ERE could help WRE cousins...for a price,of course.And only if Hephtalities do not attack them with full force.
I read about arab sailors from 14th century - apparently,they could go to China in 5 months,when land road take 10 months.
And one ship take thea same cargo as 1000 camels.
If ships in 533 are as good,sea route to China should be more profitable then silk road.
Saxons were supposed to have giant sacred trees,probably kind of seqoia.
P.S i found diagram of fighting made by Archer Jones/The art of war in western world.
Basically,in ancient times heavy infrantry defeat heavy calvary,heavy calvary defeat light calvary and infrantry,light infrantry defeat light calvary,and light calvary defeat heavy infrantry.
In mediewal times it partially changed:
heavy infrantry still defeat heavy calvary,heavy calvary defeat light infrantry,light infrantry defeat light calvary and heavy infrantry,light calvary defeat heavy calvary and infrantry.
It's been a long time since Rome had a proper civil war. It is good to see the ancient tradition is still alive.
This will not end well, the rational course of action would be to bring the war to some kind of end and keep the Rourans as the buffer zone between him and Hephthalites, while he consolidates his hold over Persia. But then humans are not particulary rational creatures.
Would agree on the 2nd point. Plus given the status of the Stilichian dynasty in the west under peril it might be better if Sabbatius looked west, either to bolster them or possibly even re-unite the empire under a single ruler. If he's really going to support the old Roman traditions.
I think Sabbatius will face serious overstretch, especially if Mihirakula manages to commit powerful forces against the overstretched Roman forces. Provided he doesn't face problems on other fronts. Plus I would expect the Nestorian Christians to be aware he's only promised tolerance until the current conflict is over so like the other non-Ephesian in the region so their only likely to be 'loyal' while they see no hope of an alternative.
Both the eastern Roman and eastern Hephthalites are seriously streteching their logistics and it isn't helping that much of the land is being badly knocked about. I would expect there will ultimately be a peace of mutual exhaustion although where the final boundaries will be will probably depend on events and 3rd parties.
It looks like the end is coming for Dhu Nuwas but unless he alienates too many of his surviving supporters it could still be pretty bloody. Mind you and Axum that holds or at least dominates much of southern and western Arabia is going to have a lot of potential. Just wonder what will happen with them next.
Oh yes - Sabbatius is currently riding high and reaching for the stars, but that also means he's got a long way to fall if anyone manages to slap him back down. If he weren't blinded by those same stars right now, the emperor would be wise to focus on consolidating and trying to digest what he already has rather than trying to bite off even more territories, but as @Butch R. Mann says people aren't always rational. Certainly Mihirakula is in a much better position to resist his advance than Narayana & Toramana ever were. That said, consolidating such massive gains in a short time will be no easy feat either, and will likely prove just as or even more challenging than trying to carry his Alexander LARP all the way to the site of the original's twelve pillars by the Beas River.
I've also noticed that it's been an extremely long while since our last narrative chapter (that was 11 chapters ago!) and almost as long since the WRE factional breakdown (8 chapters). Accordingly I've decided that the next entry will be a narrative one (for which I have a -hopefully- unexpected direction in mind already), followed by an ordinary timeline progression chapter, and then the second factional chapter. It's only fair for that one to cover the ERE, and there's going to be a lot to cover after these past few chapters + the next one.
Have you seen this video from Kings and Generals about the replacement of slavery by serfdom over much of western and central Europe? What impact would it have on the TL as a surviving western empire is likely to delay this move, especially since its also expanding eastwards in northern Europe as well as crushing internal enemies from time to time, which gives access to potential new slaves. True part of the process had already started with Diocletian's and Constantine's restrictions on peasants movements and liberties but how would things be in both Romes here? Suspect slavery might still face increasing competition from serfdom but its likely to stay prominent a good bit longer. Anyway hopefully its of interest.
“There is assuredly no sign of life around us, Brother Bréanainn.” Brother Senán reported wearily, shaking his head. “No human life, that is. We have searched the forest above us twice and Brother Énna has taken his currach[2] to another cove south of here and back, but we all have the same answer to tell you. Game is aplenty, we’ve seen no small number of fruits and wild herbs that at least seem edible, and the sea is teeming with fish, but there is still not a soul in sight now just as there were none this morning.”
“Well, that does not make sense in the least.” Bréanainn frowned. When their boats had come to a stop in this cove, they found the obvious remnants of a campsite – including a tattered tent, evidently judged too damaged by its former owners to take with them, and a firepit full of ashes – on the very beach beneath them. “Then who could have built the camp we found when we first set foot on this land?”
At that, Senán shrugged. “Assuming we have not sailed into some strange land inhabited by fey spirits or worse, I would guess that whoever set up that camp simply wandered further inland, likely a good while before we reached the shore. Shall we try to find and follow their tracks?”
Bréanainn shook his head. They didn’t even know where they were, only that they had had the good fortune to find this island after being blown off-course away from Paparia, much less how to proceed through the rocky, wholly unfamiliar meadow and woods surrounding them. God had been kind enough to send them to this apparently bountiful land, preserving all fifteen of them through fog and rain and chilly winds for weeks on end, instead of leaving them stranded at sea to starve or freeze to death; they should not test Him now. “Nay, Brother. At least not yet. You and the others deserve to rest. When you are done, I will need you to assist me in setting up our own encampment here, and in gathering food as well – between the storm and the journey here, we have greatly depleted our provisions, so we will need to stock up not only to survive the next few days, but for the return journey as well. We do not have the time to waste on chasing ghosts.”
While Senán nodded and left, clearly happy to have a chance to sit down on the beach, Bréanainn let out a breath and relaxed against one of the larger rocks studding this meadow by the sea. His ever-diligent assistant, the young novice Fáelbe, was transcribing the contents of their conversation onto a piece of parchment. “Your hard work does not go unnoticed by the Lord or myself, boy,” Bréanainn said cheerfully, which put a smile on the acolyte’s face. “But you do not have to take note of every conversation I have. Why, you should have gone with Senán or Énna – we have just found an uncharted territory, unknown even to mapmaking greats like Claudius Ptolemaeus! I would have thought a young lad full of energy like yourself would be eager to explore, and to find whatever secrets this land might hold, than to keep me company here by the boats.”
“Alas Brother Bréanainn, I worry that I would only get in their way.” The novice responded humbly, and Bréanainn could not disagree. Fáelbe may have been a bright young man, meticulously attentive to detail and possessing penmanship which was doubtless without peer at the monastery, but he struggled to tend to their monastery’s onions on a good day and had at one point been frightened away by what turned out to be a mere rabbit. “In any case, someone must take notes of all the wonders we have found – and which I am sure we will continue to find – here. Do you not think the Abbot will be pleased by what we have found?”
“Oh, I’m sure he will.” Abbot Lóeguire was always curious about God’s creation, perhaps more-so than Bréanainn himself. If not for the lingering injuries he received while evacuating villagers in the path of a fian[3] on a cattle raid, he suspected the older man would rather be here in his place right now. “I daresay news of this momentous discovery must reach not only his ears, but those of the Holy Father in Rome as well.” Let all Christendom know of their momentous discovery! He only hoped the Holy Father was not overly distracted by that civil war which he'd heard overtook the western half of the Roman world, shortly before he himself left Irish shores; these Romans were said to be a contentious people, but Bréanainn had not heard of them descending to such violence among themselves until recently, and in any case he supposed the Irish were in no position to talk about that on account of their own endemic skirmishing and cattle-raiding.
With a grunt, Bréanainn pushed himself into a straight-backed posture and satisfyingly cracked his neck and knuckles. He was getting on in years himself – this would soon be his fiftieth – and he was not certain he had it in him to make many more seaborne voyages like this one, either to Paparia or to this blessed isle they had just discovered. “Since Senán found no other men in the woods, I expect none are there to interrupt us as we gather food for this night. Come, Fáelbe. As you say, someone must record all the wonders we find out there.”
Bréanainn, Fáelbe and the other three monks he selected to come with them returned several hours later, having seen for themselves the truth of Senán’s words: if there were other people on this island with them, they had long since moved away from this cove. They were unmolested as they gathered provisions, and remained so as they returned to their camp on the beach – now fully set up – close to sunset, laden with berries, herbs, rabbits and birds which would have normally made them targets for any hungry and well-armed human. Of that last category, he and his fellow monks had managed to bring down three black-headed and white-chinned geese, each of whom had put up a far fiercer fight than any goose they’d found back in Éire to such an extreme that they nearly gave up on the last of the trio. But they’d persisted, and now as the Sun hid its face from them and Énna returned from the sea with nets full of cod, haddock and other fish, once they’d gotten a fire going they would eat better than they had the past four or five weeks.
The next six days passed by much more quickly than Bréanainn perceived, in no small part because they were so uneventful. Most of the Irishmen’s efforts went into acquiring and carefully rationing more food, which they expended all of their remaining salt supply to preserve for the trip back home. By the fourth day expeditions into the forest (which proved far larger than Bréanainn and Senán initially thought) had brought them to yet more open, rock-marked grassland beyond the trees, but even well past the treeline they could not find any trace of human life, not so much as another campsite and firepit.
On the morning of the sixth day Novice Fáelbe fled in terror from a ‘painted ghost’ who Bréanainn suspected was another man, perhaps one of the indigenes of this otherwise wholly tranquil and paradisaical land, but again they could find no trace of any other human. Outwardly, the other monks dismissed the incident as a figment of Fáelbe’s overactive imagination; however they could not shake off a growing feeling that they were under surveillance. Although Bréanainn was not opposed to exploring the woods once more to make contact with whoever might be watching them, virtually all of his fellow monks were, fearing that the people (or worse!) out there were not friendly on account of having avoided them up to this point and refusing to come out themselves.
So it was that the day after that, satisfied that they had seen enough of this new world for the time being and adequately resupplied themselves for the voyage to their original destination in Paparia & from there back to Hibernia, Bréanainn and the other fourteen Gaelic monks with him raised up a wooden cross to mark their campsite and give glory to God. In their last religious service on this newly-discovered soil, they gave thanks to Him for having allowed all fifteen of them to survive up to this point. That done, they boarded their currachs and bade goodbye to the Insula Benedicta – or the ‘Blessed Isle’, as he had named this island.
[2] An Irish boat, comprised of a wooden frame covered with oak-cured animal hides which were sealed together with tar. The addition of a mast and sail would have set the sea-faring currachs used by the monks in this chapter apart from the more common river-going ones back in Ireland.
