961’s first half was a time of consolidation for the Dano-Roman alliance, as Earl Magnus and Prince Harald both advised King Sigtrygg of the Danes that they needed to firmly lock Norway’s major population centers down first before pursuing the Garmrsons into the more remote and sparsely settled northern lands. Aside from securing Túnsberg, the allies also cleared Garmrson loyalists out of the stretch of land between the Norwegian capital and Jarl Sigurðr’s home of Agðir, defeating Jarl Gudrød ‘the Elf’ of Geirstað in the Battle of Geirreksstaðir[1]. Next they further took the time to extend their control into Rygjafylki in Norway’s southwestern corner, where Jarl Frøybjørn Huntjovson yielded before his own seat could be burned down by the invading army. However, after accomplishing all this but before moving against the Garmrson remnants up north, the allies got bogged down in another matter: the kingship of Norway – Sigtrygg chose this moment to unveil the candidacy of his pagan son Eiríkr, rather than Rome's choice the Christian Harald, for that crown.
Danish and English troops, having disembarked from the former's longships at a fjord, proceeding to lay waste to a stretch of northern Norwegian countryside loyal to Hákon
A ways to the south, Aloysius VI was also consolidating his own position. He had had two daughters with his
Augusta, Adela of Galilee, before finally lucking out with a son: and now that this next Aloysius Caesar had turned seventeen, the Emperor resolved that it was high time to find him a bride. For his only son and heir the elder Aloysius eventually settled on the Lusitanian princess Tareja ('Teresa'), as her home kingdom was one of several Iberian counterweights to the Stilichians and had intermarried less frequently with the Aloysians than the neighboring Theodefredings of Spain. His daughters meanwhile had already had strategic matches arranged for them in the preceding years, and accrued some fame on their own as patronesses of the Egyptian saints for which they had been named: the elder Barbara was the wife of the Bavarian king (formerly prince) Garibald II, while the younger Catherine had married Cassian the Younger, lord of Emath and heir to Aleppo. Between all these weddings, the
Augustus Imperator felt he had shored up a geographically balanced support base for decades to come.
Further still to the south and east, Saif al-Islam executed his multi-pronged amphibious offensive against Zayd al-Sadiq, capturing Zabid by land while using his new fleet to ferry 7,000 men under his cousin Yunus Beg from Jeddah straight to Aden. Yunus’ attack so far behind the front line caught the Yemeni Kharijites off-guard, and he was able to capture the port & its environs to establish a Hashemite beach-head in the Hadhramaut region. Rather than waste time scouring the southeastern deserts to which many of the Kharijites in this area fled, Yunus pushed northwestward up the Tihamat al-Yaman’s coastline, threatening to catch Zayd’s main army in a pincer movement with the Atabeg still pressing southward against them from the other end of the region. In order to avoid such a disaster, Zayd was compelled to withdraw into the hinterland mountains ahead of schedule, ceding control of Yemen’s most fertile areas to the Turkic generals but successfully preserving the majority of his forces and repelling their attempts to pursue him in the Battles of Sa’ada and Jabal Sabir. Meanwhile, Caliph Hasan reopened negotiations with the
Baqliyya leadership late this year after their initial round of talks collapsed back in 960.
On the steppes, Batbayan Tarkhan finally overran the inner castle of Atil with a daring nighttime escalade proposed and spearheaded by his Rus’ mercenaries, putting the small but highly troublesome Khazar garrison left within to the sword after a lengthy siege – Benjamin Khagan had been hoping for a Masada on the steppes, but alas Atil was not
that formidable a defensive position. In any case, with this victory Batbayan’s father Kuerçi was able to formally elevate himself to the Khaganate and proclaim Pecheneg mastery over the Pontic Steppe: the time of the Khazars as a nomadic power was definitively over, and that of the Pechenegs had begun. Having combined the heavy infantry contingent represented by those aforementioned Rus’ mercenaries with his traditional nomads’ strength in cavalry, Kuerçi Khagan now fought to evict the Ruthenians from the lands around the Don River and to contest Khazar control over the Kuban Plain. Although largely successful on both fronts, the Pechenegs did start to get bogged down upon trying to press toward the Dnieper in the west and renewing their pursuit of the Khazars into the Caucasus down south, and it certainly didn’t help that Benjamin & Aloysius VI’s diplomacy had resulted in the Ruthenians turning from an enemy of the now-rump Khazaria into another partner in the new anti-Pecheneg coalition stretching from Volhynia to Georgia.
