North America at least, thanks to news of the continental mainland's discovery reaching Europe around the time he reunited the Roman world and insisting that the new lands be named after him. Since 'Aloysius' is the fancier Latin version of 'Louis' (with the same root in Frankish 'Clovis'/'Chlodovechus'), though the Romans & friends definitely don't know the full extent of their discovery yet, this is tantamount to calling everything from Greenland to Panama 'Louisiana'.
There's never been a successful conquest of Northern China from the South in Dynastic history, the South just has no pasturelands to support cavalry, and that becomes more and more crippling the deeper you go into the Northern plains. And well, the odds of a total disaster and an entire army wiped out are dangerously high when taking on cavalry with infantry.
And while I'd normally say inviting in a major barbarian dynasty as allies is inviting disaster, there being 2 northern barbarian states makes it a bit more survivable. And well, the Byzantines managed to make it work with trading Princess Anna for the Varangian Guard.
Also, really like the Romans pulling peacetime deniable state sponsored piracy. Amusingly ironic considering how much Muslims pulled that against the Christian world historically. A serious campaign of piracy and coastal raiding can almost entirely depopulate an entire coastline, which in turn helpfully cripples that coastline's ability to contribute to naval strength.
Arguably the KMT pulled it off, if one were to view them & the CCP as 'dynasties' in the broader context of Chinese history. But yes, generally speaking there's some major (even downright crippling) disadvantages that come with trying to unite China from the south, even if the demographic one at least isn't as horribly lopsided in the ninth century as it was during the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (where Cao Wei's population comfortably outnumbered those of both Shu Han & Eastern Wu combined). As this chapter demonstrates, Dingzong is still able to put up a decent fight and deny the True Han a quick victory even though the latter attacked him after the Later Liang have first been mauled by Tibet and then their own civil war, and if the meaning of his eventual temple name should be any indicator it's that he wouldn't be a quitter even if things weren't starting to look up for him now.
Anything & everything else, as usual, is spoiler territory. Though some (like there being a renewed outbreak of hostilities between Rome & Denmark) actually isn't really since this chapter is pretty clearly setting them up as imminent happenings in the next. I can say that as we approach the middle of this century, I'll be dropping a map update & another factional overview chapter around 850, as well.
I'd say it's more the Northern Warlords and the KMT agreed to pretend the Warlords lost in exchange for the KMT actually losing so the KMT saves face and everybody avoids the cost of continuing the quagmire.
Though the KMT is also well past the period in which cavalry dominance played much role in warfare, so they really could have actually won.
And thinking on the next Roman-Muslim War, apparently Charlemagne tried to build a canal between the Rhine and the Danube where two of their respective tributaries are only 2 km of flat but unfortunately marshy land apart. He failed, and nobody ended up connecting the rivers until after railroads made it much less economically competitive.
The Aloysians though have much better engineers and a lot more resources than the Carolingians. And such a waterway would be much more valuable to the Aloysians too, considering their center of power (especially military recruitment) is on the middle Rhine but they have to keep fighting wars in the Eastern Med. No state in history would gain so much from faster and cheaper travel between Trier and Constantinople. German armies would be able to move against either greek secessionism or an invasion from the steppe, and a directly Aloysian controlled trade route from the Med/Black Seas to the North Sea would bypass the now Stilichian controlled Straits of Gibralter. It would even conveniently keep the Venetians from growing too big for their breeches, quite a serious concern for the historical Romans. Venice historically became ultra wealthy from running convoys to both the Eastern Med and the North Sea.
While war did not yet break out between the Holy Roman Empire and the Caliphate throughout 836, as both sides were still continuing to make preparations for those hostilities, swords were most certainly drawn between the Empire and the Danes, as Emperor Romanus dispatched his second punitive expedition against that regrown thorn on his northern flank. Aloysius Caesar was given his first field assignment as its nominal commander, though of course actual leadership of the approximately 10,000-strong Roman force (four legions backed by another six thousand assorted auxiliaries, this time almost all Germanic or from the British Isles with a small Wendish contingent to minimize inter-ethnic infighting) would remain in the hands of seasoned generals & captains rather than the teenage heir to the purple. Ørvendil, for his part, was not enough of a fool to assume the Romans wouldn't retaliate against his insults and tearing up of his father's treaty with them: he imposed the leiðangr upon his subjects, a sort of Norse draft wherein the free men of the realm were mobilized into ship-based units called skipreiða (with one free warrior being called up from each farm, and being responsible for maintaining & staffing a ship even if he was actually going to be mostly fighting on land).
Now the Danes did not have their own full-fledged system of advanced arms manufacturies and supply depots to rival the Roman fabricae, but rather each of their warriors had to procure their own equipment by whatever means were available to them. Thus Ørvendil ended up with an army that actually outnumbered the expeditionary force Romanus was sending against him but which was also not as well-trained and certainly inevitably far more unevenly equipped .For every heavily armored, ax-swinging housecarl or furious berserker, he fielded many more enthusiastic but poorly armed warriors who might have a helmet at most for protection, and in any case even the wealthiest of the Danish troops were accustomed to only riding their horses to the battlefield before dismounting to fight rather than serving as actual cavalrymen. At sea this force still proved more than capable of contesting the waters around western Jutland with the Romans' Belgic squadron, and also facilitated extensive Danish raiding of the Frisian, Saxon and even British shores (the primary means by which their king 'paid' the men levied by the leiðangr).
On land however, these weaknesses spelled disaster for Ørvendil's attempt to devastate northern Saxony and chase the Romans & allies off their own turf, as exemplified when he & Fjölnir overconfidently engaged about half of the expeditionary force at the Battle of Stade. The Danish shield-wall was broken up by a seemingly unending legionary assault from the front (in truth Aloysius and his captains simply cycled through their cohorts so that when one had tired or taken too many casualties, they fell back in good order and were immediately replaced by the fresh rank waiting behind them, but this gave the Danes the demoralizing impression that they were fighting an endless tide of unnervingly stoic enemies) as well as cavalry strikes on their flanks, where every time the Danes thought they had chased the Roman & Teutonic knights away, it turned out the latter were just falling back to regroup and retrieve new lances before charging in once more. Out of the 8,000 Danes who fought in that engagement, about 1,000 were killed or captured between both the battle itself and (much more lethally) the rout back to their boats on the lower Elbe, while the Romans (despite being outnumbered almost 2:1) lost a little over a tenth as many men. After this calamity, Ørvendil retreated back to the Danevirke, never to sally forth in force again; and when forced to fight a large-scale pitched battle, he would only ever do so defensively against Aloysius' army for the rest of the war – now at last he saw the wisdom in his father's wall-building, and at least the dense forests & swamp before said walls also proved as much a hindrance for the superior Roman cavalry as they had last time.
The Danish shield-wall meets the Roman legionaries' formation in close combat at Stade. Roman military discipline and stoicism in battle unnerved the Vikings, who were used to enemies that taunted and bellowed at the top of their lungs as they themselves often did, but not as much as the impression the Romans gave of being a relentless and untiring tide of soldiers
Meanwhile in China, Dingzong knew he had for once regained the strategic initiative and sought to make as much use of it as possible before the True Han reasserted their still-considerable numerical advantage. The Liang kept the Duke of Yue's men tied up by besieging Pengcheng while actually repositioning the bulk of their forces (including many of the Khitan horsemen) to repel the other two Han armies operating north of the Yangtze, neither of which were expecting a great counteroffensive aimed in their direction. The westernmost Han army was the hardest hit by Dingzong's surprise attack, and was driven from its footholds in the southern Qin Mountains along Hanzhong's boundary with great bloodshed in the Battles of Baoji, Mount Taibai and Yangping Pass: its commander Si Guofang, Marquis of Jingnan and a matrilineal relative of the imperial Liu clan of the south, got separated from his men in the retreat and was killed after blundering into a Liang patrol who he confused for his own soldiers. The central Han army was also beaten in the Battles of Xincai and Caizhou[1], but its commander Wang Shaoyu managed a more orderly retreat to the south without any embarrassments like what befell the western army.
In response to these debacles, Duanzong did not lose hope, but rather resolved to reinforce his expeditionary armies and also appoint a hopefully-more-competent general to replace his fallen kinsman. Wang stabilized the situation in the center with a victory at the Battle of Huaiyuan[2] and the rough terrain in the west hindered the Liang's pursuit of Si's remaining forces, particularly the movements of the Khitans who were unfamiliar with the local terrain and found few willing to help them even within the ranks of their allies owing to their especially barbarous conduct, such that Li Jian was able to take up his new assignment as their commander and reorganize them quickly enough to hold ground beyond the upper Yangtze. If the Khitan Liao had proven willing to side with the Northern Dynasty, Duanzong reasoned that he had best reach out to their rivals the Jurchen Jin, and turn the far north into a proxy battlefield: for their part, the Jurchens were already preparing to get revenge on the Khitans who had just bested them and hardly even needed prodding from these distant southerners to prod them further anyway.
Khitan warriors in China, where they were fighting on behalf of the Later Liang
837 saw the Romans in the north trying their might against the improved Danevirke, while Romanus kept his eye on the much more important ball in the south that he was preparing to contest with Ali. Horik's digging of an additional trench and reinforcement of his outer palisades with the addition of more timber & stones certainly didn't hurt his sons' chances of weathering the storm, but what continued to prove to be the biggest problem for the Romans was the terrain: the marshy woodland was difficult to traverse in both winter and summer, hobbled their mobility and provided Danish war parties operating beyond the Danevirke with many opportunities to hide from & ambush them. Aloysius, who had an interest in cartography even at this young age, did observe that the neck of the Jutland Peninsula was a good place to build a canal linking the North and Baltic Seas and allowing good Christians to circumvent the heathen-controlled waters to the north (which, he had learned from his Danish captives, were called 'Skagerrak' and 'Kattegat'), but despite this observation, the day such a canal would start construction was still very far off indeed.
In the meantime, he and the Romans under his command busied themselves with trying to secure their supply lines (which were vulnerable to Danish raids both overland and at sea) and besieging the Danevirke. Rather than spread his forces too thinly in an attempt to bring the entire line down at once, Aloysius had studied – and now hoped to repeat – his great-uncle Haistulf's success in breaching the palisade during Horik's reign by concentrating his efforts against specific sections of the Danish defensive line. At the most dramatic moment of this campaign, late in the autumn the Caesar personally led an assault on the ramparts near Hollingstedt, known to his Anglo-Saxon auxiliaries as one of the places where their Angle ancestors stopped on the way to the sea & then Britain.
Now the Danish heavy infantry had found defending the Danevirke tremendously easier than trying to fight the Romans in an open field and had used their advantage to repel four attempts at storming the battlements prior to this one, and this one seemed like it would be no different. Indeed Aloysius himself was nearly killed twice in the engagement, first by a mail-clad housecarl and then by a frenzied berserker (this one belonging to the jöfurr, 'boar warriors' or literally 'wild boars', and thus wearing a swine's head over his helm rather than a wolf's pelt in the fashion of the ulfheðnar) – the Roman crown prince defended himself ably enough and killed his first assailant at the cost of his shield, but that left him vulnerable to the second and he would certainly have fallen at the swine-headed warrior had it not been for Radovid, who fittingly killed the boar-warrior with a spear. The Romans were sufficiently heartened by their prince's willingness to risk his life alongside theirs to persist in the assault, eventually overwhelming this section of the Danevirke, and a grateful Aloysius immediately bought his friend's freedom after the battle. Unfortunately for the Romans, they came up against Horik's secondary stone wall not far behind this one, to which the surviving Danish defenders had retreated and linked up with reinforcements.
The Danes found that their berserkers, while being mighty warriors who excelled at individual combat and terrifying lesser foes into retreat, struggled to overcome the formation-fighting Romans who did not easily quail before the furious attacks of such wild men. Ørvendil found much greater utility in having them defend his walls rather than sallying forth to fight the Romans in the field
While the various great Indian principalities were arming up and counting down the final months to the outbreak of hostilities with their mutual Islamic enemy, a little ways to their east, the war in China continued to expand as the Jurchens finally made their move. With many thousands of Khitans having gone south to help the Liang and help themselves to some plunder (theoretically they were only supposed to be pillaging the Han's encampments & supply lines, but inevitably more than a few opportunistic Khitans would also take time to 'liberate' goods from the very same Liang subjects they were supposed to be liberating from Han control), these northeastern barbarians thought they had a clean shot at their rivals' heartland, and they were right. Guozong of the Jin and his heir, Crown Prince Bukūri Fuman, rapidly tore through the comparatively small Khitan forces present to guard their homeland and sacked their capital of Linhuang[3], in the process finally killing the former's hated rival Dazong and retrieving Zhen Mei (who managed to smooth-talk the Jurchen Emperor into not immediately murdering her and persuade him that she truly favored him over Dazong) as part of the now-captive Liao harem.
Duanzong toasted his new northern allies' success. Furthermore, as he expected, this heavy blow unsurprisingly outraged the other Khitans to the point where they were ready to abandon Dingzong's side to get their revenge, and Dazong's son Yelü Shao marshaled the Khitan armies in the south with the intent of returning north so that he might avenge his father & crush the Jurchens for this (in his view, anyway – the Jurchens would argue it was a long time coming) act of craven, opportunistic backstabbing. Dingzong could do little to sway the younger man to stay in China proper, given how full of righteous rage he was, and the departure of the Khitans under their new Emperor (who history would remember chiefly by his temple name, 'Chongzong') opened up gaps in his ranks that he could only hope his own cavalry corps had been sufficiently rebuilt to fill. Fortunately for him, it turned out that he was right on that count, and while unable to mount further offensives against the True Han as Duanzong sent in his own reinforcements, he at least had trained and supplied enough new Chinese horsemen to effectively harass the Han & keep them off-balance so that in this year, they did not mount any great northward counter-counteroffensive of their own either.
On the other side of the Earth, as his herds grew and his flock of chickens was expanded not only with the hatching of chicks but also the addition of turkeys, Kádaráš-rahbád took some time to further lock down and consolidate his control over the territories wrested from the Three Fires Council in their recent war. Since he had laid waste to many villages and thought the ones still standing to be of dubious loyalty, the great warchief shifted his strategy from simply giving his veterans new homes on the conquered soil to congregating them into entirely new towns founded on said soil, to serve as Dakarunikuan colonies and outposts of his authority. Now fortunately Dakaruniku had experienced a baby boom in the decades following their first disastrous brush with European disease, and as that generation was coming of age they provided the ambitious Kádaráš-rahbád with a large number of eager warriors and settlers with whom to further expand his power. Each new town followed the same basic formula: they were centered around earthen mounds just like Dakaruniku itself, with the tallest being where the governor (invariably a trusted lieutenant of Kádaráš-rahbád's) and his family lived, and they were settled by a mix of reliable older veterans expecting a more permanent reward for their loyal service; young blood drawn from Dakaruniku's excess population; and slaves (who were chosen for not being native to the area, and thus were less likely to know the land & nearby villages well enough to get a rebellion going).
