In the west, 710 was not only a year of war, but also the first year in which the Roman
Caesar Aloysius first enters the historical record as an independent player in any regard rather than a satellite of his father. No longer content to laze about Trévere and doubtlessly eager to start making a name for himself, the prince was recorded as taking the initiative in two regards. Firstly, in response to an uptick of hostile activity on the part of the Continental Saxons, he worked off of the foundation first laid by his grandfather to engage in the time-tested Roman tactic of
divide et impera – rather than marching an army (whose best elements he didn’t have, because Constantine took them to the Middle East) into their territory himself, he incited those Saxons who had converted to Christianity and cultivated friendly ties to Rome over the past few decades to attack their pagan kindred for him, so that he need only expend a few squadrons of cavalrymen to support them rather than risk his life and numerous resources on a punitive expedition.
A rather fanciful depiction of Aloysius Caesar outside the imperial capital of Trévere, shortly after reaching the age of majority and beginning to undertake independent action in the far western reaches of the Holy Roman Empire
Secondly, when confronted with Wendish (Lat.: ‘Veneti’) raiders – specifically, the tribe of Sorbs, distant kin to the Serb federates settled in Moesia – harassing his eastern frontier out of Germania Slavica in the early summer, this time Aloysius Junior really did ride forth with a thousand horsemen and drove the raiders into a trap set by the Lombards & Thuringians in the valley of the Saale River. In the ensuing ‘Battle’ (really a large skirmish) of Saalfeld the Wendish interlopers were badly beaten, while Aloysius retook what booty & captives the Sorbs had tried to run off with and further captured their leader Ctibor, son of their chief Horislav, among the few scattered survivors. The
Caesar used Ctibor’s life as a bargaining chip in talks with the latter, extracting reparations and a promise to never raise Sorbian arms against the Empire again from Horislav which would be undergirded by a hostage exchange (Ctibor was released and replaced by his own young son, Cestmir, who Aloysius gave a place in the princely household as a pageboy).
Off in the east Constantine would have been gladdened to hear that his son and heir was out earning achievements on his own, for he needed the good news to balance out the bad – his mother Helena died in her sleep in the autumn of 710, aged sixty-five. Having spent the spring and summer months trading blows with Nusrat al-Din in a fruitless attempt to find weak spots in the opposing Islamic general’s positions, the Emperor had to spend the last months of the year traveling back to Constantinople for his mother’s funeral, having always been closer to her (despite their periodic disagreements) than to his father. The dowager empress was grievously mourned in the eastern provinces, where she had been well-regarded as an intermediary between her semi-barbaric husband and the Greek aristocracy: they wondered whether her son would try to change the unofficial accord which had given them a comfortable degree of autonomy under Aloysius I’s reign.
Funeral procession of the dowager-empress Helena to the Church of the Holy Apostles, where she would be laid to rest among her ancestors as befitting the last of the Sabbatians. Hers was a much more austere and somber affair than the proceedings which Aloysius I had insisted on for himself
The Greeks need not have wondered long, as Thomas Trithyrius too departed from the Palestinian theater, leaving his son (and Helena’s grandson) Demetrius in command there, and was appointed Praetorian Prefect of Constantinople and the Orient shortly after Helena was laid to rest. Constantine, it seemed, was wise enough to hold no wish to wrangle with the Eastern Senate and provincial nobility (so-called
dynatoi) while he was still at war with the forces of Islam. In any case, and in accordance with her final wishes Helena herself was buried not with her husband (and later her descendants) at the new mausoleum of the Aloysian emperors outside Trévere, but rather with her ancestors beneath the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople: a final testament not only to the troubled nature of their marriage but more importantly that the late empress-mother belonged to the Sabbatic dynasty by birth (and was the last of that bloodline to depart from the Earth), not a mere extension of the Aloysian one, and that she never forgot her roots; as well as that in life she had ruled over the eastern provinces as Aloysius’ co-equal in all but name – provinces which she would not abandon even in death, it seemed.
