502-505: The Dragon's Basin
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
502 was another year of peace, quiet & rebuilding for the two Romes. The only development of note was the appointment of Boethius to the office of magister officiorum in the West in the wake of his predecessor Lucius Sempronius’ retirement, making him one of the highest-ranking civilian officials of that half of the Roman Empire despite his great youth. In truth this move was engineered by the Augusta and her sons to further empower one of their most promising allies, and indeed over the next years Boethius would use his new position to push for a streamlining of the imperial bureaucracy and the increased professionalization of the publicani (tax collectors) – ensuring the West’s government would have fewer administrators who were more loyal to him and the Stilichians by extension, and fewer opportunities for corrupt local kingpins to enrich themselves or for Merobaudes and Theodoric to sink their hooks into the engine of the Western Roman state.
However, 502 was a less quiet year east of Rome. In the realm of the Western Hephthalites, Toramana found himself embroiled in the doctrinal disputes between Nestorians, orthodox Christians and Miaphysite refugees from the Eastern Roman Empire even as he was trying to settle in for his own hard-earned period of peaceful rest. Even after asking the elders of each sect to submit written summaries of their beliefs, the Buddhist Mahārājadhirāja was as lost trying to comprehend their arguments about Christ’s nature as Sabbatius or Eucherius II would have been had they been forced to wrangle with Indian monks debating the importance of the Pali language. What Toramana did understand, however, was that some of these Christians were friendlier to Rome than others – and anyone who was a friend to Roman interests could not be a friend of his, not after Sabbatius effectively staked a claim on the Sassanid legacy by marrying Theodora and constantly menacing the frontier between their empires.
When the Patriarch of the East, Hebraeus, died this summer, Toramana took the opportunity to interfere in his succession – and the state of the Church of the East, which remained divided chiefly between Ephesians (of whom Hebraeus had been one) and Nestorians, as well as advocates and opponents of clerical celibacy (respectively aligned with said Ephesians & Nestorians)[1]. He imposed the fervently Nestorian bishop of Karkha, Shila[2], as Hebraeus’ successor. Just as expected, within the year Shila – being not only a Nestorian but a married man with children – convened a synod at Daquqa where a resolution supporting the positions of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius’ mentor, and by extension canonizing Nestorianism as the official theological position of the Church of the East was adopted, as well as one abolishing clerical celibacy even for bishops. The Ephesian representatives were barely allowed to get a word in, and immediately after the synod the harangues of Shila and his allies began to enjoy the backing of White Hun arrows.
Shila not so much debating as he is dictating to the Ephesian Christian leaders of Assyria at Daquqa
Unsurprisingly, the Synod of Daquqa was poorly received in the Roman world, exactly as Shila had warned and as Toramana hoped for. The Eastern Roman Augustus and Patriarch Hypatius of Constantinople furiously denounced the Synod as a ‘robber council’ of no legitimacy, and their declarations were joined by Pope Leo II, Alexander II of Alexandria, Flavian II of Antioch and Elias of Jerusalem[3]. All this the Mahārājadhirāja had anticipated, and the enthusiasm with which Ephesian Christians in his lands received the Pentarchs’ unanimous condemnation of the Synod of Daquqa gave him and his chosen Patriarch an excuse to crack down on them for ‘disloyalty’.
What Toramana did not anticipate was the rabid hostility of the Syrian and Egyptian Miaphysites he had taken in after the downfall of Trocundus, who viewed the Nestorians as even worse theological enemies than the Ephesians and made their displeasure with his moves (which they perceived as him showing favoritism to said hated enemies) known not only with mob action in the cities of Beth Arabaye, but also by assassinating Shila’s eldest son in December. Toramana had no idea what he’d done to provoke them to such violence, but he considered the Miaphysites’ actions to constitute nothing short of ungrateful treachery after he took them in and countered with a series of extremely brutal reprisals culminating with the burning of sixteen Syriac and Coptic elders on December 31, after first ensuring they witnessed the executions of their families down to their young grandchildren. To his further shock this atrocity and others did not break the Miaphysites’ will to resist, but hardened it by giving them martyrs. As the growing Miaphysite insurgency began to destabilize Hephthalite Mesopotamia, it was ultimately Sabbatius who got the last and loudest laugh out of this turn of events – as far as he was concerned, it was about time the Miaphysites started damaging someone else’s empire.
Toramana forces the Miaphysite elders to watch their kindred being executed before they themselves are burnt at the stake, fully expecting this display of brutality to bring their co-religionists to their knees
Far to the north, in July the Saxons of Lindum revolted at their displacement by returning Romano-Britons seeking to claim their families’ old land, which frequently happened to be the best land around the devastated city. The rebels briefly took Queen Gwenhwyfar hostage in an attempt to gain leverage, intercepting her party as she traveled to join her husband and eldest son at Segelocum[4], but while they were negotiating the terms of her release Llenleawc freed her in a daring night raid executed on Artorius’ orders. Artorius attacked and crushed them on the morning after, and offered the survivors a ‘free’ choice: accept baptism into the Pelagian Church and be given plots of land to work as tenant farmers, carefully dispersed across Britannia to ensure they would no longer be concentrated in any single region, or remain pagans and be sentenced to work in the gold and silver mines of Cambria until they died of exhaustion.
Off to the far east, Toramana’s cousins were coming to their first real blows with the Chinese. After King Kaundinye of Arsi[5] refused to pay obeisance to the Dragon Throne, confident in the new alliance with the Eastern Hephthalites, Emperor Gong sent a force of 4,000 men through the Hexi Corridor and into the Tarim Basin to bring him to heel. After arriving in Gaochang in September, the Chinese army went on to besiege Arsi through the first months of autumn. However, in mid-October a force of 5,000 Hephthalite horsemen arrived to attack them from behind and routed them in a fierce night battle with the support of the Arsi garrison. Only a few dozen survivors made it back through the Taklamakan Desert and the Corridor to report of what had happened, after which an angry Gong ended the year by sending three times as many men – led by his third son, Prince Chen Xuezhi – to level Arsi and teach their allies a sharp lesson while they were at it. For convenience’s sake, orders were issued to the governor of Arsi to prepare this army’s siege weapons locally and have them ready for collection as soon as they arrived, which was expected to occur early next year.
In 503, Theodoric Amal observed the pummeling the Gepids had been taking at the hands of the Heruli as well as the movement of Sclaveni raiders into their southeastern frontier, and deemed it necessary to act before they were completely overrun. In the late spring he petitioned Emperor Eucherius for permission to bring them into the imperial fold as a new federate vassal, citing the opportunity to recover the long-lost province of Dacia and its gold at little cost given the Gepids’ weakness, and handily secured it. This hypocritical move predictably outraged Merobaudes, who had just been kept from doing the same thing with the Thuringians and Continental Saxons by Theodoric himself, and it also spooked the younger Stilichians who did not appreciate another surge in Gothic power.
