kaya Maghan David (Soninke: 'Daoud') greeted the Roman envoys hospitably after they had made the arduous trek across the Saharan sands to his capital, suspecting nothing and content to delineate the northern border of his realm with the great power which had thus far been nothing but friendly to his people.
The Berber salt-mining town of Taghazza, once representing the southern terminus of the Kingdom of Hoggar's influence, was by now occupied by a Kumbian garrison and represented the latter's northernmost extent of influence. Leo was content to keep it that way, and considered the Tuat region to form a natural boundary between the Roman world and Kumbi: this stretch of searing desert was nearly lifeless, but for a string of Berber oasis villages which served as rest-stops for the caravans proceeding north and south along the trans-Saharan gold & salt routes, and neighbored the slightly less hellish Gourara region to the north (where some Berbers had been able to build date plantations around the oases) and the even hotter Tidikelt to the east (which was drier still, both in regards to the heat itself and in terms of lacking oases). Given how few people actually lived permanently in these areas and how worthless it was outside of its geographical necessity as a bridge for the physical facilitation of the trans-Saharan trade, both men believed opposition to their drawing a literal line in the sand (admittedly not the easiest endeavor, given how massive the uncharted Saharan wastes were) would be negligible.
It was not, at least not from the Africans, from whom the negotiations could not be kept secret for long. Bedãdéu and his cohorts may not have been able to logically argue against Leo's reasoned arguments – theoretically there was nothing wrong with wanting to clarify the Holy Roman Empire's southern border with a friendly power of fellow Christians – nor did they intend to actually wage war against Kumbi, as the African king had to admit the Augustus had reproachfully asked whether they wanted to when pressed. The Africans did have to concede that a clearly delineated border would even be helpful in the future, by preventing any possibility of misunderstanding (which could lead to much worse) with the Kumbians and keep them friendly: it was not in the Africans' interest, or possibly even ability, to strike at Kumbi when the latter kingdom could mutually enrich them both with trade and spread the Gospel further south if left at peace. Nor, for all that Leo wished to avoid open confrontation with the Stilichians, did Bedãdéu think it prudent to go to war with his overlord either; not only for fear of the Aloysians' swords and those of other loyal federates, but also for fear of the Crescent Moon to the east, which seemed to be waxing under the stewardship of Hashim the Wise. But in no way would he let any of that get in the way of the Stilichians' empowerment, which he understood to be his overlord's real motive even if the latter would not admit to it should his life depend on telling the truth.
Before the border could be set in sand, small parties of Moorish explorers and soldiers began racing to find villages and vantage points across the depths of the Sahara, where they could erect outposts and raise the solar chi-rho of the Dominus Rex to establish that in fact all areas within sight of that standard belonged to the Kingdom of Africa. In areas with no permanent settlement yet their job wasn't even to help establish a new Moorish town (at least not yet), merely encamp themselves so as to physically deny it to the men of Kumbi. If confronted by Kumbians they were instructed not to start a skirmish, but to defiantly stand their ground and dare the Blackamoors to make a move, because the only way their flag would go down was by force. If 'forced' to fight, then they could kill their attackers with impunity and claim self-defense, solidifying their claim in blood; if left alone, they would have realized a fait accompli and be able to incorporate that particular stretch of Saharan desert into the African kingdom anyway, entirely peacefully at that. David of Kumbi caught on to what the Africans were trying to do fairly quickly and responded in kind, sending his own surveyors and warriors to lock down as much of the western Sahara as possible for himself. Thus, the race was on…
An African scout leaving his oasis rest-stop behind to continue mapping out & claiming the southern wastes for his king
While the Romans strove to rein their African vassals in and the Khazar Khagan continued to struggle to bring about a synthesis of the steppe religions, the Caliph Hashim found his daily studies and discussions with scholars interrupted by ill tidings from his Alid kindred. News of the alliance between the Indo-Romans and the rising Hindu power of the Later Salankayanas had broke, leaving the easternmost extension of Dar al-Islam encircled by enemies. Younger hotheads among the eastern armies advocated direct and immediate action, but the Caliph pushed back against them with the help of their fathers (his cousins) – not only was the Islamic world doing quite well right now, a peaceful and productive state of affairs which he was content to maintain for as long as possible; but they still remembered quite well that last time, the Indo-Romans had called in assistance from their Chinese overlords which proved too much for the Muslims to overcome. In hopes of avoiding a challenging and unnecessary confrontation, Hashim authorized additional ghazw raids but not an out-and-out invasion, especially targeting the Later Salankayanas both in order to soften them up for future confrontation and to avoid provoking China before they were ready (or before the Chinese had weakened sufficiently so as to cease being an overwhelming threat to Islamic aspirations in that direction).