Mounds (used not merely for defense but also as a status marker), riverside or irrigated farms, and defensive palisades: all key features of Dakarunikuan living
The long-awaited second war between Ali & Romanus finally popped off in the early summer of 838, as a border skirmish between one party of Islamic ghazw and another of Greek, Armenian and Christian Arab soldiers while the former were returning from their raid near Gawar[4] gave both emperors the pretext to finally escalate their mutual hostility into the open. Since Ali was the one defending territory the Romans wanted this time around, it fell to Romanus to strike the first blow, and he did just that with a two-pronged advance on Mardin from Edessa in the west and Amida to the north. The Roman army besieged this lost town for four months before successfully bringing one of its walls (only partly repaired since the Arab siege years prior) down by undermining it and successfully storming the place, and followed up their victory at the reclaimed & rechristened Marida by having their second army, operating out of Antioch and led by Michael Skleros (who had since been promoted and descended from the Caucasus Mountains to fight this much stronger foe compared to the Khazars), defeat one of the Saracens' own field armies in the Battle of Azaz in the autumn months. So far, the war had been off to a good start for Romanus and the Holy Roman Empire.
With swords drawn against a far more powerful enemy in the east and lands far more prosperous than the muddy forests of southern Jutland at stake, Romanus also predictably decided the time had come to put an end to the comparatively insignificant game his son was playing up north. As Aloysius' men proved impossible to dislodge from the position they had managed to take on the Danevirke's first line, but said first line had also done its job in delaying the Roman advance long enough for the Danes to muster an impregnable defense on the Danevirke's stone second line, Ørvendil proved more willing to reach a negotiated settlement this time. Since Romanus wanted to end hostilities quickly, he did not push for overly harsh terms that the proud Danish king would be more inclined to reject: no territory would be lost and the Romans would not obstruct the Danes from rebuilding the damaged fortifications on their own soil, and while Ørvendil would be required to once more ban Viking pirates from his ports, he 'just' had to pay a one-off lump sum in war reparations to the Empire rather than years of tribute as had been demanded of his father.
These terms were certainly a disappointment to young Aloysius, who felt that he'd been gaining the upper hand and had hoped to breach the Danevirke entirely to cap off his first outing into the battlefield before going all the way to Syria & Mesopotamia to continue fighting in his father's name. But if the terms of this new Peace of Aldenburg[5] disappointed the Caesar with their moderation, the fact that they were found agreeable at all by the Danish king horrified his brother Fjölnir, despite Ørvendil's hope that in time he could build his forces back up to a point where he could once more repudiate this peace settlement and challenge the Romans (especially when he learned from Norse merchants returning from trips down the Volga that the cause of the Romans' distraction was a war with the Muslims). Humbled by the great defeat at Stade and then by witnessing the Romans breaching their outer defensive works, it had dawned on Fjölnir that perhaps there really could be no victory against the power of the Holy Roman Empire in the long run: but, if that were the case – and if even his brother had ended up bowing to them, however slightly, in the end to prove the truth of his pessimistic expectation – then that meant Horik was right all along, and he and Ørvendil had committed patricide for nothing. The Danes in general were also dismayed by their second defeat at Roman hands in a row, even if this one stung less than the first, and while some conspired against their new king for failing like the old, others began to look north and west for escape routes from this apparently intractable foe.
The idea of sailing somewhere the Romans couldn't follow started seeming more attractive to those Norsemen who had the misfortune of fighting and losing to them around the mid-ninth century. The Irish had beaten them there, true, but Ireland was also filled with said Irish and that didn't stop them from settling there!
In India, skirmishes had already begun to erupt along the long eastern border of Dar al-Islam between said border's Alid guardians and the Indian coalition associated with the Roman cause even before word of the declaration of war came down from Kufa. These cousins of the ruling senior Hashemite branch had autonomously made their own preparations for the war their overlord and kinsman had warned them was on the horizon, and divided their responsibilities on the Indian theater into three fronts: Abu Sa'id Khalid ibn Ahmad took command of the forces arrayed against the Indo-Romans, Abd al-Halim ibn Marwan would be responsible for the war effort against the Chandras of Bengal in the east, and Mu'sab ibn al-Ashtar had agreed to lead the fight against the Salankayanas. By this time the Alid family had grown so large that it could practically be considered a separate clan from its Hashemite parent, with its own myriad cadet branches taking root from Central Asia and into the Punjab, and they would doubtless reorganize themselves as such if ever given a pretext & a window of opportunity to break away from the senior Hashemites'.
The Indo-Romans under King Acacius enjoyed some significant early success at this stage of the war, turning back Abu Sa'id's initial attempt to bullrush Kophen in the Battle of Chak[6] (in which loyal local Paropamisadae of the Wardag tribe proved indispensable) and pushing a ways into the Muslim-controlled western mountains of Paropamisus & Arachosia before stalling near Firozkoh, where Abu Sa'id was building a lavish mosque and not only fought fiercely to defend it but had also brought up enough reinforcements to effectively hold the line. As Acacius pushed forward, he also increasingly came under attack by the Islamic-aligned Paropamisadae in the employ of Abu Sa'id, quite a few of whom had converted to Islam over the past decades (for the warlike new faith was one they could take to like fish to water) and who bitterly contested the mountain passes with their Indo-Roman-aligned rivals with a new religious dimension added to their traditional rivalries. The Chandras and Salankayanas enjoyed more qualified successes against the Alid forces arrayed against them, with the former pushing as far as Monghyr[7] this year and the latter repelling Mu'sab's effort to cut off their Gujarati vassals from them. However, in truth both Alid commanders were following the advice of their own Turkic lieutenants to essentially enact the feigned retreat tactic so favored by horse-riding nomads on a strategic scale to draw the Indians onto more favorable ground on which to envelop and crush them, and sought to engineer the circumstances for such dramatic victories over their enemies throughout this year.
Further to the east in China, while most of the Khitans had followed their new emperor into battle with the Jurchens on the northern steppes, Emperor Dingzong did manage to poach a few thousand of these fierce Mongolic nomads for his own ends with monetary bribes and settlement rights in some of the devastated territories to the south & east of his realm. He immediately had to throw those Khitans who agreed to join him into battle with the True Han, who had finally mustered the strength to forge ahead with their renewed northward offensive. Huge battles were fought at Xiaopei[8] (which, as the hometown of the first Han Emperor Gaozu/Liu Bang, was of considerable symbolic interest to the True Han), Bozhou[9], Shouyang[10], Songzhou[11] and Guangzhou[12] in which the Liang's superior cavalry and the generalship provided by Dingzong & his veteran commanders allowed them to match the greater numbers of the Han: they lost the first two battles but won the last two. However, the fact that Southern China was still almost pristine compared to the bloodied & rather devastated North and the infrastructure built by Dezu (which had in peaceful times been a great boon to the subjects of the Han) making for a much more resilient war machine than whatever the Liang still had after their recent civil war and nomadic raids, meant that Duanzong absolutely could continue to feed soldiers into the northern battlefields and relentlessly keep up the pressure. Understanding that he would most certainly lose a war of attrition at this point, Dingzong decided to search for an exit ramp to a negotiated settlement even despite his victories and to buy himself enough time to build the Liang lands back up.
Later Liang cavalry on the move in the Central Plains. Their equipment is clearly tinged with nomadic influence, from the curvature of their sabers to the style of their armor, and many of them are probably Turkic descendants just like the Ma clan they serve
The Romans continued to push against the Saracens throughout 839, while said Saracens seemed to have found their footing later in the year. Aloysius Caesar took a moment on his march south to take his nephew Adalric of Alemannia, now a boy of nine, under his wing at his sister's request and before he even arrived to join the front line, the Roman armies in the east were carrying their offensives forward to Dara, Ras al-'Ayn (the former Resaina) and ultimately Beroea – 'Halab' to the Arabs, and more popularly known simply as 'Aleppo' to future generations – thereby widening the link between Rome's remaining Syrian and Mesopotamian possessions. These attacks had largely stalled by mid-summer in the face of stiffening Islamic resistance, but Aloysius' arrival with reinforcements allowed the Roman army in the northeast to break through and recapture Dara from the Muslims once more. However, even the aid of the young Caesar proved insufficient to facilitate a similar breakthrough in the south, as his army was defeated near Ras al-'Ayn in the fall and the rising ghulam (of Lakzam[13] origin, his tribe being one of those split between Islamic and Khazar allegiances until recently) star Khair al-Din kept Duke Skleros' Antiochene army at bay in that same season.
On the African front, the Stilichians had been content not to mount any great eastward offensive of their own, since the situation here was the reverse of the one in the Levant: they were the ones sitting on territory which the Muslims had to recover, and so could afford to avoid risking resources on any attack larger in scale than the usual cross-border raid into Cyrenaica and to instead let the Saracens come to them. Well, those Saracens did come this year as enough resources were finally diverted from the inactive Nubian front and brought it from the other side of the Sinai to make a forceful invasion of Stilichian Libya possible. The old Dominus Rex Érreréyu had undertaken sufficient preparation to ward off this eventuality however, and while the Muslim army under Al-Mu'azzam al-Turki made it to Oea against seemingly frail African opposition, they were unable to overcome its defenses and were soon forced to retreat between the approach of Érreréyu's army from the west and the constant harrying of their supply line by parties of Moorish raiders left behind for this very purpose. Al-Mu'azzam realized the extent of the trap he had walked into and fell back in a hurry to Islamic Cyrenaica, sustaining heavy losses as he did so.
In the east, Abu Sa'id recovered enough from the previous year's defeats to push back against the Indo-Romans, forcing Acacius away from Firozkoh with the support of additional reinforcements from eastern Persia and friendly Paropamisadae converts. Acacius fell back eastward under the shadow of the mountains which gave those warlike indigenes their name, and eventually stopped the Islamic counteroffensive in a battle near the source of the Margiana River[14]. The Chandras, being the weakest of the Indian powers, advanced too cautiously to give Abd al-Halim any opening with which to surprise and decisively defeat them, but the Salankayanas put too much trust in their greater numbers and overconfidently pursued the army of Mu'sab into a trap in the great forests near the village of Lahargird[15]. There the Alids enveloped and mauled them in a furious counterattack, and the Hindu Samrat Mahendra Varma II died of wounds incurred in the rout, leaving his son Simhavishnu to succeed him and try to not lose too much territory in the great retreat which followed.
Muslim cavalry ambushing the army of Mahendra Varma II in the forest near Lahargird
Speaking of laying traps and baiting one's enemy into them, that was exactly what Dingzong was trying to accomplish this year, but for the most part his efforts were unsuccessful. The True Han commanders were generally aware that time and numbers were on their side at this point, what with each side's barbarian allies (if the Jurchens could be called that for the True Han – their relationship can be described as distant and nominally united by common foes at its most charitable) having canceled each other out, and in no great hurry to risk getting slapped around again by pursuing their less numerous but more skillful adversary onto ground which favored the latter when they could attempt the slow grinding advance which had worked better for them in the past instead. Ultimately, Dingzong took a huge risk on winter's edge: he engaged the army of the Duke of Yue in the Battle of Yingzhou[16] with some 50,000 men, despite his adversary having marshaled 110,000. The Liang plan apparently relied on surprise and alacrity to catch the Han off-guard, but this sole advantage was leaked to Liu Ying by disgruntled officers in the Liang ranks who thought their side was doomed and wished to defect to the victor, resulting in a smashing Han victory and the death or capture of 15,000 soldiers from the defeated army.
While many in Dingzong's inner circle lamented this defeat and were worried that it opened the road to Bianjing, he was in fact aware of the defectors conspiring within his ranks all along and allowed them to engineer this defeat to persuade the Han into mounting the massive offensive towards his capital which he needed them to attempt, if he was to get enough Han soldiers into a single battlefield to inflict a big enough defeat to force Duanzong into negotiations. As Liu Ying and Wang Shaoyu rumbled forth on a two-pronged drive toward the Liang seat of power, confident that this time they would bring the Liang down and reunite China under the banner of the True Han, it became apparent that the Northern Emperor got his wish. Now he just had to actually follow through and pull off his gamble, with actual dynasty-ending failure being very much on the table if anything should go wrong.
The Romans found themselves on the defensive in 840, as the Muslims took their turn to launch sustained counterattacks in the west and compelled their foes to try hanging on to their conquests for a change. Khair al-Din butted heads with Skleros and succeeded in driving the Romans back toward the highlands north of Halab, before the latter was able to stabilize his position with a victory in the Battle of Mount Simeon. As the battle was fought on the feast day of the very same Saint Simeon the Stylite for whom that mountain was named, the Greco-Roman general pledged to pay out of pocket to patronize a number of stylites and build pillars for them to live on (in imitation of that first canonized pillar-saint) for the rest of their lives in thanks. Aloysius Caesar, meanwhile, faced off against the wizened Ala-ud-Din, who recaptured Dara from the Romans by taking advantage of the incompleteness of their repairs to that city's defenses before dying of old age near the end of this year. As well in an embarrassing episode for Emperor Romanus, his Bulgar privateers sacked several Phoenician Christian villages and brought the survivors to Cilicia as slaves this summer: while the Augustus Imperator freed them & profusely apologized for their mistreatment, he obviously couldn't repatriate them to Muslim-occupied Phoenicia, and ended up 'temporarily' resettling them in Cappadocia and near the Armenian border with a promise to send them back & rebuild their homes if the Romans could recover Phoenicia.