In Nam Việt, arduous negotiations between Zhezong and Giáp Thừa Lang lasted for eight months before the two sides were finally able to reach a definitive peace settlement. The Chinese Emperor insisted that Nam Việt had to become a subject once more and was unwilling to walk away after the unexpectedly costly sacrifices of the past two decades, but King Giáp was adamant that they preserve some autonomy and successfully bluffed the Chinese into avoiding pressing on for a war of total conquest by claiming that he had additional hidden reserves like the one with which he took back Cổ Loa just a year before (he absolutely didn’t). Ultimately Zhezong agreed that Nam Việt could stay as an autonomous kingdom with the Giáp dynasty remaining at its head, rather than being annexed back into China as the Jiaozhi Commandery of old; in turn, Giáp had to agree not only to pay a heavy tribute (twice that demanded of Silla, which had submitted much more readily to Chinese overlordship) and to still kowtow before Zhezong as his overlord, but also to tolerate the continued presence of Kishi no Kisa at his court as the permanent Chinese minister-plenipotentiary despite both men having come to mutually despise the other over the course of their grueling war, tasked with securing Vietnamese compliance in regards to Chinese foreign policy and that not a
qian[2] was missing from said tribute.
King Giáp may not have totally defeated the Chinese and driven them out of his country, and in fact he still had to pay them tribute & suffer the continued presence of his sworn rival Kishi no Kisa at his court and his own expense, but he at least managed to retain his crown and some independence, which did not seem likely at the outset of this conflict. It would be some time before the Vietnamese monarchs regained the nerve to style themselves as 'Emperor' at home while still appearing as a 'King' at the Chinese court
Come 962, Sigmar von Feuchtwangen was busy engineering his true last triumph. Although by now he was far too old to lead armies in the field and smite his enemies personally as he used to in the good old days of the Crusade, the veteran had not lost his strategic wits and had spent the past few years simultaneously blockading and extensively studying his Rujani enemy. Though they had originally only accepted Roman suzerainty due to the threat of the Empire’s overwhelming empire and remained fiercely independent when it came to religion, these island Wends had been keen students of Roman warfare and had fortified their temples & tribal centers in a manner which imitated the castles of the continent, making them a tough nut to crack. From his writings around this time it was apparent that the irony that he, a German, was being put in charge of the expedition to suppress what appeared like an entire tribe of Slavic wannabe-Arminiuses was not lost on him.
Sigmar had identified Jarkun[3], a fortress-temple on the northern end of Rugia, as the spiritual heart of the Rujani – even more important than the castle of Charenza, located at the heart of the island, which was their prince’s capital – and determined that if he could capture it, it would be such a massive spiritual blow that the enemy tribe would either surrender immediately or at least become much easier to defeat. Thus after much careful planning, Sigmar sent a detachment of 400 handpicked men (including 40 Gabrielite knights & a squire brought along by each, the rest of this force being comprised of marines of the Roman navy and Christian Rujani exiles from the island) to attack the holy site. Jarkun was protected not only by stout ramparts but also by coastal cliffs, making approaching it as an unwelcome invader difficult and storming it even more-so, but Sigmar was able to distract the majority of both the Rujani warbands by making it appear as though an invasion of southern Rugia was imminent, and the defenders of Jarkun themselves by setting the waters around Jarkun ablaze with Greek fire toward sunset while his chosen 400 made their landing. The Wends did not believe that anybody could be so mad as to try to attempt an amphibious attack while their own sorcerous flames licked at their backs, when of course this was exactly what Sigmar was going to do, and so instead they judged the fire to be a distraction & hastened to contest a landing on the other side of the peninsula their temple had been built on.