Speaking of which, the Later Han were beginning to show signs of decay beneath their still-lustrous surface. The passive and slothful Emperor Chongzong was content to laze about with his myriad concubines all day, leaving actual governance of the massive empire which he had inherited to his even more numerous scholar-officials and eunuchs. Said court officials promptly gathered into cliques, organized not along lines of ideology or personal background but merely mutual interest, and squabbled among themselves. As a fish rots from the head on down, so too did corruption begin to flourish from the top down as the court factions readily turned to underhanded dealing to gain an edge over their rivals, increasingly viewed the laws as something for them to skirt when they weren't using it as a bludgeon against said enemies, and to promote their allies into high offices with loyalty as the highest qualifier rather than even basic competence.
Several trends toward decentralization which would critically undermine the Later Han at a later date got their start under the inadequate Chongzong, whose greatest (perhaps only) virtue was not being an actively cruel tyrant. The eunuchs & mandarins had no problem authorizing the sale of lands to their friends, enriched by the economic boom which China had enjoyed under the late and much-missed Emperor Guangzong. Consequently the landowning aristocracy, long kept under control by the equal-field system's enforcement by watchful Later Han Emperors, could once more accrue power beyond what their past overlords would have liked and to begin reducing the peasantry to serfdom beneath their heel again. Almost as dangerous as this trend of wealth consolidation in hands not necessarily friendly toward imperial interests was the consolidation of wealth & lands in the hands of Buddhists: the religion had been allowed to bloom under the previous Later Han monarchs, and accumulated great estates centered around increasingly lavish monasteries thanks to the generous donations of aristocrats attracted to the teachings of the Buddha, a trend that would doubtlessly accelerate now that those aristocrats had so much more silver & land to give away. Thus the Later Han's tax base began to shrink, to the detriment of all the efforts of their government from infrastructure projects to funding the army, and their subjects began forming fiefs which could mount an actual challenge to their authority in the future.
Eunuchs and scholar-officials of the Later Han cutting a backroom deal over a feasting table during the reign of Chongzong
752 brought with it the death of Pope Boniface II, and the elevation of Cardinal Ioannes to the Seat of Saint Peter as Pope John II. At thirty-five he was still fairly young man at the time of his ascension, indeed he would hold the record for the youngest Pope for quite some time; moreover he was the first of a few Popes from the Aloysian dynasty, and his long tenure would serve to further entrench the Ionian Church (and in particular its Roman See) as one of the great pillars holding up the Holy Roman Empire alongside the Senate (by extension representing the interests of the federate vassals) and the imperial office itself. Emperor Leo naturally hailed the election of his brother by the cardinals and the people of Rome, and contributed many lavish gifts to the Papacy, including the first recorded Papal tiara: dubbed the camelaucum after a similar garment mostly found in the Eastern Patriarchates, it was a white linen cap distinguished from similar Phrygian-styled caps worn by past Popes by its base being formed from an elegant circlet, from which flowed lappets of cloth-of-gold.
However, even this tiara (the most majestic headgear Popes would wear until more elaborate tiaras were supplied centuries later) was not the greatest gift which Leo provided. Immediately following the Papal coronation (itself also a more lavish affair than usual, since the Pope being crowned was after all an Aloysian prince and thereby of the blood of Saint Jude) the Emperor not only confirmed his younger brother as the Urban Prefect of Rome, in keeping with Papal tradition since the final defeat and death of Attila three centuries prior, but also Rector – civil governor – of the district of Old Latium. This was the first time that the Pope had been granted temporal authority outside of the Eternal City itself, even if said authority only extended as far as Cape Circeo and the River Garigliano for now, and fittingly the territories over which the Pope assumed the responsibility of civil governance would be known as the 'Patrimony of Saint Peter' (Lat.: Patrimonium Sancti Petri) after the Roman See's patron & founder.
The newly crowned John II, a Pope of many firsts – the first Aloysian prince to ascend to the Chair of Saint Peter, the first Pope with an actual tiara, and the first Pope whose temporal authority extended beyond Rome's city limits
For John's part, this was actually quite a disappointing gift since he'd only been handed half of Latium instead of all of it, but he naturally dared not bring such complaints up to his brother lest he be upbraided for ingratitude or even come under suspicion of harboring treasonous designs. In any case, the new Pope saw the value in the precedent being set with Roman bishops now beginning to wield temporal power in addition to the spiritual. Though arguably his friends the prince-bishops on the Dacian military frontier had been the first to do so (and actually had martial responsibilities due to the inherent danger stalking their jurisdictions, whereas the Popes were purely civilian governors since no foe had nor was expected to threaten Latium since Attila's day), he was the most high-profile example of this phenomenon to date. All this said, the 'Leonine Donation' cannot be understood as a signal that the Aloysian Emperors were ceding their role as the regents of the King of Kings on Earth to the Popes, either: Leo made it expressly clear that John had been granted this bit of temporal authority by him akin to how a Praetorian Prefect would delegate authority unto a (civil) Vicar, and that like the prefecture of Rome itself, while custom would now dictate that each new Pope would be confirmed in this honor by the Emperor immediately following his coronation, no actual law existed to bind the office to the Papacy in perpetuity outside of the will of said Holy Roman Emperor.