Duke Michael Skleros and the Roman army putting the Saracens to flight in the shadow of the holy mountain where Saint Simeon the Stylite lived on a pillar for 37 years
As Al-Mu'azzam avoided any great westward advance into Moorish Libya this year and instead stuck to taking safer swipes in a more limited fashion against the Africans, most of 840's action outside of the Levant in this new Roman-Arab war would instead be found in the east, where things went better for the anti-Islamic alliance than they had in the year before. Acacius and Abu Sa'id sent their respective Paropamisadae auxiliaries forward in a vicious campaign of back-and-forth harassment to break up the other's supply lines and soften up their position in preparation for another offensive through the mountains and vales of Arachosia & Aria (or as the Arabs & Persians now called this region after their name for its people, 'Afghanistan'). But it was Acacius who gained the upper hand in these preliminary clashes, in large part because the Muslim supply lines were longer and more vulnerable than his own, and so when he attacked the Saracens were in disarray: he was able to push them as far as the edge of the Zer-e-Koh Valley[17] in the west before Abu Sa'id finally stopped him in his tracks at the Battle of Sabzawar[18].
To the south and east of the Indo-Romans and their mountainous battlefields, Simhavishnu reinforced the survivors of his father's army and began the tough task of reversing Mu'sab's conquests, made all the more difficult by the waves of refugees fleeing the destructive terror the advancing Muslims brought with them and who he now had to house & feed. Despite these challenges, the Southern Indian emperor managed to first beat back Mu'sab at the Battle of Fanindrapura[19] and after limiting the extent of the Islamic thrust south in the aftermath of the prior disaster at Lahargird, mounted a number of small and localized but successful counterattacks which demonstrated that the Later Salankayanas were most certainly still in the fight. As for the Chandras, King Bhumichandra continued to methodically chip away at Abd al-Halim's positions in the east and to incrementally expand his realm to the west, taking advantage of more & more Muslim soldiers being diverted to the south at Mu'sab's request (first to follow up on the victory at Lahargird, then to combat Simhavishnu's counterattacks) to exploit the widening gaps in his rival's defenses and gradually build momentum for a bigger offensive in the following year.
Simhavishnu leading his army in a charge against their Alid opponents. The new Samrat of Southern India had a ways to go in order to avenge his father and push the subcontinent's invaders back, but he was not one to let such great challenges deter him
Further still to the east, Dingzong prepared to challenge the True Han armies advancing on his capital from the south & south-east at Yancheng[20] with a deceptively-small army of 30,000, giving his foes that he really was on his last legs after the Khitans mostly went home. In truth, the Northern Emperor kept a much larger reserve of 100,000 beyond the Ying River to the north, stationed between the villages of Linying and Yingchang: this force was still badly outnumbered by the combined strength of the True Han armies (nearly 250,000) but if he had the good fortune of fighting Wang's and Liu's hosts separately, well that would be a very different story. And indeed the Emperor's calculations were correct, for both generals hoped to gain the glory of finishing off the Later Liang themselves and practically engaged in a race towards Bianjing as a result, with Wang being the first to reach Yancheng and recklessly committing to an immediate attack even though many of his scouts 'disappearing' (thanks to the work of the Liang cavalry) should have been his first hint that something was off there. Dingzong's first division put up a good fight at the fords of the Ru River south of Yancheng but inevitably fell back before the onslaught of the Han, even giving up the eponymous town itself to the surging Han forces, playing the part of a determined but hopelessly outnumbered foe attempting to mount a last stand quite well – and blinding Wang to the movements of the Liang reserve, which crossed the Ying and even (to a lesser extent) the Ru to maneuver around the Han's left flank before attacking.
The central Han army was greatly confused and demoralized by these developments, ultimately routing with great loss of life under the sudden and overwhelming pressure placed on their exposed flank, and although Wang Shouyang escaped the battlefield he later killed himself rather than report a failure of this magnitude to his Emperor. That marked one down, and left only one other advancing army to go. Now the Duke of Yue arrived scarcely two days later, and could immediately tell something had gone horribly wrong after seeing the thousands of fallen Han soldiers' heads on bamboo stakes placed throughout the bloodsoaked battlefield. However rather than turn back, he apparently decided that if Dingzong had fought and defeated Wang already, then that must mean the latter had inflicted some (maybe even great) damage on the smaller Liang army as well and he just had to mop up the survivors.
This was not the case and while Dingzong couldn't get his remaining men back into position quickly enough to repeat his surprise maneuvers, he was still able to defeat Liu in a more conventional riverside engagement, frustrating all of the Han's attempts to cross the river and compelling the Duke of Yue to give up after it became apparent that the Liang were still considerably stronger than they had seemed. Liu had also put the Liang traitors in command of his vanguard, expecting them to prove their loyalty to their new master by doing or dying against their old one: as it so happened, they mostly died, often being singled out by the Liang's champions for personal combat on the grounds of their treachery. Some 20,000 Liang men died in the back-to-back Battles of Yancheng, compared to four times as many Han troops overall: still, Dingzong had his great victory, now he just had to hope that the bloodbath was severe enough to compel Duanzong into agreeing to sit down and hash out peace terms, preferably before he had to fight the remaining Han army north of the Yangtze under Li Jian.
Dingzong personally leading his heavy cavalry against the surprised Han ranks in the first of the Battles of Yancheng, which he hoped to only be the start to a victory that his ancestors could be proud of
[12] Not the famous southern port city by that name, but rather Huangchuan County, Henan.
[13] The Lezgins, a Caucasian people found in northern Azerbaijan & southern Dagestan.
[14] The Marghab River. The Indo-Roman victory would've been fought near the river's source in the central-eastern Paropamisus Mountains, in modern Ghor Province.
That's a hell of a gambit by the Liang that paid off. You can never predict the political effects of mass bloodletting. Mass deaths that seemingly don't go anywhere have led to Dynastic implosion, a la the Sui. Or sometimes Chinese states shrug off ridiculous numbers of deaths.
Some scholars think the Danevirke literally was a canal in this period, linking the Schlei fjord in the east with the Treene river and thus to the Eider river to the North Sea. I.e. what people think is the moat/ditch is actually a small shallow canal for modestly sized boats. Far less navigable than the direct link between the Eider and Kiel built later, or the still later canal between Kiel and the Elbe mouth that can accommodate battleships.
The ultimate canal wank is a Great Circle: Rhine to Danube linking the North Sea and the Black Sea, Don to Volga linking the Black Sea to the Caspian and into the Russian heartland, Volga to the Neva and thus the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic, and finally Kiel to the Eider or the Elbe and thus back to the North Sea. Most of these were conceived centuries before they ended up being built thanks to political disunity and wars over the area.
The big one starts with mixed results for all sides, although Christians and Indians are able to make some gains, however as long as Caliphate is internally stable, it is unlikely they will be able to make any serious reverse and with all the internal tensions of the Holy Roman Empire it is more likely that the first one to make major gains in the future will be the Caliphate.
Fjölnir that perhaps there really could be no victory against the power of the Holy Roman Empire in the long run: but, if that were the case – and if even his brother had ended up bowing to them, however slightly, in the end to prove the truth of his pessimistic expectation – then that meant Horik was right all along, and he and Ørvendil had committed patricide for nothing.
So apart from Northmen moving westwards over the seas to pester the inhabitants of Iceland and Aloysiana, we can also expect Fjölnir to follow the established precedent of kinslaying and kill Ørvendil in order to gain throne, but missing his son?
in the process finally killing the former's hated rival Dazong and retrieving Zhen Mei (who managed to smooth-talk the Jurchen Emperor into not immediately murdering her and persuade him that she truly favored him over Dazong)
That's a hell of a gambit by the Liang that paid off. You can never predict the political effects of mass bloodletting. Mass deaths that seemingly don't go anywhere have led to Dynastic implosion, a la the Sui. Or sometimes Chinese states shrug off ridiculous numbers of deaths.
Some scholars think the Danevirke literally was a canal in this period, linking the Schlei fjord in the east with the Treene river and thus to the Eider river to the North Sea. I.e. what people think is the moat/ditch is actually a small shallow canal for modestly sized boats. Far less navigable than the direct link between the Eider and Kiel built later, or the still later canal between Kiel and the Elbe mouth that can accommodate battleships.
The ultimate canal wank is a Great Circle: Rhine to Danube linking the North Sea and the Black Sea, Don to Volga linking the Black Sea to the Caspian and into the Russian heartland, Volga to the Neva and thus the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic, and finally Kiel to the Eider or the Elbe and thus back to the North Sea. Most of these were conceived centuries before they ended up being built thanks to political disunity and wars over the area.
Canal wank could be done here.
Aside from that - HRE would gain some ground,as well as indians,but Caliphate would survive and wait for next war.
Danes would go to America to conqer irish territories there,and more.
Maybe they become pelagians in local version? well,local version with scandinavian additions.
Interesting,what surviving british pelagians would say to that?
In 841, Emperor Romanus received a message from the Salankayana court while his son continued to lead efforts against the Muslims in the field. This was the first recorded instance of direct imperial correspondence between Rome and India in many centuries: Simhavishnu's words had to be carried overseas into the Horn of Africa and slip past the Islamic-controlled ports before traveling through Nubia and finally reaching Roman Africa in order to avoid Muslim detection. The letter informed the 'Samrat of the Raumakas' that the whole of free India was at war with their common enemy, reported to him of the progress of said war – namely that, despite the Salankayanas' early victories, they had recently been dealt a severe defeat at Lahargird – and urged him to mount a larger-scale offensive in the west to try to divert the Islamic armies, so as to buy him time to recover and therefore remain in the fight longer. Unfortunately for this attempt at coordinating strategic maneuvers in India with those in the northwestern Levant, the sheer distance and difficulty of trying to avoid detection by the Saracens meant that it would take almost a year for the message to reach Romanus, and the situation was not likely to have remained the same by then. Still, Romanus did eventually receive this message from his younger Indian counterpart and penned a positive response…which would take about as long to reach Simhavishnu as the first message had to reach him.
Not that Romanus himself would live to witness it, for his exceedingly unhealthy lifestyle finally caught up with him in this year. By 841 the Augustus Imperator was not only legendarily obese and gouty, so much so that he had to leave all the campaigning to Aloysius Caesar and various lieutenants, but he was also known to be constantly thirsty (and sating his thirst with sweet wine, in hindsight, almost certainly aggravated his then-unknown medical condition), to pass urine which attracted ants and to suffer from increasingly debilitating ulcers of the feet[1]. Thus it did not surprise many when in the mid-summer of this year Romanus the Fat died in Constantinople of a heart attack, certainly tied to and exacerbated by his various preexisting health problems, at the age of 46. Though he survived the difficulties of his early reign as a child-emperor and grew up to be a capable diplomat and even soldier who recaptured territories previously lost to the Khazars and was in the process of doing the same with lands lost to the advancing tide of Islam at the time of his demise, earning him a place on the list of positively-remembered Roman emperors from the dynasty of Aloysius & Arbogast, the seventh Aloysian Emperor was never able to conquer his vices and that more than anything turned his reign into a cautionary tale for future generations.
Romanus III at age forty-one, having been consistently unable to escape his gluttony and thus doomed to be remembered by the nickname 'the Fat' for that & the manner of his death, despite his other achievements
The news of the Emperor's death did not take long to reach his heir, who – being on the battlefields of Syria at the time – was duly acclaimed Aloysius III by his faithful paladins and legions, and soon after that it reached the Caliph, who genuinely lamented the death of his friend in spite of still being at war with the latter's Holy Roman Empire. Ali sent the new Augustus Imperator sincere condolences over the loss of his father and agreed to Aloysius' request for a truce so that he might give Romanus a worthy funeral and also arrange his own coronation. Of course, this did not mean that the Saracens forgot that they were at war and they resumed hostilities the very day after Ali heard that Aloysius had been duly crowned; the ceasefire had also been advantageous to the them, since it gave Ali time to rest & reorganize his armies and also find a suitable replacement for the late Ala-ud-Din in Abd al-Alim al-Khorasani. Duke Skleros and the federate princes of the Orient were able to hold the line in Syria & Upper Mesopotamia until Aloysius returned to retake command, but the Romans' planned offensive against Dara faltered in his absence as well.
Whatever kindness Ali had offered to his pen-pal's son did not extend to the Indian theater, where ironically despite Romanus' willingness to give Simhavishnu what the latter asked for, the various free Indian realms had to fight the Caliph's many kindred on their own for a few months thanks to said Emperor's death and Aloysius having to get his affairs in order first. Apparently the Islamic truce with the Roman world excluded the Indo-Romans, who fell back a ways to the east under the renewed onslaught of Abu Sa'id: this however was by the design of Acacius, who intended to repeatedly lure the Saracens into unfavorable terrain where he could maul them and wear their superior numbers down by way of attrition even outside of battle, over and over, until they were weakened to a point where he could hopefully flush them out of Aria and Arachosia in one or two sweeping offensives. Simhavishnu did not enjoy the advantage of campaigning in easily defensible terrain – quite the opposite, since Mu'sab held the Vindhyachal or Vindhya Mountains against him – and had to engage the Alid army in a number of bloody battles throughout 841, culminating in a hard-fought victory at the Battle of Taloda[2] which finally restored the Salankayanas' overland connection to Gujarat. The Chandras continued to enjoy the easiest front by far, as their opponent Abd al-Halim (not to be confused with the new commander of the Islamic armies, Abd al-Alim) continued to suffer from so many Alid soldiers being diverted to hold the southern front against the resurgent (if still struggling) Simhavishnu.
An unarmored war elephant of the Chandras, here seen bearing a javelin-armed mahout and an additional skirmisher on its back
Over in China, Dingzong's gambit paid off: Duanzong conceded that any realistic hope of ending the Later Liang in this one round had passed with the Battles of Yancheng and opted to quit before he was thrown out of northern China altogether. Dingzong, exhausted by having fought almost nonstop for the last 15 years and understanding that it would be risky to keep gambling what remained of his army on one dangerous decisive engagement after another, agreed to sit down and negotiate at this point as well – if he had wagered all-or-nothing on another battle with Li Jian (who still commanded the last True Han field army north of the Yangtze that he hadn't yet mauled) and his luck ran out, he could possibly end up getting his army destroyed south of Hanzhong and lose all that which he'd been fighting so hard to preserve, after all. As a result of the peace agreement both emperors reached in the winter months of 840, the True Han kept territories beyond the Huai as far as Pengcheng, but failed to deliver a killing blow against the Liang and indeed the latter bought enough time to rebuild & prepare to render the Han's occupation a temporary one in the future. Even as the flames of war continued to burn between 'Daxi' and 'Dayiguo' to the far west, Dingzong at least could finally take a breath and relax in peace as those same flames burned out across the Middle Kingdom, at least for a few years.