[3] An independent Gaelic warband comprised of landless youths. They would often sustain themselves by finding work as mercenaries in the various feuds and wars between Ireland’s petty kings.
And that's our first narrative update in many chapters. Not a very long one (hence why I'm able to post it now rather than on the weekend as usual), but as you might guess, it is one whose impact on the timeline will grow to massive size within a few centuries. Also thanks for the link @stevep , fascinating stuff. I'm of the opinion that slavery will coexist at an equal (possibly greater from time to time) size with coloni-based serfdom for many centuries yet, but the continued survival of the Roman Empire in the west might also make it possible for a reform-minded emperor to more effectively impose changes on the institution across Europe down the road. At present, anti-slavery sentiment in Western Christendom remains at its strongest in the Irish Church, in Africa (on account of Augustinian influence being at its most powerful there) and among the Romano-British Pelagians, as I've said before. (Speaking of the RBs, we'll get back to Britain soon; probably not in the next chapter, but I haven't forgotten that we've got another round of Anglo-British hostilities to get to sooner rather than later)
Total abolition is probably off the table for a very long time, certainly as long as the big landlords around the Mediterranean still rely on slaves to work their farms, but edicts mandating more humane treatment of slaves (and punishing cruelty toward them) from Paris to Syracuse for example could be within the power of a more enlightened ruler to enact, if of course imperial power hasn't atrophied by the time of their reign. The notion of taking Christian slaves being unacceptable (which would go a long way to crippling the Roman slave trade if more regions around the empire undergo baptism, as the K&G video you linked suggested) remains the most likely way to get de facto mostly-complete abolition and to shrink slavery in the Roman world down to its minimum extent, IMO.
Currah was used to sail to America in 1976 if i remember correctly - and proven better then normal ship,becouse once it was hit by something and damaged,crew could just stitch together it.Something not possible with wood.
And yourney of St Brandan is proof,that irish made that in OTL.Some viking sagas told even about irish state there. @stevep is right about slavery.
When slavs start making their states,it would be bigger problem - maiin source of income for first Russia,Greatmoravia,Czech and Poland rulers was slavery.
In case of Poland,prince Mieszko could have 3.900 standing army only thanks to slave trading.
But church gradually eradicated that practice.This time,it would be quicker.
Another useful piece ofinfo - oldest polish gentry existed in clans before our state was made,and their signs,which later becomed coat-of-arms,looked like that made by steppe people.If we add,that in oldest polish city,Kraków,Avars artifacts were found,you could use it as begginning of semistates there.
Here,legend of Jastrzębiec/goshawk/ coat of arm,which clan existed at beginning of our state and probably earlier
534 was another year which went poorly for the Western Romans, as if the universe was now collecting the debt in instability and violence which it had accumulated over the past decades of peace. Carthage remained under siege by the Altavans, and although Thevestian hit-and-run attacks on their supply lines took a growing toll on Felix’s ranks, the rebel fleet under his brother Cyprian dealt a stinging defeat to the Western Romans’ Italian squadron off Agrigentum[1] in July, allowing them to begin blockading the city. Sisinnius continued to fight to sustain the defenders’ morale and limit popular unrest to the best of his ability, but obviously the bishop could not simply summon manna from Heaven to replenish Carthage’s provisions: without a relief force or at least the lifting of the Altavan blockade, the city would fall no matter his efforts.
Matters in Hispania did not develop favorably for Theodosius III and the Stilichian loyalists this year, either. Felix’s other brother Capussa and the Baeticans took advantage of the confusion that followed Aloysius’ departure to redouble their advances in this theater, once more putting Toletum under siege and surging along the eastern coast of the peninsula. They captured Valentia in the spring and had made it as far as the banks of the Hiberus[2] by mid-summer, where they were finally halted by the combined strength of Theodemir’s legions and the loyal Visigoths in a series of battles spanning July and August, culminating in the Battle of Caesaraugusta on August 28. Theodemir returned the favor by swinging through Visigoth territory with the Roman and Ostrogoth cavalry to once again relieve Toletum in September, surprising and scattering the besieging force which Capussa and Sisenand had left behind.
Perhaps worst of all for the Western Roman Augustus however, his uncle made devastating advances across the north of the empire. Aloysius’ main army fell upon the loyal Franks of Durocortorum and Tornacum in conjunction with Ingomer’s own host from Lutetia, crushing the loyalists flat between them. Childebert and Chlothar, the faithful Frankish kings, made their last stand alongside Eucharius Syagrius at the Battle of Catalaunorum[3] on April 22. Eucharius sought to defeat Aloysius’ larger army before Ingomer arrived but miscalculated the speed at which the rebel Franks were approaching him, and none of the three loyalist commanders survived the ensuing slaughter.
The golden-headed Aloysius leading his legionaries against the trapped Stilichian loyalists at Catalaunorum
After acknowledging Ingomer as sole King of the Franks and transferring his brothers’ families to his custody (fortunately for them, Ingomer was not as eager as Sisenand of Baetica to engage in further kinslaying, instead sequestering them in various monasteries and convents across northern Gaul) Aloysius continued his advance, coordinating with Burgundofaro of Burgundy in sweeping the region. By the year’s end they had secured the submission of northern and western Gaul as far as the sea, having convinced the garrison and officials of Aurelianum to surrender soon after the Battle of Catalaunorum and vanquishing an attempt by local Gallo-Roman aristocrats to stop them at the Battle of Pictavium[4] at the end of June.
Only a heroic effort by Arcadius Apollinaris, who marshaled the power of southern Gaul and negotiated an alliance with the Aquitani and Vascon tribes to further supplement his army, managed to thwart Aloysius’ attempt to march onto the Mediterranean coast. The count was able to defeat the rebel host in the hard-fought Battle of Gergovia that fall, prevailing against Aloysius on the same plateau where Vercingetorix once put Julius Caesar to flight much in the same way – leading a massed charge of the Romano-Gallic cavalry which cracked the rebel infantry’s lines, although Ingomer’s Franks put up a valiant rearguard action which prevented them from pursuing the rebels far. Nevertheless, the year ended with Aloysius in control of not only the entirety of Germania, but also all of Gaul north of the Carantonus[5] and the mountains of old Arvernia[6].
As if to cap off a year that was proving to be increasingly disastrous for the Occident, Pope Caelius died of illness in the first week of November. Faced with defeat on nearly all fronts, the exasperated Theodosius had little choice but to give in to the additional demands of the Greens for a friendly successor to the See of Saint Peter, especially as Theudis won another one of his loyalists’ rare victories this year over the Bavarians and Lombards at Scarbantia in October. So it was that the Roman people elected a priest named Agapetus, a known ally of the now-elderly treasurer Faustus and by extension King Theudis, to the Papacy with the emperor’s approval in time to celebrate Christmas.
Amid all these calamities, a startling new discovery across the Oceanus Atlanticus nearly went overlooked by Christendom. The Irish monk Brendan of Ciarraighe Luachra[7] (already an experienced sailor and the founder of several monastic cells, hence how he survived the experience to come) was blown off-course while undertaking a routine supply shipment to the monasteries of Paparia far to the north, and wound up on the shores of an entirely unfamiliar island further west than any European had ever gone before. Astonished by the dense woods, strange and beautiful flora, plentiful fish and fruit, and apparent lack of other people around, he named this island the ‘Insula Benedicta’ – the Blessed Isle.
The future Saint Brendan and his crew arriving on the shores of the Insula Benedicta
After sheltering and collecting resources on the ‘Insula Benedicta’ over a seven-day period, Brendan and his fellow monks proceeded to sail on to Paparia (as originally planned) and then back to his monastery in Munster, where he wasted no time in sharing news – and proof, in the form of what remained of the supplies he’d gathered there – of what he’d discovered with the abbot. In turn this abbot sent a missive to Rome, which arrived amid the transition of power from the recently deceased Caelius to the new Pope Agapetus and would have been lost in the chaos if not for an especially careful and detail-minded papal clerk. Eventually the Irish missive would make it to Agapetus himself, setting in motion a chain of events that would echo through this century and well into future ones…
The Eastern Empire was having a less crushing time, though they were also not quite as triumphant as they had been the past few years either. Sabbatius resumed his eastward advance as soon as the weather permitted it, only to almost immediately run into stiff Hephthalite resistance in Gedrosia and Drangiana. His remaining army was too small to overcome such resistance, having had to detach considerable numbers of troops to garrison his conquests to the west, and not even having Belisarius as his trusty lieutenant could save the Eastern Romans from defeat at the Battle of Lake Hāmūn on May 17.
Mihirakula was eager to follow up his advantage, pursuing the further-diminished Roman army back into Persis. But by this time Narses had managed to negotiate a federate treaty with the Fufuluo, allowing them to keep much of their lands in exchange for military service to Constantinople, and proved it by sending a combined force of Caucasian soldiers, Amardians and loyal Daylamites from Padishkhwargar, and Fufuluo cavalry to aid his emperor. With these reinforcements, Sabbatius was able to turn the tables and defeat Mihirakula in the Battle of Darábgerd on July 1, putting the Fufuluo to work in effectively countering their former allies’ cavalry. The Rouran also continued to pressure the Hephthalite realm from the north, and began to seriously menace northern and western Bactria in doing so.
Belisarius with his bucellarii at the Battle of Darábgerd
It was under those tough circumstances that the Mahārājadhirāja sought terms. However, Sabbatius was unwilling to negotiate so long as he still thought he had a chance at driving into India as Alexander the Great had once done, and coordinated with his Avar allies to push past the dust storms of Drangiana. The Eastern Romans fought their way past the site of their previous defeat at Lake Hāmūn this time and managed to capture Zaranj, before Mihirakula and Narayana rallied to defeat the Augustus on the middle banks of the Helmand River in September. Following this loss, Sabbatius was finally sufficiently dissuaded from trying to campaign further into Arachosia by Belisarius, and at the latter’s advice and that of every single one of his other advisers – from Narses to Basil to his own wife, all of whom were urging him to stop and consolidate what he had already conquered – he agreed to talk with Mihirakula.
