With the Second Roman-Khazar War concluded victoriously, Leo III turned his gaze back west in 771, and what he found was not entirely to his liking. For one, the Dulebians and the Dacians had already begun to squabble over the lands between the Danube and the southern arm of the great Carpathian Mountains: never assigned to the old Roman province of Pannonia nor conquered and added to Dacia before Aurelian's pullout from that other province, this oft-barbarian-controlled territory was now increasingly contested by Dulebian settlers moving in following the expulsion of the Avars/Khazars and the remaining Vlach population. Leo could not spend much time mediating this dispute, however, on account of a larger crisis threatening to erupt further to the west, and for now settled on papering over these northern Balkanic cracks and kicking that particular can down the road for his son to resolve later.
More importantly in the eyes of the
Augustus, bloodshed had broken out on Madera/Lénna while he'd been busy warring with Simon-Sartäç. Following a growing mood of mutual hostility marked by the encroachment of each side's settlements toward the other, increasingly heated arguments and non-fatal exchanges of violence, it had begun in 768 with the Goths driving away a Moorish scout who had ridden a little too closely to one of their outposts, in the process wounding him with an arrow to the arm and a rock to the head; the man's horse managed to take him back to camp, but he died of his injuries soon after. The Africans retaliated by burning down the outpost and killing the five Goths responsible, leaving their skulls on five spears left upright amid the ruins. Then the Goths began to actively raid African villages and outposts in turn, murdering isolated Moorish settlers and escalating from there.
By the time Leo had returned from the east, a rising number of Visigoth and African troops respectively led by their captains Teodomiro de Gádiz & Habélyéu ('Fabricius') ey Ténga[1] had engaged in a score of bloody skirmishes along the island's northern coast as well as neighboring Porto Santo/Bordu Santu, culminating in a 'Battle of the Ravine'[2] where the latter killed the former but died of his own injuries a few days later. Worse still, the conflict had begun to spill off these islands altogether – the Goths had dispatched additional war parties to the Canary Islands where, because the African-influenced Guanches had proven unreceptive to their initial diplomatic entreaties, they raided villages and took those Guanches they didn't kill as slaves; the natives naturally fought back with Moorish help. As of 771 the rival kingdoms were preparing to march openly against one another – Gostãdénu's son Stéléggu was beginning to amass an army on their side of the Pillars of Hercules, and Recaredo was marshaling a response around Córdoba. Before this calamitous escalation could happen, Emperor Leo called for peace and invited the warring kings to negotiate in Naples with himself, Pope John and Patriarch Tobéa as mediators, working through the latter to assure the especially aggrieved and suspicious Africans that they would get a fair shake.
Teodomiro the Visigoth, having escaped the Africans' attempt to trap him in a Maderan ravine, struggling to return to his camp and stay ahead of Habélyéu's Berber cavalry
The Romans might be dealing with squabbling among their federates, but the Khazars had the danger of a full-on revolt on their hands. Simon-Sartäç had undeniably lost the Second Roman-Khazar War and despite his efforts to cushion the blow with marginal gains in the Caucasus, as well as his earlier victories over rival Turkic tribes to the east (which had also helped him push the Three Paths doctrine), he now faced challenges to his leadership from several among his tarkhans. Worse still, the non-Khazar peoples of his empire took the opportunity to cause further trouble: the Volga Bulgars far to the north ceased paying tribute entirely, and the aforementioned subjugated rival Turks (such as the Oghuz and Karluks) agitated to regain their independence as well. Most dangerous of all might be the Severians, however: nominally left stuck under the Khazar yoke by the terms of the Peace of Argamum due to their living on the left bank of the Dnieper, this Antic tribe nevertheless fought to join their cousins in the newly founded kingdom of Ruthenia just across the river, and while actually quite weak compared to the other rebels, it was their revolt which most sorely threatened to get the Ruthenians and their Roman patrons involved so soon after Simon-Sartäç's defeat.