With their retreat soon to be cut off by said fires, those men could only conquer or die: and conquer they did, as their advance party scaled the landside walls with ropes & grappling hooks, then seized and opened the gate for their fellows. The Romans proceeded to destroy the pagan idols they found and kill everyone within Jarkun – the Rujani priests retreated to the inner sanctuary of their temple and observed their ancient custom to the last by holding their breath there & not exhaling once in that holy place, even as the Romans broke in to wipe them out. Such had been the impact of this blow that the Rujani prince Ratislaus soon yielded before the odds, believing that Christ must now have stood triumphant over his old gods. The first Hochmeister of the Gabrielites lived long enough to witness the mass baptism of the Rujani before finally passing away from old age, having managed the rare feat of surviving into his 90s despite living a life of war; and while his last victory was still far too small in scale to be called a proper crusade, and the Wends (including the Rujani) periodically lapsed into rebellion and paganism from time to time still, in due time historians will reckon it (along with the war against the Sons of Ráðbarðr and the conflict in Norway) as a proto- or ‘zeroth’ Northern Crusade, much as Aloysius I’s war with the Tiele Turks and early Hashemites is reckoned as the ‘zeroth’ main crusade preceding the First launched by his descendant.
Sigmar von Feuchtwangen, first Grandmaster or 'Hochmeister' of the Gabrielites, in his gray years. Though too old to fight by then, he retained his wits and the iron will to apply them to achieve one more victory for Christendom before finally giving up the ghost
In Scandinavia, Sigtrygg was able to persuade his Roman allies to agree to his scheme to crown his pagan younger son Eiríkr king of Norway on the grounds that he would be more readily accepted by the Norwegians, and thus be less likely to provoke a rebellion which would necessitate further expensive Dano-Roman support to crush. In return, Eiríkr would pledge to respect the religious freedom of any of his subjects who elected to convert to Christianity, and to further appease both the Romans and Denmark’s own growing Christian faction led by his elder son Harald it was also agreed that a church should be built at Túnsberg & resources be set aside for a serious missionary push into Norway. Aloysius VI was annoyed at this turn of events but reluctant to push the issue too hard at this point in time, since he had his eye on much bigger projects and didn’t want to waste even more time on affairs in what he considered to be a cold and remote backwater if he could avoid doing so; as for Sigtrygg, he thereby succeeded in his aim of averting a sectarian civil war between his sons in Denmark, at the cost of most likely setting up a future second Dano-Norwegian war along religious lines instead.
One of those projects was the war in the North Caucasus, where despite Roman support having helped in keeping them out of the Euxine port cities like Tana, the Pechenegs were still rampaging across the Kuban and the Ruthenian-claimed steppes. While the land was fertile enough to support agriculture and said Ruthenians had tried to establish villages further east from the banks of the Dnieper, the Pechenegs were imparting unto them the same painful lesson which the Huns had once taught to the Ostrogoths – in this day & age, nomads still reigned supreme in that part of the world, and there was little hope of extending settled civilization’s reach onto those wild fields. To try to control these threats and in the knowledge that Dar al-Islam was still bogged down in its own problems (even if their situation didn’t seem quite as bad as it had in the previous couple of years), Emperor Aloysius sent his formidable brother Michael to take charge of the Roman effort to assist their Khazar & Ruthenian allies and contain the Pecheneg threat, before Kuerçi Khagan could decide to try to succeed where the Magyars had failed before and mount a more serious pretension to becoming the next Attila.
A party of Pechenegs, the latest aggravating nomadic horde to burst onto the scene and menace the Roman world's periphery. Fortunately unlike when the Huns, Avars or even the Khazars were just starting out, this time the Romans had a large number of allies standing between them and the newcomers
With an agreement over the new regime in Norway settled for now, the Dano-Roman alliance started up a new, serious offensive against the Garmrson loyalists in the north of that country once the weather allowed it in early 963. Hákon managed to retain the faith of Jarl Sveinn of Hlaðir, which at least prevented him from being flattened immediately, and took full advantage of the sheer remoteness of the northern Norwegian countryside to make the allied forces’ advance as sluggish and painful as possible. To rebuild his army and try to make the odds even marginally less lopsided against himself, he also recruited additional warriors from neighboring Sweden, offering them not only pay (which was rather meager, as he was hardly swimming in gold even before having to flee his own capital) but also an opportunity to fight in the defense of their gods & customs in Norway before the Christians ‘inevitably’ came for their own homes. The Norwegians were able to score some victories in the mountains & fjords of the north no matter whether the Dano-Romans tried to advance by land or sea, but the various descendants of Ráðbarðr were no less stubbornly determined to defeat Hákon – religious reasons on the part of Prince Harald and Earl Magnus aside, they also collectively sought to win their bitter family feud with the Garmrsons once & for all – and relentlessly pushed forward despite the occasional stinging counter-attack.
