516 proved to be a good year for the Roman world overall. In the West, not only did the Germanic frontier remain quiet since the defeat of the Lombards but Empress Clotilde gave birth to a second son, who was named Romanus after the second Stilichian emperor. Out east, Sabbatius finally brought the Galileans and Samaritans to heel once more after bringing in thousands of Ghassanid Arab auxiliaries to help: he captured the former’s stronghold at Mount Meron in the summer (indirectly aided by the Samaritans, who decidedly did not play the role of the Good Samaritan and refused to mount any major attack against the Romans while they besieged the Jews on the mountain), and followed up by compelling the latter to capitulate with decisive victories near Nablus and at the feet of Mount Ebal in the autumn. This time the Eastern
Augustus cracked down harder than he had before: while he had yet to engage in any large-scale campaign of expulsion or massacres as past irate Roman emperors had, he did execute the rebel chiefs and sell their families into slavery along with the surviving rebels and
their kindred, and levied harsh new taxes on the rest of their peoples to finance the repair of Christian churches destroyed and offer restitution to Christian families mauled by the insurgents’ advances.
Among the many damaged Christian sanctuaries which the Jews of Galilee & the Samaritans had to pay extra taxes to repair was the Church of the Annunciation built at Mary's Well in Nazareth by Constantine I and his mother Helena
However, things began to sour for both empires toward the year’s end. The West faced the first major incursion on its southern border in December of 516, when an unusually large force of Hoggari Berbers (having spent the last third of the year crossing the Sahara) began to wind through the Atlas Mountains and attack the Afro-Roman outposts there. Fortunately for the Western Empire, the African Church and kings had done such a thorough job of purging Donatist remnants over the past decade that no rebellions broke out north of the Atlas to support the invaders, but those few Donatist holdouts who had managed to survive in these mountains naturally hurried forth to join their co-religionists against the hated Romans: by December 31 King Augustine of Altava reported to Constantine III and Theodoric that the invading army probably numbered 7,000 strong, not nearly large enough to overrun all of Roman Africa to be sure, but more threatening than most raiding parties and no doubt taking advantage of any intelligence about the local terrain the local Donatists might have offered.
Meanwhile off in the orient, hostilities were beginning to heat back up between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Hephthalites. The Lakhmids took advantage of their Ghassanid rivals being called away to assist in the suppression of the Galilean and Samaritan revolts to step up their attacks into Ghassanid territory, while White Hun and Fufuluo raids into the Eastern Roman frontier also found their defenses in Mesopotamia to still be incomplete and rather weak. When Sabbatius’ emissaries demanded a cession of and reparations for the raids, Toramana instead demanded the Eastern Empire pay him tribute to compel the raiders to stop. Knowing full well that the proud and vengeful
Augustus would scorn such demands, the
Mahārājadhirāja made preparations for renewed warfare, including calling up the Mazdakites who had barely settled into their new fortress-monasteries, with the expectation that he’d be able to quickly defeat the Eastern Romans & recover what little territory he had ceded to them thanks to the mounting struggles with rebels they'd faced in the interbellum.
East of Persia, the Eastern Hephthalites waged a far less even war against the badly depleted Indians, who had been quite badly mauled both by Lakhana’s earlier battles with Budhagupta and now by their ill-timed civil war. Pushyagupta’s exhausted and badly battered armies were unable to stop Lakhana’s sweeping advance down the Ganges and indeed were trounced on the occasion that they tried, culminating in the Eastern
Mahārājadhirāja trapping him in Pataliputra and putting the great Gupta capital (damaged though it may already have been from all the times it changed hands in the recent Gupta civil war) under siege by the year’s end. Lakhana demanded an exorbitant sum of bullion and slaves which Pushyagupta could not afford due to the depleted state of his treasury and the likelihood of revolt within the walls if he caved in, so the siege would continue for the time being.