Upon arriving in Antioch in early 842, the first thing the freshly-crowned Aloysius III did was pledging to marry Euphrosyne Skleraina, the youngest and only remaining unwed daughter of Duke Michael Skleros, so as to shore up the loyalty of his highest-ranking general in the Orient and the Anatolian Greeks in general as well as the Caucasian kingdoms (for Skleros himself was a nephew of the Armenian king, and his wife – the girl's mother – was the daughter of Bakur III of Georgia, the Duke's close ally in the War of the Khazar Succession). However since the bride-to-be was only ten at this time, the Augustus Imperator had to put off going through with the marriage for some years yet and settle for a betrothal contract in the interim, which suited him just fine since in the short-to-medium term he intended to concentrate on winning the war with the Hashemites anyway. With his marriage arrangements out of the way, Aloysius proceeded to do just that and closely worked with his prospective father-in-law to marshal a renewed offensive against the Caliphate in the summer & autumn months.
Bolstered not merely by the presence of their new Emperor but also the reinforcements he brought from Europe with him, the Romans' attack proved more successful in this year and in a humbling first strike against the newly appointed Al-Khorasani, they not only recaptured Dara but also Nisibis, almost completely expelling the Muslims from the lands they had just taken from the Ghassanids (whose elderly queen-mother Arwa rejoiced at these victories). In the south, a division of Skleros' army under the command of a Count Bonifatios was finally able to begin investing Halab while the Duke himself marched down the coast into northern Phoenicia, where orthodox Ionians had consistently formed the majority population and reliably supported the Sabbatic dynasty during the days of mass religious discord which destabilized their rule in Syria ahead of the invasions of Heshana the Turk & the early Hashemites. Naturally, these Phoenicians (in particular the ones living inland, and thus unharmed so far by Bulgar piracy) welcomed the legionaries as liberators as far as Amia[3], which fittingly was called 'Am-Yawan' – 'place of the Greeks' – by its Syriac-speaking neighbors on account of it being a major Greek Ionian settlement in the region.
Flavius Aloysius Augustus Tertius at twenty-one, the age at which he took up the purple. Tall, stern and severe, he expressed greater self-discipline than his father ever had and was already a veteran soldier & commander by the time Romanus perished, making him well suited to tackling the challenges faced by the Roman world in the mid-ninth century
The Roman push in the west came at a fortuitous time for their distant Indian allies, who had the misfortune of facing significant Alid offensives in the east this year. Up north, Abu Sa'id had deduced his adversary's scheme, so he now changed tack and launched short-range, highly focused attacks out of Bost to drive the Indo-Romans out of their remaining southern Arachosian domains while avoiding any grand thrust aimed at seizing Kophen since all such attempts on his part had failed rather miserably thus far and instead relying on his Paropamisadae allies to keep their counterparts in Acacius' ranks tied up with an intensified campaign of harassment in the northern mountains. In this endeavor he enjoyed greater success and could boast of having finally cleared 'Zabulistan', as the Arabs and Persians now called that region, of the Indo-Romans and their sympathizers by the end of 842.
Elsewhere, Mu'sab feigned weakness to draw Simhavishnu into another successful ambush in the Battle of Ujjayini[4], though the Salankayana army was able to withdraw in much better order and with fewer casualties than at Lahargird. Furthermore, the long-struggling Abd al-Halim was finally able to achieve a significant victory over the Chandras by launching a night attack on their camp (exposed in their overconfidence, since they had been consistently winning on the eastern front up to this point) and sending King Bhumichandra himself fleeing in terror at the Battle of Champa Nagri[5]. However, since Ali had to divert the reinforcements he promised them to fend off the resurgent Romans in the west, his kindred in the east were unable to effectively follow up on these victories, something for which Simhavishnu dispatched another (unfortunately still very slow-moving) message of thanks to Rome for.
As news of Romanus' death and his son's continued distraction in the Middle East spread northward, it brought new hope to Ørvendil of the Danes, who believed a grand opportunity to break his treaty with Rome and resume hostilities (again) had just fallen into his lap. Early, relatively minor raids began to trouble the Northern European shoreline of the Holy Roman Empire again from Saxony to Britannia to Gaul, with reavers operating out of Dyflin & the Isles as well as Danish ports striking as far west as the isle of Nermouster[6] off the Armoric coast. However, the Danish king had set his vengeful sights much higher: proudly boasting that he would sack nothing less than Trévere itself while much of the Romans' strength was away elsewhere, he put out a call for every red-blooded Viking who hoped to immortalize their names in glory and abscond with some of the imperial capital's wealth to rally to his raven standard, while of course still fully mobilizing his realm with the leiðangr in preparation of the war to come.
Many of the greatest Norse sea-kings of that day – men with names like Herrauðr Hilditǫnn ('Herraud Hiltertooth'), Ingvar Járnhǫfuð ('Ingvar Ironhead'), and Þorgeirr hinn Turn ('Thorgeir the Tower'), seasoned raiders with (in)famous reputations and large crews behind them to a man – were swayed by Ørvendil's forceful oratory and promises of riches beyond their wildest dreams, and thinking that they actually had a chance to pull off the king's scheme with the Romans indeed being mired in war on the other side of the Mediterranean, flocked to Denmark to join his growing armada. As more ships and warriors lined up with each passing day, Ørvendil came to feel extremely confident that the gods were indeed with him & thus finally his chance to give the Romans a bloody nose (and then some) and wash away the disgrace of his own defeat had come, such that he would allow nobody to talk him out of his plans. That the seeress (Old Nor.: völva) he consulted with to determine his fortunes foresaw that, if he went through with this campaign, he would assuredly bring down a great dynasty only further reinforced his determination. Fjölnir was one of the few at court who was pessimistic about their chances and the only such pessimist of a high enough stature to be able to make his concerns known; but his brother laughed at what seemed to him yellow-bellied weakness and condescendingly proclaimed that if the former was so concerned about his own safety then he should stay behind to govern Denmark while the king was off leading the men, so that he might remain safe with the women & children.
Ørvendil, King of the Danes, listening intently as a seeress explains what Fate had in store for him. Unfortunately for the Danes, neither of them were familiar with and thus could relate this bit of fortune-telling to the story of Croesus of Lydia
Having learned some tough lessons about not merely fighting as a warrior (at which he excelled) or leading smaller divisions in combat but actually commanding large armies against other large armies, Al-Khorasani led the Arabs' push back against the Romans throughout 843 with the aid of reinforcements previously earmarked for the Indian front. His primary host managed to defeat that of Aloysius III in the hard-fought Battle of Wadi Jarrah, bringing the southward thrust of the Roman forces to a grinding halt in that river valley. The Augustus Imperator himself came under attack by a unit of handpicked mubarizun from the ranks of the elite ghilman at the battle's climax and, with the reserve under his friend Radovid unable to reach his position in time, found himself hard-pressed: still, he managed to fight his way out of that sticky situation with the assistance of his now-thirteen-year-old nephew Adalric of Alemannia. The boy's courage, loyalty and precocious ability with a sword would be held up as an example for future generations of squires to emulate for many more centuries to come.
Alas, personal heroics aside, Wadi Jarrah was still a Roman defeat in the end, and it wouldn't be the only one this year. Georgian & Armenian attacks against the Muslims' recent gains in the East Caucasus throughout 843 were decidedly less than successful, as well. Moreover Al-Khorasani and his subordinate 'Amr ibn Yazid (better known by his kunya or honorific, Abu'l Fadl) – one of the increasingly rare ethnic Arab generals of free birth in the Hashemite armies, by now well outnumbered by promoted ghilman like Al-Khorasani and his predecessors – wasted little time in moving their concentrated army southwestward to break the siege of Halab. Bonifatios lifted this siege and withdrew to link up with his superior Skleros' force, since they knew they couldn't defeat Al-Khorasani on their own, but was unable to evade 'Amr's pursuing cavalry, who mauled them at the Battle of Dar'at Izza northwest of the city. Despite finally managing to reconnect with Skleros' army at Turmanin, the Romans were defeated again and Bonifatios killed in a second engagement at that latter village, after which Skleros abandoned the Aleppo Plateau for the surrounding high ground once more. There, he defeated Al-Khorasani beneath Mount Barisha and, combined with Aloysius launching diversionary attacks from Dara & Nisibis around this time, compelled the Saracens to relent for the rest of 843.
Abu al-Alim al-Khorasani and his fellow Turkic ghilman on the move through the mountains of Syria
With the Romans still tied down in the Mideastern back-and-forth, the best Aloysius could do after being warned of the growing Norse threat on his northern border at this time (for, by this point, the army the Danish king had assembled had grown so large that it could no longer be hidden, as though all the raiders streaming out of his ports wasn't warning enough already) was to order a redoubling of military preparations among his subjects and vassals, since he couldn't yet return with the full force of the legions to crush Ørvendil once & for all. In the lands under direct Aloysian authority, coastal and riverine villages were evacuated, their residents fleeing to take up temporary shelter in the nearest well-maintained Roman castra and castellae: most intended to return to their homes once the Viking threat had passed, but others would inevitably stay and end up founding castle-towns around these fortresses. In Trévere, the city militia was called forth and its ranks expanded by the civic authorities, while the sermons given by Archbishop Rotel (Lat.: 'Rutilius') and the priests of the parishes under his authority took a more militant and cautionary tone. The Saxons, Thuringians, Britons and others also bolstered their defenses and marshaled whatever forces they hadn't sent along with the new Emperor to defend their homeland.
In India, the anti-Islamic alliance seized the moment afforded to them by the Alids' offensives stalling out to catch their breath, regroup and prepare new pushes westward and northward on their own part. It took until late in 843 for them to get going again, but when they did, they all did so successfully: Acacius crushed the overextended vanguard of Abu Sa'id's army in the Battle of Unai Pass and threw the latter out of the central Paropamisadae Mountains (thereby ending the threat to Kophen once more) on top of fending off Saracen attacks aimed at his capital on the other side of the Caucasus Indicus, the Later Salankayanas widened their corridor to Gujarat in the Barwani Hills Campaign against Mu'sab, and Bhumichandra stopped his realm's bleeding by turning Abd al-Halim back in the Battle of Hetampur. Roman merchants traveling eastward along the Silk Road took a maritime detour on their way home to visit the Chandra court, not merely to trade in Bengal but to also bring a message of acknowledgment & thanks to the 'King of the Gangaridae' (as Greco-Roman tradition named the Bengalis since the day of Diodorus Siculus) who Aloysius understood to be his other Indian ally (and the only one with whom Rome had no official relationship with, until now). In the absence of proper ghilman or ethnic Arab reinforcements the Alids increasingly resorted to local recruitment to keep their numbers up (for even their victories had cost them much in preceding years), and felt they had missed a great opportunity to at least seriously weaken their foes for years to come; they were decidedly less than pleased with the senior Hashemite branch for once again failing to properly support them.
Among the Danes and other Norsemen however, there were others who shared Fjölnir's more pessimistic outlook on the ultimate prospects of this invasion's success. Those who had already begun to flee west (rather than north to Norway) after the Romans defeated the Danes twice in a row (even if the damage of each defeat had been blunted somewhat by the Danevirke) for now mostly ended up in the Isles or in Dyflin, where they found the Pictish and Irish lands to be less profitable but far easier and also less risky pickings, though others would soon wander further west still. Guðrøðr Ingesson and the Dyflin Norse did battle with the myriad petty-kings of the southern Uí Néill branches on four occasions throughout 843 – one in each season – and prevailed each time, as the Irish had so far failed to adapt to Viking warfare and his shield-walls pushed past their kerns' javelins and slings to carve the spirited but much less heavily-equipped Celtic warriors up like roast meat. With each victory Dyflin expanded its zone of control, culminating in the wintertime victory of the Norsemen over Niall mac Donnchad – the overking of Mide[7] and nominal High King in this year – at the Battle of Loch Gabhar. As Niall lost 200 men out of his 1,000-man army, most of whom drowned in the frozen lake after which the engagement was named while fleeing, he was in no shape to keep fighting and had to acknowledge Norse overlordship over much of eastern Mide, after which Guðrøðr began to call himself a king.
A pre-battle duel between Irish and Norse champions. Alas, the Gaels were rarely as successful in larger engagements as their champion was in this particular man-to-man clash
With the African front still stable and Al-Mu'azzam apparently content simply to mount low-intensity raids against the Libyan frontier going into 844 – something which he claimed was justified by the overly stiff African resistance he faced previously, but in truth was driven by his petulant anger at seeing the younger Al-Khorasani promoted over him, even though his inactivity was sure to further lower his esteem in the Caliph's eyes – Aloysius decided the Moors ought to start making themselves useful on another front. The elderly Dominus Rex Érreréyu agreed to dispatch 6,000 men to the Emperor's side, under the command of his son Gébréanu (Lat.: 'Cyprianus'). However, he did not do this until after first executing a diplomatic coup in Iberia, where he managed to secure Gébréanu's marriage to Ermessenda (Fra.: 'Ermesende'), a daughter of the Tarraconensian king Mauregat (Lat.: 'Mauregatus') and granddaughter of that kingdom's founder Adriano/Adrià I, with a massive dowry that the bride's father assumed would be impossible for the Moors to pay.
Unfortunately for him, Mauregat was unaware of Érreréyu's ties to the gold merchants of Ghana, and unfortunately for Aloysius his position was poor enough that he couldn't afford to turn this help (which after all, he himself had requested) even though this diplomatic thaw between Gardàgénu and Tarragona undermined the purpose for the existence of the Yazigo kingdom in the first place. At least the latter's grandmother Rosamund had not lived to witness this first Stilichian maneuver to unravel the restraints she had conspired to place upon them before departing the Earth, having outlived Romanus by only two years. In any case, the Moorish division did actually prove helpful to Aloysius in preventing the Muslims from recapturing Dara yet again, though they arrived too late to keep Nisibis out of Saracen hands. With these reinforcements in hand, the Augustus Imperator resolved to force a decisive battle around the latter increasingly-ruined city with which to end hostilities on a pro-Roman note in the coming year.