Back home, Aloysius III laid the groundwork for the reform which would define his reign – officially reuniting the two Roman Senates into one, thereby dissolving another tradition formerly established by Constantine I, for it had long confounded him that one Empire should have two rival Senates even centuries after reunification. Such a move was sure to cause alarm in the East, where Constantinople & beyond had gotten quite used to operating autonomously from the West even after the marriage of Helena Karbonopsina to Aloysius I formally reunified the Roman world. Thus, even with the prestige his dynasty had accrued from their successful Crusade (which, the Emperor would remind his Greek subjects, his grandfather had launched in order to protect them from the consequences of their own folly in supporting Alexander the Arab’s revolt against the senior Aloysian lineage) Aloysius had to be careful, starting by issuing assurances that the East would retain autonomy and broad self-government through the existing Praetorian Prefecture of Asia and associated offices.
Initial plans to just directly integrate the Eastern Senate into the Western one proved unfeasible when it became understood that this would produce a single Senate with well north of 3,000 Senators (two-thirds of whom came from the bloated Eastern Senate). This was obviously far too many to be seated in the
Tabularium on the Capitoline Hill where the Western Senate met since the
Curia Julia was converted into a church by the African empress Tia three centuries ago, and also too many to fit in the Eastern Senate’s own grand meeting house in the
Augustaion of Constantinople for that matter. Aloysius sensed an opportunity to also trim some fat from government expenses, and decided the restored united Senate would have a more manageable number of Senators not just to be able to fit in a single building but also to save costs: 1,000 should suffice in his view (600 being the traditional size of the imperial-era Senate in the West, with additional seats created for the Greeks and the various federates), and would already require the expansion of the
Tabularium (which itself had in turn already absorbed the ancient Temple of Vejovis into its foundations long ago) to absorb nearby unused buildings such as the Temple of Vespasian & Titus.
The Aloysian imperial envoy prepares to unveil his master's first proposal to merge the two Roman Senates back into one before the Western Senators
While they left the actual fighting to their English auxiliaries up north, the real Roman war effort abroad was gathering momentum in the east. The allied strategy on the northeastern shores of the Euxine Sea had borne an alarming resemblance to Menachem Khagan’s failed strategy against the Pechenegs, sticking to defending cities like Tana or the mountain passes in the Alan and Avar territories which led to Georgia rather than taking the fight to the rampaging nomads. The minute Michael was informed of this, he decided it would not do and prepared to strike forth from Tamatarcha after first assembling & ferrying over his reinforcements from Karcha[4], as ancient Panticapaeum was still called now even after it was returned to Greco-Roman hands by the Khazars. While risky – if the Grandmaster were defeated in the field, the newly Roman cities of the coast and the rump Khazaria still lingering in the northeastern Caucasus would both be vulnerable to the wrath of the Pecheneg hordes – Michael’s decision caught Kuerçi & Batbayan off-guard, as did the ferocity of his knights in battle and their obvious experience fighting off masses of lightly-equipped horse-archers from the Crusade; coupled with support from the Khazars’ own light cavalry, the allies went on to win their first field victories in the Kuban this year.