Far removed from the affairs of the Roman world, the men of the distant North were planting an acorn from which an oak capable of rivaling their easternmost Sclaveni proxies would sprout one day. Norse traders founded the town of Aldeigja[1] after the nearby eponymous lake, whose name they derived from the native Finno-Ugric tribes' 'Aaltokas' and which would be translated by its Ilmen Slovene neighbors as 'Ladoga'. From this site, strategically situated on the River Volkhov, the Norse could reach the Volga and travel downriver to trade as far as Atil, Constantinople or even Kufa, plugging the easternmost of their people into the world's great trade networks. Aldeigja itself would grow prosperous without ever reaching the heights of a true city, but it did serve as a key launchpad for more intensive settlement of this region by Norsemen in the decades and centuries to come.
Norsemen from Aldeigja trading with their new Ilmen Slovene neighbors
In China, the trend of decentralization and a slow withering of the central government's finances began to have a negative impact on its military, as well. As the equal-field system degraded and the fields were no longer so equal, instead being increasingly concentrated in the hands of local landowning magnates, and military salaries were cut (both due to decreasing tax revenue and corrupt officials seeking to stuff their own pockets with the 'cut' pay) the same happened to the fubing militia system. After all, as they did not own the land they were tied to, the conscripts who contributed most of China's manpower in the battlefield no longer had any good reason to remain invested in their martial responsibilities to the state; nor were the landowners who had bought up their small farms interested in giving them time enough to drill to fight (potentially in a peasant revolt against said landowners), instead generally preferring to squeeze every productive minute and every crop out of the new serfs and their families as possible.
Now all this was actually a perfectly fine development in the eyes of the court factions, since the eunuchs and the mandarins both found rare common ground in the idea that in fact the small professional core (increasingly dominated by hereditary military families of mostly Turkic descent) of the Later Han army was good enough to be the Later Han army. Their agreement was good enough reason for Emperor Chongzong to go along with their scheme, because surely it had to be a good idea if nearly all of his fractious advisors could agree on it, no? In theory such an army would be both cheaper and deadlier than pulling together a great mass of conscripts – certainly it could be trusted to campaign abroad for extended periods of time much more reliably than conscripted farmers whose hands were also needed back home for the harvest.
Moreover, it was not as if there was even any existing threat severe enough to justify mass conscription and the formation of the hundred-thousand-man armies of yore at this moment, nor had there been one since the destruction of the Rouran and Northern Tegregs. China's most formidable enemies in the past generation had been the Muslims, and a small expeditionary force serving in a supporting role to the Indo-Romans had been enough to see them off. As far as the Later Han court could determine, there was no downside whatsoever to downsizing their military: it saved cash, by extension it justified lowering taxes (increasing Chongzong's own popularity), allowed the peasants to focus on working & harvesting in the fields, and it wasn't like the remaining professional soldiers were complaining about their increased responsibilities, nor were they insufficient to keep China's vassals and rivals in line. In this regard the courtiers were not even wrong; the question they did not think to answer was, to whom would this slimmed-down Chinese army of mostly Turks and other non-Han frontier ethnicities be most deadly?
A horse archer of the Later Han army, doubtlessly recruited from one of many families of Sinicized Turks originally acquired from their shattering conquest of the Tegregs. It was in these men that the dynasty increasingly exclusively trusted their defense during their decadent decades
Come 753, the brothers Aloysiani embarked on another major infrastructure project which would build upon the final great achievement of their honored father. Emperor Leo commissioned the rebuilding of Trajan's Bridge over the lower Danube, using both wood and stone (including reusing as much of the existing ruins of the old bridge as possible) and following the old bridge's specifications as closely as humanly possible, thereby recreating a strong physical connection between Dacia and the rest of the Holy Roman Empire; previously, the Roman army which had liberated half of the lost province from the Khazars had crossed over much less permanent wooden bridges and boats. Pope John, meanwhile, opened up the treasury of the Roman Church to fund this endeavor and make it easier for his brother to send armies to support his friends in the region. That the Aloysians would engage in such a project as this signaled their determination to keep trans-Danubian Dacia in perpetuity and to contain any foreign invader from the east there if possible, as the original bridge had been destroyed precisely to consolidate the imperial border & hinder enemies at the Danube five centuries ago.