An irate Merobaudes turns his back on Theodoric as the Ostrogoth king rides out to bring the Gepids to heel
As the Ostrogoth king promised, the Western Empire did not have to expend a significant effort against the Gepids to subjugate them. Theodoric invaded Dacia with a dozen legions and another 12,000 Ostrogoths for a total strength of 24,000 men, which was already too much for the Gepid king Mundus[6] to deal with on top of the Heruli, who had been closing in on his royal seat at Sarmizegetusa. As his people’s traditional protector, the Eastern Roman Empire, was both unwilling and unable to aid them due to having been completely cut off from the southern border of the Gepid realm, Mundus offered to surrender to Theodoric and become a foederatus of the Western Empire if the Ostrogoths would save him from the Heruls, an offer which the magister militum accepted. Theodoric went on to rout the Heruli in a great battle before Sarmizegetusa, expelled them from the mountains of Dacia in a series of further battles which raged into winter, and returned to Ravenna at the year’s end with Mundus at his side, proudly announcing to Eucherius II and his court that the old province of Dacia which Aurelian had been forced to abandon had been reclaimed after over 200 years – though it would still be peopled and defended by the Gepids.
In the east, Sabbatius offered refuge to the Ephesian Christians fleeing from Hephthalite and Nestorian persecution in Assyria and Mesopotamia, and together with the Pentarchs and Eucherius II he acknowledged one of their surviving elders as Patriarch Paul of the East – Hebraeus’ lawful successor in the See of Saint Thomas. In his latest show of realpolitik the emperor also offered shelter and assistance for the Miaphysite insurgents who were working to terrorize the roads and riverine travel along the Tigris and Euphrates, allowing them to establish fortified bases on his side of the border from which they could raid the Western Hephthalite realm, while tasking his growing number of limitanei on the Mesopotamian frontier with simultaneously preventing them from slipping further west to spread their heretical beliefs among Roman citizens and deterring Eftal pursuit of the raiders into his lands. As he knew that this state of affairs could only persist for so long before Toramana inevitably attacked him for harboring the latter’s enemies, Sabbatius began to fortify the border towns (or repair damage done to existing fortifications, in Nisibis’ case) and mass ever more of his new legions in Syria & Mesopotamia while ordering his Caucasian vassals to begin planning for renewed hostilities with the new power in Persia.
In the Tarim Basin, Chen Xuezhi’s larger and more formidable second army finally arrived at Gaochang in April and wasted little time there to pick up its siege weapons and local volunteers before marching on Arsi, which they reached in the first days of May. The Chinese overcame Arsi’s defenses over the course of a 12-day siege, then sacked the oasis-city and wiped out its royal family before imposing a local nobleman from Gaochang to rule over what remained as their client. It was this man who Lakhana’s own host of 10,000 found when they arrived from Sogdia, three days too late to prevent their ally’s demise – though not too late to storm the damaged walls themselves, soon after which they killed him and the entirety of the 1,000-strong garrison Xuezhi had left behind.
A Chinese soldier from Gaochang, outfitted in the manner of the Tocharian natives (themselves descended from, and clearly inspired by, the Yuezhi – many of whom went on to become the Kushans of India – and Saka peoples)
Far from being intimidated by the sight of his ally Kaundinye’s head and those of his kin adorning one of the damaged towers of Arsi, the Mahārājadhirāja of the Eastern Hephthalites furiously swore revenge, and just eliminating the interloper the Chinese had left behind would not be enough. Leaving Kaundinye’s nephew Kana in control of Arsi, he pursued the Chen army as it made its way back to Gaochang and attacked them within sight of that other oasis city, getting the drop on them and disrupting Prince Xuezhi’s attempt to organize his ranks with a furious arrow storm and cavalry stampede as his opening move. In the Tarim dust and heat Lakhana faced Chen Xuezhi in single combat, having torn through his surprised army to reach him, and struck his head off after a hard-fought duel.
As the Chinese left their siege weapons behind in the rout which followed, Lakhana seized those weapons and turned them against Gaochang; he was able to breach the walls and sack the city itself, but could not break into the citadel where the governor, his family and highest officials had gathered, so instead he used a captured mangonel to hurl the Chinese prince’s head onto their highest balcony and left with the rest of Gaochang’s people in chains behind him. The governor notified his superiors, who eventually notified Emperor Gong, who in turn was apoplectic at the news of another army’s destruction and the death of his son. A third Chinese army, this one 35,000 strong and led by Crown Prince Huan as well as Gong’s second son Chen Yufan, began to set out through the Hexi Corridor to avenge their younger brother; Lakhana meanwhile was not blind to the high risk of Chinese retaliation for what he just did, so he remained in the Tarim Basin and summoned thousands more men from Bactria, Sogdia and India to join him and also compelled the remaining oasis-states under his protection to contribute to his efforts in their defense, bringing the strength of his own army up to 25,000. He also sent most of the captured Chinese siege weapons back to Balkh for study – and replication, if possible.
Come 504, the old Dacian gold mines were once more being exploited for the benefit of the Roman Empire, or at least its Western half. With this new supply, the Western Empire’s mints were able to produce coins of even higher value, accelerating the replacement of the old horrendously debased coinage initiated by Honorius II. However Theodoric made it absolutely clear that the gold mines of Dacia were effectively under his control and the Gepids a new addition to his power-base more than they (officially) were to the empire at large, tying their royal family to his by arranging a marriage between his daughter Theodegotha to Mundus and garrisoning large numbers of Ostrogoths in the mining camps, towns and forts of the Gepids (supposedly to secure them from the Heruli and Sclaveni while they were still recovering from the beatings inflicted over the previous two decades). By arranging the marriage of his other daughter Ostrogotho to Anicius Faustus, the comes sacrorum largitionum whose troubled appointment process had caused a temporary rift between the Empress Natalia and Pope Leo, he further solidified his control over the imperial treasury as well.