The negotiations were short, in large part because they did not actually establish a lasting peace. All the combatants agreed to was an indefinite truce along the borders which Sabbatius and Mioukesheju had stopped at, with the unspoken understanding that any of them could and almost certainly would resume hostilities the instant they felt they’d sufficiently rested and consolidated themselves. Narayana continued to govern Gedrosia and parts of southeastern Drangiana from Pura[8], and certainly had an interest in restarting the war as soon as he was able; Mioukesheju was unsatisfied with his own considerable gains and similarly even more eager to start fighting again than Sabbatius, who in turn had only put his ambitions on hold rather than giving up on them entirely. Regardless, for the time being all sides had bought themselves some time to recover, plan out their next moves and (in the case of the Romans and Rouran) see to their new lands. Sabbatius ended the year by riding back toward Mesopotamia to begin properly organizing his conquests, leaving Belisarius and his bucellarii on the empire’s new eastern frontier to watch for any signs of renewed Eftal aggression.
Far off to the east, the delegation which Sabbatius had sent to China finally reached their destination late this year, being received with all the pomp due to emissaries of great ‘Daqin’[9]. Their bid to revive trade along the Silk Road, long hampered by constant instability and warfare in the Tarim Basin and Persia, was considered favorably by Emperor Huan; their secondary proposal to partition the Rouran, even more-so. Kavadh was ambivalent to that prospect, having no love for either the Romans or Rouran but also well aware that (being an old Buddhist monk who had spent most of his life outside Persia) there was no chance of him recovering the throne of his ancestors at this point. Huan referred these Eastern Roman party to Yami Qaghan, who was greatly interested in finishing off his people’s ancient enemies and extending Tegreg power to the Caspian Sea. As 534 drew to a close, the Roman envoys would prepare to bring back not only a Turkic alliance and renewed trade with Serica[10], but also a surprise in the form of tea leaves: among the gifts which Huan handed to them for delivery to Sabbatius were bricks of dried tea leaves, but in addition they managed to get a hold of tea seeds with which to start growing the plants on Roman soil (specifically in the rainy mountain valleys of eastern Pontus, which proved to be the most fertile ground for the first tea plantations).
Eastern Roman envoys presenting Emperor Huan of Chen with gifts
Lastly, the war in Arabia continued to slowly grind on toward its bloody conclusion. Aksumite forces captured Zafar this year after a lengthy siege, and Kaleb was not in a merciful mood with regard to the survivors: a sack and massacre immediately followed, both to avenge Dhu Nuwas’ past atrocities against Arab Christians and to relieve the frustration of the Aksumite warriors after having kept the city under siege for over a year. From the north, the Baccibaxaba’s heir captured Yathil[11] with an army of Quraish and especially vengeful Najranites, and turned the latter loose on the town with predictable consequences. Slowly but surely, the Ethiopians and their Arab & Nubian allies closed in on Dhu Nuwas’ final stronghold at Ma’rib – though sometimes they could move a little more quickly than anticipated, as not all of Dhu Nuwas’ vassals were as determined to fight to the death as their overlord and would readily submit in exchange for guaranteed survival as an Aksumite subject – while the stubborn Arab king prepared for the inevitable siege by stockpiling ever more provisions and working his slaves to death fortifying the city.
535 was the year in which the Western Romans began to reverse their dismal fortunes, at least outside of Hispania where Theodemir and Fritigern were unsuccessful in their attempts to budge the front line against Capussa and Sisenand. Although Cyprian managed to land in Sicily and capture Lilybaeum[12] early in the spring, then moving on along the northern shoreline to take Panormus[13] by May 1, the repaired and rebuilt Western Roman fleet proceeded through the Strait of Messina and decisively defeated their Altavan counterpart in the Battle off Malta on May 25. This victory not only broke the blockade of Carthage, but it also left Cyprian stranded in Sicily and utterly unable to aid his brother in Africa. After celebrating the birth of his firstborn son Constantine and designating him Caesar of the Occident four days later, Theodosius elected to personally command a 17,000-strong army being ferried from Rhegium[14] to bypass Cyprian & relieve the besieged African capital: upon his arrival and a resurgent Thevestian advance from the Aurès Mountains, Felix withdrew to the west, finally breaking the siege of Carthage altogether.
On June 14 Felix rallied to do battle with the legitimate emperor on the lower banks of the Bagradas River[15] west of Carthage, hoping that engaging the imperial host on a river crossing would mitigate his numerical disadvantage. Indeed, by the time they fought he was fielding only 14,000 men against 25,000 loyalists: a combination of the Italian legions brought over from Rhegium, the remnants of the Western Roman army in Africa coupled with recruits from Carthage, and the Thevestian Moors. At Vandalarius’ advice, Theodosius took advantage of his greatly superior numbers to detach a corps of 7,000 men (almost entirely made up of lightly-equipped and mounted Moors) under the former’s command with orders to cross the Bagradas at an unguarded ford far to the north, then swing back south to attack the Altavans’ flank.
The Thevestian king’s strategy worked fantastically, and the Altavan army crumbled between the frontal assault of Theodosius’ heavy infantry (organized into wedges to try to pierce the Altavan defensive lines on the crossings) and the sudden onslaught of Vandalarius’ warriors from the north. Felix managed to escape on horseback after leading his mounted reserve on a frantic and ultimately failed counterattack, while his infantry was mauled by the victorious loyalist force. The Altavans withdrew into the safety of the Atlas Mountains, harried by their Thevestian kindred all the way, while the Augustus recovered the coastal cities which Felix had occupied at the outset of the civil war. Complicating matters, Hoggari raiders took advantage of the Battle of the Bagradas to intensify their attacks on the weakened Altava throughout the year, capturing the fortified border-villages of Dimmidi[16] and Gemellae[17] before sweeping up to Thubunae[18] and even threatening the major fortress of Lambaesis[19].
Theodosius III observes his army battling Felix's on the fords of the Bagradas while awaiting Vandalarius' flanking attack
While Theodosius III battled his cousin’s ambitious husband in Africa, he left it to Theudis and the Ostrogoths to constrain his uncle’s advances. Having been halted at Gergovia the year before, Aloysius changed tack and moved to attack Italy itself, no doubt hoping to achieve a quick victory by marching on Ravenna and taking Theodosius’ court hostage while the emperor himself was away. He sprang a feint by sending his so-called Caesar Aemilian to attack Pannonia with several legions backed up by the Alemanni, Lombards and Bavarians, distracting the magister militum while he moved the bulk of his forces (including his best veterans from the Germanic march) through the Alpine passes controlled by his Burgundian allies. By the time the Ostrogoths, Gepids and Iazyges under Theudis’ leadership defeated Aemilian in the Battle of Poetovio[20] that June, Aloysius had already forced Mediolanum to surrender and was quickly moving in on Ravenna.
Despite having just fought a major battle, the Ostrogoth king pushed his troops to hasten down the road to Ravenna and managed to intercept Aloysius at Verona. Here, though the Germanic rebels were ultimately victorious over his weary federates, Theudis fought well and inflicted considerable losses on Aloysius’ men, with his Iazyges horse-archers in particular proving to be without any equals among the rebel host. He next retreated south to Faventia[21], where he replenished his army with the Italian legions which Theodosius didn’t take to Africa: a plot among some of those legions’ legates to betray the Ostrogoths and aid Aloysius was sniffed out by agents of Faustus, who ascertained that the men were being bribed by Aloysius’ own spies from certain financial irregularities, and their heads adorned the Ostrogoth battle-standards when the two armies met for a rematch outside Faventia on July 12. This time, Theudis prevailed after cracking Aloysius’ flanks with his superior cavalry and pursued the usurper all the way to Mediolanum, where they ended the year as (respectively) besieger and besieged.
On winter’s eve, the isolated and often loosely-governed towns and tribes of Armorica – closer to the Romano-Britons across the sea in blood and language, and more receptive to their Pelagian doctrines than the arguments of Ephesian missionaries sent from Gaul and Italy – took their being cut-off from the rest of the Western Empire as an opportunity to renounce Roman rule, citing the legions’ inability to protect them from the Franks who’d been raiding them with impunity for a year on account of their refusal to bow to Aloysius as the rest of northern Gaul had. Instead they pledged themselves to the Riothamus Constantine, who (expecting Aloysius to either win or at least fight and distract Rome for a long while) was quite happy to seize the peninsula to further hurt the old Roman enemy. Raedwald was not blind to this development, and promised the Roman envoys in Eoforwic that he would move to combat the Romano-British once more when spring came again; a challenge that Constantine also expected and welcomed. Both sides believed they’d sufficiently recovered from their last round of fighting, and were eager to test their new armies on the battlefield.
While the Western Empire remained embroiled in civil war, the East was moving to organize its new territories. Sabbatius and his son Anthemius entered Babylon in triumph early in the year, where they also met the latter’s five-year-old son – also named Anthemius, but nicknamed ‘Anthemiolus’ to distinguish him from his father – for the first time, as the child had been born months after the war with the collapsing Western Hephthalite state called both Augustus and Caesar away. Sabbatius revived the Trajan-era province of Assyria, setting its capital at Nineveh, and added the bulk of his Mesopotamian conquests to (surprise) the province of Mesopotamia, whose capital he moved from Amida to Babylon. From the rest of his gains, he:
Created the province of Susiana out of Sassanid and Hephthalite Khuzestan & Meshan, with its capital at Susa;
Carved out the province of Media from the parts of northwestern Persia not already under Fufuluo or Amardian rule, minus most of Adurbadagan which was awarded to Armenia, with its capital at Ecbatana;
Transformed the Persian core of Pars into the province of Persis, with Istakhr remaining as its capital;
And made the provinces of Carmania and Aria to mark the new easternmost border of the Roman world, defended by Belisarius and his men from their regional capitals at Kerman and Zabol.
While in Babylon Sabbatius also reached an agreement with the Exilarch of the Babylonian Jews, Huna VII. The emperor upheld the Sassanid and Hephthalite-era accords established with Huna’s ancestors, acknowledging the Exilarchy as the hereditary governors of the Mesopotamian Jewry and allowing them to continue running parallel rabbinical courts to settle affairs between Jews, handling tax collection within the community, and managing charitable works as well as the three great academies of Nehardea, Pumbedita and Sura, where documents recording the debates and rhetoric of past Jewish scholars were being compiled into the Talmud. In exchange however, the emperor not only demanded the Jews assist him with administering and extracting revenue from his conquests but also do their utmost to ‘keep the peace’ by avoiding hostilities with the Christians at all costs, starting by censoring certain passages in their emerging Talmud which local bishops had brought to his attention on grounds of blasphemy against Christ. He pointed to the fate of the Nasi of Constantinople, the Exilarchs’ Roman counterpart – the position having been abolished a century before by Theodosius II – as a threat and an example of what to expect if the Babylonian Jews should refuse to comply, or fail him in any other way. In turn, the Jews of Babylon demonstrated just how seriously they took this threat and the prospect of Roman rule when they added the offending passages back in as soon as Sabbatius looked away; it seemed Rome would get along with these eastern Jews about as well as they had been getting along with the ones in the Holy Land.