Further east still, Tuohan Khagan gave the order for his people to pull up their tents, saddle up and ride for the unknown west with him to avoid annihilation between the Chen armies and their rising Turkic subjects. The Rouran were able to outride their Chinese pursuers, who in any case were quite satisfied with just having made these ‘unpleasantly wriggling maggots’[1] finally go away, but had less luck with the Tiele, who set an ambush for their hated former masters as they headed for the Altai Mountains. The two great nomadic hordes fought an extraordinarily brutal battle in the shadow of Sutai Mountain that autumn: ultimately the Rouran, driven by a furious desperation, managed to claw their way out of the Tiele trap and scatter their pursuers, but at great loss – including Tuohan Khagan, who was actually killed near the beginning of the battle by a well-hidden Tiele archer, and many of his children. He was succeeded by the eldest of his surviving sons, Yujiulü Zuhui, who assumed the title Mioukesheju Khagan[2] – ‘Silent Khagan’ – in mourning for his fallen kin and the plight of his people even as he continued to lead them westward through the Altai range, a migration which would eventually take them into territories held by the White Huns…
Mioukesheju Khagan and the Rouran were in for quite a few tough winters to come
517 began in the West with the first battles between the Hoggari and Western Roman forces in Africa, chiefly the men of Altava. Delays in mobilizing his people for war prevented King Augustine from simply bottling the marauders up in the Atlas Mountains, so instead he had to confront them as they emerged from the freshly-looted mountain town of Cuicul[3] in March. He had used his time well and assembled a larger army of 10,000 men however, and with this force he managed to defeat the Hoggari despite the terrain disadvantage: his Roman legionaries and Vandal-descended federate infantry easily crushed the far inferior Hoggari foot, while his own Berber cavalry put theirs to flight in a brutal but quick clash.
The Hoggari retreated back into the Atlas Mountains with haste, abandoning much of their plunder and all of their slaves in their hurry to get away from their foes. The recovery of what had been pillaged from his lands and his victory at Cuicul had made Augustine overconfident however, and he did not wait for his brother Hilderic of Theveste to join him with 6,000 reinforcements before giving chase. The Hoggari promptly turned around and ambushed him in a canyon outside Macomades[4], where one of their slingers gave the Altavan king a fatal injury to the head (even despite him wearing a helmet) with a particularly well-aimed rock.
Augustine’s son Felix retreated to nearby Constantina[5] with the Hoggari in pursuit, but this time his uncle was able to come to his rescue and they crushed the rival Berber host between their armies in a great battle outside the city on May 2. That done, they pursued the Hoggari through the Atlas Mountains more carefully, while Donatist elements of the Hoggar Kingdom’s army native to Roman territories began to disperse and once more hide in said mountains. A second victory at Legis Volumni[6] on the very edge of the Sahara sent what remained of the Hoggari – some 2,000 ragged survivors – packing, and placed Felix in Constantine III’s favor. As Hoggar’s king Amêzyan refused to pay any sort of restitution to the Western Romans later that year the irate Western
Augustus authorized a raid of their own to punish the Hoggari Berbers, though the horsemen Felix sent proved less adept at crossing the Sahara than Amêzyan’s warriors had and little came of this endeavor, much to the Romans’ frustration.
A Western Roman clibanarius from Carthage, backed up by an Altavan nobleman and light horseman, moments before running down a fleeing Berber warrior of Hoggar
While the Western Empire wrestled with Berbers, the East was not only undertaking preparations for another round of warfare with the Hephthalites this year, which included the assembly of more
carroballistae in Antioch to counter any elephants Toramana might field and the training of new recruits in the Anatolian & Syrian provinces. The rather disorderly state of imperial law had long irritated Sabbatius, and now even though he stood on the precipice of another war, he had resolved to at least begin tackling the problem. At this point, both halves of the Roman world were governed by three codices of often-contradictory laws: the
Codex Gregorianus (a collection of legal decrees, edicts and rescripts issued by various emperors between 130 and 290), the
Codex Hermogenianus (a collection of such ‘constitutions’ promulgated by the Tetrarchs) and the
Codex Theodosianus (compiled out of the legal pronouncements of the Christian emperors following Constantine I, compiled by Sabbatius’ great-grandfather Theodosius II).