Gébréanu, Prince of the Africans, with his new bride Ermessenda of Tarraconensis. Their marriage was proof that the late Rosamund and Romanus had underestimated the Stilichians' resources and resolve to break out of the restraints set to block their expansion & road back to the throne, not only with force but also with subtlety
In truth, Aloysius would have been content to keep fighting well past that point, but the awaited Danish invasion of Germania and Belgica forced his hand. Indeed it was no mere raid, as the Romans already knew and had prepared for, but still the numbers and ferocity of the Norsemen exceeded his expectations and those of his captains in the affected regions. Ørvendil began the campaign which would earn him the nickname 'the Bold', with all that that implied, in 844 by setting his first wave of raiders loose on the Northern European coast from Hamburg to Ouessant[8], but the vast majority of these men were in truth not even Danes, rather belonging to the many bands of Scandinavians he attracted with his summons. These reavers operated with effectively total autonomy, raiding where they pleased – along the shores, up & down rivers, even further inland from the waterways in more daring cases – and squirreling much or all of their spoils for themselves with no heed for any order from Ørvendil beyond 'go forth and raid Roman shores', and quite a few of them who survived the trip didn't even bother returning to Denmark. The Roman defenders found that, being raiders more than true soldiers and certainly undisciplined and ill-equipped compared to themselves, these men would be of little threat if they weren't as numerous as a horde of ants and as quick as dolphins in the sea.
The Danes' real hammer-blow was aimed at Trévere. Ørvendil set out for the capital of the Holy Roman Empire with the second-largest Viking army to ever be recorded in history, numbering at some 12,000 warriors (of whom about three-quarters were actually Danish, but the non-Danes were naturally those Ørvendil considered the strongest and most reliable of the foreign warriors) and 250 ships, as well as the hope that the third time would definitely be the charm for Denmark. There was no stopping an armada like this at sea: indeed the Empire's Belgic squadron was defeated and its commander Count Septémy (Lat.: 'Septimus') died in a brave but futile attempt to hold the Norse back from sailing up the Rhine in the Battle off Leithon[9], for which the Ionian Christians consider them minor martyrs. The Romans had done well to evacuate the villages in the Danes' path into castles with all that the peasants could carry, leaving the Norsemen with precious little to sustain themselves with as they sailed or marched onward to Trévere.
Ørvendil had hoped his behemoth army could just live off the land as they moved, but since this was not possible he had to establish a long supply line from the mouth of the Rhine east/southward, which was a big problem since not only did the Danes have little experience with running logistics this far away from their homeland on such a huge scale (a horde of 12,000 as well as their servants, camp followers & horses ate a lot of food every day, after all) but his convoys were vulnerable to back-biting raiders who raced out of the Romans' castles to spring a few ambushes and then retreat behind the safety of their walls. He did enjoy a bit of good news in that the legionary presence left around Trévere was insufficient to engage his army on the field of battle however, since they had been expecting to square off with an army half the size of what he actually brought to bear (which they could have taken on with far better odds of success). Still, as his campaign was starting to go awry within days of landing at the mouth of the Rhine, when he finally came before the imperial capital the Danish king proclaimed that he would magnanimously go home and even sign a pact guaranteeing no further aggression from Danish soil if the Treverians paid him a huge ransom.
The city's defenders – jointly led by Archbishop Rotel and Count Hattugatus (Saxon: 'Hathagat'), a general of Continental Saxon origin – bluntly threw these terms in the king's face, confident that Trévere's defenses could easily hold out against the Norse until their Emperor returned in glory and that attrition would wear down the Danes sooner rather than later. While they had 'only' 2,000 men left under their command, these included some of the best fighting men in the Roman imperial army, including a unit of the Aloysians' prized paladins and a contingent of British legionary archers, and the formidable fortifications & moat of a city which had served as the first capital of the Constantinians and of the Gallic usurpers before them further served as a significant force multiplier. Moreover, before the Vikings had reached their destination, Rotel had been able to dispatch messages to the nearby federates urging them to come and help. Since the Norse had been a plague unto the Teutonic federates and even Poland (whose lands they harried from outposts established along or off the Pomeranian coast, such as Wollin[10]) his words were well-received by the courts he reached out to: the only thing preventing most of said federates from immediately marching to Trévere's relief was that they had to deal with the spike in raids targeting their lands first. Alemannia, being far inland, was one of the few who didn't have that problem and King Adalric the Elder marshaled his warriors for a northward expedition while his Danish adversaries settled in for the Siege of Trévere.
A Romano-Frankish urban militiaman fighting to defend Trévere from the Vikings. Aside from his kettle hat (standard issue for Northern Roman legionaries in the ninth century), he wears the subarmalis (Roman arming jacket) in the 'African fashion' – alone as padded armor, without mail atop it – and is wielding a long seax & round shield painted with the Aloysian colors
The Romans worked to engineer their desired decisive battle with the forces of Islam in early 845, starting with Skleros making another push toward Halab. The Duke defeated Khair al-Din's division in three smaller engagements – the Battles of Athareb, Taftanaz and Saraqib – to clear his path toward Halab once more, but he would not be marching there alone, for Emperor Aloysius combined the primary imperial army with his secondary one for this thrust. Indeed Aloysius' involvement was critical to the defeat of the Arabs at Saraqib, and Khair al-Din witnessing the presence of the imperial banner and the numbers of the legionaries beneath it in turn led him to inform Al-Khorasani of what was coming their way. Thus the Islamic supreme commander moved to reinforce his subordinate and concentrate his forces around Halab to challenge the 30,000-strong Roman army as it approached, as the Augustus Imperator and his father-in-law intended.
The Battle of Aleppo which followed these initial maneuvers was the largest of the war, as the Saracens came to field 32,000 men against the Romans. Undaunted by this marginal numerical disadvantage, Aloysius and Duke Skleros committed to fighting on the plain beneath the Mount Simeon range, directly west and in sight of the city walls. While the Muslim archer corps was superior to that of the Christians, even with the addition of the latter's African reinforcements, a fortunately timed downpour very early in the engagement damaged the bowstrings of both armies' missile troops and prevented a great ranged exchange which likely would have favored the former. Having been unable to get more than a few volleys off at one another, both sides proceeded to fight at close quarters. In this stage of the battle, the Romans had the advantage and it showed, as their heavy cavalry broke that of the Saracens and an attempt by Al-Khorasani to counter them with his camelry was in turn successfully answered by Aloysius sending in the Moorish dromedary corps under Gébréanu.
As the Islamic center cracked and gave way under the pressure of both the Roman infantry pressing in from the front and the cavalry assailing their now-exposed flanks, victory seemed to be in reach for Aloysius, who ordered his men to keep pressing on all fronts. However, Al-Khorasani had a backup strategy in store and now moved his reserves up around the Romans' own flanks to encircle their formations, while personally leading a single elite ghilman division into the fray with his own bodyguards in the mix to shore up his own crumbling center. This strategem worked and the Islamic center stabilized while their reserves got into position to outflank the Romans, nearly producing an imitation of Cannae which was further sped along by Aloysius' horse being killed from underneath him by the last strike of a dying Arab cataphract. However, Aloysius was not without a Plan B of his own, and even as he sprang up and removed his helmet to reveal his continued survival to his wavering troops, the Roman reserve under Radovid was springing into action to break up the Saracens' pincers.
Aloysius III prepares to lead his heavy cavalry into the Battle of Aleppo beneath an assortment of Christian banners
With the pincer strategy foiled and no remaining reserves to pull into the fray, Al-Khorasani knew the day was lost and sounded the retreat back to Halab, struggling mightily in the process to prevent a total rout as the Christians inevitably surged and sought to annihilate their fleeing foes. To his credit he continued to demonstrate that he was a highly skilled warrior and leader of men, as he led efforts to cover the army's retreat and bravely fought back against increasingly overwhelming odds with a Damascene scimitar of the highest quality in hand, with which he struck down many a Roman knight and legionary. In the end he managed to deny Aloysius a truly crushing triumph despite being grievously wounded, for the Arabs did ultimately get away with 'only' 7,000 casualties and not (for example) a crippling 17,000, compared to about 4,000 Romans. Aloysius thought about besieging Halab – he calculated that that city could not possibly sustain an army as large as the one that had sheltered behind its walls for long, and that their morale must be shaken not only from the recent defeat but also their commander being bedridden with injury – but, as Abu'l Fadl took command of the beleaguered Muslim defenders while news of the true scale of the Danish invasion of his core territories reached him, he decided he'd won enough ground back to call this war a success after all and to send out an olive branch to the Hashemite court.
Now Ali was himself not initially inclined to make peace with the Romans at this point, instead harboring thoughts of redirecting his Egyptian army northward to Halab's relief and rousing additional Persian and Mesopotamian forces for the fight. However, the Caliph changed his mind after the Later Salankayanas scored a major breakthrough against his eastern cousin Mu'sab in the Battle of Dasapura[11], even as their allies continued to struggle against the other Alids this year. There Simhavishnu copied the Muslims' feigned-retreat tactic to draw a large part of the Alid army out of formation, then sent his war elephants stampeding through the gap in their lines straight at Mu'sab's position: the Islamic general lost his courage at the sight of nearly a hundred of the great beasts barreling towards him and fled, and his men followed soon after even as the Salankayanas pursued them and inflicted terrible bloodshed. With the Hindus aggressively pushing as far as Khoh[12] in the aftermath of this rousing victory, the Caliph elected to sue for peace before the situation deteriorated any further in the west or east.
The separate treaties signed in Laodicea-in-Syria (which the Arabs had taken to calling 'Latakia' during their occupation) and Morontabara[13] could certainly have been worse for the Muslims. In the west Aloysius recovered parts of eastern Mesopotamia which his father had previously lost to Ali but not all of it, restoring Ghassanid control to Dara but leaving Nisibis in Saracen hands, while also reclaiming the northern Phoenician coast from which the Muslims had been unable to expel Skleros' garrisons. A mutual moratorium was also placed on seaborne raiding, for which the Cilician Bulgars were already getting a taste. In the east the Indo-Romans clawed some of their mountain strongholds back and widened the defensive buffer around Kophen, in addition to further securing Peucela, and the Chandras also recovered a good chunk of western Bengal so that their realm no longer seemed constantly on death's door. The Salankayanas were the greatest benefactor of these peace terms, ending Muslim rule and restoring that of Hinduism well into the Amber Hills in the central-northern Aravalli Range, for which Simhavishnu would be celebrated by the Indian people for many years to come.
Simhavishnu leads his elephants and cavalry through a gap created in the Alid lines by a successful feigned retreat at the climax of the Battle of Dasapura. With this victory, the Salankayana emperor proved himself to be Islam's greatest obstacle in India since the fall of the Hephthalites
While these losses stung, they were not crippling to the Hashemites: still, they represented a big black mark on Ali's otherwise quite successful reign and also greatly widened the wedge between him & the Alids, who alternately accused him of being too friendly with and too focused on defeating the Romans in the west as well as failing to consistently support them against the Indian pagans. The stress of dealing with all of this doubtless accelerated the death of the aged Caliph, who was already sixty as of this year. As for Aloysius, the new state of peace in the east afforded him time to return to Trévere with an army that still comfortably outnumbered Ørvendil's, now hellbent on burying this persistent and perfidious Danish threat to his northern frontier for good. His return could not have come at a better time, since initial efforts to relieve the great siege had floundered in the face of Ørvendil's superior numbers at the time and his suicidal determination to take the city despite thus far being unable to make a dent in its defenses thanks to a lack of siege weapons: rather than drive the Danes away altogether, Adalric and the Alemanni ended up breaking through their lines and reinforcing the garrison under Hattugatus.
[1] Symptoms of diabetes – a disease which was poorly understood in the ninth century, and for which there historically existed no treatment until the discovery of insulin in the 20th century.
[2] Talode, Maharashtra.
[3] Amioun.
[4] Ujjain.
[5] Bhagalpur.
[6] Noirmoutier.
[7] Meath – the region of east-central Ireland, around Dublin & Tara.
1 Flavius Aloysius Augustus Tertius at twenty-one, the age at which he took up the purple. Tall, stern and severe, he expressed greater self-discipline than his father ever had and was already a veteran soldier & commander by the time Romanus perished, making him well suited to tackling the challenges faced by the Roman world in the mid-ninth century
Don't know which artist was first, but that picture looks a lot like the ones for Maekar Targaryen, GRRM's Stannis Baratheon expy for his Dunk and Egg prequel series. Stannis is the Mannis and all, but hopefully Aloysius doesn't have all the personality flaws.
Does look like his reign is starting off well with it being pretty obvious what's going to befall the Danes. Those tricksy seers and their double meaning prophecies that can always be conveniently interpreted to cover whatever happens. And speaking of recovering Phoenicia and its orthodox Christians, we haven't been hearing of what's been happening with Christian heretics in and out of the HRE. Iconoclasm might not get much traction without Muslims clearly winning against Christians, but who knows what was in the water to induce the quasi-gnostic heresies like the Paulicians or Bogomils. And of course a surviving and formalized Heptarchic structure backed by a resurgent and still Universal Rome would make things completely different for Christians both orthodox and heterodox everywhere, but particularly for incentives inside the Caliphate.
Stilichian ambitions seem to be on the rise, though the battle for supremacy probably needs to wait for the Muslims to fall apart first so both sides can afford to beat on each other. I'm still hoping for it to end with neither side actually outright winning and we end up with the full HRE experience with Electors. Though I'm also hoping for things not to go to shit, and coming up with an elective monarchy that doesn't automatically go to shit is pretty hard with basically no historical examples.
And you know what the Aloysians can do to prepare for the inevitable conflict? More canal wank: this time the French Canal des Vosges, linking the Saone and with it the Rhone, with the Moselle, and thus directing western Med trade to Trier and away from Africa. Problem: the height differentials means that unlike Baltic-North Sea, or Rhine-Danube, the pound lock is needed for cheap and efficient traffic. And there were a whopping 4 centuries between the pound lock being invented in China and it first showing up in Europe. Arguably though that was because medieval Europe was too splintered to do serious public works that profits a large region, and an unified Rome could adopt or even independently develop the technology much sooner.
As a result of the peace agreement both emperors reached in the winter months of 840, the True Han kept territories beyond the Yangtze as far as Pengcheng, but failed to deliver a killing blow against the Liang and indeed the latter bought enough time to rebuild & prepare to render the Han's occupation a temporary one in the future.
Should probably be described as "beyond the Huai". The Huai wasn't a tributary of the Yangtze back then. That came about from human action when the Song Dynasty broke the dikes of the Yellow River against a Jin army, causing the entire lower Yellow River to shift to the Si River (the one that flows through Pengcheng) basin, pouring so much silt through it to the Huai, that once the Yellow River shifted back North, the entire Huai was blocked up and diverted south.