Exilarch Huna VII and the other Babylonian Jewish elders debating how to best approach the victorious Augustus
With new administrative borders drawn by spring’s end, Sabbatius continued his westward return journey and stopped at Ephesus in June to call a third church council there, this time involving all the bishops of the Nestorian East from Nineveh to Zaranj. Despite still being in turmoil, the Western Empire approved of him calling this council and did not neglect to send all the bishops it could spare as well, including ecclesiastical delegations from Rome and Carthage. Sabbatius’ primary objective was to mend the Nestorian Schism and pull as much of the Church of the East back into communion with the Ephesian Church as possible, and by extension secure the loyalty of the Mesopotamian and Persian bishops – who would provide him with the very pool of learned men, quite familiar with the newly conquered regions, that he would rely upon to administer his new domains. Among those in attendance was his second son Theodosius, who he had made a priest with an eye on engineering his ascent to the Patriarchate of Constantinople: something that would both remove a potential challenger to his elder son Anthemius’ succession in the future, and bind the Church closer to his dynasty. Theodora was also present, no doubt to persuade her husband into taking as much of a pro-Syriac and pro-Persian direction as she could get away with.
This proved to be a challenging ordeal for the Eastern Augustus, to say the least. Few among the Nestorian prelates had forgotten how he burnt their last Patriarch at the stake, and even setting that atrocity aside there were many issues – both theological and political in nature – standing in the way of reconciliation between the Ephesians and their wayward brethren to the far east. First he instructed his faithful bishops to seek a Christological compromise with the Nestorians, which came in the form of a dyothelite clarification: it was ruled that as Jesus Christ had two natures in one person, it was only logical that he had distinct divine and human wills correlating to his divine and human natures, cooperating in obedience to God the Father[22].
However the majority of the Greek bishops would not waver from their contention that Christ’s two natures were united in hypostasis and consequently Mary could be called Theotokos or ‘Mother of God’, a position in which they were backed fully by their Latin counterparts; Sabbatius and his loyalists eventually conceded this point. In a further bid to appease the bishops of the East, Sabbatius promised not to anathematize Theodore of Mopsuestia, the mentor of Nestorius, on account of him having corrected his own denial of Mary’s title of Theotokos before dying in 428, as well as to protect the School of Edessa so long as its adherents fell in line with the theological comprises being hammered out at this council. Instead, some of Cyril of Alexandria’s most incendiary invectives against Nestorius would be anathematized on the grounds of being worded in a way that strayed too close to Miaphysitism, though the long-deceased Cyril himself and the vast majority of his work continued to remain in the good graces of the Ephesians.
Clerical celibacy was another thorn in the side of the emperor. The Church of the East had wholly disavowed it under Shila as part of their continuing break from the Ephesians, while within the Ephesian Church itself the issue was an open question with many answers. It was not illegal for clerics and deacons, even bishops, to marry and father children in many regions: support for celibacy was stronger in the West (particularly Hispania since the 306 Synod of Eliberri[23]) than in the East, but even there many had started families of their own or come from long-entrenched clerical families. Once again Sabbatius sought to find a mutually agreeable compromise on this issue, pushing his agents among the assembled bishops to coordinate with their Western counterparts, and eventually came upon one which he thought had the best chance of working out: marriage would be forbidden to bishops, priests and deacons after ordination, with priests and deacons being permitted to remain married and to live with their wife if they took said wife before being ordained. In accordance with the arguments of Saints Jerome and Ambrose of Milan as well as the ruling of the Councils of Carthage, it was ruled that a man who married before being elevated to the bishopric did not have to dissolve their marital union, but was to totally abstain from conjugal relations with his wife.
A fourth major issue – the diocesan organization of Persia and Mesopotamia, for which the Nestorian Patriarchate of Ctesiphon was considered unsuitable both because of its heretical ties and the fact that none of the Ephesian sees had recognized its originally Persian-sponsored claim to the patriarchate – was complicated by the African bishops’ request that Carthage also be elevated to the rank of a patriarchal see. Though Theodosius III approved, having only just begun to turn the tide in Africa and desperately seeking to keep Sisinnius on his side, Pope Agapetus was obviously reluctant to concede any influence over the Church in the West, especially as the Carthaginians argued for Hispania, Corsica and Sardinia to be placed under the jurisdiction of the then-hypothetical Patriarchate of Carthage. Ultimately, in light of Africa’s contributions to the survival of the Roman state; the spiritual & intellectual contributions of the Latin Fathers who hailed from there; and the support of the bishops of the other patriarchates who were leery of Rome’s considerably outsized influence compared to their own, the council agreed to elevate Carthage to patriarchal status – but not to grant them authority over Hispania, which would instead remain under Rome’s direction as a concession to Agapetus’ party.
Latin and Syriac prelates debating at the Third Council of Ephesus while Sabbatius and Theodora look on
Thus, by the end of the year the Third Council of Ephesus had amended the Pentarchy into a Heptarchy: joining the original four patriarchal sees and Jerusalem were the Patriarchates of Babylon, to which the provinces of Assyria & Mesopotamia were assigned in addition to everything east of them, and Carthage, which held sway over the Western Empire’s African provinces, the island of Malta, and the province of Corsica et Sardinia, and was also understood to be responsible for any & all future West African Christians south of the Atlas Mountains. Much like Ctesiphon had done, Babylon naturally named Saint Thomas, who had ventured further east than any of the other Apostles, as its patron & legendary founder while Carthage – not known to have been directly visited by any of the Twelve Apostles – designated Saint Simon as its own patron, for the Zealot was considered to have been one of the Apostles who evangelized in Africa in certain Christian traditions (including, of course, Sisinnius’ own).
Detractors (sometimes not-so-)jokingly called these two the ‘black sees’ on account of the unsavory reputation of their seats: Babylon of course had long been a byword for the font of sin, depravity and the oppression of the faithful while Carthage had arguably been the most formidable of Rome’s classical enemies and also had a history of sacrificing infants to Moloch and other old Phoenician gods, for which they had been condemned from the Punic Wars into the Christian era. Their supporters naturally insisted that not only was the past the past, and that both Babylon and Carthage had become major centers of Christianity in the long centuries since those darker times, but their elevation to patriarchal status was proof that the power of Christ can redeem even cities and civilizations so soaked in innocent blood that they would otherwise be irredeemable; as well, they pointed out that none of the other sees’ seats (except, arguably, Constantinople) had a clean record lacking any persecution of the righteous in the past themselves. Sabbatius, for his part, stayed aloof from these rhetorical exchanges and made no secret of his contentment at the establishment of this latest compromise, fully reaffirming his alliance with the Stilichians and promising to send legions to Theodosius’ aid as soon as he could spare some.
These compromises were hard sells to the Nestorian prelates, and though a majority of them eventually bowed to the council’s rulings, Theodosius and all other chroniclers would record that they did so with little enthusiasm. Of course, the remaining Ephesian Christians of the east who had survived the Nestorian persecutions supported by Toramana were delighted; it was from their ranks that the first Patriarch of Babylon, Babaeus (Babowai) of Beth Waziq, was chosen at the discreet recommendation of Basil, newly installed as Mesopotamia’s hereditary governor with the dignity of ‘Prince’ – and no doubt advised in his choices by his sister the empress Theodora, eager to quickly consolidate the restored power of the Sassanids (even if it was but a pale shadow of their ancestors’ might) over the Fertile Crescent. Those among the Church of the East who accepted the rulings of the Third Council of Ephesus and the legitimacy of Patriarch Babaeus were called ‘Chaldeans’ – after the founders of the Babylonian Empire – or ‘Melkites’[24] – ‘king’s men’, referring to their submission to the emperors and ecumenical councils of the Roman world – by the more committed Nestorians, who continued to follow the heed of the Patriarch of Ctesiphon (now Yaqob II, elected with haste and in secrecy for fear of imperial reprisals).
These settlements also had the unfortunate side-effect of further alienating the Christians of Egypt, who were apoplectic at getting essentially nothing out of this ecumenical council except an insult thrown at Cyril of Alexandria, and were only kept from revolt by still-fresh memories and scars from the beating they received at Belisarius’ and Narses’ hands in the last decade. Monophysitism continued to grow in popularity among the Copts, and the Vicar of Arcadia Aegypti was badly injured in a roadside assassination attempt which claimed the lives of several of his bodyguards and scribes. Nevertheless, Sabbatius was not dissuaded from trying to push his plans through and authorized the harsh repression of any disorder across the region, up to and including mass public executions if local officials deemed it necessary.
Between the ongoing civil war and the Third Council of Ephesus, the Papacy had virtually no time to spare on Brendan’s curious discovery this year. The most Pope Agapetus could do was sign off on a proposal from the Irish Church’s monastic leadership to once more send Brendan westward and establish a modest mission on his Insula Benedicta, which Brendan himself agreed to undertake in-between building new churches & monasteries in Ireland itself & the rising Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata. With thirty-four other volunteers accompanying him, the experienced monk retraced his steps across the Atlantic aboard another, better-prepared fleet of currachs and began constructing a monastery – hopefully the first of many in this New World – starting in July.
A month later, while still building said monastery around the cross which the first expedition had raised up on their last day there in 534, the Hibernian monks were surprised by a party of fur-garbed and hooded men who did not speak Irish, Latin or any other language they could think of, and at least one of whom wore a fearsome mask[25]. The quick-thinking Brendan got on the indigenes’ good side by offering them salted fish and meat, but was unable to make much headway communicating with them otherwise until they finally left. As time wore on and the monastery at what would become known, centuries later, as Saint Brendan’s Cape was finished, the Irish and the natives (whom the former group dubbed the ‘Daoine Fiáine’ or ‘Wildermen’ for their barbaric appearance, wildly different tongue and lack of knowledge about Christianity) did manage to find a mutually intelligible language in trade: near the year’s end, despite a continued inability to verbally communicate, the monks traded a large iron cooking cauldron for some fur cloaks (all the better to survive the winter with) and a soapstone bowl – the first economic transaction between the Old and New Worlds.