Far to the south, the race for the Saharan border had not kept the Africans and Kumbians from coordinating religious missions to Senegal and other African lands, since both kingdoms did after all lie under the geographic jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Carthage. In particular the men of Kumbi had begun a serious effort to expand to the south and west, and the conversion of those tribes which stood in their path to Christianity was a major element of their strategy to absorb the latter. Following the course of the great river Sanghana[2], or as the Romans called it the 'Bambotus', Moorish and Blackamoor evangelists alike (who generally got along much better than their respective kings did) would establish missions as far as this river's mouth on the Atlantic over the coming decades. In time, the region around the lower Sanghana[3] will form the westernmost arm of the nascent Ghana Empire growing out of Kumbi.
A lone Moorish evangelist and his Blackamoor friends from Kumbi establishing a joint mission on the course of the Bambotus
Meanwhile in the distant east, old and new nomadic powers were beginning to shake up the northern reaches of Central Asia. Simon-Sartäç Khagan, eager to build up some prestige with which to support his ongoing efforts at religious syncretism and believing the Sclaveni tribes to his west were too weak to be of much 'help' in that regard, turned to subjugating some of the rival nomadic hordes on his eastern flank for this purpose. He led the Khazar army to a swift and crushing victory over the nearest and weakest of these neighbors, the Kimeks, in the summer of this year. His victory alarmed some of the Oghuz chiefs to the south, who then launched their own attack into former Kimek territory both to take advantage of the latter's fall and to try to hold the Khazars back.
Proving the Khazars still had more than a little fire in their bellies even after being defeated by the Romans, Simon-Sartäç rallied to inflict a heavy defeat on the Oghuz at the Battle of Tamim, the kışlak or winter capital of the Kimeks on the southwestern shore of Lake Balqaş[4]. This, however, was only the beginning of his larger campaign to subjugate the Oghuz, no differently than he had just done to the Kimeks. As ridiculous as the Khagan may have seemed in his battles, wearing both Buddhist amulets and a helmet depicting the fierce face of the Tengriist war god Kyzaghan (the Turkic equivalent to the Mongolic Jamsaran, revered by the late Avars and more distant neighbors of the Khazars further east alike) while riding beneath a banner depicting the Jewish menorah – his victories made it seem to his subjects that whatever he was trying to accomplish was actually working.
A Khazar light cavalryman on the move against his master's new enemies to the east. Simon-Sartäç had apparently begun to operate under the belief that he could paper over the theological chasms on the steppe with prestige from victories abroad, as the Muslims had been doing
Speaking of more distant neighbors to the Khazars, a new power was beginning to stir in the frontier between China's Anbei (or Northern) Protectorate and the grazing lands of the Karluks. Bögü Qan of the Uyğur clan had, by a combination of careful diplomacy (held up by the strategic marriages of his children) and might of main, united his people and in this year proclaimed himself Qaghan of the Uyghurs. This was an unacceptable challenge to the Karluks, their traditional overlords who had exported no small number of Uyghurs (among other Turkic peoples) to China as slaves in the past, and their own Khagan Kobyak dispatched an army under his nephew Togli Khan to stomp out the Uyghur uprising. Bögü, however, destroyed this suppression force in an ambush by Lake Ubsunur[5] and sent Togli's head to his uncle. Kobyak Khagan responded by calling for the Later Han to step in and help him destroy these troublesome rebels, but in another act of great sloth and indifference Emperor Chongzong declined, instead telling Kobyak to sort out his own internal affairs – after all, the Chinese army was in the process of downsizing and reorganizing, and his advisors were wholly unconcerned by what appeared to be a spat between some extremely distant nomadic savages on the northern edges of the world.
In 754, following years of talks, surveying and unauthorized low-intensity skirmishes, the Holy Roman Empire and Kumbi finalized their border. While it was impossible to meticulously measure every scrap of sand and draw a line through it all, both realms agreed that this border should roughly extend from the plateau of Adrar (as the Berbers called that region of stony deserts, after the mountains overlooking it) before bending northeastward to the southernmost reaches of the Hoggar Mountains. The boundary skirted around Kumbian-controlled Taghazza, while leaving the Africans in control of the northern half of the trans-Saharan trading route's western arm at Ouadane, whose Berber elders bent the knee after being confronted by a party of mounted African legionaries. Admittedly most of these lands were infertile, and the Africans had trouble establishing lasting settlements that far south at this time: most of their outposts were but military camps and had little to no growth potential due to the hostile environment, and in quite a few cases they even resorted to leaving a simple flagpole and ring of stones to mark their territory, with only a few managing to evolve into towns of some note over the following decades & centuries – of these the largest was Gégetté[6], which was built to control some mountain passes in the Adrar plateau. Still, at least that meant they had not only room to expand still, but also an idea of just how far to push – and not to go a step further – until and unless they should find themselves in need of and in a good place to begin waging war against their southern neighbors.