Michael had agreed to take his eyes off the Levant for the moment and refocus against the Pechenegs because the Saracens were, as of this year, still in too poor a shape to mount any threat to the new Roman borders. A second collapse of negotiations between Caliph Hasan and the
Baqliyya resulted in the latter beginning to raid the newly recovered Hashemite territories in Arabia & southern Iraq, forcing Saif al-Islam to reallocate resources to fend them off and slackening the pressure he had put on the Yemeni Kharijites in turn. Hasan expected Saif al-Islam to grind the
Baqliyya down to the point where Abu Sa’id would have to concede more favorable terms, while also ironically setting up his demise as the Caliph still planned on having him and the heretics destroy each other to clear the way for his own restoration to full power.
In that regard, the Atabeg seemingly did not disappoint, as following a few initial defeats in the Nejd he found his footing against this eastern rival and brought sufficient reinforcements to bear to root the
Baqliyya out of their newly-obtained footholds near Diriyah. Saif al-Islam was no mere dumb thug good only for crushing his master’s enemies however, and aware that Hasan had already conspired to get rid of Ja’far with eventual success (if also an extremely rocky road to get there), decided to engage in some skullduggery himself. When Abu Sa’id sent him an emissary in secrecy to warn him that Hasan was trying to play them both, the Turk – who had already come to harbor some suspicions in this direction even if he had no solid evidence to back it up until now – did not have the man killed out of hand but instead took the warning seriously and sent his own envoys to engage in under-the-table talks with the heretics in turn, offering the Kharijites a truce once more if they returned the Black Stone to him (thereby allowing him to upstage Hasan) and gave him a free hand to put the Caliph back in his place. It was past time, he reasoned, that the Banu Hashim be compelled to accept that they were but figureheads, and that the real power in Dar al-Islam now lay in the hands of men like him.
Depiction of an occluded Caliph Hasan being simultaneously carried on a litter by Turkic servants and manhandled by Saif al-Islam, most likely intended as an analogy for the Hashemite court's situation in the later years of his reign
Aloysius VI’s plans of Senatorial reform proceeded slowly through 964. The Emperor desired for his reunited, singular Senate to not only serve as a functional consultative body, but also to more accurately reflect the role of the federate kingdoms and bind them a bit more tightly to the Roman world order – previously, despite the existence of some Senators from the ‘barbarian’ federate states, the Western and Eastern Senates had still been thoroughly dominated by the high Roman and Constantinopolitan (not even ‘just’ Italian or Greek, really) nobility despite their increasing lack of relevance on the national or even regional stages respectively, particularly the former who had immense prestige attached to their names but little else after consistently ending up on the losing end of various plots & civil wars against the Stilichian and (to a much lesser extent) Aloysian emperors. Thus, the Emperor intended not only to trim the number of Senators down to the 1,000 he considered more reasonable, but also to redistribute the remaining seats to extend greater representation to the federate nobility at the further expense of the ancient Senatorial clans.
To stem the inevitable aristocratic outrage, Aloysius had in mind some steps to preserve the stature of the aforementioned Senatorial families within the new Senate structure. Theoretically he could have simply pushed ahead and buried all opposition under brute force which they could not possibly match, but such was not the way of a civilized monarch and the sixth Aloysius preferred to avoid attaining a reputation for tyranny just a few short years into his reign. The Dominate-era tripartite division of ranks within the two Senates into the orders of
illustres,
spectabiles and
clarissimi which was then amended by Aloysius I to include the
gloriosi and
forti would be preserved and refashioned into a way of keeping up barriers between the old and new Senators[5]: the highest and most dignified of these ranks, that of the
vir illustris or ‘illustrious men’, was henceforth to be the exclusive preserve of those Senators who could prove their pedigree as a patrilineal descendant of one of the great Senatorial clans of Rome and Constantinople, and though the
Princeps Senatus had to be elected by the entirety of the assembly he could only ever come from the ranks of the
illustres.
Non-Roman princes of royal blood were to be seated among the clerics (exclusively archbishops and Roman cardinals) and provincial nobility of the
spectabiles, and men of lesser birth who managed to enter the Senate through the patronage of the Emperor himself, more established aristocrats or their own kings (more often than not, being the first men of their family to do so – a sort of latter-day
novi homines) or their own wealth (as was the case with the great merchant houses which ruled maritime city-states such as Venice & Pisa, it would be some time still before the burghers of Bruges and other Northern European ports could match their stature) were ranked among either the
clarissimi, if they already hailed from families of lesser nobility without great kings in patrilineal ancestry, or the
gloriosi (for soldiers who rose to the comital or ducal ranks through the legions) and
forti (for knights from federate kingdoms) if not.