Brendan and his monks building the first Christian monastery on the other side of the Atlantic
In Arabia, old Kaleb and his army remained utterly dedicated to finishing the fight with Dhu Nuwas, which was fast approaching its denouement this year. The remnants of the Himyarite army was trapped in their capital with nowhere to go and a considerable but finite amount of provisions, and although they periodically sallied to raid the Aksumite siegeworks, the Aksumites were simply too numerous and well-prepared to be thrown back by such tricks. Ablak and other junior Ethiopian commanders were also hard at work eliminating other lingering pockets of resistance around Ma’rib, whether by pushing the defenders to surrender or with lesser sieges of their own: one of the larger holdouts was Sana’a, which Ablak stormed and sacked on August 25 before returning to rejoin his father.
Finally on the night of September 28, after a half-starved Dhu Nuwas hanged those captains of his who attempted to launch a coup and surrender the city to the Aksumites from Ma’rib’s highest tower, Kaleb gave the order to storm the city, whose defenders had been weakened by hunger (their provisions had nearly been depleted and what little was still left had been rationed out in morsels for the past week) and Aksumite probing attacks. Though the 4,000 remaining Arab warriors tried mightily to resist, they had no actual hope of withstanding their 25,000 foes – Ethiopians, Nubians, and pro-Aksum Christian, pagan and Jewish Arabs all – once the attack began. Ablak directed the assault on a sparsely defended section of the city wall and overwhelmed the few hundred defenders there with an escalade of thousands: after that, it was only a matter of time before Ma’rib would surely fall. By the next morning the city was aflame, the Baccinbaxaba having given his army carte blanche to sack the seat of his hated enemy, and Dhu Nuwas had thrown himself from the roof of his tower after running out of objects to throw at the elite Ethiopian warriors swarming up at him.
It might have taken them a century and many thousands of lives (including most of the Baccinbaxaba’s own years), but Aksum finally had its decisive victory over Himyar. Kaleb assigned his general ‘Ariat to govern Himyar from Muza with an all-Christian council of Arab advisors, having left Ma’rib a smoking and desolate ruin, and ended the year by sailing home with a massive train of slaves, cattle and other plunder, including Dhu Nuwas’ broken crown, his wife’s silks and enough incense to distribute to all of Aksum’s churches for a year or two. With control over the Bab el-Mandeb’s shipping routes firmly secured and his regional archenemy eliminated at long last, the elderly Ethiopian emperor could finally refocus on other foreign matters, namely what appeared to be his Eastern Roman counterpart making concession after concession to the Nestorians while sidelining his Miaphysite co-religionists and mauling them whenever they should object…
Kaleb returns to Aksum a conquering hero
1. Western Roman Empire
2. Eastern Roman Empire
3. Franks
4. 'Germanic Empire'/March of Arbogast (Aloysius)
5. Visigoths
6. Goths of Baetica
7. Burgundians
8. Alemanni
9. Bavarians
10. Thuringians
11. Lombards
12. Iazyges
13. Ostrogoths
14. Gepids
15. 'African Empire'/Altava (Felix)
16. Theveste
17. Romano-British
18. Anglo-Saxons
19. Britons
20. Picts
21. Dál Riata
22. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta and Connachta
23. Papar
24. Saxons
25. Frisians
26. Heruli
27. Vistula Veneti
28. Antae
29. Sclaveni
30. Sclaveni foederati
31. Caucasian kingdoms of Lazica, Iberia and Albania
32. Armenia
33. Padishkhwargar
34. Mazdakites
35. Fufuluo
36. Ghassanids
37. Lakhmids
38. Hoggar
39. Garamantes
40. Nobatia
41. Makuria
42. Alodia
43. Aksum
44. Quraish & Yathrib
45. Rouran Khaganate
46. Hephthalites
47. Late Guptas
48. Tegreg Khaganate
49. Chen Dynasty
50. Goguryeo
51. Southern Korean kingdoms of Baekje, Gaya and Silla
52. Yamato
53. Funan
54. Champa
[7] Historically, Saint Brendan was indeed a profilic sailor and voyager. He is best known for his legendary journey across the Atlantic in search of the Garden of Eden, as recorded in the 9th century Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, during which he encounters a sea monster which he and his fellow monks mistook for an island and discovers an actual island, the ‘Isle of the Blessed’ hidden behind a curtain of mist.
[8] Bampur.
[9] Historically, the Chinese referred to the Roman Empire as ‘Daqin’, and by giving it the name of their first imperial dynasty they implicitly acknowledged it as a civilized counterpart to China itself. They also called the Byzantine Empire ‘Fulin’, but only during and after Tang times.
[10] A Roman name for China, which can be best translated as ‘land of silk’.
[11] Baraqish.
[12] Marsala.
[13] Palermo.
[14] Reggio.
[15] The Medjerda River.
[16] Messaâd.
[17] Near M’Lili.
[18] Near Barika.
[19] Tazoult.
[20] Ptuj.
[21] Faenza.
[22] The dyothelites hold the opposite position to monothelitism, the doctrine that Christ may have had two natures but only one will, which was formulated by Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople in the 7th century in an attempt to construct a theological compromise to bind Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians together. Dyothelitism was the default position of the Nestorians and fully committed to by the Catholics & Orthodox with the Third Council of Constantinople in 681.
[23] Identified as ‘Elvira’, this town was not far from modern Granada.
[24] Historically, ‘Melkite’ is the term applied to Syriac Christians who acknowledged the Council of Chalcedon as legitimate. OTL ‘Chaldean’ Christians, meanwhile, the adherents of the Chaldean Catholic Church, which spun out of a schism with the Nestorian Church in the East and entered communion with the Catholic Church in 1552; their real-life head is also titled Patriarch of Babylon.
[25] These ‘Wildermen’ encountered by Brendan & his fellow Irish monks would have been Dorset Eskimos, who were present on Newfoundland until about 1000. They were probably the Skraelings encountered by the Norse, though by then the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period had caused them to decline.
So we are getting an early start of tea in Europe?
Western emperor had managed to fight the traitors to stalmate for now, but war is not decided yet and even in victory, he will be heavily indebted to the Greens.
Meanwhile the Sabbatious machinations might bring an enemy to his borders that will be stronger than weakened Rouran.
Bloody hell that's a large eastern Roman empire! Its possible that a lot of it could collapse rapidly but the Hephthalites have taken a hell of a kicking. There's going to be issues with Axum but unless there's serious internal dissent, which might well be the case its set up to be the monster of the west.
The Romano-British state might have made a fatal mistake in accepting Brittany as assuming the western empire wins the current war its going to be piling in from the south even while the Anglo-Saxons attack from the north.
We have the longer term aspect of the discovery of the Americas although how reliable settlement will be with the technology of the time will be an issue. Also with a 1st point of contact so far in the north and the lower technology of the old world its a possibility that the inevitable pandemics will occur long enough before widespread settlement that possibly some viable cultures will survive or recover in the Americas. Although unless they have long enough and some access to old world technology and animals it could be a short lived survival.
More war in WRE,ERE ready for second round,this time with Aksumites attacking them,And turks coming closer to Europe.
It seems,that ERE would quickly become smaller again.
Babylon powerfull walls in 534 still stand,so city should be impossible to capture using their technology.
In Talmud Jesus is son of unmarried woman who have lover,magician and heretics,killed by jews alone without any romans helping them.And among one of daily prayers is "let all christians die".And they always helped any invader against ERE.
It would be smarters just exile them to India.
Official China-ERE relations are something new,in OTL only roman merchants get there.Interesting,how fast China discover then there is "island" West of Europe,and if they try to sail there ?
Tang dynasty had strong fleets in OTL which sailed to India,Africa and maybe even Australia.
Considering that they belived in land of immortals there,it is another reason to do so.
If America would be slowly contacted from North,then it would take time for plagues to decimate locals - but survivors would be stronger.
No attacking big cyvilizations just after plagues hit them,like in OTL.
And no easy target to conqer like Aztecs and Inka,too.
I do not think,that in this TL European manage to conqer all of the Americas.Probably not even most.But - thanks to monks,they would be christians.Or buddhists,if China join!
Britannt - i see war Brittany + Riothamus vs saxons + Dal Riada/other irish + WRE .
It seems,that Artur would fall but unless OTL after much bigger wars.
P.S If one of Dhu Nuwas sons run on ship to Madagascar - then,after few generations,army of lemurs under jewish king Julian would come back and destroy Aksum!!!
There really were bigger lemurs there.Not sapient enough to fight,unfortunatelly.
Sabbatius is indeed playing with fire right now. The ERE's new borders ironically resemble those of the Achaemenid Empire, but keeping it will be probably the single greatest challenge of his reign (which has already been quite long and filled with challenges leading up to this pinnacle). The rough ride is really just beginning... @ATP To my understanding, the passages in the Babylonian Talmud considered blasphemous by Christians first started to become an issue of public controversy & to invite harsh reprisals against Jewish communities in Europe with the Disputation of Paris in the 13th century. At this point and for the next couple chapters Sabbatius & his court will definitely not have time to worry about any of that beyond the token condemnation he's already given, but certainly it doesn't bode well for the internal stability of the ERE's new eastern half in the medium or even short term.
Speaking of which, I still plan on ending November with a factional chapter exploring the ERE's inner workings and first steps in handling their new conquests in greater detail. After that, it'll be back to the normal timeline progression chapters. I should be able to post updates a little more frequently after this semester and Christmas since my next semester isn't as busy, hopefully something like 2 chapters every other week or every third week from January 2022 onward until the end of classes in April.
The Romano-Britons should be pinning their hopes on the latest Roman civil war lasting a while, to be sure. Even if it does, they're not likely to be able to hold on to Armorica in the long term against the resources the WRE can throw at them. The force calculus is just too overwhelmingly against them and they don't have the Channel to protect their newest acquisition.
There's indeed practically no chance that the Europeans can go on a conquering spree in the Americas this early. As you guys have said, contact happening now and not a thousand years later could actually be beneficial for the various native peoples, giving them time to recover and build up their own civilizations after the Old World pandemics hit them, as well as to absorb European tech (such as metal weapons or horses) from trade. The New World will also have its own diseases to hit the Old with, ex. syphilis, quite a bit earlier too of course. I've got some ideas for hydraulic civilizations around the Great Lakes and Mississippi down the line at least, since these seem to be the most logical places for such civilizations to spring up (and in the Mississippian culture's case, they actually did build cities with populations in the thousands or tens of thousands from the RL 9th century onward).