Speaking of Dar al-Islam, they were not inclined to give Constantine any respite to mourn his mother. Even as Abdullah had a letter offering his condolences sent from Kufa to Constantinople, Nusrat al-Din continued to pressure the fortresses of Upper Mesopotamia, although they held firm against his army this year thanks to the repairs Helena and Constantine had worked on in the preceding years. Izzat al-Habashi also launched a hard push along the coast of the Sinai against Demetrius Trithyrius, driving the latter out of Rafah and Gaza before the Roman general and his Banu Kalb allies were able to fight him to a standstill in the Battle of Ascalon. While the Muslims had so far been of no help whatsoever to their Donatist allies (who were still getting slowly ground down by the Stilichians), they had managed to reverse many of the Roman advances outside of Upper Mesopotamia by the time 710 ended.
The same could not be said for Abdullah’s Alid cousins in Al-Hind, now mostly occupied by having to deal with the wrathful Indo-Romans and Chinese called down upon them by the folly of Hussain. With the exception of Abduljalil, Al-Azad led his brothers to confront the Christo-Buddhist counterattack, first meeting Zamasphes in combat at Qandabil[1] – or as the non-Muslims still called it then, Ganjaba. The Muslims took up a strong defensive position on a hill, but were pushed off said hill by the heavily-armored Chinese troops in a furious clash; Hussain himself was killed, ostensibly nobly sacrificing himself to repent for his foolishness having brought this northern threat down to menace his kin in the first place, but more likely Al-Azad gave him rearguard duty to try to eliminate one of his four competitors. Nevertheless the youngest Alid prince, Al-‘Arab, led a mounted counterattack which pushed the pursuing Chinese & Indo-Roman cataphracts back and prevented the Battle of Qandabil from ending in a total disaster for his family. Still this seemed to only delay the inevitable, as Zamasphes continued to remain on the offensive while his fractious enemies remained on the backfoot – by the end of 710 the four Alids and their remaining soldiers had been pushed far down the Indus, and were stuck under siege in Sehwan (which Zamasphes recorded under its old name, Sindomana).
Clash between Indo-Roman and Arab heavy cavalrymen in the dunes of Gedrosia
Come 711, Aloysius continued to act autonomously, this time trying to further rebuild Rome’s relationship with its long-wayward province of Britannia. In addition to expanding commercial ties, the
Caesar also negotiated the marriage of the
Ríodam (‘great/high king’ – Brydany[2] rendition of Latin
Riothamus, Old Brittonic
Rigotamos) Coréné’s (Lat. ‘Corineus’) ten-year-old grandson Artur d’Avalon[3] (Bry. for ‘Artorius’, evolving from Bretanego ‘Arturo’) to his similarly young kinswoman Claire d’Armorique, herself the daughter of the incumbent Armoric Duke Clair (Lat.: ‘Clarus’) and thus great-granddaughter to his own uncle Rotholandus (Francesc ‘Rodéland’, Gallique ‘Roland’). The Pelagian Romano-British had long shared an affinity with the Bretons of Armorica, to whom they shared blood ties which began with some British refugees fleeing the province in the aftermath of Flavius Constantine’s failed war for the purple against Stilicho and the first wars with the Anglo-Saxons, but the ruling Rolandines of that land were committed Ephesians and a bastard cadet-branch of the Aloysians besides. Consequently, while hailed by the continental Romans and the immediate Pendragon household as an important step forward in reconciling their nations, the new British princess-by-marriage was viewed with suspicion (or even hostility) by many of her husband’s future subjects, who feared she was the latest Trojan horse deployed to bring Britannia back under ‘Ephesian tyranny and sin’.