And yeah, that war isn't over. Back before the Yellow River disaster ruined its navigability, the Si River and thus Pengcheng was both a dagger aimed north and a highway to the south:
That guy has some really great videos on historical geography and how that affected the geopolitics of Chinese warfare.
Don't know which artist was first, but that picture looks a lot like the ones for Maekar Targaryen, GRRM's Stannis Baratheon expy for his Dunk and Egg prequel series. Stannis is the Mannis and all, but hopefully Aloysius doesn't have all the personality flaws.
Does look like his reign is starting off well with it being pretty obvious what's going to befall the Danes. Those tricksy seers and their double meaning prophecies that can always be conveniently interpreted to cover whatever happens. And speaking of recovering Phoenicia and its orthodox Christians, we haven't been hearing of what's been happening with Christian heretics in and out of the HRE. Iconoclasm might not get much traction without Muslims clearly winning against Christians, but who knows what was in the water to induce the quasi-gnostic heresies like the Paulicians or Bogomils. And of course a surviving and formalized Heptarchic structure backed by a resurgent and still Universal Rome would make things completely different for Christians both orthodox and heterodox everywhere, but particularly for incentives inside the Caliphate.
Stilichian ambitions seem to be on the rise, though the battle for supremacy probably needs to wait for the Muslims to fall apart first so both sides can afford to beat on each other. I'm still hoping for it to end with neither side actually outright winning and we end up with the full HRE experience with Electors. Though I'm also hoping for things not to go to shit, and coming up with an elective monarchy that doesn't automatically go to shit is pretty hard with basically no historical examples.
And you know what the Aloysians can do to prepare for the inevitable conflict? More canal wank: this time the French Canal des Vosges, linking the Saone and with it the Rhone, with the Moselle, and thus directing western Med trade to Trier and away from Africa. Problem: the height differentials means that unlike Baltic-North Sea, or Rhine-Danube, the pound lock is needed for cheap and efficient traffic. And there were a whopping 4 centuries between the pound lock being invented in China and it first showing up in Europe. Arguably though that was because medieval Europe was too splintered to do serious public works that profits a large region, and an unified Rome could adopt or even independently develop the technology much sooner.
Should probably be described as "beyond the Huai". The Huai wasn't a tributary of the Yangtze back then. That came about from human action when the Song Dynasty broke the dikes of the Yellow River against a Jin army, causing the entire lower Yellow River to shift to the Si River (the one that flows through Pengcheng) basin, pouring so much silt through it to the Huai, that once the Yellow River shifted back North, the entire Huai was blocked up and diverted south.
And yeah, that war isn't over. Back before the Yellow River disaster ruined its navigability, the Si River and thus Pengcheng was both a dagger aimed north and a highway to the south:
That guy has some really great videos on historical geography and how that affected the geopolitics of Chinese warfare.
Not sure who the artist is, though I assume it's the same person who made the second-to-last image (looks like the same character & style). So far I've mostly been running searches in Google for the images I use - tried Brave before but unfortunately their engine still doesn't turn up as many results, nor results as good as, Google. I think the prompt I used for this one was something along the lines of 'byzantine emperor 800s battle armor', was lucky not to have to scroll too far down to dig these ones up earlier today.
Interesting stuff about the old course of the Huai, I've taken that into account & edited the chapter accordingly. While I try to stay on top of things like this, so many changes have been made to the geography in the past centuries that it's tough to get everything right, if I had a nickel for every time I saw a lake and thought about setting up a battle there only for it to turn out to be a modern reservoir...well, I wouldn't be rich, but I could probably afford to buy myself some very nice meals for a couple weeks
Everything else is spoiler material, but I can say that all this buildup toward the Aloysian-Stilichian rivalry will be going somewhere before the end of the timeline, I have no plans of going the GoT route and spending so many words & chapters building up to something big only to then do absolutely nothing with it lmao. That, and canals being valuable infrastructure are naturally going to be on most ambitious emperors' to-do lists, although actually completing large-scale projects of that nature probably will take longer than the time we still have until 1000 AD.
Hail be to Simhavishnu!! Long may he reign and let his successors be as worthy as him!
Finally at long last Islam's relentless advance has been thwarted and reversed to a significant degree in both the East and West, especially in the East. That is a balm to my heart.
Will the Northern Chinese be intervening to help the Khitans in some capacity, just so they could have their help later on? Or are the Khitans too far gone for that to be feasible?
Not sure who the artist is, though I assume it's the same person who made the second-to-last image (looks like the same character & style). So far I've mostly been running searches in Google for the images I use - tried Brave before but unfortunately their engine still doesn't turn up as many results, nor results as good as, Google. I think the prompt I used for this one was something along the lines of 'byzantine emperor 800s battle armor', was lucky not to have to scroll too far down to dig these ones up earlier today.
Interesting stuff about the old course of the Huai, I've taken that into account & edited the chapter accordingly. While I try to stay on top of things like this, so many changes have been made to the geography in the past centuries that it's tough to get everything right, if I had a nickel for every time I saw a lake and thought about setting up a battle there only for it to turn out to be a modern reservoir...well, I wouldn't be rich, but I could probably afford to buy myself some very nice meals for a couple weeks
Everything else is spoiler material, but I can say that all this buildup toward the Aloysian-Stilichian rivalry will be going somewhere before the end of the timeline, I have no plans of going the GoT route and spending so many words & chapters building up to something big only to then do absolutely nothing with it lmao. That, and canals being valuable infrastructure are naturally going to be on most ambitious emperors' to-do lists, although actually completing large-scale projects of that nature probably will take longer than the time we still have until 1000 AD.
Stilichians would do notching,as long as Caliphate exist.The same goes for Aloysians.
But,if Caliphate break,for example becouse Alids decide that enough is enough and they do not follow Hashemites anymore,then,with muslim cyvil war,we could have WRE cyvil war as well.
No matter what happen,Indian states would not fought each other as long as there is one muslim state facing them,no matter if they fight Hashemithes or not.
And,they would remain allies of HRE,even if they have cyvil war.
Another possible result - WRE emperors would send few expeditions to America,seeking road to India which do not go through muslim territory.
Of course,all they would found would be Toltecs ,Mayans and other states there,but - we would have HRE colonies there.
Fighting vikings,who come there to run from HRE,and britons who arleady run there.
Since there would be no one Aztec or Inca big state to conqer,some indian states should survive here,at least for a time.
Especially in South America - even in OTL Incas could hold for few centuries,if Atahualpa was not bloody idiot.
And,in Denmark - if Fjolnir used lost war as pretext to remove his broter Orvendil,and take his waifu,then Orvendil son Hamlet could avange his father and kill Fjolnir,dying later.
After that,King of Norway could take over.
But, @Circle of Willis could send Fjolnir to America instead,and become King of Toltecs instead.
Both options would be funny,and we could have Hamlet later after all!
P.S In reality some dude like hime existed,but ruled only on one Baltic island/forged which one/ ,and survived and lived happily with some princess from England.
P.P.S Vikings from Wollin was in OTL elite raiders named as jomsvikings,hired by many scandynavian Kings,till one of them finished their stronghold.
You could use them here like that,too.
It looks like the Muslims are finally having a taste of what ails the Romans so much - whenever they are on the way to establish superiority over the enemies of one side of the empire, the situation on the other side goes bad, and they are forced to divert their attention to it.
The enemies of Islam just need better coordination. If recovering Egypt is improbable, backing the Nubians to recover a Red Sea port would at least allow more reliable communication. The big problem with the Silk Road route to communicate with the East is that a steppe confederation strong enough to protect the route is also a threat to sedentary neighbors.
Not sure who the artist is, though I assume it's the same person who made the second-to-last image (looks like the same character & style). So far I've mostly been running searches in Google for the images I use - tried Brave before but unfortunately their engine still doesn't turn up as many results, nor results as good as, Google. I think the prompt I used for this one was something along the lines of 'byzantine emperor 800s battle armor', was lucky not to have to scroll too far down to dig these ones up earlier today.
The 2nd picture having purple eyes really makes it look Targaryen. Hey, Maekar was a strong King, just need to avoid dying senselessly in some minor skirmish.
That the seeress (Old Nor.: völva) he consulted with to determine his fortunes foresaw that, if he went through with this campaign, he would assuredly bring down a great dynasty
The dawn of 846 was most welcome in the Roman world. Aloysius III might not have won a completely crushing victory over the Saracens, to be sure, but he still achieved a meaningful reversal of the defeat Ali once inflicted on his father and clawed back Phoenician territories that had not been in Christian hands for almost a century. Moreover his decision to make peace with the Hashemites was well-timed, as it freed him up to return to his own capital with an army that still comfortably outnumbered Ørvendil's. The Danes had long kept his capital under siege, but without siege engineering expertise of the sort employed by the Romans themselves or the Arabs they could not hope to overcome its strong stone walls: while able to cross the Moselle-fed moat even under the fire of the garrison's British archers and to get their ladders up, the Vikings were beaten back every time they sought to storm the city, and an attempt to batter the gates down with handheld rams was repelled beneath a deluge of boiling oil. Furthermore while Greek fire was not available to burn the Viking longships with, the Romans here made do with mangonels hurling pots of pitch, followed up by fire arrows. While the defenders' operations were directed by Count Hattugatus, Archbishop Rotel was responsible for keeping their spirits up, which he did by planting a great jewelled cross on the battlements and unflinchingly marching up & down & across the walls to exhort the troops, despite frequently coming under attack himself.
After an assault involving crude raft-mounted siege towers also ended poorly, with Rotel using his very presence as bait to draw the Norsemen into attacking the most heavily defended section of the walls head-on and their commander, Jarl Ingvar Ironhead dying from a blow which failed to penetrate his helm but still fractured his skull underneath it, Ørvendil switched to trying to starve Trévere into submission. Even that was unsuccessful however, and if anything it was the huge Norse army which was more likely to starve before the Treverians did – there were no provisions they could pilfer from the evacuated villages around the capital, which meanwhile was well-stocked. A summertime disease outbreak in the city raised the stakes and gave the Danish king hope that he might be able to force the defenders into favorable negotiations, but Rotel successfully suppressed all voices in the Romans which entertained the thought of paying Ørvendil's repeatedly-demanded ransom and kept the morale of the people & the garrison high enough to persist through their troubles until Aloysius returned, which he did by mid-year.
Archbishop Rotel of Trévere exhorts the capital's defenders to stay strong in the face of yet another Danish assault
After Norse scouts reported the approach of the dreaded imperial army and warned of the overwhelming odds they were sure to face, no small number of Ørvendil's men lost heart and began to look for an exit. The non-Danish captains and jarls proved particularly fickle, and inarguably had the most justification to be since they were not bound by oath or blood to fight to the death for Ørvendil, but even among the Danes there was mounting dissension and a realization that Fjölnir might have been right all along. The increasingly beleaguered king had to fight an uphill battle to keep his warriors in line and on the field, one which only grew more difficult as the days passed and finally threatened to explode into open mutiny when the Ríodam Cogénin IV (Lat.: 'Constantinus') reached the mouth of the Rhine with 3,000 reinforcements from Britain and England, having spotted an opportunity to cripple the pirates plaguing his shores. While the Britons successfully drew a large part of the Viking fleet onto the high seas with a diversionary squadron of their own, the Pendragons landed their army, burned the 80 ships the Norse had left docked and put their defenders to the sword. The other captains out at sea, having realized this ruse too late, were unable to reach a consensus on what to do next: ultimately, rather than risk themselves by attempting to reopen Ørvendil's route of retreat, they scattered and went their own separate ways.
Thus by the time Aloysius reached Trévere, he found his enemies to no longer be the vast and unrelenting horde of savage, irrepresible Norsemen he was told of, but a dispirited and trapped host in great disarray. The Danish king had personally and brutally put down an attempt at mutiny among some of the men under his command, Dane and non-Dane alike, and also killed several of his harshest critics in a series of holmgangs, but none of this solved his various problems at their root and he couldn't prevent the greatest Norwegian, Geatish or Swedish jarls from leaving with their men ahead of what they understood to be a hopeless battle. Still Ørvendil refused to try to flee overland or negotiate his own surrender, motivated both by the stubborn pride that drove him to believe warring with the Romans twice in a row was a good idea in the first place and fear (probably rightly) that Aloysius would not forgive him after he'd been so quick to tear up the terms he reached with the latter's father. Instead, he resolved to face the Romans head-on and die gloriously so that the bards would be more likely to overlook the decisions he'd made leading up to this point, an endeavor which fewer than 4,000 of his men would support him in.
Though Aloysius faced the Danes with some 20,000 Romans and the remaining garrison of Trévere (also about 4,000 strong with Adalric's Alemanni reinforcements) was prepared to sally forth to further support him, the Emperor did not believe that to be any excuse to get sloppy. First the Romans' missile troops were to exhaust all of their ammunition – arrows, javelins, bolts – in a sustained barrage which left the Danish shield-wall looking like a massive pincushion, while the legionaries marched into dart-throwing range beneath this barrage's cover and expended their own plumbatae just when the Danes thought this missile storm was over. Only then did Aloysius form his heavy cavalry into wedges to smash gaps in the lines of the Danes still standing, after which his infantry followed to finish the job. As the Vikings feared, Trévere's defenders also spilled forth to assail them from behind and further compound their problems once the main Roman attack was underway. The only real question was not whether the Danes could still prevail, but who would have the honor of presenting Ørvendil's head to the Emperor: Adalric the Elder got closest to doing so, being the one to deliver the fatal blow with his lance, but in his final spiteful moments Ørvendil in turn felled the Alemannic king with his long-ax, so it fell to one of the former's knights to do the deed and also report what had happened to Aloysius.
Ørvendil's Danes mount their last stand against the impossible odds presented by Aloysius III's army
Despite having finally killed the troublesome Ørvendil and massacred those Danes foolish enough to insist on dying with their liege, Aloysius could not spare much time, not even to allow his squire to grieve for his father. He dispersed his cavalry to scour the northern Germanic countryside, hunting down the various Viking stragglers who had deserted Ørvendil's banner before his arrival and were now frantically trying to make their way back out onto the high seas before the hammer of Roman justice came down on them, while marching the rest of his forces up to the Danish border. There Fjölnir greeted him as the new King of the Danes, having married his brother's widow Gunhild as part of a scheme to get elected by the surviving Danish nobility over Ørvendil's underage son so that he might be the one to negotiate their surrender. Aloysius was in no mood to play nice and dictated severe terms: closure of Denmark's ports to piracy and the execution of any pirate who set foot there, the dismantlement of much of the Danevirke, and a huge war indemnity on top of a bigger tribute than that which his grandfather had demanded of Fjölnir's father, to be paid indefinitely. Fjölnir did surprise the Romans by volunteering to undergo baptism, and since Cogénin served as his godfather, he was dubbed 'Claudius' by the Christians: after all, in Roman reckoning the Pendragons were patrilineally adopted members of the gens Claudia and had been since their forefather Caratacus (Brit.: 'Caratācos', Bry.: 'Cerado') bent the knee to Emperor Claudius centuries prior.