With the restoration of the Dacian gold supply in addition to the Spanish one, the imperial mints of the West were able to banish the last of the debased coins of old, some of which were almost entirely made of lead
Faustus aligning himself with the Green clique and Theodoric’s consolidation of power absolutely alarmed the Frankish faction and the Stilichians, to such an extreme in fact that they were willing to temporarily ally with each other to limit his influence. Theodosius persuaded his father to appoint his brother-in-law Aloysius Dux Moguntiacensis over Theodoric’s candidate for that office, putting him in charge of a comital legion despite his great youth and so disrupting an attempt by the magister militum to undermine Merobaudes’ command, while Constantine agreed to a betrothal between himself and Clovis’ daughter Clotilde to create further connections between the Stilichian dynasty, the Merovingians and the Arbogastings – though because the Frankish princess was still a child and ten years younger than Constantine, the actual wedding was postponed until she had matured. As Theodosius’ own wife Anastasia revealed she was pregnant in October, the Caesar also promised a match between his unborn child to a son or daughter of Augustine of Altava to lock the Africans into this emerging ‘Red-White-Blue’ alliance as well.
In Britannia, the Angles went to war against the Britons of Rheged as soon as spring began and the snows cleared enough for them to march in force. With 11,000 warriors at his back Icel smote the men of Rheged in multiple battles across the summer, and by fall he was besieging their capital at Caer Ligualid[7], which was known to Artorius and the Romano-Britons by its old Latin name Luguvalium. Though the warriors of Alcluyd had come to relieve their ally, they proved to be too few in number to overcome Icel’s much larger host and achieved little besides distracting the Anglo-Saxons long enough for Urien, the prince of Rheged, to break out and reach their camp with his wife, children and 200 handpicked warriors. Urien’s father King Cynfarch remained in Caer Ligualid as the frustrated Icel prepared to storm it, and was put to the sword along with the remainder of his household and army when the town finally fell on September 14. Alcluyd now stood entirely alone as the sole independent outpost of the old Brittonic people still remaining, strengthened though it may be by streams of refugees from Gododdin and now Rheged as they fled the Anglo-Saxon conquest, and its own king Dyfnwal ap Cinuit began looking to alliances with the Gaels to save itself from Icel’s inevitable offensive.
The Angles triumphantly marching across Rheged
East of Rome, while Sabbatius welcomed his daughter Lucina into the world, violence continued to swell between Nestorians and Miaphysites in Assyria. The latter had transformed the long-abandoned and ruined fortresses of Singara[8] and Hatra into their bases, and from these sites they raided Nestorian Syriac settlements along the Upper Tigris. After one such raid targeted the villages around Nineveh in June, Toramana personally led an army of 20,000 to besiege Hatra and drive the Miaphysites out of there, which he accomplished by mid-autumn; but the Miaphysite defenders had fought so fiercely despite not even numbering a thousand strong that he came to believe it would be easier, and far cheaper, to simply contain the remaining insurgents at Singara. The defense of the Upper Tigris was left in the hands of the reinforced garrisons of existing cities and a detachment of 5,000 warriors whom he’d left at Hatra, further backed by local Nestorian militias, all of whom were placed under the overall command of Takhsich – a younger son of Sagharak and one of his brothers-in-law.
While the Western Hephthalites continued to combat the Miaphysite rebellion, their Eastern brethren were busy fighting a much bigger and more overtly threatening opponent in China, with mastery over the Tarim Basin and its trade routes being the prize. Princes Chen Huan and Yufan reached the devastated but still Chinese-controlled Gaochang in May, then moved on to engage Lakhana’s army near Arsi a month later. In the Battle of Lake Bosten which followed, the White Huns initially succeeded at scattering the Chinese cavalry, but their charges were disrupted & mauled by Chinese crossbowmen at range and subsequently floundered against the disciplined infantry lines led by Crown Prince Huan. Eventually Prince Yufan rallied the initially defeated cavalry and brought them back to the field, forcing Lakhana to disengage and fall back in defeat: the final toll stood at 3,000 Hephthalites to the Chen’s 800.
Having prevailed over the Eftals at Lake Bosten, the Chinese advanced on Arsi again, where the defenders submitted in the knowledge that they had no hope against the massive Chen army without Lakhana’s help. At the advice of his friend and spiritual mentor Kavadh Huan took a different tack than his fallen younger brother and treated the Tocharians here more mercifully, collecting tribute and hostages but forbidding his men from sacking Arsi a second time and even leaving the Hephthalite-installed king Kana in place on the condition that he switch his allegiance to China. Still, before leaving he and Yufan did not forget to instill in Kana and his court an understanding that this relatively light hand-up was a one-time offer, and that they would not be nearly as forgiving if the people of Arsi betrayed their trust.
Kana of Arsi and his wife bending the knee before Crown Prince Huan of Chen
After securing Arsi and leaving 2,000 men to hold the city, the brothers marched on to the next Tocharian city on their road west: Kucha[9], by far the largest and wealthiest of all the Tarim oasis-states. At first the Chinese seemed to have the upper hand, driving the Hephthalites into retreat once more in a battle east of the great trading city and then proceeding to surround and besiege Kucha itself starting on July 31. But the walls of Kucha were taller and stronger than those of Arsi, and in any case Lakhana was not far away; he was, in fact, implementing his own strategy to lure the Chinese into a trap and a sense of complacency, then close his jaws around them and dash them to pieces against Kucha’s stout defenses. Fifteen days later he struck, having worn the Chinese army down with an increasing number of swift and vicious raids out of his desert camp over the previous two weeks, and inflicted a severe defeat upon them while they were just beginning an attack on Kucha itself. Huan and Yufan retreated to Arsi, having sustained 8,000 losses between the Battle of Kucha and Lakhana’s harassment of them along the road back, although they still had sufficient numbers and their garrison at Arsi was stout enough to deter Kana from even thinking of double-crossing them at this moment of weakness.
Lakhana had harried the Chinese as they retreated from Kucha, but Huan and Yufan were able to rally at Arsi and defeat him once more in another battle before that city’s western gates. Though he cursed Kana for not coming to his aid, the Eastern Mahārājadhirāja was in no shape to carry out his threats toward his former client and fell back toward Kucha around the start of October. By now news of the back-and-forth clashes in the Tarim & ensuing stalemate had been borne by traders as far as Pataliputra, and the Gupta court saw these Sino-Hephthalite clashes as an opportunity. Parties of Gupta warriors began to test the defenses of their Huna enemies once more, sacking several villages along the middle Ganges toward the end of the year and compelling Lakhana to seek peace with the Chinese so he could shore up his southern garrisons before the Guptas invaded in force. Huan agreed to a truce and to negotiate a possible peace settlement – he did not expect a productive outcome, as any agreement he made would have to be run past his vengeful father anyway, but figured it was a good way to stall until the reinforcements he knew were on their way through the Hexi Corridor arrived.