The Eastern
Augustus contacted his Western counterpart in the summer of this year, seeking to begin compiling these three codices as well as the myriad legal opinions of Roman jurists dating well into the Republican period, even centuries before the birth of Christ. Only once that was done could the even more arduous work of harmonizing them begin. As the West was in a state of peace after weathering the Berber incursion, Constantine III was on board with Sabbatius’ plans – doubtless motivated as much by the prospect of being able to govern his empire even more efficiently as he was by the opportunity to reignite even a flicker of his brother’s friendship with the ruler of the East – and so it was agreed that they’d open new departments of bureaucrats to work on this matter in their respective empires, with Constantine’s men collecting the laws and legal opinions of the West while Sabbatius’ collected those formulated in Thrace and eastward. A project of this scale promised to take years, especially with the imminent war with the Hephthalites being sure to distract the Eastern Empire, but the two emperors hoped that by dividing the labor they could get it done within at least a decade.
An imperial scribe pores over a newly collected legal text at Sabbatius' order
In India, thanks to the pressure of the
Huna blockade and resulting starvation, Pushyagupta was able to finally persuade the notables and great merchants of Pataliputra to cough up most of the gold and silver which Lakhana was demanding (and to send his army to extort the remainder from the populace, even looting the city’s temples for valuables), and presented this princely sum to the Eastern Hephthalite
Mahārājadhirāja as a peace offering. However, Lakhana was dissatisfied and continued to demand the slaves as well. When Pushyagupta tried to collect these slaves from the city’s population, a revolt erupted and he was ultimately killed by a mob in June after his own men deserted him.
The people of Pataliputra raised up an even more distant relative of the imperial house, Govindagupta, as their new
Samrat on the condition that he’d resist the Hephthalites to the bitter end. Lakhana was all too happy to deliver that end, and while his first two attacks on the city walls failed in the face of desperate Gupta resistance, the third succeeded thanks to an outbreak of disease which left nearly a third of the garrison dead alongside thousands of civilians, allowing the Hephthalite army to overrun a practically undefended section of Pataliputra’s western wall and fan out to overwhelm the rest of the city from there. The
Hunas promptly subjected the Gupta capital to a vicious sack which went on for six days and spared not even invalids in the city’s hospitals, after which Lakhana left with a train of as many as 150,000 slaves – over half of Pataliputra’s remaining population – and virtually all the valuables which Pushyagupta had not turned over to him.
Govindagupta fell on his own sword and his widow burned herself atop his corpse in an impromptu funeral pyre than suffer the indignity of becoming Lakhana’s captives. While disappointed at his failure to capture the enemy leaders, Lakhana settled for making Kumaragupta II ruler over the ashes that remained of the Gupta Empire; nominally the latter still retained the imperial title
Samrat, but all knew it for a hollow pretense. The Guptas’ power was broken by the defeats and civil wars of late, now limited to much more modest borders extending from the region of Magadha around Pataliputra to the Bay of Bengal. It was also clear that this Gupta rump state was a client of the ascendant
Hunas who were now the new overlords of northern India, still challenged only by various smaller tribes and kingdoms which had escaped Gupta suzerainty as the latter empire spiraled into its steep decline, and who further demanded a considerable annual tribute from the Kumaragupta in exchange for not simply finishing him and his people off right then and there.
An Eastern Hephthalite roars with triumph following the fall of Pataliputra
Meanwhile, despite their failure to utterly annihilate the Rouran the year before, the Tiele Turks were overjoyed to find themselves effectively masters of the abandoned Rouran territories north and west of the Great Wall – naturally they celebrated by fighting for the spoils and for control among themselves, with chieftains Yifu and Yieju being the strongest of the contenders. Having removed the Rouran from his list of concerns, Emperor Ming was quite content to sit back and let the Turks maul each other, planning to compel the eventual winner to be a pliant vassal who’d surely keep his northern frontier quiet for generations to come.