With Rome's enemies to the north and east defeated for now, Aloysius III could finally start turning to domestic affairs in 847. Firstly he finally got around to marrying his betrothed, Euphrosyne Skleraina, after having to put the wedding off for years while he battled the Saracens and then the Vikings. Next the Augustus Imperator worked to ensure the election of his faithful nephew & squire – nay, a proper knight now – to kingship over his people, the Alemanni. Aloysius heeded his counselors' advice not to be seen throwing his weight around too much and creating the perception that his ward was no more than Trévere's puppet, instead allowing Adalric to make his own case to the Alemannic aristocracy while also allotting him an outsized share of the plunder & first tribute payments from Denmark (ostensibly to compensate for the death of his father in the line of duty) so he could more easily pay off any such magnates whose allegiance wavered. The Holy Roman Emperor also exercised soft power through the Church, whose priests and bishops extolled the virtues of the young and provably brave Adalric from every pulpit in Alemannia, and further reminded all who would hear that it was only right and just that a martyr who fell in battle against the pagan Norsemen – as Adalric the Elder had – should be succeeded by his eldest legitimate son.
These efforts paid off and by the year's end, the younger Adalric had indeed been elected and crowned King over the Alemanni by his countrymen in Winterthur[1] (which the Romans still recorded under its Latin name of 'Vitudurum'), at once justly rewarding one of Aloysius' most reliable kinsmen and reinforcing that particular federate kingdom's loyalty to the Empire. However, this was not the end of Aloysius' schemes to reward his friends and shore up his vassals' loyalty. For his first friend Radovid he managed to procure the hand of Vsemyslava, the sole daughter of the Dulebians' incumbent Kňehynja (as they called their Prince in their own tongue, which was growing more divergent from common Old Slavic in its own ways) Beryslav, with much cajoling and a favorable ruling in a land dispute with some Dacian landowners. While the Dulebian custom was still to elect their princes through the veche or popular assembly, as it was in most other Slavic principalities, this marriage and his continued imperial patronage naturally improved Radovid's chances of succeeding his new father-in-law – or failing that, his own children's chances of claiming the princely seat for themselves. Of course the hard work of cultivating a political base in Dulebia inevitably required him to buy a villa by Lake Pelso and spend much more time away from the imperial court, despite Aloysius having also bestowed upon him the honorable office of comes sacrae vestis ('Count of the Sacred Wardrobe', a role which was also responsible for the Emperor's private treasury).
Adalric the German, newly crowned as King of the Alemanni (also referred to as the Suebi, or 'Swabians', after their dominant tribe). Notably his regalia is inspired by that of his Roman uncle & overlord, especially the adoption of the globus cruciger
Up north, Claudius-Fjölnir had the extremely unenviable task of simultaneously meeting the tribute payments he now owed to Rome, rebuilding Denmark's shattered military strength (without which he had no way of resisting further Roman demands), and not getting killed by his resentful subjects all at once. The good news was that those Danes most inclined to militantly opposing Rome, Christianity and supporters of either (as he seemed to be) had already died with his brother. The bad news was that said Danes had also been the strongest and most enthusiastic warriors among his people. Furthermore, the tribute mandated by Aloysius was so high as to beggar his realm, and since he couldn't even raid Roman shores this left him without the funds to sustain a host capable of more than (barely) defending Denmark's coast-lines and suppressing dissent, which of course was the Roman Emperor's intention. The king's conversion to Christianity had achieved his intended aim of averting an even more punitive settlement, one which probably would have left Denmark completely dependent on Roman military protection and lacking less autonomy than even a federate state, but he couldn't have gone around building churches and promoting the faith among his people even if he wanted to due to how tight his treasury was already.
One knock-on effect of this beggaring Aloysius' extortionate demands was a great exodus of Danes abroad. Some actually ended up working for the Romans as mercenaries, or else were supplied to the Empire as slaves by Claudius- Fjölnir in lieu of payments of gold & other materials: having seen for himself the efficacy of ghilman slave-soldiers in the Levant, the Emperor decided this was a good time to put a Roman spin on that concept, and after compelling every Viking looking to enter Roman service (either voluntarily as a mercenary or involuntarily as tribute from the Danish king) to undergo baptism he had them & their families (if they brought one with them) settled at strategic 'danger zones' on or near the front lines against Islam. In this manner Aloysius III was responsible for the creation of a Terra Normannia, or 'Little Normandy', in Sicily; Rhodes; Crete; Cyprus; and south of Antioch. Three hundred of the most promising of the young Danish boys were set aside to undergo intensive martial training under his own eye over the next few years, and organized into a new household guard unit called the Varegi or 'Varangians', a Latinization of the Norse term for 'sworn companions' (Væringi). Unlike the ghilman, these Varangians were not slave-soldiers (having been freed immediately after being baptized) for Aloysius did not trust slaves with his own safety and thought he could one-up the Muslims in this regard, so instead he sought to immerse them in the fast-growing tradition of Christian chivalry as an alternate means of securing their loyalty – that, and of course, there was also the knowledge that (whether free or slave) they'd surely be torn to shreds by the rest of his paladins & subjects if they ever turned against him.
A 'Varangian' squire and his mentor, an Italo-Roman paladin of the imperial household
However, not all or even most of these self-exiling Danes went to the Empire which was responsible for their condition in the first place. Many went northward to join their fellow Norse on the Scandinavian peninsula, spreading word of the endless, soulless legions who crushed their host in defense of vast riches, humbled their kings and beggared their homeland in the name of the 'Hvítakristr' ('White Christ', as these pagans took to calling Jesus). Ørvendil's young son Amleth was among these, having been spirited out of Denmark by the handful of housecarls still loyal to the former's memory after the catastrophic Battle of Trévere (for if he stayed his uncle would surely have arranged a fatal accident for him, being an obvious rival claimant), and possessed of a fiercely vindictive streak against both the Romans who killed his father and the uncle who usurped him, would grow up to become a formidable Viking himself – first, though, he had some growing to do at the Swedish court and then elsewhere, under the wing of certain princes of that people.
For the time being however, the lesson Aloysius fashioned out of Denmark struck home and spurred, on one hand, a cession of Viking raids on the continent for some time, as it was now obvious to even the most brazen Vikings that attacking a strong and undivided Holy Roman Empire (and especially its capital) essentially amounted to an elaborate way of killing oneself; and on the other, not merely an escalation of attacks on the British periphery of the Roman world, but also the first Viking settlement on Lesser Paparia – or as the Norsemen who laid down roots there called it, Ísland ('Iceland'). Still other Norse turned their eyes east, to the vast wintry lands of the Finns and East Slavs who remained beyond Rome's grasp. There their kinsmen had already established Aldeigja as a base of operations and the first great stop on the Volga-borne Norse trading route to Khazaria & beyond, but after all these decades, Aldeigja alone no longer seemed sufficient to hold the number of Norse adventurers who wished to try their luck someplace where they didn't have to worry about getting a plumbata thrown at them.
While the Christian world was settling down, tensions were beginning to escalate in its Islamic counterpart throughout 848. The weight of this defeat, tarnishing what had otherwise been a spotless record of one victory after another (even if they were all moderate in nature and not the sweeping, crushing gains of his ancestors), placed a significant mental burden on Ali. Ultimately this burden killed him, as the usually calm and rigid Caliph lost his temper for the first time in many years when an advisor suggested he allay both the lingering questions over his fitness to continue leading Dar al-Islam and the succession by abdicating in favor of one of his sons – in his rage, he collapsed from an apopleptic stroke. Aloysius returned the favor Ali had once shown him by dispatching a message of sincere condolences to Kufa, though his own courtiers were considerably less concerned about the demise of such a persistent foe of Christendom and compared the circumstances of the Caliph's death to that of the first Valentinian; but in the Caliphate itself, Ali's sudden death at sixty-three shut the door on the first of those questions while opening the gate to the second.
Now like all the Caliphs before him, Ali had taken the Qu'ranically-mandated maximum of four wives in addition to a harem of concubines, and consequently left many sons to squabble over the inheritance. What was different this time around was that not only had the prestige of the Banu Hashim been tarnished by their loss in the recent Roman-Arab war, but the army was also divided over which prince to support, whereas all past Caliphs had been able to keep infighting over the succession to a minimum by ensuring their soldiers backed their chosen heir. In this case, the preexisting fault-line between a faction of junior, up-and-coming ghilman championed by Abd al-Alim al-Khorasani and the senior ghilman veterans led by Al-Mu'azzam Al-Turki (who were of the opinion that Ali greatly erred in promoting the former upstarts over themselves) tied directly into the dispute between Ali's first wife, Safiyya bint Nuh, and his fourth wife Umayma bint Zubayr. Both sought to place their sons, respectively the princes Ahmad and Ja'far, on the throne vacated by their husband, and had long been fierce rivals – Safiyya being a descendant of the Lakhmids and thus belonging to the Qahtanite (Southern Arab) tribal group, and Umayma being of the Banu Kilab who in turn were tied to the Qahtanites' Adnanite (Northern Arab) opponents.
Once it became clear that Ali would not rise again, Umayma struck the first blow by attempting to seize control of Kufa and proclaiming Ja'far the new Caliph, on account of him being Ali's own favorite son and herself, his favored wife. But Safiyya was quick to launch a counter-coup, having first bound up an alliance with Al-Khorasani and his clique of younger ghilman officers, thereby expelling her rival from the capital and enthroning Ahmad ibn Ali on grounds of primogeniture while purging the partisans of Umayma. Remnants of the Adnanite faction fled to Egypt, where Al-Turki was based, and the older general proved amenable to cutting a deal with them: he would march into Syria and then Mesopotamia with the intent of placing Ja'far on the throne, and in return they would purge his rivals (whichever ones had survived his onslaught, anyway) and give him the promotion he believed he deserved.
Saffiya bint Nuh gives one of her slaves a message to relay to her ally, the general Al-Khorasani, while also trying to avoid suspicion in the harem of her newly-deceased husband
In the Orient, the Liao-Jin conflict was reaching its crescendo. Chongzong had been on a tear against the Jurchens ever since he returned home with the vast majority of the Khitan warriors who went to China, aided in no small part by the Khitans' greater organization and superiority in mounted warfare: the Jurchens had greater numbers, but theirs was a less complex society riven by tribal disputes to a greater extent than the Khitans, and it was more difficult for them to raise huge herds of horses or train said horses for warfare in the wintry forests of their homeland, unlike the steppe- born Khitans who (like most other Mongolic peoples) were practically born in the saddle. In this year the Liao scored their most crushing victory yet at the Battle of Huanglong near the Songhua River, where Chongzong avenged his father by driving a lance through the heart of Emperor Guozong of the Jin.
However, before the Khitans could finish off their Jurchen rivals, Dingzong intervened with an 'offer' to mediate a truce between the warring tribal empires of the north (one backed by his own army). It was not in the Later Liang's interest to allow either the Khitans or the Jurchens to unite the northern steppes under their banner, after all, nor was he inclined to burn every bridge he might still have with the Jurchens and thereby concede the prospect of allying with them to the True Han forever. Chongzong had half a mind to attack the Liang for this interference but agreed to mediation both under the promise that Dingzong would get him a good deal & out of concern that a Chinese invasion before he'd fully crushed the Jin might be exactly the sort of thing to decisively turn the tide against him, while the Jurchens under Guozong's successor Shengzong (Bukūri Fuman) were happy to grab at this conveniently-thrown life preserver. The Jin survived as a consequence, though they had to cede large chunks of their western domain to the Liao and also pay a stiff-but-not-insurmountable annual tribute in grain, silver & slaves. They also had to return Zhen Mei to the Liao court, only for Chongzong to decide that she was too old for him and send her back to China soon afterward: this however had proceeded according to her and Dingzong's plans, since it allowed her to safely extract herself from the steppes and go into a luxurious retirement befitting one of the Northern Emperor's best spies.
The armies of Egypt and Iraq (as the Arabs were inclined to call Mesopotamia) collided near Palmyra in 849, no doubt with many powers surrounding them watching with great interest. For fear that the Holy Roman Empire, the Khazars, the Nubians, the Indian kingdoms or some combination of the above (and even their own increasingly antsy Alid kindred) would pounce on the opportunity provided by an extended fitna, both the partisans of Ahmad and Ja'far were anxious to settle thid dispute as swiftly as possible. The Egyptian faction, which was backed not only by the senior ghilman officers but also Adnanite tribes settled closer to the frontiers of the Caliphate like the Banu Sulaym, saw that they were outnumbered by the Iraqis and sent forth messengers bearing pages from the Qu'ran on their spears to demand the opening of negotiations, and the resolution of this succession dispute by the arbitration of a panel of judges trusted by both sides.
Ahmad ibn Ali was content to agree to such terms, at the very least because he understood it would look bad if he ordered envoys bearing pages from the holy book of the religion he claimed to lead to be shot down. However, his mother Safiyya and his generalissimo Al-Khorasani talked him out of accepting any such offer, believing it was a bad-faith attempt by the Egyptians to stall for time and bring up reinforcements to alter the numerical balance in their favor. Ultimately, the Iraqis sent Ja'far's messengers away with a proclamation that they would trust in Allah alone to judge this dispute justly, and committed to battle. The Iraqi leaders had judged wisely and well: their side's numerical superiority, both overall and when it came to a comparison of both sides' elite corps of ghilman troops, delivered to them a sanguinary and swift victory. Palmyra, which had sided with the rebel faction, was sacked after the engagement, and Al-Turki killed himself after attempting to flee into the Syrian desert only to be hounded by his pursuers at every turn, causing him to despair that there was no escaping the victors. Ja'far also fled and headed for Egypt in an attempt to stir up further resistance, but was captured and 'disappeared' in custody: since there was an obvious taboo on shedding the very blood of the Prophet Muhammad, he was most likely either starved or strangled to death with a silken rope.