Before I forget again, must mention the elephant in the room. You compared the latest attempt at a religious compromise by Sabbatius with Heraclius's similar attempt to settle differences in doctrine. I think we all know how that ended up, angering hard liners on both sides so wondering if there are going to be issues ahead. Especially when adding in two new Patriarchates which are going to cause issues as well. The Papacy especially won't like the idea of losing some of the lands under its direct spiritual control while it might also weaken its claim for primary overall in Christianity. Are we going to have the 1st serious schism since the TL started?
By the way I referred to it in the last reply but many thanks for that map. Its makes things a lot clearer as to what's going on in assorted places and especially the borders of the eastern empire. I hadn't thought of the geographical comparison with the Achaemenid empire and have my doubts they can hold all those eastern lands.
One possible good point for the Hephthalites is that there is very little contact with China now and the latter could see the Tegreg Khaganate as a greater threat to its control of the eastern end of the silk road.
For me, what came to mind wasn't the Achaemenids, but Justinian - for somewhat different reasons than OTL, the East Romans won't be able to hold everything they conquered. I expect there will be some shedding of conquered lands in no more than one generation.
For me, what came to mind wasn't the Achaemenids, but Justinian - for somewhat different reasons than OTL, the East Romans won't be able to hold everything they conquered. I expect there will be some shedding of conquered lands in no more than one generation.
Duh! Should have thought of this earlier. What if there's a Plague_of_Justinian equivalent? Possibly Circle of Willis is going to include this however in the near future. Checking the OTL start date is supposed to be 541 so a few years yet unless it comes early. Which is a possibility with a lot more movement in the wider ME region.
Another factor was the Volcanic_winter_of_536, which is due soon and is unlikely to change date much. Also since one of the candidates for the volcano is on Iceland this could be pretty bad for those monks who have been spreading westwards. There are other volcanos or even a possible comet strike as causes.
I'm not sure what the climate was like in the 6thC. I know later the Viking period and its exploration in the west was helped by what was a significant warm period and at least one of the factors for the collapse of their colony on Greenland was the replacing of this by the early stages of the Little Ice Age.
All in all the world is - going by OTL - heading for a bad 15-20 years and that could change a hell of a lot for everybody.
Languages: Late Latin, though it is used almost exclusively at court and in official correspondence. A Thraco-Roman dialect of Latin[1] is spoken among the commoners of Thrace. Other major languages spoken throughout the empire include:
Greek (Constantinople, the southern Thracian coast, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean islands and other Greek communities across the empire)
Aramaic (the Levant, Assyria & Mesopotamia; includes Jewish Palestinian, Jewish Babylonian and Galilean Aramaic, which are the respective vernacular dialects of the Jews of southern Judea, Mesopotamia and Galilee)
Armenian (eastern Anatolia)
Zan (eastern Pontus)
Coptic (Egypt and Cyrenaica)
Middle Persian (Persis)
Median (Media)
Saka (Carmania and Aria, the former Sakastan)
Bactrian (Aria)
Many less-prominent languages also survive in more rugged regions of the empire, ex. some of the old Anatolian tongues (mostly Isaurian and Pisidian) and Galatian in parts of Anatolia, and even a vestige of Elamite in Khuzestan.
On the surface, as of the mid-sixth century Rome’s eastern half seems to have reached a new, triumphant zenith for the Roman world. The Augustus Sabbatius, a highly ambitious and dynamic leader who has had the additional luck of surrounding himself with various equally or even more competent lieutenants, has managed to turn the Orient around from the civil-war-torn wreck it had been at the turn of the century into a behemoth that has gone further than any Roman ever had before. Indeed, the Eastern Empire now sits atop the former core of its most formidable enemy to date, the fallen Sassanids – and has even reduced their remaining extant scions to little more than vassals of Constantinople.
But despite the celebratory mood in Constantinople, this is not the whole story. Sabbatius may have managed to move past the rocky start to his reign and piled up many impressive victories with the help of his capable and devoted servants such as Narses and Belisarius, but his hold over the eastern & southern three-quarters of his empire is as fragile as a newly made sheet of glass. The Syriac Christians of the Levant have been mollified to an extent by the compromises recently arranged at the Third Council of Ephesus, which favored the teachings of the Antiochene School and made a considerable effort to reconcile with the Nestorians who grew out of said teachings. The same cannot be said of Egypt’s Christians, who perceive themselves as being even more isolated and oppressed than they had been when Sabbatius crushed their earlier rebellions against his rule, and are lashing out with increasing aggression even as he authorizes his agents to undertake ever-harsher repression against them.
In the east, Roman control is even shakier, although this is to be expected considering that they have only just conquered the lands east of Nisibis. Assyria and Mesopotamia are where Sabbatius’ authority is at its most stable (relatively speaking), held up by the combined efforts of Basil the Sasanian and the newly formed Patriarchate of Babylon. Even there however, their authority is undermined by the Syriac Nestorians who refuse to bend the knee to Constantinople and acknowledge Patriarch Babaeus as their leader, seeing the former’s emperor as a vicious oppressor who made fiery martyrs of their leaders and the latter as a heretical, collaborationist puppet. Beyond the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Romans have had to stretch their forces extremely thinly to police vast provinces that have never before known their rule and where Christianity’s influence is not only still weak, but where they face lingering organized resistance from zealous and well-fortified Mazdakite Buddhist militants in addition to the prospect of a Hephthalite counterattack.
All of these are at the moment secondary concerns to Sabbatius, for the Augustus of the Orient shares his people’s joy at his triumphs and considers the reverses of 534 to be no more than a roadbump on his road to Alexander’s pillars in Sogdia and India. Even now he is planning to stab his Rouran allies in the back in co-operation with the Tegreg Turks, a fast-rising power to the northeast whose growing might allows them to increasingly tug at the leash of their Chinese masters, and seize their portion of Persia for himself. Time will tell if the Eastern Romans will be able to hang on to their massive new conquests, and how much of these they can retain, or if their overextension and Sabbatius’ unparalleled ambitions will burn their candle at both ends as midnight approaches.
In terms of its structure, the Eastern Roman administrative apparatus is presently still quite similar to its Western counterpart. For the most part, military and civil functions still remain entirely separated into their own hierarchies, which are united only at the top in the emperor’s own person. Until recently, this half of the Roman Empire remained organized into the Praetorian Prefecture of the Orient, which is also the only prefecture left to the East since the whole of Illyricum has remained under the rule of the Western Empire since they helped Sabbatius win his throne near the turn of the century. Now with the conquest of many former Sassanid territories, Sabbatius is planning to organize his new provinces into a ‘Praetorian Prefecture of Persia’.
What has begun to change is that Sabbatius embarked on a streamlining of government. Early in his reign, as part of his purges and reforms the Augustus eliminated many offices he considered superfluous drains on his payroll and/or prone to corruption, including several dioceses. Most notably, he combined the Diocese of Pontus with the Diocese of Asia under the latter’s name, eliminating the former’s vicariate and his hefty salary (although the succeeding office, the governorship of the province of Helenopontus, was still accorded the honorable rank of vir spectabilis, placing its holder above most Senators in prominence).
The civilian Diocese of Egypt has also been recently abolished in response to spiking unrest there, with both civil and military authority being combined into the person of the Dux et augustalis Aegypti (or simply ‘Duke of Egypt’) and what amounts to indefinite martial law imposed upon the Egyptian provinces, with severe repression against riots and subversive elements (mainly anyone deemed to be a Miaphysite/Monophysite agitator) having been authorized. If this model is successful in crushing the latest bout of Egyptian unrest, Sabbatius will likely export it to the rest of his empire and eliminate the remaining civilian vicariates in favor of unified civil-military authority figures.
Egypt, which has been placed under total military rule for the most part, represents the first major break in the Roman Empire from the complete bifurcation of civilian & military authorities established by Diocletian & Constantine I
Another development in the East which increasingly sets it apart from the West, and is reflected to an extent in the above-mentioned administrative reforms, is the absolute despotism with which Sabbatius rules his half of the empire. Supreme executive and legislative power nominally resides wholly with the Augustus and his ministers, much as it does in the Occident, and the Senate of Constantinople is as much of a rubberstamp as the one in Rome (although it has historically been far less prone to treason, and consequently enjoys a much better relationship with Sabbatius than the Roman Senate does with the Stilichians), its functions limited to providing the emperor with advice that he can disregard with no consequence and a body of literate recruits for the civil service and the army’s officer corps.
But in practice the Stilichian emperors have had to decentralize quite a bit of power away from themselves in order to preserve their empire, allowing their many federate kingdoms to run themselves for the most part and to slowly, organically integrate into Roman civilization (if not quite the Roman administrative apparatus) in addition to giving the Arbogastings a large, autonomous fief on the frontier, which has recently backfired quite badly for Theodosius III. They depend on co-operation with their barbarian vassals and civil officials to effectively rule the Western Empire, requiring them to frequently compromise with and maintain a careful balance between the domineering factions of the Blues and Greens into which most of the above fall into. In other words, although they are nominally the absolute rulers of everything west of Macedonia, the Western Roman Emperors do not (or rather have not been able to) act like it in practice, and haven’t for decades since at least Eucherius II.
The Eastern Empire has had no such issues – its vassals, such as Armenia or the Ghassanid kingdom, are not integrated into its structure the same way the West’s federates are – and as a result its Augustus has had no issue with exercising increasingly overwhelming control in all matters of state, including matters of religion. True, the Western emperors also claim to rule by divine mandate: but in the East Sabbatius not only claims to effectively be God’s shadow on the Earth, but he can and does actually rule like it as well. There is virtually nobody around him who can substantially resist a decree he hands down: not his wife, not his eunuch chamberlain Narses, not Belisarius nor any of his other generals, virtually all of whom lack a territorial power-base (quite unlike the federates of the West) and depend on his patronage for their political prosperity. When these advisers and lieutenants want something, they must convince and barter with him, not the other way around. In virtually all cases they have familial ties binding them to him and assuring him of their loyalty (for example, Theodora is his wife, Basil his brother-in-law and Belisarius his son-in-law), and while such nepotism may not be too bad when they are all men (and one woman) of ability while Sabbatius has a strong personality and no shortage of competence himself, it is not difficult to imagine how this might go horribly wrong with a less able emperor at the helm and a less able crew at his side.