As part of the Treaty of Gartènné[7], Emperor Leo and his chroniclers also acknowledged the Kaya Maghan Daoud as not merely king of Kumbi, but 'supreme king' (Lat.: Summus Rex) of 'Ghana' – the 'realm of warriors' in the tongue of the Soninke people, founders and rulers of this great Aethiopian kingdom to whom Daoud himself belonged. This may have been a case of willful misunderstanding, as Daoud (exploiting the massive gold mines of his homeland) minted coins bearing his own name & likeness in addition to that of his Savior and seemed to consider himself of equal rank to the Holy Roman Emperor. Of course, the Romans acknowledged only one Emperor who was also the universal head of the Ionian Church, and while their preexisting ties of friendship and sheer geographic distance had made it unthinkable for the Empire to claim any sort of suzerainty over Ghana beyond that strictly spiritual sense – Roman officials were still not about to ascribe to this distant Blackamoor prince the same imperial title which they reserved strictly for the Blood of Saint Jude.
The court of Daoud, first of the Ghanaian emperors, who aspired for his realm to be to West & Central Africa what the Romans were to Europe
In any case, Leo had timed his diplomatic overtures to the south well, even if not by conscious design. The Hashemites too were beginning to probe more deeply into the 'Dark Continent': Caliph Hashim sent forth explorers, traders and raiders alike out of southwestern Egypt and Cyrenaica into the vast region which Islamic chroniclers will refer to as Bilad al-Sudan ('the lands of the blacks')[8] (contrasted to Bilad al-Barbar – the continent's northeast down to the Horn of Africa, and Zanj – the Swahili Coast), both in search of additional resources and simply to satisfy his own curiosity. Initial plans to find a way through which they could outflank the African kingdom proved unfeasible due to the presence of great 'sand seas' which were functionally impassable for armies of any appreciable size (even one equipped with a large number of camels), found to be even more hostile to human life than much of the lands newly claimed by the Moors themselves far to the west – the only town the Arabs were able to establish here was Kufra, situated at a rare oasis.
However in his wisdom, Hashim did not immediately write this region off as worthless wasteland. Having been enlightened to the existence of extensive Garamantian trade networks in the east-central Sahara before his ancestors destroyed that kingdom thanks to his extensive scholarship & access to Roman records, the Caliph now sought to fully revitalize the eastern arm of the trans-Saharan trade under Islamic power. Over the coming years Muslim explorers would chart out additional oases toward the Tibesti Mountains, around which existing settlements would be brought under the Caliphal umbrella one way or another and new ones were built by Arab colonists & merchants, and they would ultimately even realize Hashim's original design of flanking the Moors in a way by re-founding the oasis town of Murzuk in the Fezzan south of the African kingdom's Libyan possessions. The Muslims steadily established contact with peoples far beyond the native Toubou (still known to the Romans as 'Troglodytae'), as far as Buhayrat Tshad – Lake Chad – and found lucrative trading opportunities relating to salt, slaves and ivory along the old Garamantian routes. Furthermore, as much as the Romans were spreading Christianity into West Africa, the Caliphate would also increasingly aspire to spread Islam into Central Africa from their newly acquired vantage points.
Far off in the east, within and beyond other desert lands, the Uyghurs' confrontation with their former Karluk overlords was escalating toward its climax without Chinese interference. Bögü Qaghan and Kobyak Khagan met in six battles this year, twice in the spring; twice in the summer; and twice in autumn. Of these Kobyak and the larger Karluk horde seemed to hold the advantage, for he won three out of the first five engagements and had pressed the Uyghurs hard by the fall of 754. However, Bögü Qaghan decisively turned around what seemed to be his last stand at the Battle of the Upper Orkhon, drawing the Karluks into assaulting his people's last great fortified encampment in a river valley and then trapping them in said vale with the bulk of his remaining warriors. The Karluks fought mightily to break out of this trap but were unable to do so, the narrowness of the battlefield preventing them from fully exploiting their numerical advantage, and four of them died for every Uighur there, including Kobyak Khagan himself.
With this victory Bögü Qaghan definitively secured a future for the Uyghurs, and established himself at the former Tegreg capital of Ötüken, which he rebuilt under the name 'Urgin-Balyq'. In order to avoid arousing the ire of the Later Han at this early stage, he would also travel to Luoyang to prostrate himself before Emperor Chongzong and pledge the loyalty of his rising nation to the Dragon Throne, which was sufficient to allay any suspicion on the part of the lazy Emperor and the rivaling cliques of court officials – far more concerned with their own feuds with one another than which particular tribe of nomads lingered on their periphery, so long as these nomads coughed up tribute in a timely manner and did naught to trouble them – for the time being. The remaining Karluks naturally resented the Chinese army's unwillingness to help them and saw no need to continue paying tribute in exchange for absolutely nothing in return, especially with the Uyghurs now physically separating them from China; besides, they had more concerning matters to worry about in the west, as the Khazars continued to surge through Oghuz territory and no doubt eyed them in their vulnerable state as well.