While the Romans sought to shore up peace internally, Zhang Ai and the Muslims were concluding the terms for an external peace between their empires far from Roman shores. The great eunuch-chancellor didn't particularly care for the distant Indo-Roman state and thought China had invested quite enough resources into its defense, so he was willing to concede those territories on the western side of the Caucasus Indicus which Mansur al-Din and Hasan ibn Hashim had managed to not only conquer but also hang on to – in exchange for a considerable, though only one-off, tribute payment from Kufa which Zhang was sure to skim from, as usual. Ma Gui and most of his army were to be recalled, but Ma Hui would be left behind with 3,000 men to help protect the Indo-Romans as a permanent garrison & deterrent force. Zhang reasoned that either the younger Ma was as reliable as the elder, in which case he could also be relied upon to also control the undoubtedly resentful Strategius, or if he were less loyal to the incumbent dynasty than his father, then keeping him that far away from home would make it more difficult for him to stage an effective rebellion.
In that regard, the Chinese chancellor was half-right: Strategius was livid upon being handed these terms, and to add insult to injury, the new state of peace also justified Zhang demanding he come to Luoyang to kowtow before his newest overlord to boot. He requested that Ma Gui disregard the terms, instead continuing to fight to help the Indo-Romans reverse all of their recent territorial losses in full, but the dutiful general refused to disobey his new orders despite his own vehement personal disagreement with them and instead tried to assure his ally that he would work to change the Emperor's mind. Though unaware of the full extent of Zhang's corrupting hold on the Chinese court and government, Strategius knew enough to regard the latter's plan as unfounded optimism. Still, he couldn't carry the war on without Chinese help, so he had little choice but to accept Zhang's settlement for now and move the Belisarians' seat from the now more-exposed Kophen to Peucela; the Salankayanas and Chandras similarly quit the war soon after, allowing old Hashim to claim a victory and territorial gains on all fronts, even if they weren't quite as sweeping as he'd originally expected. Fortunately for Strategius, Ma Hui was not so hung up on notions of honor & loyalty to an overlord who had proven they had little of either, and turned out to be much more receptive to his advice & tutelage.
The market square of Peucela, chosen by the Belisarians to serve as a more secure capital now that Kophen was on the front-line with Islam
The Neapolitan negotiations being presided over by Emperor Leo and Patriarch Tobéa (with Pope John II playing a supporting role) dragged on through 772. Ascertaining very quickly that Gostãdénu was still more than a little upset about being outwitted when it came to dealing with the Blackamoors of Ghana and that pressing him to make additional concessions to his northern rival Recaredo would probably get him to walk out entirely, Leo stressed that he sought to find a compromise in which territorial concessions of any kind would be minimal, or even nonexistent. This kept the Moors from leaving the table in the first few days of the process, but the fact remained that Recaredo was equally unwilling to budge on any land so soon after just beginning to expand overseas (even if it was by trying to poach what the Africans had already discovered rather than actually breaking any new ground himself).
A
status quo ante settlement was viewed as unacceptable by Gostãdénu, not only because blood had already been shed, but also because the African settlements on Madera/Lénna happened to be concentrated on the drier eastern side of the island, which was unsuitable to any significant extent of agriculture. As far as the Moors were concerned, a war to seize the much more fertile north & west of the island was perfectly in line with their interests, and if it came with a chance to conquer the extremely wealthy region of Baetica from the Visigoths (which would also conveniently cut the latter off from any chance of overseas expansion at all) then so much the better. In turn, it wasn't as though Recaredo was particularly averse to the idea of a conflict with his southern neighbor either. It was apparent that old Leo would have to put his formidable cunning, with which he had outfoxed enemies from the Continental Saxons to the Khazars & Arabs, to good use here if he intended to finesse a peace settlement which wouldn't collapse within the first five minutes of him turning his back to the West.
The peace process in the far west was not the only matter which Leo III had to worry about. Though the ink had barely dried on the
vellum of the Peace of Argamum, the Ruthenians were already threatening to break its terms by meddling in support of the rebellion of their Severian kindred to the east. Although the Ruthenian Grand Prince Mstislav hadn't even finished rebuilding his capital as of 772, he was eager to curry favor with Leo in preparation for another war with the old Khazar oppressor, to the point of having his and Veleslava's oldest son baptized as Lev in honor of the Emperor and the work he did to free the majority of the Antae from the Khazars' shadow. In terms of actually practical preparations for warfare though, he couldn't do much more than to accept a request for protection issued by the Severians of Pereyaslav, a village on the left bank of the Dnieper near Kyiv.