The ranks of its membership aside, the unified Senate would also inherit the constitutional rights and responsibilities left to its immediate predecessors by the Romano-Germanic emperors: primarily, new laws drawn up by the Emperor’s agents would first be presented to and debated by the Senators, who could then forward amendments to the Emperor (who, however, naturally retained the right to veto any such Senatorial amendments if he so pleased). The Senate further retained its longtime role in the formal process of elevating a new Emperor to the purple, being required to officially elect the
Augustus Imperator after the army has acclaimed him as such & raised him up on their shields but before the Patriarchs have anointed & crowned him, although succession was by default hereditary within the
Domus Aloysiani and Senators at this time did not dare contemplate the consequences of not electing an acclaimed
Caesar to succeed his father.
The old Senate in the West had not exactly covered itself in glory since early Stilichian times, and the one in the East was only marginally better despite growing over twice as large. It was the hope of Aloysius VI that a reunited Senate with clarified constitutional rights & responsibilities, as well as no shortage of chastening examples to consider when the Senators are thinking about doing something foolish, would do better than its predecessors
Elsewhere, the princely Grandmaster Michael succeeded in forcing a major field battle with the Pechenegs near the Euxine Sea for the first time. A trap was set using a large and ostentatious caravan sent from Balanjar to Tana, and since the Pechenegs did not appear to have learned from the last time Benjamin Khagan fooled them with a decoy convoy, after first enduring weeks of harassment this time he & Michael succeeded in ambushing their ambush at what would be known as the Battle of the Hypanis[6]. The ‘Roman’ army there was actually mostly comprised of Georgian & North Caucasian (Alan and Circassian) auxiliaries as well as a contingent of Ruthenians with only a few actual Greeks & Romans, but Michael himself was present with a hundred of his winged knights and carefully kept them in reserve despite still pursuing a very aggressive strategy against the Khazars in other regards, demonstrating the influence of age & experience on the reckless valor he had once displayed against the Saracens.
Caught off-guard, the Pechenegs feigned retreat at first before suddenly turning to fight back ferociously in a classic nomadic maneuver, and managed to push back the attacks of the Christian army. However in so doing they played into Michael’s hands, and the advances of their own wings (spurred on by false hope that they were about to win the engagement) inadvertently created a gap in their own line which the Michaelites and the Georgian heavy cavalry promptly stampeded through, the former’s indomitable Grandmaster spearheading their wedge as it crushed the Pecheneg center. Kuerçi Khagan fled in shock, while Batbayan Tarkhan at least tried to stand against him but was still soundly defeated, for even in his fifties Michael proved to still be one of the greatest warriors of his age and more than a match for the Pecheneg prince; that said, Batbayan did enjoy the dubious distinction of being one of the few opponents who managed to survive and limp away after crossing lances with one of the most formidable fighters of the Aloysian lineage thanks to the sacrifice of his bodyguards. In any case, the demoralized Pechenegs soon withdrew with worse losses than they had hoped for – for the first time but not the last in history, a nomadic horde from the Pontic Steppe had been defeated in large part thanks to a contingent of ‘winged’ Christian knights – and while it did not completely break them the Battle of the Hypanis did represent a turning point in the war which had, up till now, been one long Pecheneg winning streak.
A rather fanciful depiction of Grandmaster Michael squaring off with Batbayan Tarkhan, expressing no fear despite being outnumbered & indeed surrounded by Pechenegs
Aloysius VI strove to juggle two issues for his planned Senate reform through 965. The first was how to compensate the Senators who would (or, at least, the younger sons & brothers of their families would) be losing seats under his reapportionment scheme: happily, there was an obvious solution in appointing those men to various offices, mostly in the reconquered Middle East. These jobs which would allow them to augment their salary (assuredly not overly large, as the Emperor knew it’d be pointless to cut costs by shaving down the size of the Senate if he then had to make similarly outsized payments to the ex-Senators in their replacement jobs) by skimming from local tax collection and engaging in raids against the divided and still-recovering Saracens, while also hopefully inducing these men to lay down roots in the Levant and contribute to its defense in the future as well.