In mid-505, princess Anastasia gave birth to the Western Caesar’s first child, a daughter named Eucheria. As previously promised, within six months of her birth Theodosius arranged her betrothal to Felix, the eldest son and heir of King Augustine of Altava who was eleven years her senior, and in so doing firmed up ties between the Stilichians and their African vassals. These maneuvers did not escape the notice of Theodoric, who responded by shoring up ties between his house and the royal Balthings of the Visigoths by arranging the betrothal of his third daughter Amalasuintha to Alaric II’s own heir Fafila: a pair who were much closer in age than Felix and Eucheria or Constantine and Clotilde, and thus could marry within another year or two rather than a decade or more.
At this point even Eucherius II must have noticed the tension building beneath his throne, because he invited all these notables and more from the other provinces to a grand Christmas feast in Rome. There, in the last days of the year he urged the known rivals Merobaudes and Theodoric to reconcile and forgive each other’s past trespasses in public. That done, they swore friendship with one another and the emperor’s sons, and the four as well as their lieutenants spent the rest of the year feasting and gallivanting about the Palace of Domitian. While the sincerity of their sudden reconciliation and fraternity was doubted by just about everyone but the Augustus himself, who found it to be a satisfactory conclusion to the factionalism brewing within his court, the end-of-year merriment did seem to successfully lower the political temperature in the Western court some.
Eucherius II intended the Christmas of 505 to not just be an occasion for merriment, but for political reconciliation – or at least a temporary cooling of tensions – in Rome itself
Far to the east, past the steadily healing Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Hephthalites’ internal struggles in Assyria, the Chinese Dragon and the Bactrian Roc remained at odds over the Tarim Basin. Negotiations between Lakhana and Chen Huan, conducted with Kavadh as an intermediary and interpreter, broke down after Emperor Gong dictated that no peace was to be made unless Lakhana was prepared to acknowledge the entire Tarim Basin as a large Chinese tributary and the Chinese reinforcements arrived. Their numbers bolstered back to some 36,000, Princes Huan and Yufan kicked the White Huns back from near Arsi to Kucha and then some, methodically driving Lakhana from the battlefield and compelling Kucha’s surrender with the sight of 6,000 Eftal heads on spears.
Lakhana retreated to Kashgar and summoned his own reinforcements, but between India and other garrison commitments he was never going to be able to bring as many warriors into the Tarim Basin as the Chinese could spare, even discounting how much more populous China was than his own (much more recently war-torn) realm. Once more, he turned to the Hephthal dynasty’s traditional strategy for dealing with overwhelming odds: making risky, aggressive gambles in the hope that eventually one of them would pay off. An initial attempt at counterattacking ended poorly at Tumshuq[10], so instead Lakhana retreated to Yarkand[11] (taking the warriors of Kashgar and Khotan with him) and relied solely on his light cavalry to harass the Chinese host as it advanced on Kashgar with an eye on luring them into battle on more favorable ground.
Eventually this strategy bore fruit, as Huan and Yufan were misled by a captured captain of Lakhana’s into believing the Hephthalite army had not acquired sufficient reinforcements to stop them and decided to take a detour to finish him off before capturing Kashgar. In the ensuing Battle of the Yarkand River, Lakhana threw everything he had left at the Chinese vanguard after it forded the eponymous river on the way to Yarkand and successfully cut it off from the rest of the Chinese army, resulting in the slaughter of over 10,000 Chinese soldiers in a span of four hours and the capture of Prince Yufan. His effort to carry on the attack into the main Chinese camp and eliminate Huan failed, making it impossible for him to drive the Chinese from the Tarim altogether, but with his demonstration of greater-than-estimated strength and new bargaining chip he was able to negotiate an end to the war that limited his own losses; Kucha and Arsi would remain under Chinese suzerainty, but Kashgar and Khotan remained under his influence and he would keep Prince Yufan as a ‘guest’ in his court to deter further Chinese aggression for the next eight years.
A noble horseman of Kashgar, the northwestern-most and most heavily Saka-blooded of the Tocharian kingdoms, riding with Lakhana's army
Finally, to the south there was a change of leadership in both Aksum and Himyar. In Aksum old Ousas passed away in his sleep at the age of 81, after which his son and heir Kaleb – already a proven warrior and leader of men – smoothly succeeded him before the first day of summer. In Himyar the transfer of power months later was not so quiet, as Dhu Shanatir proved to be an odious tyrant and was ousted this autumn by one of his own lieutenants, Yusuf ibn Sharhabil, in another bloody palace coup: asserting his distant relation to the old Himyarite royal family (he was a second cousin once removed of King Mas’ud), Yusuf seized the throne for himself with the regnal name ‘Dhu Nuwas’[12], a reference to his thick and long-curled sidelocks. Both Kaleb and Dhu Nuwas were experienced and competent leaders who had proven their worth well before coming to the thrones of their respective kingdoms, and their inevitable clashes were certain to shape the future of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa for generations to come – though their first war as monarchs was not fought between each other, for Kaleb spent most of his first year in power campaigning to place his son Ablak on the throne of Alodia following the death of the latter’s maternal grandfather, King Mouses, against the wishes of Mouses’ nephew and male heir Masannal.
====================================================================================
[1] Historically this dispute was more or less settled, and the Church of the East firmly given over to Nestorianism, by the 484 Synod of Beth Lapat, which couldn’t happen on-schedule ITL due to the upheaval of the Hephthalite conquest of Persia, ensuing fragmentation and the troubled years of Toramana’s regency. The Hebraeus mentioned wasn’t Patriarch of the East from 497 to 503 IOTL either, that role was filled by Babai who was a victor and benefactor of the Synod of Beth Lapat.
[2] Historically Patriarch of the East from 503 to 523, Shila was indeed married and rather nepotistic in life. However, it was his predecessor Babai who shifted the Church of the East to a hard Nestorian stance and abolished clerical celibacy IRL.
[3] Flavian II was historically Patriarch of Antioch from 498 to 512, and Elias (I) was Patriarch of Jerusalem from 494 to 516. Both were staunch Chalcedonians, which brought them into conflict with the Miaphysite-inclined Emperor Anastasius IOTL (to the point where he deposed both of them over their theological disputes) but ensure a good working relationship with the firmly orthodox Sabbatius ITL.
[4] Littleborough.
[5] Karasahr.
[6] The son of the Gepid king Giesmus, historically Mundus served both Theodoric the Great (starting in 488, and despite Theodoric having also killed his father – albeit in completely different circumstances than ITL) and Justinian (from 526 onward, after Theodoric’s death). He helped suppress the Nika riot and conquered Dalmatia from the Ostrogoths at the cost of his own life.
[7] Carlisle.
[8] Sinjar.
[9] Kuqa.