Pereyaslav, the first Ruthenian foothold in Severian lands on the left bank of the Dnieper and a major provocation against the Khazars so soon after Leo and Theodosius had just signed a peace treaty with them, at this time still not even a gord/gorod (fortified town) but a minor riverside village
Of course Simon-Sartäç was furious at this development, which he denounced as a treaty violation, but he and his sons had their hands full trying to put out other, much bigger fires across their empire at the time. Meanwhile Leo advised Mstislav not to push his luck any further, as the Ruthenians were clearly in no position to actually fight another war and the Holy Roman Empire needed to rest its legions, especially with news of the Muslims having concluded a peace settlement with their long-lost Indo-Roman cousins far off in the east and no doubt moving newly-freed reinforcements to the Levantine frontier. In truth, Leo thought the Dnieper was already a good place to mark the easternmost border of Rome's sphere of influence and was not interested in further hostilities with the Khazars anyway: to him, the Second Roman-Khazar War had conclusively proven that the Hashemites were a much graver threat than those nomads could ever be.
Further still to the east beyond the Pontic Steppe, it was in this year that Lady Si completed her meteoric ascent to the rank of
lì fēi or 'Beautiful Consort', one of the four co-equal top concubines in the imperial harem: for this reason, it is from this point onward she is usually referred to as Si Lifei in the histories, and she is further recorded as the last of the 'Four Beauties' of China after the Spring-and-Autumn era Xi Shi, the early Former Han-era Wang Zhaojun, and late Former Han-era Diaochan, with poets celebrating her beauty as that which causes flowers to wilt out of shame[3]. From this lofty seat she could not only more frequently see and better secure the safety of her son Liu Dan in his gilded cage, but also sway Emperor Xiaojing into appointing her relatives and more dangerously, her Liu former in-laws, to ministerial and military offices of prominence. Even Zhang Ai had trouble pushing back against Si's growing influence now, driving him to cultivate an alliance with Xiaojing's chief wife Empress Dou to constrain her.
Now by the time Si Lifei had had her new rank and honors conferred upon her, Ma Gui and Strategius had arrived in the capital – the former to lodge a protest, the latter to bow before the second Chinese Emperor in less than ten years. At Zhang's advice Emperor Xiaojing dismissed Ma's complaints and advocacy for renewing the war in the far west even as he awarded the able general with gold, silk brocade and new estates, sending the latter away disgruntled. Strategius meanwhile left Luoyang not only empty-handed, but with an arbitrary increase in tribute (no doubt because Zhang wanted a new palace or five) which left him angrier than ever, and though he failed to incite Ma Gui to mutiny, he resolved that not only was the execrable court in Luoyang bound to change that sooner rather than later, but that he should try to push Ma Hui in that rebellious direction instead just in case the elder Ma really did stay loyal unto death – if the current dynasty was going to be of no help to him even as they continued to demand his loyalty & tribute, then perhaps it was time for a new dynasty to take power instead. In any case, Xiaojing's court faced an additional foreign policy crisis soon after Strategius went home: in light of similar heightened demands for tribute the
Tennō Suzaku decided 772 was a good year in which to cease paying tribute to China and, in fact, to wholly renounce the overlordship of the Later Han. Zhang accordingly directed preparations to chastise the 'dwarf barbarians' of the east for this defiance.
Si Lifei making herself presentable for Emperor Xiaojing with the help of her newly chosen handmaidens, as the time has not yet come for her to drive a knife into his back
The
Augustus Leo spent 773 carefully working on a compromise settlement with which to resolve the Moorish-Gothic conflict. By the year's end, he and his cohorts among the top echelons of the Ionian Heptarchy's westernmost churches could breathe a sigh of relief, as they appeared to have finally orchestrated mutually acceptable terms and papered over the cracks between the rival kingdoms. The
status quo ante on Madera/Lénna was upheld, with the caveat that the Romans would build a series of aqueducts to transport water from the much wetter northern side of the island to the dry south & east[4]. This allayed the Africans' biggest objection to having the
status quo be preserved – that their existing farms wouldn't have enough water to be productive – although considering how mountainous the island was, it would certainly take the Holy Roman Empire a good deal of time & money to get this project done. The waters around the islands were to remain open to commercial & fishing activity on the part of both the Goths and the Moors, as well, for it had been discovered that there was plenty of fish in the seas for the both of them (in fact, on a goodwill visit to Espal and Ténga Leo would dine on salted & smoked fish caught in those contested waters, including marlin & scabbardfish).