Matters elsewhere conspired to pull the
Caesar’s attention away from his environs, as well as his increasingly visibly pregnant wife Himiltrude, later in the year. Down in the far south the Stilichian campaign against Hoggar was moving a little faster this year, as the brothers & their allies achieved two significant breakthroughs: in the north the Africans overcame the scorching-hot gorges beyond the town of Arak, which had represented the last high-water mark of Roman advances against the Donatists under Emperor Stilicho, while in the south the warriors of Kumbi wrested away control of the important oasis town of Tamenghest. Following the death of King Mazippa from old age and stress, his successor Cutzinas appealed to the Muslims to do something – anything – to relieve the pressure threatening to cave his kingdom in on all sides.
The solution was provided Izzat al-Habashi, who launched feints into southern Palaestina to keep Demetrius Trithyrius and the Kalb in a defensive posture while plotting a second major attack on Lepcés Magna (Lat.: ‘Leptis Magna’) for most of the year. When he struck, the Romans did not expect any success on his part: King Yusténu’s brother Muru had ably defended the city against the army of Islam a few years before, after all, and their mastery over the seas would make a prolonged siege impossible for the Muslims to pull off. Indeed Al-Habashi did not gamble on a siege – instead he moved to take Lepcés Magna by storm relying on the numerical weight of his Abyssinian and Egyptian reinforcements, the skill and ferocity of his (also mostly fellow Abyssinian)
ghilman, and the connivance of the Jewish community of the city, some of whom responded favorably to his spies’ overtures and promises of not only better treatment but also high office under Islamic rule.
With the bulk of Africa’s strength still bearing down on Hoggar, Aloysius left his pregnant wife to march down to Italy with the remaining mounted elements of the Treverian
exercitus, assume command of the
exercitus of Ravenna and from there be transported by sea to relieve Lepcés Magna under his father’s orders. By the time he had crossed the Alps however, Lepcés Magna had already fallen – Muru was killed trying to defend a sabotaged gate and the Muslims went on to sack the city which had held them back twice in the past, but for whom the third strike turned out to be a most unlucky charm. Consequently the
Caesar sailed for Cartàginu (Lat.: ‘Carthago’) instead, hoping to collect whatever strength he still could in the African capital and add it to his own army before confronting Al-Habashi: the Ethiopian
ghulam general remained on the offensive, seeking to conquer as much of Africa as he could before the remaining Stilichians turned back from Hoggar, and would have to be stopped before Aloysius could even think about trying to retake Lepcés Magna.
Comes Muru and his men, unable to close the gates of Lepcés Magna, mounting their last stand against Izzat al-Habashi's forces using what defenses of the city they still had at their disposal
While Emperor Constantine rebuffed the Caliph’s invitation to negotiate, hoping that his son would be able to reverse this significant setback, and instead continued to trade blows with Nusrat al-Din, the third great
ghulam leader in Abdullah’s employ was looking to score some achievements of his own. Abu Sa’id al-Askari had little success in pushing Kundaçiq Khagan out of Khorasan, but he did at least manage to hold the aging Khazar ruler back in the mountains of Tabaristan, while also having more success in repelling the latter’s sons in Azerbaijan. Most notably Al-Askari was able to trick Balgichi Tarkhan into leaving Tabriz with the expectation of engaging the Muslims in a pitched battle, only to then outmaneuver him and capture the lightly-defended city; the embarrassed eldest son of Kundaçiq was unable to retake Tabriz and had to retreat further north, away from the shores of Lake Urmia.
In Al-Hind, the end seemed nigh for the Alids as their rations dwindled to almost nothing in Sehwan. Only the sacrifice of the third brother Sa’ad, not coincidentally also the biggest eater among the sons of Ali, ensured they had even lasted that long; he gallantly sallied from the city with a few hundred volunteers one night and promptly died from Indo-Roman arrows. Or so saith Al-Azad – Al-‘Arab, the youngest and now the only other son of Ali remaining in the city with him, suspected his eldest brother had tricked Sa’ad into charging off to his death (which would indeed have freed up more food for them, and also eliminate another competitor in peacetime if they should survive this war) with false promises of support for his ill-fated midnight ride.