A mosaic of Sabbatius prostrating himself (proskynesis) before Jesus Christ. As he does before the King of Kings, so does the Eastern Augustus expect his subjects, even top-ranking Senators and generals, to do before him
Speaking of religion, the Ephesian Church – specifically its Constantinopolitan Patriarchate – is as closely tied to the Eastern Roman state as it is to the Western Roman one, as well. Sabbatius is maneuvering to make his second son Theodosius the next Patriarch of Constantinople, which he expects to both eliminate any risk the younger man might pose to his brother Anthemius’ eventual succession and decisively place the See of Saint Andrew under imperial authority. Many priests still serve in the various bureaus of the empire’s governing apparatus as clerks, secretaries, and accountants among other roles, and bishops often collaborate closely with the civilian vicars and military dukes or counts whose diocesan commands correspond to their ecclesiastical dioceses as they do in the West. A critical difference is that more and more of these clerics do not speak Latin: most (being recruited from the Patriarchate of Constantinople) instead speak and write primarily or even exclusively in Greek, which is well on the way to displacing Latin as the official language of the Eastern Empire – already the latter is being spoken and written less and less, even in official correspondence, outside the cities of Thrace and the court of Constantinople itself.
That said, the fact that the Orient houses most of the Heptarchy’s other Patriarchates – the Occident only has two, Rome and Carthage, and both are generally Latin-speaking and quite similar in their liturgical rites – does pose a complication. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem is closely aligned with Constantinople so there’s not much of a problem there; but the Patriarchates of Antioch and Babylon hold to their own rites, in the latter’s case are especially partial to conducting services in Aramaic rather than Greek, and do not appreciate what they view as the Greeks of Constantinople intruding into their communities. Following the Third Council of Ephesus which established the Babylonian Patriarchate and made an effort to reconcile Nestorianism with orthodox Ephesianism, Sabbatius has begun appointing a greater number of Syriac clerics to office across Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia, both to better include them within the Roman community and to more effectively administer these increasingly less-Greek lands.
Most troublesome of all is, as usual, Egypt. The orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, which is recognized by the emperor and the other Heptarchs, is frankly far less popular among the Copts than the Miaphysite Patriarchate of Alexandria and worse still, the less organized Eutychian-Monophysite heresy. While the official Patriarchate’s followers are mostly Greeks from urban areas such as Alexandria itself and consequently this Patriarchate conducts its services in Koine Greek as Constantinople does, the Coptic Patriarchate (which practices the Alexandrian Rite and holds its services in Coptic) aptly draws its support from the Coptic majority, ranging from the lower classes in those same cities to the rural peasantry – and they have not been happy in the slightest about their increasing marginalization under Sabbatius. Urban riots, peasant revolts and assassination attempts have become a fact of life in the Egyptian provinces as the Copts lash out against what they perceive to be an increasingly foreign oppressor working in cahoots with their Nestorian theological archenemies, and the authorities are not winning any hearts and minds over with their own increasingly repressive and brutal responses.
The collection of laws which Sabbatius has set his scribes to work on, in tandem with the West’s own legal scholars and bureaucrats, for much of the sixth century – and which is finally nearing completion as of 535 – includes the culmination of Sabbatius’ trends toward despotism and religious orthodoxy. Among other things, this new ‘Corpus Iuris Civilis’ or ‘Body of Civil Law’ will mandate that Ephesians and Roman citizens are to be considered synonymous, that heretics cannot enjoy the privileges of citizenship, and it will even include laws to further beat the dead horse of paganism into the Earth’s core, such as equating participation in pagan sacrificial rituals with murder[2]. It remains to be seen how these laws, which finalize the transformation of Christianity from a persecuted underground faith to the state church of the Roman Empire, will be received once they are unveiled; but if the past is any indicator, they are unlikely to soothe the long-simmering tensions in Egypt and the Levant, at all.
As of 535, Sabbatius is but a year or two away from being able to unveil his great legislative overhaul before the Roman world
The Eastern Roman Empire has long been the wealthier half of the Roman world, and it shows – even after the civil wars of the late fifth century which culminated in Sabbatius’ assumption of the purple. Base and precious metals from Anatolia, incense and silk and other exotic goods from the trade routes crisscrossing the Levant, grain and fruit from the breadbasket of Egypt; all this and more the Eastern Romans can boast of, protected by manpower from Thrace and the borderlands with Armenia. The Eastern Empire is also more heavily urbanized than the West, having had its core cities (of which Constantinople is the greatest, with a population of about 500,000 as of 535) seriously threatened to a much lesser extent than the West had in the past century, and can therefore afford to levy greater taxes on its larger populations of city-dwelling artisans and merchants to finance infrastructure projects and military expansion alike. To all these sources of wealth, Sabbatius has recently added the war-damaged but not totally devastated secondary breadbasket that is the Fertile Crescent, as well as extended Roman control over the Silk Road across much of old Persia. Of course, exotic resources are not the only things that travel along these trade routes…
One especially interesting product the Eastern Empire has picked up from the Silk Road trade is tea. The tea seeds collected by Eastern Roman envoys to China and brought back to the empire in 534 have found fertile ground in eastern Pontus, and the hard-working Augustus himself quickly took a liking to the bitter taste and invigorating properties of the drink which his cooks prepared by steeping the harvested leaves in boiled water. The merchants of Constantinople do not reckon tea to be quite as valuable as silkworm eggs, but it is an exotic and consequently fairly highly-priced product all the same, and certainly one more welcome in the dead of winter than all the colorful but thin silks in the world. With the conquest of Persia from the Hephthalites and the submission of the king of Padishkhwargar, Daylam is also open to tea cultivation, and both it and coastal Lazica (where climactic conditions are similar to Pontus) are likely to end up providing new homes for the shrub in the coming decades or centuries.
The Romans have found that, of all their lands, the tea shrub grows most easily in the rain-soaked hills of eastern Pontus
Diversity of resources and being situated atop or near many lucrative trade routes might have made the Orient prosperous, but it also saddles them with a hodgepodge of equally diverse populations that rarely get along 100% with the imperial authorities. In this they may not seem too different from the Occident, but at least the Western Romans’ subjects (whether actual citizens or Germanic federates) mostly speak Latin and hold to the same Christian rites. This is absolutely not the case in the East, where native Greek-speakers are concentrated in the westernmost provinces of Thrace & Anatolia and the great cities while Latin-speakers are a negligible minority (if they exist at all) beyond Thrace, and these wildly different demographics are reflected in their religious rites.
Broadly speaking, the Eastern Roman state must contend with two major non-Greek Christian communities – the Syriac Christians of the Levant and Mesopotamia, and the Copts of Egypt – as well as three eqully major strains of Christianity which they deem heretical: Nestorianism, Miaphysitism and Monophysitism. Many Syriacs (including virtually all those in Mesopotamia) have their own Eucharistic rite, developed over the centuries in Edessa, and conduct their religious services in Aramaic. Those who do not already hold to Ephesian orthodoxy and celebrate according to the Liturgy of Saint James (developed in Jerusalem and Antioch) tend to either be Miaphysites or Nestorians, the latter of whom still follow a parallel Patriarchate of Ctesiphon that goes unrecognized and outlawed by the Ephesian authorities. While leaving Miaphysites in the cold, Sabbatius has made an effort to reconcile with the Nestorians at the urging of his Sassanid wife and brother-in-law, culminating in the recognition of a Patriarchate of Babylon at the Third Council of Ephesus in 535.
The Syriac liturgy is considered more archaic than that of those of the rest of the Heptarchy, as its anaphorae (consecration of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood) is missing the Words of Institution (some variation of the Messiah’s recorded words at the Last Supper) which is present in the other liturgical rites of the Christian world. While still conducting services in Aramaic, the Patriarchate of Babylon have added the aforementioned Words of Institution to their version of the Syriac Rite[3], which conveniently serve as an easy way to identify which priest is in line with Ephesian orthodoxy and who isn’t. Those who hold to the Nestorian Patriarchate of Ctesiphon obviously would not celebrate the Eucharist, or Qurbana as it’s called in Eastern Aramaic, according to the modified rite, and so the Ephesians would not consider Communion administered by these Nestorian clerics to be valid.
The Third Council of Ephesus resulted in some of the Church of the East reuniting with the orthodox Ephesians. Whether it can last and their new Patriarchate of Babylon can successfully bind the new Persian conquests to the Eastern Roman Empire is an open question
As for Egypt, orthodox Ephesians are very much a minority there, with the Coptic majority overwhelmingly hewing to Miaphysitism. Christological disputes aside, these Copts do not recognize the authority of the Ephesian Patriarch of Alexandria in favor of their own leader, who they call Pope and Patriarch (but is usually referred to as the Coptic Pope) and their own liturgy, the Alexandrian Rite said to have originated with Saint Mark’s disciples and which lacks the overt Trinitarian references of the other churches’ liturgies. They are quite hostile toward the imperial authorities, and have rioted against Ephesian religious processions or entered into open rebellion against Constantinople from time to time in the past. The Monophysites, who hold to the heresiarch Eutyches’ position that Christ only had one divine nature, are a growing minority in the Egyptian countryside and even more violently opposed to Sabbatius’ rule, with no small number of bandits, rebels and other malcontents forming their ranks. Both the Miaphysites and Monophysites have had to adopt less centralized, underground structures of organization to survive imperial crackdowns, especially as their leaders frequently end up burning at the stake (if caught by the Eastern Roman government) or fleeing to find refuge in Aksum.
Sadly the gulf between Egypt’s heterodox Christians and the orthodox Ephesians is only widening with time, repression and Sabbatius’ overtures to their Nestorian theological archenemies. More moderate elements among both the Ephesian and Miaphysite communities are right to worry that this yawning chasm in understanding may eventually grow beyond possibility of reconciliation in the foreseeable future. The one – and, increasingly, only – thing which Egyptian Christians of all stripes are known to have in common is that they have a stronger monastic tradition compared to the other Patriarchates, most famously ascetic hermits who live atop pillars in imitation of Saint Simeon the Stylite.
Other than heterodox Christians, the Eastern Roman state must also contend with its share of non-Christian religious minorities, none of whom are remotely as eager to receive Ephesian proselytization efforts as the Germanic pagans in the West. The Jews and their Samaritan cousins are the most obvious members of this category, with a habit of causing trouble in Palestine every couple decades; the Babylonian Jews who had previously been Sassanid and White Hunnish subjects are not likely to be an exception to that rule, if the rocky start to their relationship with Sabbatius is any indicator. The conquest of Persia has also obviously brought a large number of Zoroastrians under Sabbatius’ rule, enough that he cannot easily persecute or destroy them no matter the disdain his bishops might have for these ‘pagan fire-worshipers’, and Buddhists & others considered pagans by the Christian Romans as well.