Furthermore, the Visigoths would release any Guanche slaves they had taken and pay modest reparations for their raids on the Canaries, which were acknowledged as part of the African sphere of influence. To compensate, Leo pledged to sponsor the construction of additional palaces and churches in Hispania for his son-in-law's benefit, and also advised Recaredo to turn his gaze westward – they knew the continent of Aloysiana lay beyond the Atlantic, and if the barbarian Irish and heretical Britons could make their way there, why not the civilized and faithful Spaniards? Finally, Recaredo's daughter Gosuinda (Got.: 'Goiswintha') was to marry Bãdalaréu (Lat.: 'Vandalarius'), Stéléggu's son and thus the grandson of the Lord-King Gostãdénu, to seal the peace between their kingdoms. While Leo believed this settlement would hold for at least some time, until either the Moors or the Goths (or both) got greedy enough to breach it anyway, and thereby constituted his final gift of diplomacy & cunning to his son as he felt his life increasingly slipping away from him, the old Emperor would probably have decided it better to let the two western federates fight it out instead if he knew of the consequences of that seemingly entirely conventional marriage decades down the line…
Newlyweds Gosuinda of the Goths and Bãdalaréu of the Africans, whose marriage brought peace between their kingdoms in the short term but would set up unforeseen consequences for both peoples many decades later
While the Romans had been distracted by the need to placate their feuding vassals, and the Khazars continued to repress open rebellion among theirs, Leo's even older enemy to the east was setting up his own plans for a future he wouldn't live to see. Hashim al-Hakim had had many years to observe the efficacy of
ghazw raids in softening up his enemies ahead of any actual invasion, and thought of expanding such operations to the sea. Roman trade across the Mediterranean, besides obviously bringing the Christians great profit, also served to connect Antioch to Espal and was buttressed by a strong navy, built back up since the days of Aloysius I and Helena Karbonopsina to defend their once-unchallenged mastery over
Mare Nostrum and outfitted with exotic weapons such as the lethal 'Greek fire', which the Arabs had been trying to catch up to by way of naphtha. With the forests & ports of Phoenicia and Syria under control, Hashim and his heir Hasan now began a major effort to expand the Islamic fleet with an eye on eventually cracking that very Mediterranean mastery, campaigning against the islands of Cyprus and Crete, and causing serious disruption to the Roman commercial network at the same time that Muslim raiders were doing the same to their frontiers on land. The death of the former's beloved wife Farah from old age, despite shaking him to the core, did not deter him from this naval effort and if anything motivated him to try to bury his grief in work.
The Caliphate was not alone in striving to build a fleet with which to contest mastery of nearby waters this year. Also in 773, the Chinese were pulling together a great fleet at the port of Hangzhou, with which they would sail to the island of the Yamato and chastise Suzaku both for not paying the tribute which he owed to the Dragon Throne and also, once and for all, for daring to presume he and his lineage had any right to the imperial title. Considering how much larger the army of the Later Han was compared to any host the Yamato could conjure, even with the practice of conscription having fallen out of favor, Emperor Xiaojing's court expected this punitive expedition to be little more than a walk in the park. Suzaku, for his part, was frantically scrambling to prepare a defense against his greedy and tyrannical former overlords: the Yamato had been honing their martial skills in clashes with the Emishi tribes to their north, who had proven to be skilled archers and skirmishers capable of resisting the more heavily-armed Yamato warriors with ambushes & raids, but still he knew that the Chinese would be vastly more formidable foes than the latter.
Unexpectedly however, the Chinese attack never materialized. A severe storm struck and crippled the Later Han fleet shortly after it set out from Hangzhou, sinking more than half of the 213 ships amassed for the invasion. The survivors tried to push onward, but gave up and returned to Hangzhou in disgrace after being hit by
another storm near the islands of Liúqiú[5]: in the first recorded instance of contact between China and the people of the latter island chain, some shipwrecked survivors of the Later Han fleet washed up on the Liuqiuans' shores and managed to establish friendly relations with them, trading weapons and tools for food, until they were rescued by their fellows who still had ships. Among the Chinese people this natural disaster was perceived as a major sign of divine disfavor toward the dissolute and unpopular Emperor Xiaojing, or even an outright signal that the Later Han had lost the Mandate of Heaven and that it was time for a new dynasty to take their place. Meanwhile, Suzaku thanked his gods for battering the Chinese with these 'divine winds' before they could even make landfall and hoped that Xiaojing & Zhang Ai would give up after this debacle.