Kobyak Khagan of the Karluks chasing down an Uyghur horse-archer in his attempt to break out of Bögü Qaghan's trap at the Battle of the Upper Orkhon
755 inflicted upon the Romans' new policy toward the Slavic peoples its first serious test. Cestmir, the pro-Roman kŭnędzĭ or ruler of the Veleti (largest of the tribes of the Lutici confederacy[9]) who had once been a pageboy to Aloysius II, died in this year and was succeeded by his similarly pro-Roman and pro-Christian eldest son Domoslav. However, the policy of openness and friendship pursued by father and son generated backlash from traditionalist elements of Lutici society, who envied the wealth of Roman merchants and resented the tactics employed by their missionaries against the old gods. After Rastislav of Předhradí, the Moravian missionary assigned to convert the Lutici as a whole, began to incite Christian converts to begin destroying their old idols to demonstrate their newfound faith & solidify their break with the past – a practice which Domoslav took no measure to curtail, in no small part because his own wife Liudmila had converted and was an enthusiastic backer of Rastislav's – said traditionalists rallied behind his half-brother Radimir, the son of Cestmir and one of his concubines, who promptly launched a coup and beheaded the lawful Prince of the Veleti with his own blade barely six months into the latter's reign. Liudmila meanwhile fled directly to Roman Lombardy with her & Domoslav's toddler son, Vojnomir, in tow and begged for imperial assistance in defeating the usurper.
Radimir wasted no time in persecuting the Christians among the Veleti and the Lutici as a whole, supported by the other tribes constituting this confederacy. Rastislav was killed by being thrown into a pit of snakes, making him the first to die out of the fifteen 'Apostles to the Sclaveni'. Of course, the reaction from Rome was swift and crushing: Leo assembled an army comprised of several northern legions, Germanic and Slavic federate troops – the Lombards & Thuringians, who harbored longtime rivalries with their Sclaveni neighbors, made the largest and most enthusiastic contributions, but the next-largest came from and was led by Zvonimir Svetoslavić, the newly-baptized Croat Prince whose kingdom was the second among the South Slavs to adopt Christianity after the Carantanians – and Christian Polish volunteers. This 18,000-strong army he had placed under the Caesar Theodosius, who had only recently celebrated the birth of his first child Scantilla (Fra.: 'Escantelle'), to serve as the latter's first major combat outing. His orders were to crush Radimir, restore Vojnomir to his father's throne, and re-establish Christian missions among the Lutici in honor of the martyred Rastislav. These southern Wends had dared spurn the sweetness of Rome's friendship, so now they would taste the bitterness of her fury instead; and their punishment beneath the sticks of the legions would serve as an example to others who may be thinking twice about accepting Rome's offered carrot.
Now Radimir was not so foolish as to verge into being practically suicidal, and had taken some precautions to try to avoid getting immediately stomped flat by the much more powerful Roman army, which he absolutely knew was going to come for his head. He had sought to build alliances with the Obotrite tribes to his north, and had also cultivated a personal friendship with the then-Polish heir (now king) Włodzisław in their youth when he was still an adventurer striking out from his father's court. This friendship he now called in, so that Włodzisław would agree not to march with the Romans. Unfortunately for Radimir, the cunning Emperor Leo had not been unaware of his efforts and was practically four steps ahead of him in the realm of diplomacy: he bought the Obotrite chiefs off with generous gifts of jewelry, fine wine and even a few exotic silks so that they'd stand down, and struck an agreement with Włodzisław that while he would not force the latter to directly march against his old friend (the Augustus thought adding the full might of the Poles to his son's army would be unnecessary overkill anyway) in turn Włodzisław wouldn't hinder any among his subjects who had converted to the new faith from joining Theodosius' host, allowing for several hundred Christian Poles to attach themselves to the Caesar's ranks.
Finding himself diplomatically outmaneuvered by the canny Augustus and out of options, Radimir thought of fleeing to his old friend's court until he was informed of the trickle of Christian Poles moving to join the imperial army, after which he grimly resolved to mount a last stand against the overwhelming odds instead. The Romans proved impossible to defeat in the open field due to not only the much higher grade of their equipment & their more effective organization but also due to the simple fact that just this one army of Theodosius' outnumbered even the largest Lutici warband by at least three-to-one, so Radimir dragged the conflict out as long as possible with guerrilla warfare in the untamed woods & riverlands which comprised his homeland. Theodosius meanwhile copied the tactics of his father in Saxony (though 'Luticia' being so much smaller than Saxony meant he wouldn't have to keep at it as long), building forts to secure his supply lines and provide refuges as he marched, which he staffed with mostly Lombard or Thuringian auxiliaries.