While the Zoroastrians hold out cautious hope for some measure of coexistence and tolerance under the Augusti, the Persian Buddhists – most of whom follow the Amidist teachings of the convert and populist firebrand Mazdak, and fear losing their collective property and freedom to the Roman-backed gentry if they yield – remain practically universally hostile to Roman rule and continue to hold out in the autonomous, well-provisioned and well-defended mountain fortresses they established under Toramana. Since reasoning with the fanatical Mazdak is off the table, Sabbatius in turn has instructed his generals to ruthlessly grind any Buddhists still in arms against him to dust, damning them as autotheistic cultists (based on a misunderstanding of their pursuit of enlightenment) who should die if they will not stop long enough in their quest for the Pure Land to bend the knee to him. Least lucky of all are the last vestiges of the old Mesopotamian religion: already gravely diminished by the spread of Zoroastrianism and Syriac Christianity long before the Eastern Romans entered the scene, those few pagans who have managed to hold on to Marduk, Ashur, Ishtar and the rest of their ancient pantheon have found themselves being swept away and the last of the holy sites left to them destroyed or usurped by the ascendant Ephesian Patriarchate of Babylon.
The Mazdakites have refused to recognize Eastern Roman rule and continue to resist from well-fortified communes in the Persian mountains, where the better-equipped but overextended Romans find it more than a little difficult to suppress them
That said, the Eastern Empire has had one great success in integrating its main Germanic population, the Moesogoths. Their lords installed in various civil and military or even ecclesiastic offices across the empire, their men added to the strength of the legions which have marched as far as the deserts of Gedrosia while their women scattered to live in the East’s many glorious cities and their children grew up alongside Roman neighbors, the Moesogoths have wholly taken to Roman Christianity and customs to the point where they are on track to disappear as a distinct people in as early as a generation. Sabbatius himself is a sterling example: raised at the Western court in Ravenna as a child and now having ruled the Eastern Empire for nearly 40 years, the Augustus is entirely steeped in Roman customs and while he is fluent in both Latin & Greek, he does not speak a lick of his father Vitalian’s Gothic tongue. Though the Sabbatians are the second great Romano-Germanic dynasty to wield power over the Roman world, they have arguably assimilated even faster and more thoroughly than the Vandal-blooded Stilichians did at first.
The Eastern Roman army has evolved somewhat in the past 100 years, but not so much that it can be said to be totally different from their Western Roman counterpart – neither structurally, where they have for the most part retained the same old ranks and divisions of the past, nor in terms of equipment. The biggest change has affected the Danubian limitanei or frontier-garrison units, who are no longer professional troops in the wake of the Hunnic invasions and civil wars of the late fifth century. Rather, they have become something resembling a localized military caste: these soldiers have settled down at and around their border-posts, becoming farmers and eventually landowners responsible for the safety of not just the empire in the abstract but also their own families and tenants.
The defenders of the Danube, now the front line protecting their own families and farmsteads in addition to the Eastern Empire itself
While in general Thrace is a major recruiting ground for Sabbatius’ armies, it is about the only place from which he recruits limitanei grade troops, and also the only place where he bothers to station them as of 535 AD. Elsewhere, the Eastern Empire is increasingly outsourcing its frontier defense to its network of peripheral vassals, not dissimilar to the Western Empire’s military relationship with its own federate kingdoms. This decision has allowed the Augustus to turn his treasury toward augmenting the comital and palatine legions who comprise his mobile armies, and consequently to prioritize going on the offensive against his enemies (as he has done almost all the way to the Indus), though in victory these veteran legions have had to diffuse their strength and stretch themselves dangerously thin to hold down their master's numerous new conquests. It is only the new eastern frontier which absolutely requires a professional, Roman garrison outside of Thrace at this point, and Sabbatius has left his greatest general Belisarius to not only hold said frontier with some of his finest troops but also to begin recruiting the locals as auxiliaries to further augment his (admittedly limited and thinly stretched) garrisons.
The Orient’s legions fight in a slightly different style than those of the Occident, in order to better contend with their rather different set of foes. Most prominently, there is a much greater emphasis on cavalry in their ranks than in those of Theodosius III and his predecessors. They field ten formations of cataphractarii and clibanarii – four full legions, three half-legions, and three 250-man alae or independent wings, for a total approximate strength of 7,000 such men – compared to the meager three maintained by the West. Attired in mail or scale armor of the finest quality and optionally an imposing iron mask, wielding a lance and armor-crushing mace, and riding atop similarly heavily armored steeds, these cataphracts are Sabbatius’ iron fist, equally capable of ripping gaps in the ranks of his many enemies and matching the formidable heavy horsemen of the Sassanids and Eftals blow-for-blow. Other than these famous ultra-heavy cavalry units, the Eastern Romans also field many more javelin-and-spatha-armed medium horsemen titled equites scutarii, promoti, etc. much like the West does, and a substantial number of equites sagittarii (horse archers) recruited from frontier areas.
A maskless Eastern Roman clibanarius riding into action, flanked by a mailed heavy infantryman of the comitatenses and a Laz medium auxiliary
This emphasis on cavalry has complemented the Augustus’ need for a mobile, professional and offense-focused army capable of crossing and taking large swathes of territory quickly very well indeed. Other than their cavalry, the East’s engineers are no less capable than their Western brethren and in addition to routine duties such as paving & repairing roads, fortifying encampments, building bridges, etc. they have regularly assembled carroballistae – wagon-mounted field artillery – for their employers, which both complement the rest of their impressively engineered siege trains when taking cities and can be deployed to take down Persian and Hephthalite elephants in the field. Their efficacy in executing this purpose has been demonstrated quite frequently in the many wars of the 5th and 6th centuries.
The Eastern Roman army further sets itself apart from the Western one with its choice of allied auxiliary troops and mercenaries, a versatile bunch who cover their weaknesses and accentuate their strengths. The Armenians, heavily influenced by traditions inherited from the Persians, provide them with additional cataphracts drawn from their noble nakharar clans, while the Kartvelian kingdoms supply them with indomitable infantry well-used to traversing the mountains and forests of their homelands, who have since proven very useful in battling through the Zagros Mountains. The conquest of those mountains brings to Sabbatius the possibility of recruiting Kurdish archers and skirmishers, all the better to enhance the lighter contingents of his army with and to garrison their homelands so he can redeploy his better troops elsewhere.
Other than these allies both old and new, the faithful Ghassanids have consistently contributed both heavy and light cavalry contingents, and especially camel-riders who have proven invaluable in combating enemy cavalry; the Eastern Romans were sufficiently impressed that they created their own camelry corps, the dromedarii, in imitation of this unique Arab force. Similar contributions will be expected of their old Lakhmid rivals since the latter bent the knee before Sabbatius. The Aramaic-speaking peoples of the Levant have long furnished Rome with a skilled archer corps, and the Assyrian bowmen serving under Prince Basil are no exception. The recent conquest of Media has also brought with it Fufuluo recruits: Turkic nomads who, naturally, make fine horse-archers capable of trading arrows with any of their former Hephthalite allies. In all, given enough time, the Eastern Romans can expect to field an extremely versatile and well-rounded army which their enemies, Hephthalite or otherwise, will have difficulty finding weaknesses in.
A noble camel-rider of the Ghassanids attached to Sabbatius' army, attired in Roman-inspired armor
So many death flags...poor ERE,hard times are waiting for them.But - they tried grab too much.
And,betrayed Rourans become Avars,take over slavic tribes and keep attacking ERE for next 100 years,just like in OTL.
They created combined armies of slavic infrantry used as cannon fodder and avar medium calvary delivering final blow.
We found avar artifacts in city Cracow/althought in 534 it was probably only small stronghold/ ,and in part of current polish territory.
In Croatia ,except artifacts,exist legends about ogres/obres - giants living in castles which murdered men and taken woman.
Avars operated from strongholds on slavic territories,but they certainly was no giants.
And making allies with turks...that is how Ottomans take ERE - they started as military allies,payed by land given becouse emperors have no money.
But - weaker ERE is better for Europe.If they succed,they would attack WRE,and then they would lost East to Hephalities anyway.
Hephalities - they would keep India here,made it buddhist,and eventually become indians.Good for indians,too - no caste system.
With more strong states still existing,more sea merchandise,too.WRE should take over Baltic/amber/,ERE - made more contacts with Africa.No Bantu people there/in South Africa/,so they could even create colony there.
And on Madagascar.We would have more bones of giant birds and lemures then in OTL.Althought they are doomed anyway.
No taking of South America,monks from North only.Good for natives.
Australia - in 17 - 18th century sailors from Indonesia get there.Now,somebody could made it earlier.No for land - to fish strange creatures named sea cucumbers,which they sold to China.And get rich.Chineese are strange people to pay for something like that.
Good summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the eastern empire under Sabbatius. Potentially a massively powerful state but also potentially fragile because of the autocratic nature of both Sabbatius and his religious viewpoints with the growing intolerance of 'others' which make up the majority of the empire's subjects. Plus since Sabbatius has been ruling for 40 years what happens when he dies? Succession is always a ticklish issue, especially after a long reign.
The western empire - assuming a similar summary will follow - has less resources and more clear problems with a continued civil war - but may have some inner strength with its leaders required to compromise with at least his most powerful subjects and hence keep in touch with them - and a more homogeneous society.
I accidentally found few things about ancient Japan:
When first written text come from Nara period/710-794AD/ traditions are much older.
First chronicle,Kojiki was written about 720AD,but describe period from mythical times/one book/ till human history,from 660BC till 628 AD.
Second,Nihongi,cover mythology again/2books/ and human history till 697AD.
Historians agree,that oral traditions was at least 1000 years older then written.There were short sentenced written at least about 300AD,and chineese chronicles from that period mention japan state.
First poem mythology, Manyoshu,written about 790 AD by poet working on his own,have poems from about 300AD till 759 AD.
About tatooes -chineese chronicle Shanguo Zhi /300AD/mention that in Japan/Wa/ tatooes was used to show social standing.
Nihongi mention traitor Azumi no Muraji who was punished by tatooing his face.
Later it stop using till 1672 - but still was used in 460 AD.
So,about 534 Japan should have emperor with real power,ruling by beaucrats using chineese model,and even creating poems
/some older poems was supposed to be written bu old emperors/
With Buddhism arleady on place.And maybe tatooes,too.