[10] Tumxuk.
[11] Yarkant.
[12] Historically the successor of Dhu Shanatir in uncertain but probably bloody circumstances, Dhu Nuwas was a more able ruler than his predecessor, but also a zealous Jew. His alliance with Sassanid Persia and persecution of Arab Christians eventually brought the wrath of Byzantium and Aksum upon Himyar, resulting in its destruction around 523-525.
However, 502 was a less quiet year east of Rome. In the realm of the Western Hephthalites, Toramana found himself embroiled in the doctrinal disputes between Nestorians, orthodox Christians and Miaphysite refugees from the Eastern Roman Empire even as he was trying to settle in for his own hard-earned period of peaceful rest. Even after asking the elders of each sect to submit written summaries of their beliefs, the Buddhist Mahārājadhirāja was as lost trying to comprehend their arguments about Christ’s nature as Sabbatius or Eucherius II would have been had they been forced to wrangle with Indian monks debating the importance of the Pali language. What Toramana did understand, however, was that some of these Christians were friendlier to Rome than others – and anyone who was a friend to Roman interests could not be a friend of his, not after Sabbatius effectively staked a claim on the Sassanid legacy by marrying Theodora and constantly menacing the frontier between their empires.
When the Patriarch of the East, Hebraeus, died this summer, Toramana took the opportunity to interfere in his succession – and the state of the Church of the East, which remained divided chiefly between Ephesians (of whom Hebraeus had been one) and Nestorians, as well as advocates and opponents of clerical celibacy (respectively aligned with said Ephesians & Nestorians)[1]. He imposed the fervently Nestorian bishop of Karkha, Shila[2], as Hebraeus’ successor. Just as expected, within the year Shila – being not only a Nestorian but a married man with children – convened a synod at Daquqa where a resolution supporting the positions of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius’ mentor, and by extension canonizing Nestorianism as the official theological position of the Church of the East was adopted, as well as one abolishing clerical celibacy even for bishops. The Ephesian representatives were barely allowed to get a word in, and immediately after the synod the harangues of Shila and his allies began to enjoy the backing of White Hun arrows.
Shila not so much debating as he is dictating to the Ephesian Christian leaders of Assyria at Daquqa
Unsurprisingly, the Synod of Daquqa was poorly received in the Roman world, exactly as Shila had warned and as Toramana hoped for. The Eastern Roman Augustus and Patriarch Hypatius of Constantinople furiously denounced the Synod as a ‘robber council’ of no legitimacy, and their declarations were joined by Pope Leo II, Alexander II of Alexandria, Flavian II of Antioch and Elias of Jerusalem[3]. All this the Mahārājadhirāja had anticipated, and the enthusiasm with which Ephesian Christians in his lands received the Pentarchs’ unanimous condemnation of the Synod of Daquqa gave him and his chosen Patriarch an excuse to crack down on them for ‘disloyalty’.
What Toramana did not anticipate was the rabid hostility of the Syrian and Egyptian Miaphysites he had taken in after the downfall of Trocundus, who viewed the Nestorians as even worse theological enemies than the Ephesians and made their displeasure with his moves (which they perceived as him showing favoritism to said hated enemies) known not only with mob action in the cities of Beth Arabaye, but also by assassinating Shila’s eldest son in December. Toramana had no idea what he’d done to provoke them to such violence, but he considered the Miaphysites’ actions to constitute nothing short of ungrateful treachery after he took them in and countered with a series of extremely brutal reprisals culminating with the burning of sixteen Syriac and Coptic elders on December 31, after first ensuring they witnessed the executions of their families down to their young grandchildren. To his further shock this atrocity and others did not break the Miaphysites’ will to resist, but hardened it by giving them martyrs. As the growing Miaphysite insurgency began to destabilize Hephthalite Mesopotamia, it was ultimately Sabbatius who got the last and loudest laugh out of this turn of events – as far as he was concerned, it was about time the Miaphysites started damaging someone else’s empire.
Toramana forces the Miaphysite elders to watch their kindred being executed before they themselves are burnt at the stake, fully expecting this display of brutality to bring their co-religionists to their knees
Far to the north, in July the Saxons of Lindum revolted at their displacement by returning Romano-Britons seeking to claim their families’ old land, which frequently happened to be the best land around the devastated city. The rebels briefly took Queen Gwenhwyfar hostage in an attempt to gain leverage, intercepting her party as she traveled to join her husband and eldest son at Segelocum[4], but while they were negotiating the terms of her release Llenleawc freed her in a daring night raid executed on Artorius’ orders. Artorius attacked and crushed them on the morning after, and offered the survivors a ‘free’ choice: accept baptism into the Pelagian Church and be given plots of land to work as tenant farmers, carefully dispersed across Britannia to ensure they would no longer be concentrated in any single region, or remain pagans and be sentenced to work in the gold and silver mines of Cambria until they died of exhaustion.
Off to the far east, Toramana’s cousins were coming to their first real blows with the Chinese. After King Kaundinye of Arsi[5] refused to pay obeisance to the Dragon Throne, confident in the new alliance with the Eastern Hephthalites, Emperor Gong sent a force of 4,000 men through the Hexi Corridor and into the Tarim Basin to bring him to heel. After arriving in Gaochang in September, the Chinese army went on to besiege Arsi through the first months of autumn. However, in mid-October a force of 5,000 Hephthalite horsemen arrived to attack them from behind and routed them in a fierce night battle with the support of the Arsi garrison. Only a few dozen survivors made it back through the Taklamakan Desert and the Corridor to report of what had happened, after which an angry Gong ended the year by sending three times as many men – led by his third son, Prince Chen Xuezhi – to level Arsi and teach their allies a sharp lesson while they were at it. For convenience’s sake, orders were issued to the governor of Arsi to prepare this army’s siege weapons locally and have them ready for collection as soon as they arrived, which was expected to occur early next year.
In 503, Theodoric Amal observed the pummeling the Gepids had been taking at the hands of the Heruli as well as the movement of Sclaveni raiders into their southeastern frontier, and deemed it necessary to act before they were completely overrun. In the late spring he petitioned Emperor Eucherius for permission to bring them into the imperial fold as a new federate vassal, citing the opportunity to recover the long-lost province of Dacia and its gold at little cost given the Gepids’ weakness, and handily secured it. This hypocritical move predictably outraged Merobaudes, who had just been kept from doing the same thing with the Thuringians and Continental Saxons by Theodoric himself, and it also spooked the younger Stilichians who did not appreciate another surge in Gothic power.