518 was a return to peace and quiet for the Western Roman Empire, with the most notable event this year being the wedding of King Felix of Altava to the now-thirteen-year-old niece of Constantine III, the orphaned princess Eucheria, as had been arranged by her father Theodosius over a decade prior. The same could not be said for the Eastern Romans, who finally had to face Toramana’s anticipated invasion after little over half a decade of peace and found less luck against the Eftals than their Western cousins had against the Berbers the year before. Toramana had once more assembled a strong army of Hephthalites, Fufuluo and Persians (Buddhist and Zoroastrian), and once he sprang his offensive he proved to be as ferocious and unrelenting as ever. Meanwhile, despite his frantic efforts to rebuild the defenses of Singara and Dura-Europos, Basil’s work on the frontier was far from complete when the White Huns struck and he was quickly put to flight by the
Mahārājadhirāja’s onslaught.
Basil the Sassanid just barely manages to fight his way past a swarm of Western Hephthalite pursuers
Sabbatius stuck around in the capital for the birth of his younger daughter, who was named Theodora after her mother, before setting out to join Basil with 20,000 reinforcements at Callinicum in April – reaching him soon after Circesium had also fallen to the surging Western Hephthalites. Together they managed to blunt Toramana’s advance in a battle along the Euphrates that summer, and were further reinforced by the arrival of Armenian, Lazic and Iberian troops in Syria as fall began. Though he was pushed back by this reinforced Eastern Roman army at Thannuris[7] on August 30, Toramana rallied to repel Sabbatius’ effort to recapture Singara a few weeks later and took advantage of the majority of the Armenian army having joined their imperial overlords to turn his sights onto southern Armenia and southeastern Anatolia. A series of increasingly destructive raids, starting with the sack of Cepha[8] and building up to daring winter raids against towns on the southern shore of Lake Van. King Artavazd Mamikonian requested leave from Sabbatius to depart and force the Eftals away from his lands, but the Eastern
Augustus refused out of concern that dividing the Eastern Roman army like so would play right into Toramana’s hands.
In India, 518 was a year of consolidation for the
Hunas. Lakhana still harbored ambitions to eventually reunite his people under his banner, but long before that he had to first ensure that his newfound hegemony would not be overthrown the instant he crossed west of the Indus to contend with his cousin. To prove his commitment to solidifying his people’s supremacy over the subcontinent he began by moving his capital from Bactra to Indraprastha[9], the ancient capital of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata. While this city may be long ruined, the
Mahārājadhirāja fortunately had many new slaves on hand with which to rebuild and repopulate it, on top of all the Bactrians and Indo-Saka he would command to migrate to his new Indian seat of power over the next years.
In time, the Hephthalite migrants would more permanently settle down to replace the broken
kshatriya clans which had spearheaded Gupta efforts to defend against the Hunnish advance in northwest India and paid the price, becoming known as a new martial aristocracy called the
raja-putra (‘sons of the king’, for many of the Bactrians in particular were nobles with ties to the royal Hephthalite house) or simply ‘Rajputs’. The Buddhist White Huns also adopted a more flexible approach to caste politics where they ruled in line with the Buddha’s teachings, recruiting many
vaishyas (merchants) to help administer their conquests and
shudras (workers) to pad out their armies, while also repealing anti-caste-intermarriage statutes imposed by the Guptas.
Even further east, the Tiele Turks surprised the Chen court when Yifu defeated Yieju and absorbed the latter’s confederation into his own in the spring of this year, much quicker than Emperor Ming and all but the most pessimistic of his advisors had predicted. They were divided on how to respond: the army’s commanders and court eunuchs advised Ming to attempt a divide-and-conquer strategy, propping up the lesser Turkic chiefs against Yifu with the aim of keeping the Turks perpetually divided, while the magistrates and Buddhist monks counseled trying to work with Yifu rather than senselessly antagonizing him by aiding the lesser chiefs and tribes who they thought had little chance against him anyway. In the end the choice was made for them by Yifu, who went on to subdue his remaining opponents over the summer and autumn while the Chinese bickered among themselves – his victory over Yieju and the lack of immediate Chinese support for his foes began a snowball effect, where the other Turkic peoples (such as the Göktürks and Uighurs) increasingly chose to submit peacefully and acknowledge him as their overlord one after the other rather than fight what seemed to be a futile struggle.