For a few more weeks, the two brothers continued to jointly pray for salvation so long as Zamasphes had them besieged. But after Abduljalil finally resolved to aid his brothers rather than risk being cut off from all support from the rest of the Caliphate if they were to be destroyed, attacking the Indo-Roman/Chinese army from behind and driving them from the field in conjunction with a desperate all-out sally from within Sehwan, Al-‘Arab immediately confided his suspicions in his second brother. The younger sons of Ali regarded their eldest brother as Qabil[4] come again, certainly not to be trusted and (although they couldn’t quite countenance killing him with their own hands) hopefully to be disposed of by their enemies before he manages to set up that same fate for them, just as he almost certainly had already done with their other brothers.
Abduljalil ibn Ali meeting with his remaining brothers, Al-Azad and Al-'Arab, after relieving the Siege of Sehwan
In early 712, Aloysius landed at Cartàginu and stopped only to muster 2,000 reinforcements (all that could be summoned out of the city on such short notice) before hastening southeastward to meet the advancing threat of Izzat al-Habashi. No sooner did he receive word that his wife had given birth to their son, who was named Leo after the late Helena’s grandfather (and thus contributed to the early Aloysian tradition of alternating the names of their heirs between past Western and Eastern Emperors), did he also engage Al-Habashi’s host near the port of Gergis[5]. While the Roman army was larger, more of its elements were green recruits from Italy & Africa than the
Caesar would have liked, and few of the elite Romano-Germanic paladins had remained rather than ride to the Levant with his father, so he had to hope that the paladins of Italy (mostly drawn from the remaining aristocratic families of Ostrogothic heritage) would suffice; conversely, the Islamic army had been worn down by fierce resistance on the part of the Christian Berbers of the Nafusa Mountains, who had slowed Al-Habashi enough for Aloysius to arrive in-theater without immediately coming under siege in Carthage in the first place.
Aloysius sought to use his greater numbers to envelop the Arab army, bringing forth Patriarch Sésénnéu (Lat.: Sisinnius) II of Carthage and the relics of the African patron Saint Simon to hearten his less dependable African troops. For his part, Al-Habashi countered with an audacious and forceful assault on the Roman center with the intent of breaking through to the
Caesar’s position and ending his life, hopefully causing the collapse of his army. This strategy was nearly successful despite Aloysius packing most of his professional troops (particularly the infantry legions of Trévere) into his center, foiled only by the valor of his
candidati bodyguards who fought off the death-squad of
mubarizun Al-Habashi had assigned with bringing him the Roman prince’s head at the cost of their own lives. Unable to bring the engagement to an early and decisive conclusion, and feeling the weight of the Roman numbers slowly but surely pressing in against him over the course of the day, Al-Habashi retreated after a few hours and left the Romans in possession of the battlefield.
Despite having been defeated in the Battle of Gergis, Al-Habashi managed an orderly retreat out of Africa Zeugitana and back eastward along the Libyan coast, while young Aloysius was initially too rattled by his brush with death and his army too battered to immediately give chase. Likely he would have made the retaking of Libya much harder for the Africans & Romans, had he not been killed in an ambush by the Berbers of Nafusa on his way back to Lepcés Magna some weeks after the battle. Heartened by this news, Aloysius informed Yusténu & Guséla to keep applying pressure to Hoggar while he dealt with the Muslims in Libya. Al-Habashi’s second-in-command and now successor Amr ibn Qayyim al-Ansari was not so daring as his superior, and essentially allowed the
Caesar to march unopposed onto Leptis Magna in favor of pulling all his troops behind the mostly-intact walls of that decidedly not-so-intact city.