Zhang Ai's fleet being battered by the 'divine wind' before it can even reach Japanese shores, considered nothing short of a miracle by the Yamato and a terrible omen for the Later Han by the Chinese
In 774 the Aloysian imperial household was struck by two serious developments. The first, grimmer one was that Emperor Leo experienced a health scare, collapsing while feasting after a conference with the Germanic federate kings while discussing relations with the neighboring Danes and Wendish tribes. The
Augustus actually recovered from this heart attack and began to make public appearances once more a few weeks later, but he understood that his time on the Earth was coming to an end and that he had best make the final arrangements for a peaceful transfer of power before God called him home. The vassal kings and lords of the Holy Roman Empire were duly summoned to Trévere later in the year, so that they might renew their oaths not just to serve him but also Theodosius Caesar – a man already commanding respect as a general and administrator with a good record, all the better with which to take up the purple in a year or two.
The second, happier occasion was that the great lords in attendance had also conveniently arrived in the capital in time for the wedding of the future Emperor's own son and heir. Theodosius had established another Aloysian familial tradition when he persuaded Leo to invest his son Constantine with the title of
Princeps Iuventis, an honor formerly granted to the immediate heir to the purple (like himself) alongside that of
Caesar, but from now on used to distinguish the oldest son of the Emperor's oldest son from his princely brothers and cousins. Now Rome's teenage 'Prince of Youth' was set to marry the Lombard princess Rosamund, herself also a niece by blood to the King of the Thuringians and by marriage to the King of the Continental Saxons, thereby reinforcing Aloysian ties to the Teutonic kingdoms and allaying Lombard concerns about what the alliance with Poland might mean for their eastern border. The bride was but eight years old however, so until she was old enough for the match to be consummated, Constantine busied himself with the great love of his life – his wetnurse's daughter Marcelle (Lat.: 'Marcella') de Convelence[7], who as the daughter of 'mere' Romano-Frankish gentry, was too lowborn for the future Holy Roman Emperor to ever possibly marry.
Constantine, the first Aloysian to hold the title Princeps Iuventis or 'Prince of Youth' without being the incumbent Emperor's immediate heir-apparent, idling with his longtime lover Marcelle de Convelence in the twilight of his grandfather's reign
In the sands of the Tarim, a party of Tocharian merchants traveling under the protection of Ma Hui's and Strategius' soldiers made a startling discovery this year: while sheltering from a freak sandstorm, the men found the skull of a long-dead dragon[6] in their cave, which they carefully brought with them all the way to the new Indo-Roman capital. The news was interpreted as nothing less than a sign from Heaven by Ma Hui, who was encouraged in this interpretation by Strategius – there could be no doubt about it, the stars were aligning for a change in power in China and they had chosen the Ma clan as the next recipient of their celestial mandate. The younger Ma excitedly wrote of the archaeological discovery and its implications, of which he was certain, to his father and eagerly awaited orders to march back from the west to support the latter in toppling the unjust, and now also increasingly obviously accursed, Emperor Xiaojing. In this task, Ma Hui was equally sure that not only would their soldiers follow them faithfully, but so would the Chinese people.
Now Ma Gui was not entirely certain about toppling the Later Han entirely and seizing the Dragon Throne for himself, but events going back almost a decade had taken a toll on his once-firm loyalty to the dynasty – so much so that, at the very least, he didn't turn his son in for treason nor did he take any action to rein in his troops' increasingly loud complaints about their salary and the incompetence of government officials who insisted on intruding upon their inspections and plans. 774 brought additional developments which would take an ax to what remained of that loyalty, as firstly the Later Han strove to pull together a second fleet with which to invade the islands of the Yamato. Unfortunately Zhang Ai chose to assemble this fleet during typhoon season, resulting in a summer cyclone sinking his ships before they could even leave port this time.