Al-Turki attempting to flee the site of his failed rebellion
Thus Ahmad stood victorious as the new Caliph, and not a moment too soon. But although he had resolved this succession crisis in one stroke, mostly thanks to his mother and chief general overriding his poor political instincts, the fact that this trouble over the Hashemite succession had flared up into open revolt & bloodshed at all was a bad sign of things to come. Abu Sa'id, Mu'sab, Abd al-Halim and the other Alids dragged their feet when summoned to Kufa to do obeisance before the latest Successor of the Prophet, and it did not take a political genius to deduce that this great eastern Hashemite cadet branch was discontent with their seniors. Furthermore, heretics such as the Khawarij once more began to emerge from their hiding holes, emboldened by the recent defeat to cast aspersions on the Hashemites' claim to the Caliphate and to lament that the fruits of Muhammad's family tree had fallen oh so far from their progenitor before all who would hear them. Ahmad keenly felt the mounting pressure to restore his dynasty's pressure and hoped to find an opportunity to do just that in the coming years (whether in the East, West or both), though for now he would have to dedicate his energies to suppressing these manifestations of internal dissent and praying that the situation didn't deteriorate any further.
Far to the north, beyond even the Pontic Steppe, a great combined expedition of Danish and Swedish adventurers, traders & settlers sailed forth from Roden[2] and into the eastern lands, reaching Aldeigja before separating in twain. While a few members of this expedition chose to remain in the town, approximately half went south under the leadership of the Swedish prince Yngvarr Ingjaldrson – the elder of the twin sons of King Ingjaldr the Hunter, who being his sixth son, had little hope of inheriting anything ahead of his many older brothers if he'd stayed in Svealand – and pushed up the River Volkhov (so named by the local Ilmen Slavic population after their priests, the volkhv) to the shores of a lake smaller than Lake Ladoga by which Aldeigja stood. This area was familiar to the Norse who had crossed it (and indeed charted out much of the Neva Basin) so that they might trade further south in previous decades, but for the first time they now built a new town near the Volkhov's outflow, dubbed Hólmgarðr[3]. Yngvarr's younger twin Valdamarr, meanwhile, led the slightly smaller eastern arm of this expedition to found Beloozero[4] by Lake Beloye ('White Lake' in the tongue of the local Slavs, and from which its name was derived), from where Viking sailors could head down to the Volga by way of its tributary the Sheksna.
Now the twin princes desired to carve out their own kingdoms in this land far from home & their overbearing kin, so to that end they were more inclined toward engaging their neighbors with peaceful diplomacy than an outside observer (especially a Roman one) might expect of Vikings. Where possible, Yngvarr and Valdamarr both sought to sway the local Ilmen Slavs and the many Finno-Ugric tribes – an even broader, more diverse group than the Ilmen Slavic tribes with many names, such as the Veps (Finnic: 'Vepsläižed'), Meryans (Fin.: 'Merä') and Chuds (Fin.: 'Tšuudi') – to bend the knee with a minimum of bloodshed. They offered their services as impartial mediators in the incessant petty disputes between these tribes, and both also took Slavic wives in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the local tribal elites: moreover, they encouraged their followers to do the same and intermarry with the Slavs & Finns of the region. Where they could not obtain obeisance and tribute with honeyed words, the princes did draw their battle-axes and lead their men into battle to subjugate the truculent tribe. It was in that environment that Amleth of the Danes first cut his teeth, combating the tribal warriors of the Ilmen Slavs and the Veps resisting Yngvarr. In these eastern forests the exiled prince would learn statecraft from observing the Swedish princes' dealings, and study warfare under the eye of Yngvarr's general Ráðbarðr 'of the Twisted Beard', an already-accomplished warrior & raider with ambitions of leaving his master's service and exploring the world as a free man.
Yngvarr Ingjaldrson, supported by his retainer Ráðbarðr Twisted-Beard among others, receives the submission of some of the Slavs living near his new seat of Hólmgarðr
850 proved to be another year worthy of celebration in the Roman world, for it was in this year that an heir was born to the Aloysian dynasty. Empress Euphrosyne gave birth to twins in the porphyry chamber of Trévere's Aula Palatina (itself a copy of the one in Constantinople's Great Palace), a boy and a girl. In keeping with the Aloysian naming tradition of alternating between Western & Eastern Roman names, the two were respectively baptized as Alexander and Alexandra, and Aloysius III held spectacular games from the capital down to Rome itself and to Constantinople & Antioch in the east in honor of this occasion. Christian authors & panegyrists from this timeframe not merely lauded the successes of their Augustus Imperator in seemingly every matter, foreign & domestic alike, but also drew a sharp contrast between the unified & prosperous state of the Holy Roman Empire at the midpoint of the ninth century to that of its Islamic rival, which had just lost a war and now barely pulled itself out of a round of internecine fighting.
Speaking of which, Ahmad and his court were working round the clock to cool tensions and build barriers to prevent another civil war from bursting out any time soon. The new Caliph sought to walk the tightrope between the Adnanite and Qahtanite Arabs, as his predecessors had, but that was rather more difficult in the mid-ninth century when not only did he not command the same respect they did, but the pool of spoils & honors to distribute was rather depleted compared to previous ages. Ultimately, in an effort to circumvent and marginalize Arab tribal politics entirely, Ahmad took up a policy of demilitarizing the Arabs of his empire, starting by predicating his amnesty for the Adnanite supporters of his half-brother on their disarmament. While this trend had already begun under the previous Caliphs, he consciously made it policy & took it to a greater extreme than any of them had – actively incentivizing ethnic Arabs to stay out of roles where they might get to handle weapons in any capacity greater than the ceremonial with not only orders to settle here-or-there, but also appointments to civil offices, generous retirement packages in the form of land grants & monetary bribes, and the promotion of Arab-driven commerce.
In that latter regard, the Hashemites had something new to bring to the table: papermaking, which they had learned by this point from contact with their True Han trading partners. Ahmad subsidized the first paper mills in Kufa and promoted the opening of numerous new bookstores, inviting as many Arabs who might otherwise be inclined to go into military life to instead work in this new industry as he could, and even mandated that paper be used for all government business. No doubt this proliferation of knowledge and culture (for among the literature published and sold in the new Hashemite bookstores, none were more famous than tales from that grand collection of folklore from all over the Caliphate dubbed the 'One Thousand and One Nights', whose compilation began under Caliph Hashim) was in line with 'Ilm Islam's emphasis on scholarship & the sensibilities of Ahmad's deceased ancestor Hashim.
An early paper-maker in the mid-ninth-century Hashemite Caliphate
However, besides partially re-Arabizing the civil bureaucracy of the Caliphate (which had previously been increasingly Persian-dominated, also since Hashim's day), Ahmad's reforms also decisively – and as it turned out, irrevocably – altered the martial balance of power within Dar al-Islam in favor of the slave armies. This he did nothing about beyond simply finishing up a purge of the 'old guard' officers who had taken the side of Ja'far, since in his mind, a disloyal slave could be easily replaced by a loyal one, and on average the ghilman were both more reliable and more competent soldiers than his fellow Arabs anyway. If any baleful consequences were to arise from his overreliance on Al-Khorasani's clique and the ghilman corps as a whole, well, that was a problem for his descendants to worry about. The same was true of the zanj slaves, who were most heavily concentrated – and most miserable – in the plantations of Iraq. There they continued to toil beneath the lash of Arab overseers and for the benefit of Arab landlords & magnates, pairing the resentment building from their ill-treatment & ghastly working conditions with hope cultivated from the Gospel in the marshy backwoods when their masters were not looking.
While a new generation of leaders was being born in Rome and another was trying to consolidate its newfound hold on Kufa, an ocean away it was just about to start taking power from the old. Kádaráš-rahbád had ruled long and surprisingly well for a man who would surely have been branded a ruthless & tyrannical warlord in more civilized lands, laying the foundations for a riverine empire by hook & by crook (mostly the latter) and pushing his people to make thousands of years' worth of technological advances in a few decades in a bid to catch up with their new British neighbors, but he was not immortal and old age caught up to him in 850. Having marginalized the traditional council of elders over his lengthy reign (and arranged grisly accidents for those who he suspected of conspiring against him for centralizing power into his own hands, accidents which would claim not only their lives but those of their families as well) but also sired twenty children across almost as many women, among whom he now had to choose a successor.
In order to head off any succession crisis and civil war which could undo his life's work, a now-old and sickly Kádaráš-rahbád ordered that all those among his sons who sought to claim his mantle engage in what amounted to a gladiatorial death-match atop the city's mound for warriors in order to determine which among them was the strongest, and thus, the fittest to succeed him. Any son of his who did not want to risk their lives against their brothers was free to sit the contest out, but would be disqualified from even being considered for the succession by default. Anyone who stepped into the ring, meanwhile, had to fight until they were either the last man standing or quite dead – nobody would be allowed to live as a potential claimant and threaten the victor's rule once their father was no more. These contests, he decreed, were to be held when a ruler of Dakaruniku felt himself to be on the verge of death; and even if that were not the case and he went on to live (even siring still more children) for another ten years, its results would stand unless the victorious heir himself perished. Old 'Bloody Axe' was firmly of the opinion that only the fittest, strongest and most ruthless of his sons ought to succeed him for the good of his budding empire, not necessarily the one occupying the right place in birth order or even the one he liked best.
This fratricidal 'system' of succession, if it can be called that, certainly had holes big enough for the entirety of Dakaruniku to paddle a kayak through – the strongest and most ruthless warrior was not necessarily the most qualified to lead an empire after all, and Kádaráš-rahbád failed to anticipate the question of what happens if even the victor of the bout dies of his wounds, leaving only the disqualified sons of a ruler alive. But as with Ali a world away, such questions he left to future generations to answer. At least in the short term, he got the results he wanted: of his eleven sons, eight agreed to fight for his throne, and his seventh son Naahneesídakúsuʾ (literally 'Sword-Tooth', but intended to mean 'Teeth-Like-Swords' in the tongue of the Míssissépené) defeated all his half-brothers to become the great warlord's chosen heir. With the succession thus settled, Kádaráš-rahbád was able to peaceably pass away in his deathbed at the age of sixty-six: to Naahneesídakúsu he left Dakaruniku, which he found a petty chiefdom and transformed into a kingdom, as well as the task of further building upon his bloody legacy and turning that kingdom into a proper Mississippian Empire.
The sons of Kádaráš-rahbád gather to fight for their father's inheritance
1. Holy Roman Empire
2. Praetorian Prefecture of the Orient
3. Papal State
4. Burgundians
5. Alemanni
6. Bavarians
7. Frisians
8. Continental Saxons
9. Thuringians
10. Lombards
11. Aquitani
12. Tarraco
13. Lusitania
14. Africa
15. Romano-British
16. Anglo-Saxons
17. Lutici & Obotriti
18. Bohemians & Moravians
19. Dulebians
20. Carantanians
21. Croats
22. Serbs
23. Thracians
24. Gepids
25. Dacians
26. Cilician Bulgars
27. Ghassanids
28. Armenia
29. Georgia
30. Caucasian Alans & Avars
31. Picts
32. Norse Kingdom of the Isles
33. Irish kingdoms of the Uí Néill, Ulaidh, Laigin, Eóganachta & Connachta and Norse Kingdom of Dyflin
34. Norse petty-kingdoms
35. Denmark
36. Sweden
37. Pomeranians
38. Poland
39. Volhynians
40. Ruthenia
41. Dregoviches
42. Kryviches
43. Ilmen Slavs
44. Rus'
45. Baltic tribes of the Prussians, Scalvians, Curonians, Samogitians & Aukstaitians
46. Hashemite Caliphate
47. Alids
48. Nubia
49. Ghana
50. Khazars
51. Pechenegs
52. Kimeks
53. Oghuz Turks
54. Karluks
55. Indo-Romans
56. Later Salankayanas
57. Gujarat
58. Chandras
59. Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas & Pandyas
60. Anuradhapura
61. Tibet
62. Uyghurs
63. Later Liang
64. True Han
65. Nanzhong
66. Khitan Liao
67. Jurchen Jin
68. Silla
69. Yamato
70. Nam Vi?t
71. Champa
72. Chenla
73. Srivijaya
74. Sailendra
75. New World Irish
76. Annún
77. Three Fires Council
78. Dakaruniku
Well, the not so great Danes got righteously rekt.
More than thousand years after the grand Dakaruniku succession trial, the guys at TTL FASA will be reading about it and thinking:''we can use this for Clans''.
They also had to return Zhen Mei to the Liao court, only for Chongzong to decide that she was too old for him and send her back to China soon afterward: this however had proceeded according to her and Dingzong's plans, since it allowed her to safely extract herself from the steppes and go into a luxurious retirement befitting one of the Northern Emperor's best spies.
Amlet and Claudius - thank you, @Circle of Willis ! and both smarter then victims of Sheakspeare muse.
Amlet here could not become King of Denmark,but ,after learning in Novogrod,could take part of Ireland,Siberia,or even Central America.
Or die heroically killing uncle,it would be as good.
Varagian guard - very good idea,they would not betray becouse of HRE politic.
Ahmet making army of slaves only - it could end only in tears for arabs,and turks who take over would not have problems with choosing ruler,becouse one son would simply kill other without any duels,like Ottomans did.
And Zanji slaves waiting for good time to rebel from marsches - we could have this TL Haiti,probably with their own voodoo christianity.
Dakaruniku King choosen after duel - in time it would lead to problems,but not as bad as arabs would have.
China - we wait for round two,i would bet on Han here.
But,till then,all would have generation of peace - i see many ships sailing for new lands,this time Central America should be discovered - but by whom,irish,brits,romans or vikings?
And who would they meet? Totlecs,if i remember correctly,was arleady falling.
P.S in Poland vikings,except Wolin,had also Truso - commercial town from which they buyed many things from local prussian tribes.HRE should not attack them becouse of that,right?
Guess Aloysius thought a crippled enemy is better than another Federate that leaves existing Federates free to scheme with the border pushed out. Reasonable really.
It's interesting how almost every Muslim empire ever decided slave soldiers were more reliable than tribal soldiers, including Muslim empires themselves founded by usurping slave soldiers. They are probably right, though that's saying more about how unreliable tribal elites are.
True about Amleth,but - i asked for that very nicely!
And,since Ottomans murdered in cold blood their brothers,they could not compare to Kadaras-rahbad.Becouse he created system of fighting.