A candidatus bodyguard of Aloysius Caesar strikes down one of the Islamic champions deployed as battlefield assassins by Al-Habashi at the climax of the Battle of Gergis
In the Levant, the battle-lines were beginning to firmly stabilize as Africa increasingly became the focal point of Roman-Arab hostilities instead. In the spring Constantine attempted a joint offensive with the Ghassanids and Banu Kalb to secure the upper length of the Euphrates and shut Islam out of eastern Syria, but this strategem was foiled due to Nusrat al-Din managing to defeat their armies separately before they could fight their way to the intended rallying point at Sipri, which the Arabs called Asfirah[6]. Nusrat mounted his own offensive in the late summer and early fall months, intending on pushing the Romans out of Upper Mesopotamia once and for all, but this time the
Augustus managed to lure him into engaging on favorable (to the Romans) ground around the Mountain of Nisibis and soundly defeated him. When the Caliph once again offered to negotiate peace terms, Constantine was more receptive this year, although the talks broke down in short order – he was adamant about both holding all of his territorial gains and having Lepcés Magna returned to the Empire, both conditions which were unacceptable to Abdullah.
Further to the east, while the Alids continued to struggle to survive against Zamasphes, Abu Sa’id al-Askari was finding that the army left to him had hit their limit on the Khazar front. He had managed to push the royal Tarkhans back up the western coast of the Caspian and beyond the mouth of the River Aras (as the Arabs called the Araxes), but could go no further. Islamic attempts to regain further territory beyond that river were repelled by the recovering Khazars, and a better-prepared King Gurgen of Armenia also decisively shut down an effort by Al-Askari to support his superior Al-Din’s Mesopotamian offensive by pushing into the Armenian kingdom – after facing determined Armenian-Georgian resistance in the Battle of the Akera River and the failure of Sempadian partisan support to materialize, Al-Askari withdrew rather than risk overreaching and exposing his position in the southeastern Caucasus to the Khazar tarkhans. Kundaçiq Khagan seemed content to hold on to his gains in Khorasan and just aggressively raid Islamic Persia this year, but was committed to not negotiating a separate peace with the Caliph – his old oath of vengeance and sense of honor compelled him to not abandon Constantine and the Romans.
Gurgen Mamikonian, King of Armenia, overseeing some of his troops training ahead of the Battle of the Akera River
Beyond the borders and troubles of the Roman world and its immediate great neighbors, trouble continued to brew in Britannia. The
Ríodam Coréné passed away in the last weeks of 712’s winter, and while he was an ailing old man whose demise from natural causes could easily have been predicted by any observer who beheld him, hardline Pelagian devotees elected to consider his death to be retribution from on high for his policy of rapproachment toward the Romans – freedom of will and choice did not mean freedom of choice, as they would describe it. These Pelagians would doubtless have been further infuriated by his son and successor Bedur’s (Britt.: ‘Bedwyr’, Gall.: ‘Bedivere’) commitment to staying the course, and their displeasure manifested in the outbreak of a rebellion in the mountains of Cambre[7] before the year was out, which culminated in the acclamation of his cousin Brogeual (Britt. ‘Brochvael’) d’Ésc[8] as a rival high king in Gloué[9] in the week after Christmas.
713 saw the Romans and Muslims each making their last major attempts to redraw the geopolitical map of western Eurasia in this round of fighting. In the west Aloysius continued to keep Lepcés Magna under siege, having the Roman navy blockade it by sea while on land his legions not only invested the city but also successfully fought off Islamic efforts to relieve Amr al-Ansari out of Egypt throughout the year. Al-Ansari himself did not have sufficent rations to withstand a long siege, having lost a good deal of Al-Habashi’s marching supplies while being harried by Berber guerrillas on his way back to the city, and sued for terms near the end of the year in an attempt to extract himself from Lepcés Magna.