The second was nailing down a definitive meeting place for the Senate. The Roman Senate was still proud enough that having to convene in Constantinople was an absolute non-starter, no matter the number of indignities heaped upon them over the past centuries (though to be fair much of it they brought on themselves), while the Constantinopolitan Senate was similarly loath to have to leave their home city – especially if it was to convene in the old Rome, which Constantine the Great built and sanctified his new capital to get away from in the first place. Proposals to have the Senate meet halfway between the two old imperial capitals, perhaps in rich and fast-growing Venice (while it would certainly have made the Venetians very happy) or by rebuilding Salona with Diocletian’s old palace in particular serving as their new meeting house, floundered in the face of overwhelming opposition from both Senates and also, in Salona’s case, prohibitive projected costs. Trévere was thought to be too far removed from the Mediterranean and besides, Aloysius was not keen on sharing the northern imperial capital with his Senate when getting away from them was in turn one of the reasons which his dynasty’s progenitor had made this hometown of his into their permanent seat of power. The
Augustus Imperator pondered simply settling on a ‘revolving meeting house’ scheme instead, with the Senators convening in Rome during the first half of the year and Constantinople the second or vice-versa.
To the south and west, an unexpected new development was beginning to open up. Those Spanish and African knights who had fought for the Irish against the Pendragons and did not settle down in the Emerald Isle now came home, some with Irish wives and children, others with interesting stories of what Aloysiana was like that they heard from their Irish comrades (who, in turn, were repeating what they had heard from their parents before said parents got cut off from their relatives across the Atlantic by the Norsemen) – a bountiful land scarcely touched by human hands, with good land and surrounded by waters teeming with fish, though the extreme cold and occasional hostile primitive Wilderman kept it from truly being a new Eden. By now these tales had crept up to the ears of the royal courts in Toledo and Gardàgénu, and both the Theodefredings and Stilichians were certainly interested in finding new avenues through which they could accrue more power and wealth.
Despite their differences and the fact that Spain only arose again by tearing itself free from African hegemony with Aloysian support during the Seven Years’ War, the incumbent King Rodrigo Turismundez was a forward-thinking man who believed that cooperating with the only other great Christian kingdom known to have established maritime colonies to the west would greatly improve his chances of success; besides, now that the Africans had bowed and returned into the fold of the Emperor's peace, they could no longer be classed as an enemy to be opposed at all costs. His Moorish counterpart Gostãdénu III was a young and ambitious sort, but who had learned well enough from the example of his predecessors that it was unwise to openly challenge the Aloysians for the purple – certainly not while the latter were still riding high from having led Christendom to its greatest triumph over Islam in over 200 years. Even with the resources of more of North Africa and the friendship of distant Ghana, such a conflict would be very risky for his family. However, perhaps the riches of this new world which the first Aloysius had arrogantly presumed to name after himself might tip the scales away from the heirs of Arbogast. And so the descendants of Alaric and Stilicho went back from being enemies to allies, as their forefathers had, at least for this singular purpose of discovering & settling Aloysiana: plans were drawn up and resources stockpiled for a joint Hispano-African sailing expedition to the uttermost West, to depart from Espal in a few years’ time.
More than a thousand years ago, the Moors' Carthaginian ancestors sailed far down the coast of Africa under the lead of Hanno the Navigator and encountered all manner of strange men & creatures, culminating in the hirsute and fiercely hostile 'Gorillai'. Now the Africans of today hope to match his feat, albeit in a rather different direction
While the Stilichians were up to something new in the west, the Aloysians were trying to push the old wars they were already fighting in the north & east to a conclusion. To the north, the direction of the Norwegian conflict was still left in the hands of King Sigtrygg and Earl Magnus: Aloysius didn’t see any need to interfere as long as he continued to hear of good progress against the Garmrsons, which he did this year, as the allied forces slowly but surely rooted their rival kinsman’s followers from one fjord after another as part of their strategy to slowly strangle the Garmrsons in their den. To the east, Kuerçi Khagan responded to his embarrassing defeat by falling back on another traditional nomadic strategy when confronted by a formidable sedentary opponent – retreat to the steppes and engage in relentless backbiting, hit-and-run strikes which fully exploited his army’s mobility while avoiding any large-scale engagements similar to the Battle of the Hypanis until, hopefully, his enemy got tired enough to present some vulnerabilities. However, the Hypanis had also dealt a hard enough hit to the Pechenegs that they could not resume the offensive even on other fronts, and so Aloysius VI sought to terminate his uncle’s mounting frustration at the situation (and the continued drain on his eastern resources which this represented) by bringing Kuerçi to the negotiating table before too long.