By the winter of 518, Yifu had proclaimed himself Yami Khagan of the Turks, something which he presented as a
fait accompli to the Chen court. As the Tiele called themselves the ‘Tegreg’ in their native Turkic, their rising empire came to bear that name as well. At the encouragement of Kavadh, Emperor Ming graciously acknowledged him and his Tarduš clan as the rightful overlords of their people by way of a fine gift of silver and the arrangement of a marriage between his second-youngest daughter Princess Linchuan & Yami’s grandson Istämi, promising many years of shared prosperity so long as the friendship between Turk and Han Chinese held. For now Yami Khagan was content to accept the emperor’s offer and remain at peace with China, turning his gaze west unto the fleeing Rouran and lands which no Turk had ever ruled before. Meanwhile the anti-Turkic faction in the Chen court fell silent for now, though there was little doubt in Ming’s and Kavadh’s minds that they’d advocate dissolving this alliance and working to break up the Tegreg Khaganate if the able Yami Khagan were to ever leave the picture.
A Göktürk chief bends the knee to Yifu of the Tiele/Tegregs, now Yami Khagan of the Turks
519 seemed to start well for the Eastern Romans, who attempted a second push onto Singara and Dura-Europos early in the year and succeeded, driving the Hephthalites back in a number of battles along the Saokoros[10] and Euphrates. As White Hunnish raids into eastern and southern Armenia did not cease despite these victories, Sabbatius – now confident in his victory – agreed to release King Artavazd to secure his homeland from the marauders, confident that they now had the advantage and he could afford to lose the Armenians for a while. As it turned out, the emperor was wrong on both counts: in truth Toramana had staged the withdrawal of his armies from the frontier to trick the Eastern Romans into wrongly thinking that they had him on the ropes, and kept up the attacks on Armenia to try to force them into dividing their armies at this supposed moment of triumph.
Having succeeded on both counts, the
Mahārājadhirāja marshaled his reinforcements along the middle Tigris & Euphrates to spring his counteroffensive in July. Sabbatius had continued to make use of Ghassanid scouts in this time, so he was not caught completely off-guard, but he had still slightly underestimated the strength of his counterpart’s remaining armies and could not match their numbers without the Armenians. Toramana proceeded to inflict a major defeat on the
Augustus at the Battle of Telassar[11], where despite the latter’s
carroballistae striking down many of his elephants he was able to overwhelm their cavalry with his own and badly maul their infantry, and hounded the Eastern Romans out of his territory and back into their own over the next three months. The emperor’s Armenian bodyguards Aratius, Isaac and Narses Kamsakaran, champions of Sabbatius and kindred of the similarly named eunuch Narses, were all slain covering his retreat.
Toramana leads his heavy lancers in a crushing charge against the Eastern Roman lines at Telassar
Toramana did not stop pursuing Sabbatius once they were back on Roman soil, defeating him again at Circesium and Thannuris (this time winning at the latter site) before he could rally his scattered and bloodied armies and slowing down only to detach a 12,000-strong force to besiege Nisibis. Worsening matters for Sabbatius, mounting Copt resistance in Egypt exploded into open rebellion at the sight of all these reversals, which emboldened the Miaphysites of that land into declaring one of their own magnates – Olympiodorus of Oxyrhynchus[12] – in the provinces of Arcadia and Thebais, while revolt in the cities of the Lower Nile and the Delta rendered those areas ungovernable even where the Roman garrisons & governors nominally managed to retain control.