As if this were not enough proof that the Mandate of Heaven was slipping from the Later Han's fingers, not long after that disaster in port they were further confronted by one on land: the Khitans, a Mongolic tribe descended from the Xianbei who had once been the terror of northern China and founded several short-lived dynasties like the Northern Wei before post-Jin China was reunified by the Song in the mid-fifth century. Encouraged by the contraction of the Chinese sphere of influence in recent decades, the Later Han's apparent unwillingness to destroy or even seriously punish the Mohe for Wugunai's rebellion, and this spate of natural disasters, Khitan raiders began to harass China's northwestern frontier, ultimately slipping past the increasingly dilapidated & undermanned Great Wall to pillage farmsteads & towns along the Great Bend of the Yellow River. Ma Gui advocated immediate & forceful retaliation and volunteered to lead the punitive expedition himself, but Xiaojing heeded Zhang Ai's advice to bribe the Khitan chiefs into staying home instead. The former, outraged and at last giving up on any hope of persuading the Emperor to see reason as long as the eunuch-chancellor lived to pull his strings, finally began to actually plot rebellion with the intent of overthrowing Zhang's government and stringing him up.
The mostly-intact 'dragon skull' found by Ma Hui's men and the merchants they were guarding while sheltering from a Tarim sandstorm, which he used as a talisman proving his destiny was to sit on the Dragon Throne and preserved throughout the ages long after his death
775 was a mostly uneventful year for the Holy Roman Empire, until its last few months at least. Emperor Leo suffered a second heart attack from the stress of holding court and drawing up plans for the next round of hostilities with Dar al-Islam, and this one proved fatal. On a chilly and rainy autumn night the
Augustus did pass away at the age of sixty-three, the same age at which his illustrious progenitor Aloysius I shuffled off his own mortal coil, and was duly succeeded by the
Caesar Theodosius who had not left Trévere's environs since the previous year for fear of his father's worsening condition, and thus was there to join his parents in Leo's last moments. Crowned by his uncle Pope John a few weeks before Christmas, the fifth Theodosius would also be reckoned as the fifth and last of the 'Five Majesties' – historians' collective name for the first five Aloysian Emperors (Aloysius I, Constantine VI, Aloysius II, Leo III and now Theodosius V) and a reference to the Five Good Emperors of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty.
As the nickname suggested, these five were some of the best monarchs of that dynasty and not only set formidable examples for their successors, but were also responsible for an array of wide-ranging reforms & victories that would influence Europe for many years after their demise and serve as a foundation which would, hopefully, be able to weather the reign of the less capable among their descendants. But of all the Five Majesties' accomplishments in consolidating the Holy Roman Empire – reuniting Western and Eastern Rome, reforming the Senate to facilitate the complete integration of the federate kingdoms into the new Roman order, and finalizing the evolution of Ephesian Christianity into its Ionian form among others – perhaps the greatest might be their ability to consistently pass the purple down from father to son in a mostly orderly manner (their most serious civil war being the one marring the transition between Constantine VI and Aloysius II). The Great Stilichians too had managed dynastic succession, but rarely peacefully and often with at least one non-succession-related crisis in the background to boot, so it had been up to the Aloysians to work on entrenching the principle of primogeniture (at least as far as imperial succession was concerned). In this, their success was so miraculous (especially by Roman standards) that it was considered further proof that theirs truly must've been the Blessed Blood of Saint Jude.
Setting aside long-term trends in the course of Roman history to refocus on the present, Theodosius faced his first test as Holy Roman Emperor almost immediately after his coronation, and certainly before 775 had even ended yet. Also in the fall of 775, Simon-Sartäç crushed one of the most threatening of the rebel leaders who had taken up arms against him, Bastu Tarkhan, who he drew into a battle where he worked as the anvil to his sons' hammer. After stringing Bastu up by his entrails, the Khagan next turned his attention to the rebellious Severians while dispatching Isaac & Zebulun to suppress revolts among the Oghuz Turks & Kimeks to the east. No small number of Severians flooded toward Ruthenian-held Pereyaslav ahead of the Khagan's vindictive hordes, and Simon-Sartäç demanded that Mstislav's scant few warriors vacate the town and return back over the Dnieper if they didn't want him to wipe them off the face of the earth.
In response the Grand Prince of Ruthenia appealed to his overlord for assistance, scarcely five years after making peace with the Khazars. Aware that the Ruthenians (having barely begun to recover from the walloping they'd received in the early stage of the Second Roman-Khazar War) still had no chance of withstanding a Khazar onslaught before the Romans could help them, and not inclined to start a third war when the Muslims on their southern flank were still unengaged, Theodosius elected to negotiate with Simon-Sartäç instead of immediately rushing to militarily defend the fragile Ruthenian principality. He had proven himself a capable soldier and strategist already, but now came the time to prove whether he had inherited any of his late father's diplomatic mettle as well.