Theodosius' Holy Roman forces on campaign against the Wends: here a Frankish paladin, a Breton knight and a Croat light infantryman have gathered on break in the woodlands which the Lutici tribes called home
'As long as possible' turned out to be about four months for the barbarians, as the Romans' inexorable march reached the Lutici capital at Rethra[10] in mid-autumn. Radimir, knowing his crude fortifications could not long hold against Roman engineering, forestalled an immediate assault by revealing that he had kept several hundred Christian converts alive up to this point precisely to serve the role of a bargaining chip. Theodosius agreed to negotiate, but was unable to reach mutually agreeable terms and retired to his camp in the surrounding woods; that night, Radimir launched a desperate night attack on said Roman camp to try to kill the Caesar and scatter his army, but Theodosius had kept his guard up at the advice of his father's veteran generals and slaughtered the sallying Lutici in the ensuing night battle. While Radimir had ordered the handful of warriors he'd left behind in Rethra itself to kill the prisoners if he failed, those men wavered in their conviction and surrendered instead after it became obvious that their master was no more & that killing the converts out of spite would only guarantee an even more excruciating death for themselves at Roman hands.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Rethra young Vojnomir was duly acclaimed as the new kŭnędzĭ of the Veleti with Liudmila as regent, hostages were taken from the other Lutici tribes to ensure their compliance, and Christian missionary activity resumed in their truncated kingdom. Theodosius judged that the Lutici should not be destroyed entirely, but he did allow the Lombards & Thuringians to annex disputed lands as far as the Rivers Havel and Spree, using the Theodosian forts to enforce their authority as far as the village of Poztupimi[11] as their own just reward: a hard enough punishment to demonstrate to anyone watching that Rome would not take usurpations against friendly rulers and the murder of its evangelists lightly, while still demonstrating that in line with Christian teaching he and the Empire believed in second chances (God help whoever thought they'd get a third chance from him though). For this feat Theodosius was nicknamed 'Sclavenicus' even at this early point in his career, though he personally humbly declined it on the grounds that the Lutici had not been a sufficiently strong foe for him to earn a victory title from beating them, and Leo was satisfied at his son's demonstrated abilities and judgment, and in line with Aloysian foreign policy tradition which favored the conversion & subordination of defeated barbarians over their total annihilation where possible.
[1] Staraya Ladoga, historically founded by the Vikings in 753 instead.
[2] The Senegal River.
[3] Senegambia, more or less.
[4] Lake Balkhash.
[5] Lake Uvs.
[6] Chinguetti.
[7] Cartennae – Ténès.
[8] West & Central Africa.
[9] The relationship between the Veleti and Lutici is unclear: the latter might have been the former's successor, or they might've incorporated the former, or they may have even just been the same entity under different nomenclature (they did roughly occupy the same geographic area, were both comprised of four tribes, and 'Lutici' seems to have actually started as the Veleti's Slavic neighbors' nickname for them). For the purpose of this TL, I've gone with a combination of the second & third explanations.
Well the Empire of the Later Han are starting on their way to be the empire of the Late Han. It could take a while depending on which group of Turkic people end up emerging as the new great power of the eastern steppes and how rapid the decline is but the Turks that the Han earlier brutally conquered are going to have some payback. This will also pose an increasing problem for Indo-Roman kingdom as well as China's protection is now effectively removed, albeit that may not be visible in the Indian region for a few years.
I doubt Simon-Sartäç will manage a lasting merger of his assorted faiths. Judaism like Christianity and Islam by its nature will not tolerate other faiths as long as they have real power. Plus they will have the enmity of the Roman empire to the west and an unstable eastern border.
Also there is the question of the Rus. You mention their reaching Constantinople as well as other locations. Is that via the historical route down the Dnieper or are they going down the Volga then crossing over to the Don? The latter would take them further away from Roman and its influence so could delay/prevent their conversion to Christianity so they might not end up being able to supplant the Khazars down the Dnieper valley region and are less likely to get imperial support for such as role as they did OTL. Assuming their still primarily traders but sooner or later their likely to seek to become a territorial power.
The empire is seeing some interesting developments. Leo is seeking to constrain the Africans, which they can only see as an hostile act so will undermine their loyalty. It sounds like he has successfully kept them out of the more valuable lands around OTL Senegal which might have added to their resources considerable and also enable trade connections elsewhere and for the moment, with no potential for projecting Roman military power into Ghana itself the latter is safe from imperial expansion, even if deep down the empire will reject the idea of it being truly independent. As such it can act as a clear check on the African state expanding either territoriality or economically to the south.