An irate Merobaudes turns his back on Theodoric as the Ostrogoth king rides out to bring the Gepids to heel
As the Ostrogoth king promised, the Western Empire did not have to expend a significant effort against the Gepids to subjugate them. Theodoric invaded Dacia with a dozen legions and another 12,000 Ostrogoths for a total strength of 24,000 men, which was already too much for the Gepid king Mundus[6] to deal with on top of the Heruli, who had been closing in on his royal seat at Sarmizegetusa. As his people’s traditional protector, the Eastern Roman Empire, was both unwilling and unable to aid them due to having been completely cut off from the southern border of the Gepid realm, Mundus offered to surrender to Theodoric and become a foederatus of the Western Empire if the Ostrogoths would save him from the Heruls, an offer which the magister militum accepted. Theodoric went on to rout the Heruli in a great battle before Sarmizegetusa, expelled them from the mountains of Dacia in a series of further battles which raged into winter, and returned to Ravenna at the year’s end with Mundus at his side, proudly announcing to Eucherius II and his court that the old province of Dacia which Aurelian had been forced to abandon had been reclaimed after over 200 years – though it would still be peopled and defended by the Gepids.
In the east, Sabbatius offered refuge to the Ephesian Christians fleeing from Hephthalite and Nestorian persecution in Assyria and Mesopotamia, and together with the Pentarchs and Eucherius II he acknowledged one of their surviving elders as Patriarch Paul of the East – Hebraeus’ lawful successor in the See of Saint Thomas. In his latest show of realpolitik the emperor also offered shelter and assistance for the Miaphysite insurgents who were working to terrorize the roads and riverine travel along the Tigris and Euphrates, allowing them to establish fortified bases on his side of the border from which they could raid the Western Hephthalite realm, while tasking his growing number of limitanei on the Mesopotamian frontier with simultaneously preventing them from slipping further west to spread their heretical beliefs among Roman citizens and deterring Eftal pursuit of the raiders into his lands. As he knew that this state of affairs could only persist for so long before Toramana inevitably attacked him for harboring the latter’s enemies, Sabbatius began to fortify the border towns (or repair damage done to existing fortifications, in Nisibis’ case) and mass ever more of his new legions in Syria & Mesopotamia while ordering his Caucasian vassals to begin planning for renewed hostilities with the new power in Persia.
In the Tarim Basin, Chen Xuezhi’s larger and more formidable second army finally arrived at Gaochang in April and wasted little time there to pick up its siege weapons and local volunteers before marching on Arsi, which they reached in the first days of May. The Chinese overcame Arsi’s defenses over the course of a 12-day siege, then sacked the oasis-city and wiped out its royal family before imposing a local nobleman from Gaochang to rule over what remained as their client. It was this man who Lakhana’s own host of 10,000 found when they arrived from Sogdia, three days too late to prevent their ally’s demise – though not too late to storm the damaged walls themselves, soon after which they killed him and the entirety of the 1,000-strong garrison Xuezhi had left behind.
A Chinese soldier from Gaochang, outfitted in the manner of the Tocharian natives (themselves descended from, and clearly inspired by, the Yuezhi – many of whom went on to become the Kushans of India – and Saka peoples)
Far from being intimidated by the sight of his ally Kaundinye’s head and those of his kin adorning one of the damaged towers of Arsi, the Mahārājadhirāja of the Eastern Hephthalites furiously swore revenge, and just eliminating the interloper the Chinese had left behind would not be enough. Leaving Kaundinye’s nephew Kana in control of Arsi, he pursued the Chen army as it made its way back to Gaochang and attacked them within sight of that other oasis city, getting the drop on them and disrupting Prince Xuezhi’s attempt to organize his ranks with a furious arrow storm and cavalry stampede as his opening move. In the Tarim dust and heat Lakhana faced Chen Xuezhi in single combat, having torn through his surprised army to reach him, and struck his head off after a hard-fought duel.
As the Chinese left their siege weapons behind in the rout which followed, Lakhana seized those weapons and turned them against Gaochang; he was able to breach the walls and sack the city itself, but could not break into the citadel where the governor, his family and highest officials had gathered, so instead he used a captured mangonel to hurl the Chinese prince’s head onto their highest balcony and left with the rest of Gaochang’s people in chains behind him. The governor notified his superiors, who eventually notified Emperor Gong, who in turn was apoplectic at the news of another army’s destruction and the death of his son. A third Chinese army, this one 35,000 strong and led by Crown Prince Huan as well as Gong’s second son Chen Yufan, began to set out through the Hexi Corridor to avenge their younger brother; Lakhana meanwhile was not blind to the high risk of Chinese retaliation for what he just did, so he remained in the Tarim Basin and summoned thousands more men from Bactria, Sogdia and India to join him and also compelled the remaining oasis-states under his protection to contribute to his efforts in their defense, bringing the strength of his own army up to 25,000. He also sent most of the captured Chinese siege weapons back to Balkh for study – and replication, if possible.
Come 504, the old Dacian gold mines were once more being exploited for the benefit of the Roman Empire, or at least its Western half. With this new supply, the Western Empire’s mints were able to produce coins of even higher value, accelerating the replacement of the old horrendously debased coinage initiated by Honorius II. However Theodoric made it absolutely clear that the gold mines of Dacia were effectively under his control and the Gepids a new addition to his power-base more than they (officially) were to the empire at large, tying their royal family to his by arranging a marriage between his daughter Theodegotha to Mundus and garrisoning large numbers of Ostrogoths in the mining camps, towns and forts of the Gepids (supposedly to secure them from the Heruli and Sclaveni while they were still recovering from the beatings inflicted over the previous two decades). By arranging the marriage of his other daughter Ostrogotho to Anicius Faustus, the comes sacrorum largitionum whose troubled appointment process had caused a temporary rift between the Empress Natalia and Pope Leo, he further solidified his control over the imperial treasury as well.
With the restoration of the Dacian gold supply in addition to the Spanish one, the imperial mints of the West were able to banish the last of the debased coins of old, some of which were almost entirely made of lead
Faustus aligning himself with the Green clique and Theodoric’s consolidation of power absolutely alarmed the Frankish faction and the Stilichians, to such an extreme in fact that they were willing to temporarily ally with each other to limit his influence. Theodosius persuaded his father to appoint his brother-in-law Aloysius Dux Moguntiacensis over Theodoric’s candidate for that office, putting him in charge of a comital legion despite his great youth and so disrupting an attempt by the magister militum to undermine Merobaudes’ command, while Constantine agreed to a betrothal between himself and Clovis’ daughter Clotilde to create further connections between the Stilichian dynasty, the Merovingians and the Arbogastings – though because the Frankish princess was still a child and ten years younger than Constantine, the actual wedding was postponed until she had matured. As Theodosius’ own wife Anastasia revealed she was pregnant in October, the Caesar also promised a match between his unborn child to a son or daughter of Augustine of Altava to lock the Africans into this emerging ‘Red-White-Blue’ alliance as well.