The only saving grace for Sabbatius was that Toramana was unable to finish him off, despite the latter’s efforts. What was supposed to be the great Hephthalite deathblow was blunted in the Battle of Callinicum on November 30, where a young and previously-obscure captain named Belisarius[13] rallied wavering Thracian and Moesogoth contingents to secure his emperor’s left flank against a furious Eftal charge even as Narses the eunuch (that flank’s overall commander) was advising Sabbatius to flee behind Callinicum’s walls and consider suing for peace. After witnessing this display of valor on his left the
Augustus resolved to continue fighting in the field, and managed to grind the White Huns to a standstill after twilight. Even better news came soon after the heartening victory at Callinicum, as Artavazd was on his way back from Armenia and had routed Toramana’s second army at Nisibis after marching through Corduene. The capitulation of Alexandria to the Egyptian rebels on December 31 following the naval evacuation of the city’s governor and Patriarch reminded the emperor that his situation was still dire, but at the very least he had managed to parry Toramana’s finishing attacks and now had hope and time with which he could still (he hoped, anyway) turn the situation around.
While the flames of war continued to burn across the Middle East in 519, those same flames were just beginning to burst into life anew in Britannia. After years of rebuilding and re-consolidating his power over the Saxons, Icel began to march against Artorius II and the Romano-British once again. This summer, he led a large force of 8,000 men towards Lindum while dispatching his son-in-law Raedwald to attack Deva with a second army half the size of the first: no doubt the
Bretwalda’s hope was to compel his opponent to divide his forces. In response Artorius, who saw through this gambit, issued a call to arms to his various counts & dukes, and added their levies to his core cavalry force as he moved to eliminate Raedwald’s smaller force before turning his sights on Icel.
As Raedwald found himself facing nearly 3:1 odds that July, he beat a hasty retreat back onto his king’s territory. Artorius II gave chase and mauled him in the Battle of Heleshala[14], where the outnumbered and outmaneuvered Anglo-Saxons were rapidly put to flight after the Romano-British horsemen outflanked their shield-wall and pursued for another two days; half the Anglo-Saxon army was destroyed, while Artorius sustained only about 200 losses – a tenth of Raedwald’s. Satisfied that Raedwald would no longer pose a threat in his rear after this thrashing, the
Riothamus moved on to confront the
Bretwalda.
Romano-Britons corner an Angle (or 'English') warrior of Raedwald's army following their engagement at Heleshala, which proved disastrous for the latter
Alas, by the time he reached Lindum, most of the city had fallen once again to the Saxons: only the fortified
praetorium and a few adjacent buildings remained under the garrison’s control. Artorius’ arrival on August 2 prevented Icel from sacking the majority of the town, and indeed placed him in an extremely precarious position: but the able Angle king caught his counterpart off-guard with a nighttime breakout attempt, successfully puncturing a hole in the Romano-British lines as they set up camp and escaping into the darkness before Artorius could reorganize his troops to pursue. Three days later the two armies fought another battle in a hilly valley west of Luda[15], where Artorius attempted to stop the Anglo-Saxons from reaching their fleet and evacuating safely back to their territories by sea. There, despite a severe disadvantage in cavalry Icel prevailed by holding back the Romano-Britons’ footmen and horsemen both atop a hillcrest, then countercharging down the slope once he had worn them out. Though significantly aged since his last real battle with the Romano-Britons nearly twenty years prior, old Beowulf continued to superbly acquit himself in the front line of Icel’s shield-wall.
The year ended with the Anglo-Saxons back on their feet and their soil, having successfully extracted themselves from a potentially disastrous blunder, and both sides continuing to skirmish throughout the summer and fall as they built up their forces for another major confrontation in the next spring. On the British side, the Pelagian clergy began painting this as a holy war against the pagan Anglo-Saxons in a bid to drum up volunteers to follow their
Riothamus' example in his ‘good march’, while Icel awaited the arrival of another batch of Saxon migrants from the continent.
Elsewhere, in West Africa the Hoggari were up to something the Romans would not have expected of their puritanical and violently zealous Donatist enemies: engaging in peaceful trade. Little of it was done with the Ephesians they considered heretics, of course, but with heathen peoples far to the south across the great sand sea that was the Sahara. Their scouts mapped out the most accessible oases (of which Tamanghasset[16] came to house the kingdom’s southernmost town of any note) and the safest desert trails, while their warriors secured these paths from less-organized rival Berbers and charged tolls on any caravan passing through for ‘protection’; such fees they demanded almost all the way up to the Atlas Mountains which marked the Western Empire’s southernmost frontier.