He may had made a rod for future emperor's backs however by giving his brother territorial lands. Despite the fact this is currently a gift of the emperor to an individual pope it won't be long before popes will seek to claim those possessions as inherent rights. Plus as I think is hinted this is also a precedent that other religious organizations are likely to follow so you could see more and more land coming under clerical control and hence being lost to the empire economically.
The fate of the Lutici make clear to their neighbours that the empire will not tolerate any independent state outside their control. Most are unfortunately going to have to submit to forced conversion and at least indirect incorporation but some of the stronger and more distant states could find it worthwhile to seek to ally for mutual defence when it comes to the case of them being forced to block any Christian missionaries entering their lands.
Before I forget with the map from the previous post I hadn't realised how much of the Ganges valley that the Alids had conquered. Are they managing to get large scale conversions to Islam or is it as OTL with the bulk of the population staying Hindu, or given the date possibly Buddhist?
In this regard the courtiers were not even wrong; the question they did not think to answer was, to whom would this slimmed-down Chinese army of mostly Turks and other non-Han frontier ethnicities be most deadly?
I'm sure this will be answered some time down the road in the way that will not be favorable for the Later Han emperor. And given that you mention the fact that Chongzong was not a cruel tyrant several times, I reckon his successor will be, triggering the downfall of the dynasty.
Clerical management of lands was a great centralizing tool for historical Kings and Emperors, as they don't set up dynasties of their own. Until the ruler loses control of the appointment of new bishops. The Investiture Dispute is what took the historical HRE from a vigorous and most unified state in Europe to the joke it became after the Great Interregnum.
The Popes will have a much harder time trying to claim the right of appointment given the explicitly lawful position of Emperors over the Heptarchy of which the Popes were merely one of, but I'm sure one is going to try regardless. Probably claiming or really a part of a reform movement against clerical corruption. Bishops being effectively imperial governors will inevitably make them more worldly than spiritual, at least those not on the front line of a holy war against the heathen.
The German Federates are also being remarkably well behaved. I'd expect the expansionist example of the Stilichans would have them champing at the bit for some religiously approved expansion of their own. Naturally militant peoples under enforced peace within the Empire have to be led to war somewhere. Maybe a Crusade if the Emperors are really insistent on mostly peaceful expansion against the Slavs.
Giving the Popes (or any other Patriarchate for that matter) too much temporal power is something the Emperors should be concerned about in the long term, certainly. With the Roman state having preserved its continuity from the WRE days, there's already the example of Saint Ambrose - not even a Pope - excommunicating Theodosius the Great and actually getting said Emperor to bend that church and state will doubtless be thinking about when there's friction between the two. (Granted, that particular dispute wasn't about investiture, but still. In fact Theodosius' crime, letting barb troops massacre thousands of Roman citizens, would probably have seemed a much scarier context to stand up to him in than a dispute over ecclesiastical authority.)
As far as the ambitions of the lesser federates go, this chapter is showing some of it starting to leak forth in the form of some of the Germanic ones snapping up Lutici/Wendish territory the instant the chance presented itself. Considering that the east is a natural direction for the Teutons in general to want to expand (dat Ostsiedlung, also westward & southward expansion is a no-go so long as the HRE stands for obvious reasons), and that the Emperors are trying to turn the Slavs in that direction into Christian allies rather than destroy them & hand their land off to the Germans - well, it's not a spoiler to deduce that these mutually exclusive goals are probably going to end up at loggerheads at some point. Same goes for the Balts, though they're less receptive to Christianity than the Slavs have been.
Ultimately, you can think of kingdoms like Poland as kinda like the Slavic equivalent to Ghana and ones like Lombardy as the Teutonic equivalents to Stilichian Africa. Except they don't have the Sahara to keep them apart and no real history of longstanding friendship (probably quite the contrary), which doesn't bode well for their future relations.
@stevep The western Gangetic plain's definitely still majority Hindu/Buddhist at this point, the Alid conquest is still relatively fresh. They're definitely working on converting the locals to the new religion though, and aren't going to be going about that business nearly as carefully or gently as the Indo-Romans are.
Anything & everything else, as always, are spoiler material. Especially stuff to do with future developments in Russia, all I can say at this time is that any 'anti-Normanist' controversy ITL will be taking a rather different tack compared to OTL
With this chapter we're now halfway through the 8th century, so please enjoy this factional overview of the Indo-Romans – who I consider to be one of the stranger and more precariously placed, but also more interesting, factions to have cropped up in the TL so far – before we return to our regular timeline-progression chapters.