With their homeland secured by the timely intervention of the
Caesar, the Stilichians had a free hand to redouble their attacks on Hoggar and achieved another big breakthrough this year. After so many centuries and another seventeen days of hard fighting, they & their Kumbian allies finally managed to grind their way to the Donatist capital of Abalessa (although Prince Guséla was killed along the way, as the Donatists managed to drop a boulder on his tent while he was sleeping inside it) and capture it by storm in spite of the blistering Saharan heat and rough mountain terrain in their way. While some of the Donatist population managed to flee into the Hoggari gorges west of the city (those who could not were exterminated by the Afro-Roman army, enraged beyond all reason by the three centuries it took to get to this point and the determined Donatist defense), Cutzinas preferred to fall with his city rather than have it be said that he was a coward in the face of the sinful Ephesians, and Yusténu duly avenged his brothers by taking the king’s head in turn.
African troops breaking into the Hoggari capital of Abalessa. After three hundred years of incessant raiding, limited punitive expeditions, and the occasional disastrous failure, the Ephesian Christians of North Africa finally had their ancestral Donatist archenemies dead to rights and were determined to ensure the latter could no longer ever threaten them again
While Hoggar’s population centers had been overwhelmed by the forces of Ephesian Christianity (although Donatist resistance continued to linger in the caves and gorges of Hoggar), further in the east Nusrat al-Din and Emperor Constantine met for three more great battles in an effort to shift the pendulum of war. In the first months of the year Al-Din shifted his focus southward, defeating Demetrius Trithyrius in the Second Battle of Ascalon and placing Jerusalem under siege, but he was pulled back northward after Constantine launched additional offensives out of Upper Mesopotamia to relieve pressure on Palaestina. The
Augustus and Islam’s incumbent foremost generalissimo met at the Second Battle of Sinjar, Ras al-Ayn (or as the Romans still called it, Resaina) and finally Constantina[10]: the Muslims won the first two battles, but Al-Din overextended his forces in his counterattack and was badly beaten after Constantine found his second wind in the third. Following these clashes and further inconclusive fighting in the eastern Caucasus, the Emperor and the Caliph agreed to a truce and to once again try to reach a peace agreement.
In Britain, the civil war between the lawful
Ríodam Bedur and the usurper Brogeual rapidly came to a climax as the latter marched directly on Lundéne[11], expecting to settle the succession in a single decisive blow. In hopes of acting so quickly as to prevent either the English or the Romans from having any chance to invade his country, Bedur duly rose to meet his cousin’s challenge and engaged the rebels on the road to his capital near Hydropole[12], both men risking their lives on the front line of their armies in keeping with Pelagian tradition (which demanded that kings and generals lead from the front so as to set an example for their underlings). This decision proved more fatal for Brogeual than it did for Bedur – within half an hour the usurper had been felled by a javelin through the face, after which his army quickly surrendered. Having seen off one rebellion, Bedur was now confident enough to call a synod at Lundéne with the intention of finessing Pelagian doctrine.
There he and his supporters among the British Church proposed a ‘Semi-Pelagian’ position which taught that humans were born untainted by sin and with the free will to choose between salvation or damnation,
but also that they would grow in faith by the will of God. Unfortunately for him the hard-line Pelagian bishops and priests believed this to be erroneous doctrine, introduced not to clarify existing Pelagian teachings or allay domestic unrest but rather as a first step toward submission to Ephesian dogma, and vigorously rejected it on those grounds. The Ephesians in Lundéne and the Holy Roman Empire also rejected this middle position, instead firmly upholding the synergistic doctrinal position which held that God was involved in every step of the road to salvation including its beginning (furthermore, they would not deviate from the other orthodox position that all men were born with the taint of original sin, which the Semi-Pelagians still rejected). It would seem that religious conflict in Britannia would continue to swell and escalate after all, despite Bedur’s attempt at a compromise.