In Britannia, the Angles went to war against the Britons of Rheged as soon as spring began and the snows cleared enough for them to march in force. With 11,000 warriors at his back Icel smote the men of Rheged in multiple battles across the summer, and by fall he was besieging their capital at Caer Ligualid[7], which was known to Artorius and the Romano-Britons by its old Latin name Luguvalium. Though the warriors of Alcluyd had come to relieve their ally, they proved to be too few in number to overcome Icel’s much larger host and achieved little besides distracting the Anglo-Saxons long enough for Urien, the prince of Rheged, to break out and reach their camp with his wife, children and 200 handpicked warriors. Urien’s father King Cynfarch remained in Caer Ligualid as the frustrated Icel prepared to storm it, and was put to the sword along with the remainder of his household and army when the town finally fell on September 14. Alcluyd now stood entirely alone as the sole independent outpost of the old Brittonic people still remaining, strengthened though it may be by streams of refugees from Gododdin and now Rheged as they fled the Anglo-Saxon conquest, and its own king Dyfnwal ap Cinuit began looking to alliances with the Gaels to save itself from Icel’s inevitable offensive.
The Angles triumphantly marching across Rheged
East of Rome, while Sabbatius welcomed his daughter Lucina into the world, violence continued to swell between Nestorians and Miaphysites in Assyria. The latter had transformed the long-abandoned and ruined fortresses of Singara[8] and Hatra into their bases, and from these sites they raided Nestorian Syriac settlements along the Upper Tigris. After one such raid targeted the villages around Nineveh in June, Toramana personally led an army of 20,000 to besiege Hatra and drive the Miaphysites out of there, which he accomplished by mid-autumn; but the Miaphysite defenders had fought so fiercely despite not even numbering a thousand strong that he came to believe it would be easier, and far cheaper, to simply contain the remaining insurgents at Singara. The defense of the Upper Tigris was left in the hands of the reinforced garrisons of existing cities and a detachment of 5,000 warriors whom he’d left at Hatra, further backed by local Nestorian militias, all of whom were placed under the overall command of Takhsich – a younger son of Sagharak and one of his brothers-in-law.
While the Western Hephthalites continued to combat the Miaphysite rebellion, their Eastern brethren were busy fighting a much bigger and more overtly threatening opponent in China, with mastery over the Tarim Basin and its trade routes being the prize. Princes Chen Huan and Yufan reached the devastated but still Chinese-controlled Gaochang in May, then moved on to engage Lakhana’s army near Arsi a month later. In the Battle of Lake Bosten which followed, the White Huns initially succeeded at scattering the Chinese cavalry, but their charges were disrupted & mauled by Chinese crossbowmen at range and subsequently floundered against the disciplined infantry lines led by Crown Prince Huan. Eventually Prince Yufan rallied the initially defeated cavalry and brought them back to the field, forcing Lakhana to disengage and fall back in defeat: the final toll stood at 3,000 Hephthalites to the Chen’s 800.
Having prevailed over the Eftals at Lake Bosten, the Chinese advanced on Arsi again, where the defenders submitted in the knowledge that they had no hope against the massive Chen army without Lakhana’s help. At the advice of his friend and spiritual mentor Kavadh Huan took a different tack than his fallen younger brother and treated the Tocharians here more mercifully, collecting tribute and hostages but forbidding his men from sacking Arsi a second time and even leaving the Hephthalite-installed king Kana in place on the condition that he switch his allegiance to China. Still, before leaving he and Yufan did not forget to instill in Kana and his court an understanding that this relatively light hand-up was a one-time offer, and that they would not be nearly as forgiving if the people of Arsi betrayed their trust.
Kana of Arsi and his wife bending the knee before Crown Prince Huan of Chen
After securing Arsi and leaving 2,000 men to hold the city, the brothers marched on to the next Tocharian city on their road west: Kucha[9], by far the largest and wealthiest of all the Tarim oasis-states. At first the Chinese seemed to have the upper hand, driving the Hephthalites into retreat once more in a battle east of the great trading city and then proceeding to surround and besiege Kucha itself starting on July 31. But the walls of Kucha were taller and stronger than those of Arsi, and in any case Lakhana was not far away; he was, in fact, implementing his own strategy to lure the Chinese into a trap and a sense of complacency, then close his jaws around them and dash them to pieces against Kucha’s stout defenses. Fifteen days later he struck, having worn the Chinese army down with an increasing number of swift and vicious raids out of his desert camp over the previous two weeks, and inflicted a severe defeat upon them while they were just beginning an attack on Kucha itself. Huan and Yufan retreated to Arsi, having sustained 8,000 losses between the Battle of Kucha and Lakhana’s harassment of them along the road back, although they still had sufficient numbers and their garrison at Arsi was stout enough to deter Kana from even thinking of double-crossing them at this moment of weakness.
Lakhana had harried the Chinese as they retreated from Kucha, but Huan and Yufan were able to rally at Arsi and defeat him once more in another battle before that city’s western gates. Though he cursed Kana for not coming to his aid, the Eastern Mahārājadhirāja was in no shape to carry out his threats toward his former client and fell back toward Kucha around the start of October. By now news of the back-and-forth clashes in the Tarim & ensuing stalemate had been borne by traders as far as Pataliputra, and the Gupta court saw these Sino-Hephthalite clashes as an opportunity. Parties of Gupta warriors began to test the defenses of their Huna enemies once more, sacking several villages along the middle Ganges toward the end of the year and compelling Lakhana to seek peace with the Chinese so he could shore up his southern garrisons before the Guptas invaded in force. Huan agreed to a truce and to negotiate a possible peace settlement – he did not expect a productive outcome, as any agreement he made would have to be run past his vengeful father anyway, but figured it was a good way to stall until the reinforcements he knew were on their way through the Hexi Corridor arrived.
In mid-505, princess Anastasia gave birth to the Western Caesar’s first child, a daughter named Eucheria. As previously promised, within six months of her birth Theodosius arranged her betrothal to Felix, the eldest son and heir of King Augustine of Altava who was eleven years her senior, and in so doing firmed up ties between the Stilichians and their African vassals. These maneuvers did not escape the notice of Theodoric, who responded by shoring up ties between his house and the royal Balthings of the Visigoths by arranging the betrothal of his third daughter Amalasuintha to Alaric II’s own heir Fafila: a pair who were much closer in age than Felix and Eucheria or Constantine and Clotilde, and thus could marry within another year or two rather than a decade or more.