Finally, in Arabia Saif al-Islam announced a major breakthrough in the war against the
Baqliyya. Abu Sa’id had caved and finally returned the Black Stone to him after being defeated in the Battle of Hafar al-Batin, the Hashemites having first had to dig numerous wells to expand on their Prophet’s initial projects in the area and to carefully guard their convoys in order to supply the effort to deal a significant blow to the Kharijites in this area. The Atabeg thanked him not by adhering to a truce which he feared would just give the
Baqliyya time to recover & regroup when he had been on a winning streak against them recently, but with follow-up offensives that drove them out of the Al-Ahsa oasis in eastern Arabia and toward either Oman or the islands of Bahrayn where their fleet was still strong enough to prevent the Hashemites from pursuing. In any case, Caliph Hasan would not be there to celebrate when his faithful second-in-command presided over the great triumphal parade which would culminate in the restoration of said Black Stone to its rightful place in the Kaaba, having suddenly taken ill and died in less than a week around the same time as the Battle of Hafar al-Batin.
Saif al-Islam ensured that he would be succeeded by his underage son Musa, upon whom the
laqab or honorific ‘al-Amin’ (‘the Trustworthy’) had been bestowed by his father for his guileless nature; a most pliant puppet perfectly suited to his needs, nothing like the unexpectedly strong-willed and troublesome Hasan, and one whose ascent marked the definitive eclipse of the Banu Hashim by their theoretical subordinates. As far as the Atabeg was concerned, the previous Caliph clearly had to go not only for trying to get him killed by dealing with heretics but also for the sake of stability, since he’d otherwise endlessly scheme against not just Saif al-Islam himself but also any man who came after him until he had regained full power (which Saif doubted he would be all that effective at actually wielding, given that Hasan had never actually gotten to govern the Caliphate between the Banu ‘Awwam and then himself). The Egyptian Hashemites denounced Al-Amin as another pretender and an even more obvious pawn of these Turks who had taken it upon themselves to rule the Caliphate in all but name than his predecessors, but they were not in good shape to take advantage between their own similarly thorny internal situation with the brood of Al-Farghani and the fact that they were flanked by Christendom on both ends of their kingdom. Mutual exhaustion after the civil wars and relentless scheming of the past decades on one hand, and the Kharijites being in retreat on the other, made it appear as though some much-needed peace & stability was near at hand for Iraq – if Saif al-Islam could get over his puppet’s dubious legitimacy, and keep his fellow Turkic warlords in ‘Hashemite’ Persia under control…
With his enemies eradicated or on the back foot and the Banu Hashim firmly subordinated under his power, Saif al-Islam Ghazi felt he was finally getting into position to steer the Iraqi ship of state back into calmer waters and start the long, arduous process of rebuilding their power to challenge that of the Holy Roman Empire & reunite with his nominal overlords' wayward kin in Misr
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[1] Gjerstad.
[2] Chinese ‘cash’ coins, historically minted since the Warring States period until the advent of the Republic in the 20th century.
[3] Arkona/Jaromarsburg.
[4] Kerch.
[5] This is an inversion of what happened historically to the Byzantine Senate, where the rank of the
illustres was inflated into worthlessness and the rank of the
gloriosi/gloriossimi was invented to compensate.
[6] The old Greek name for the River Kuban. The battlefield site would have been in the vicinity of modern Ust-Labinsk, where the Kuban and Great Laba meet.