The Ríodam Bedur at the Synod of Lundéne, 713-714, surrounded by those bishops he could find who were supportive of his 'Semi-Pelagian' compromise and facing off with the hard-line Pelagians. His efforts to find a compromise that would indefinitely keep the Romans at bay without also fueling civil unrest in his own kingdom were not going very well as of this time, to put it mildly
Elsewhere, beyond the opposite limit of even the maximal Roman border in the East once attained by Emperor Sabbatius, the Alids moved towards their final major confrontation with the Indo-Romans at the Battle of the Gomal River. Here at first the Muslims nearly had the victory, baiting their enemies into crossing the river with a feint retreat before assailing the Indo-Roman vanguard with their full might and using catapults to attack the bridge the foe had just marched over; but Zamasphes’ engineers had prepared numerous boats precisely for the case that his army may need to cross without using a contested bridge. Ultimately the Muslims were defeated and Al-Azad killed by an arrow in the chaos (fired, perhaps, not by any Indo-Roman or Chinese soldier but by one of his own brothers’ men), but the Indo-Romans and Chinese had suffered their heaviest casualties to date and Abduljalil & Al-‘Arab survived to rally the remaining Islamic troops.
At this point the remaining Alid brothers sued for peace and offered to both cede their mountainous hinterland (of those still in Muslim hands, the most important town in that region was Qiqan[13]) and all their territory near the headwaters of the Indus to the Indo-Romans, as well as to pay tribute to China. Zamasphes was skeptical of their terms and wished to carry on the fight until he had finished off the Alids altogether, but was persuaded to accept this agreement by the Chinese general Li Lun, who thought it a good enough deal and was weary of fighting so far from his homeland. Thus did the Alids manage to largely settle their fratricidal internal issues and live to fight another day, albeit at a rather steep cost to themselves – including, in Abduljalil’s case, having to pass up on an opportunity to further expand his own domain in India.
The early months of 714 was where the Khazars mounted their own final attempt to alter their border with Dar al-Islam, as Kundaçiq Khagan – conspicuously missing from the tentative trucial agreement between Constantine and Abdullah, which he had expressed vocal support for but not actually committed to himself – launched a surprise winter offensive out of Khorasan. However, his sons were not able to support him in the west, allowing Abu Sa’id al-Askari to blunt his assault in the Battle of Saanabad[14] in March. Only after this final gambit had been foiled and under further urging from his Roman brother-in-law did the elderly Khagan agree to join the truce and peace talks, which would be held at Erevan[15] near the Armenian border with the Caliphate.
The Peace of Erevan would adjust the borders of Western Eurasia in favor of Christendom and the Khazars, but not by nearly as much as may have been expected at the outset of this conflict considering that the Hashemites had started out in a civil war. The Romans kept their gains in Upper Mesopotamia, including many important fortress towns (of which Nisibis was the most prominent) which they could now restore, but failed to acquire any meaningful amount of buffer-space in Syria or especially Palaestina, much less cut Egypt off from the rest of the Caliphate. They also managed to avoid the embarrassment of losing any territory to the Muslims, at least – Lepcés Magna was returned to African hands, Amr al-Ansari’s position there having clearly become unsustainable. Al-Ansari was also required by treaty to not only return the plunder and slaves taken from the sack of the city, but further abandon the treacherous Jewish elders who had helped his late superior Al-Habashi take the site in the first place to Roman justice: naturally Aloysius Caesar and King Yusténu immediately had them killed, and their chief Anan bar Elijah – held responsible for persuading the others to sell the city out to the Muslims in exchange for ‘high office’ under the new regime – was hanged from Lepcés Magna’s highest remaining tower above his compatriots.
As for the Khazars, they gained a significant swath of territory in Khorasan, and a good deal less in the eastern Caucasus. Kundaçiq was able to preserve his conquests between the Amu Darya and the Aladagh & Alborz mountain ranges, placing him in control of almost the entirety of the Caspian Sea’s eastern shoreline. On that same body of water’s western coast however, the Khazars were only able to advance their control as far as Ardabil, while the Armenians’ hold on the western shore of Lake Urmia was also affirmed once more by the Muslims. The vast majority of Persia proper and large parts of Azerbaijan remained under Islamic authority, and Abdullah now finally had the time & breathing space to reorder it to his liking with his troublesome cousins defeated & foreign enemies kept at bay.