At this point even Eucherius II must have noticed the tension building beneath his throne, because he invited all these notables and more from the other provinces to a grand Christmas feast in Rome. There, in the last days of the year he urged the known rivals Merobaudes and Theodoric to reconcile and forgive each other’s past trespasses in public. That done, they swore friendship with one another and the emperor’s sons, and the four as well as their lieutenants spent the rest of the year feasting and gallivanting about the Palace of Domitian. While the sincerity of their sudden reconciliation and fraternity was doubted by just about everyone but the Augustus himself, who found it to be a satisfactory conclusion to the factionalism brewing within his court, the end-of-year merriment did seem to successfully lower the political temperature in the Western court some.
Eucherius II intended the Christmas of 505 to not just be an occasion for merriment, but for political reconciliation – or at least a temporary cooling of tensions – in Rome itself
Far to the east, past the steadily healing Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Hephthalites’ internal struggles in Assyria, the Chinese Dragon and the Bactrian Roc remained at odds over the Tarim Basin. Negotiations between Lakhana and Chen Huan, conducted with Kavadh as an intermediary and interpreter, broke down after Emperor Gong dictated that no peace was to be made unless Lakhana was prepared to acknowledge the entire Tarim Basin as a large Chinese tributary and the Chinese reinforcements arrived. Their numbers bolstered back to some 36,000, Princes Huan and Yufan kicked the White Huns back from near Arsi to Kucha and then some, methodically driving Lakhana from the battlefield and compelling Kucha’s surrender with the sight of 6,000 Eftal heads on spears.
Lakhana retreated to Kashgar and summoned his own reinforcements, but between India and other garrison commitments he was never going to be able to bring as many warriors into the Tarim Basin as the Chinese could spare, even discounting how much more populous China was than his own (much more recently war-torn) realm. Once more, he turned to the Hephthal dynasty’s traditional strategy for dealing with overwhelming odds: making risky, aggressive gambles in the hope that eventually one of them would pay off. An initial attempt at counterattacking ended poorly at Tumshuq[10], so instead Lakhana retreated to Yarkand[11] (taking the warriors of Kashgar and Khotan with him) and relied solely on his light cavalry to harass the Chinese host as it advanced on Kashgar with an eye on luring them into battle on more favorable ground.
Eventually this strategy bore fruit, as Huan and Yufan were misled by a captured captain of Lakhana’s into believing the Hephthalite army had not acquired sufficient reinforcements to stop them and decided to take a detour to finish him off before capturing Kashgar. In the ensuing Battle of the Yarkand River, Lakhana threw everything he had left at the Chinese vanguard after it forded the eponymous river on the way to Yarkand and successfully cut it off from the rest of the Chinese army, resulting in the slaughter of over 10,000 Chinese soldiers in a span of four hours and the capture of Prince Yufan. His effort to carry on the attack into the main Chinese camp and eliminate Huan failed, making it impossible for him to drive the Chinese from the Tarim altogether, but with his demonstration of greater-than-estimated strength and new bargaining chip he was able to negotiate an end to the war that limited his own losses; Kucha and Arsi would remain under Chinese suzerainty, but Kashgar and Khotan remained under his influence and he would keep Prince Yufan as a ‘guest’ in his court to deter further Chinese aggression for the next eight years.
A noble horseman of Kashgar, the northwestern-most and most heavily Saka-blooded of the Tocharian kingdoms, riding with Lakhana's army
Finally, to the south there was a change of leadership in both Aksum and Himyar. In Aksum old Ousas passed away in his sleep at the age of 81, after which his son and heir Kaleb – already a proven warrior and leader of men – smoothly succeeded him before the first day of summer. In Himyar the transfer of power months later was not so quiet, as Dhu Shanatir proved to be an odious tyrant and was ousted this autumn by one of his own lieutenants, Yusuf ibn Sharhabil, in another bloody palace coup: asserting his distant relation to the old Himyarite royal family (he was a second cousin once removed of King Mas’ud), Yusuf seized the throne for himself with the regnal name ‘Dhu Nuwas’[12], a reference to his thick and long-curled sidelocks. Both Kaleb and Dhu Nuwas were experienced and competent leaders who had proven their worth well before coming to the thrones of their respective kingdoms, and their inevitable clashes were certain to shape the future of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa for generations to come – though their first war as monarchs was not fought between each other, for Kaleb spent most of his first year in power campaigning to place his son Ablak on the throne of Alodia following the death of the latter’s maternal grandfather, King Mouses, against the wishes of Mouses’ nephew and male heir Masannal.
====================================================================================
[1] Historically this dispute was more or less settled, and the Church of the East firmly given over to Nestorianism, by the 484 Synod of Beth Lapat, which couldn’t happen on-schedule ITL due to the upheaval of the Hephthalite conquest of Persia, ensuing fragmentation and the troubled years of Toramana’s regency. The Hebraeus mentioned wasn’t Patriarch of the East from 497 to 503 IOTL either, that role was filled by Babai who was a victor and benefactor of the Synod of Beth Lapat.
[2] Historically Patriarch of the East from 503 to 523, Shila was indeed married and rather nepotistic in life. However, it was his predecessor Babai who shifted the Church of the East to a hard Nestorian stance and abolished clerical celibacy IRL.
[3] Flavian II was historically Patriarch of Antioch from 498 to 512, and Elias (I) was Patriarch of Jerusalem from 494 to 516. Both were staunch Chalcedonians, which brought them into conflict with the Miaphysite-inclined Emperor Anastasius IOTL (to the point where he deposed both of them over their theological disputes) but ensure a good working relationship with the firmly orthodox Sabbatius ITL.
[4] Littleborough.
[5] Karasahr.
[6] The son of the Gepid king Giesmus, historically Mundus served both Theodoric the Great (starting in 488, and despite Theodoric having also killed his father – albeit in completely different circumstances than ITL) and Justinian (from 526 onward, after Theodoric’s death). He helped suppress the Nika riot and conquered Dalmatia from the Ostrogoths at the cost of his own life.
[7] Carlisle.
[8] Sinjar.
[9] Kuqa.
[10] Tumxuk.
[11] Yarkant.
[12] Historically the successor of Dhu Shanatir in uncertain but probably bloody circumstances, Dhu Nuwas was a more able ruler than his predecessor, but also a zealous Jew. His alliance with Sassanid Persia and persecution of Arab Christians eventually brought the wrath of Byzantium and Aksum upon Himyar, resulting in its destruction around 523-525.