As had been the case since Punic times, the trade which flowed along these desert roads was chiefly in four things: gold, salt, ivory and slaves. Of these salt was the hardest to come by, as even the Hoggari lacked the manpower to consistently secure and work the great salt mines of the Sahara. They also had to fiercely compete with their fellow Berbers, the Garamantians, to profit off ivory and slaves – only gold flowed through the routes they’d locked down in an uncontestably great volume. There was especially great demand for slaves in the market of Carthage, despite the stern disapproval of the African Church, which in any case meant nothing to the Donatist men of Hoggar. But the Hoggari did not solely trade goods with the people of the far south: they also began sending missionaries southward as 520 approached, seeking to evangelize their particularly rigoristic take on the Christian teachings to the heathen peoples of the Sahara and Sahel, and in time they would find some measure of success.
Camels were first introduced to North Africa in the 3rd century, and the Berbers took to them as readily as they did to the sands of the Sahara. They would prove instrumental in ferrying both merchants and missionaries southward for centuries to come
On the other side of Africa, Aksum was stirring once more. In September rebellion broke out among the Banu Qurayza, one of the Arab tribes around Yathrib which had previously bent the knee to them, and Dhu Nuwas was all too happy to help them, for they were his co-religionists (nevermind that in the past, they had fulfilled their obligations to the
Baccinbaxaba and furnished his army with auxiliaries & supplies in wars against Himyar) and in any case gave him an obvious way to further undermine his rival’s power. For his part, Kaleb obviously could not let this stand and wasted no time in assembling an army for transport across the Red Sea, this time taking his son and heir Ablak of Alodia with him.
By the year’s end Kaleb had reached Yathrib and threw back the Himyarite and Banu Qurayza forces jointly besieging its garrison of Aksumites and loyal Arabs (mostly the Banu ‘Aws, Banu Khazraj and the Jewish Banu Qaynuqa). Even as Dhu Nuwas’ captains reordered their forces in the ‘Asir Mountains, a secondary Aksumite army was crossing the Bab el-Mandeb and moving to recapture Muza, requiring the Himyarite king’s direct attention. This second war between Kaleb and Dhu Nuwas had now evolved well beyond the Banu Qurayza, instead increasingly centering on the renewed contest for control over the Bab el-Mandeb and the lucrative trade routes which flowed through it.
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[1] The Chinese often transcribed the Rouran’s name as ‘Ruanruan’ or ‘Juan-Juan’, which indeed meant ‘unpleasantly wriggling maggots/worms’. Suffice to say this was not intended to be a term of endearment, and demonstrated how much of a headache the Chinese found the Rouran to be.
[2] Historically this title was held by Yujiulü Poluomen, who ruled the Rouran from 521 to 524 IOTL.
[3] Djémila.
[4] Oum-El-Bouaghi.
[5] Constantine, Algeria.
[6] Lioua.
[7] Tell Tuneinir.
[8] Hasankeyf.
[9] Delhi.
[10] The Khabur River.
[11] Tal Afar.
[12] Al-Bahnasa.
[13] Famed as one of the greatest Byzantine commanders who routinely won great victories despite a lack of resources and the distrust of his overlord Justinian, (Flavius) Belisarius restored Roman rule over Africa and Italy after crushing the Vandals and Ostrogoths in the span of a few years (though it was Narses who finished the latter off after they got a second wind under Totila). He also won major battles against the Persians and Kutrigurs. Despite increasing mistreatment by Justinian, he remained adamantly loyal to the Eastern Roman Empire, regularly crushing rebels against the emperor and at one point refusing to become the Western Roman Emperor with Ostrogoth backing.
[14] Halsall.
[15] Louth. The specific battlefield in this case is known to us as Hubbard’s Hills.
[16] Tamanrasset.