The Caliph would not be the only monarch to use the time between this great war and the inevitable next one to engage in some housecleaning, that was for certain. The
Augustus Constantine did not even reach Constantinople before he called an ecumenical council (specifically in Miletus, south of Ephesus in Ionia), ostensibly with the intention of heading off various theological controversies between the Eastern & Western Patriarchates before they metastasized into much worse problems – such as the filioque, a single line found in Latin renditions of the Nicene Creed – as well as finding an alternative olive branch with which to bring the British Church back in line with the rest of Ephesianism.
Ephesian bishops arriving for the Council of Miletus, 714
However, Constantine was in truth more interested in resolving political tensions related to the expanded size and scope of the Roman Patriarchate (namely that the vast and still-expanding ranks of Germanic & Slavic converts did not feel represented in the still heavily Italian, and specifically urban-Roman, dominated Holy See). Concocting a religious doctrine upon which to justify the Roman imperial office and especially a good reason as to why the Aloysian dynasty should have an undying claim upon it constituted an important secondary objective for the Emperor, as well. Ironically however, the first issue raised at the Council of Miletus once all the attending prelates had been seated would have nothing to do with any of those issues: the Carthaginian delegation, led by Bishop Gradzéanu (Lat.: ‘Gratian’) of Yunéga[16], communicated their Patriarch’s and King’s desire to harshly punish the African Jewry in general for the treachery of the Jews of Lepcés Magna, which after all had cost the latter’s youngest brother Muru his life on top of thousands of other Christians killed or enslaved.
While Constantine remained at Miletus, his heir Aloysius made his way back to Trévere, not only to reunite with his wife and newborn son but also to take up an interesting proposal coming out of Britannia. The troubles of the
Ríodam Bedur clearly were not at an end, as the British high king was attacked by assassins while conducting a regular tour of his realm in hopes of inspiring his skeptical subjects and shoring up support for his rule. While he and his bodyguards managed to dispatch the would-be regicides, Bedur strongly suspected that the assassins were Pelagian zealots infuriated by his continuation of his father’s Roman-friendly policies and willingness to compromise with Rome on theological issues. His response was to offer to send his own heir Artur to Nantes, the capital of Armorica, both so that the latter might be brought up alongside his wife and for safety’s sake while also avoiding placing him under direct Roman custody in Trévere; this was one compromise the Aloysians could certainly live with. However, although it safeguarded the Pendragon heir’s life, this choice would prove to be yet another one which cost Bedur more esteem in the eyes of his own Pelagian subjects.
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[1] Gandava, Pakistan.
[2] ‘Britannic’ – Later British Romance, evolving out of Early British Romance or ‘Bretanego’ after another two centuries of separation from Rome. Brydany would have been considered truly its own Romance language, not a mere dialect of Vulgar Latin: no longer bearing any great resemblance to Italian unlike its predecessor, I had in mind instead a strong French/Gallo base (since historical British Romance was said to take a good deal after Gallo-Romance) with an added Welsh/Breton flair to distinguish it from continental Romance.
[3] Glastonbury Tor, then still an island surrounded by unreclaimed fens.
[4] The Islamic name for Cain.
[5] Zarzis.
[6] As-Safira.
[7] Cambria – that is to say, Wales.
[8] Isca Augusta – Caerleon.
[9] Glevum, or Caerloym – Gloucester.
[10] Viranşehir.
[11] Londinium – London. This Brydany rendition takes more after the Briton/Welsh translation of London’s Latin name, ‘Lundein’, than it does after the French ‘Londres’.
[12] Dorchester-on-the-Thames. The village may have been referred to as ‘Hydropolis’ in Greek & Latin, hence its Brydany rendition as ‘Hydropole’.
[13] Kalat.
[14] Mashhad.
[15] Yerevan.
[16] Unica Colonia – Oran.