The newly enthroned Flavius Theodosius Augustus Quintus 'Sclavenicus', here seen in Constantinople where he intends to negotiate a settlement over the Dnieper on behalf of his vassal Mstislav with his former enemy the Khazar Khagan, surrounded by his Rhangabe in-laws who held high office & honors in his government
Over in China, 775 had brought with it additional Khitan raiders, who pillaged across the Hetao Plain as far as Pincheng[8] and were at first stopped only by the Taihang Mountains, but this time Ma Gui decided to take the initiative and go off to fight the raiders himself without direct orders from the central government. Despite being outnumbered, with a mere 2000 horsemen he managed to surprise, scatter and systematically defeat five times his number in Khitans before they could retreat beyond the Great Wall, returning many thousands of enslaved captives to their homes and recapturing much of the Khitans' booty. For this feat the general won much popularity with the people of northwestern China – but not with the imperial court, where Zhang Ai upbraided him for acting without orders and shedding blood 'unnecessarily' where he could've just bribed the Khitans into going home and returning what they had stolen.
This was the last straw for Ma Gui, who resolved to instigate a rebellion to dispel the eunuch-chancellor's odious influence and restore a competent government with a spine over the Middle Kingdom. Certainly his soldiers were all for it; but among his senior officers Zhang had recruited an informant, Wang Zhizhong, with no small amount of gold, wine and women, for the eunuch had correctly appraised the increasingly obviously angry and mutinous Ma as a threat to his power. This Wang reported his superior's plans to overthrow the imperial court to Zhang as soon as he learned of it, and the reaction from Luoyang was swift. A false message was delivered to Ma's headquarters at Taiyuan, seemingly penned and sealed by Emperor Xiaojing himself, claiming to have actually agreed with him and inviting him back to the capital to take up high office so that he might serve as a counterbalance to Zhang's influence – of course, Zhang had written the letter himself and applied the imperial seal to it, and when Ma arrived he was promptly arrested and executed for treason.
If Zhang thought that would be the end of it, however, then for once the conniving eunuch had miscalculated most dreadfully. News of what had happened, accompanied by a piece of their beloved commander's quartered corpse, drove Ma's soldiers into a rage and they lynched Wang Zhizhong when he tried to assert his new position of command over them, granted to him by Zhang as a reward for his part in engineering Ma's demise. The leaderless mutineers occupied Taiyuan and its environs, and while they were left rather aimless in the wake of Ma's and Wang's consecutive deaths, before a well-paid suppression force (led by Si Sugan, a cousin of Si Lifei) retook the city they managed to get word of this latest injustice and their revolt out to the people of northern China, no small number of whom had just been saved by Ma earlier in the year. By 775's end, large parts of northern China had been consumed in riots and agrarian uprisings further fueled by a cold-induced poor harvest: a development which troubled Zhang Ai but was actually welcomed by the chief concubine, who saw an opportunity to surround the Emperor with her relatives & in-laws under the guise of 'protecting' him from the insurgents. All said insurgents needed to pose an independent threat to the Later Han regime, in turn, was a strong and charismatic leader who could unite them.
Such leadership could only be provided by Ma Hui, who was residing in Peucela where Strategius' court was still settling in by the time word of his father's death reached them – in the form of a letter commanding Strategius to quietly put the 'son of the high traitor' to death. Finding the audacity of Zhang Ai and Xiaojing to demand that he carry out such a dishonorable deed just a few years after they stabbed him in the back during negotiations with the Caliphate to be equal parts darkly amusing and infuriating, the Indo-Roman king instead revealed the contents of the message to the younger Ma and encouraged him to march back home, topple the corrupt and degenerate Later Han, and found a new dynasty which would pull the Middle Kingdom out of the pit it was currently in – one which could also be counted on to properly support its vassals abroad, of course. Both men had already discussed the likelihood of China's regular army, comprised overwhelmingly of Sinicized Turks like the Mas themselves, defecting to his side in the eventuality of a real rebellion.
After thanking Strategius for his honesty, as well as all those years they had fought the Muslims together, and asserting that he will not be forgotten by the next Emperor of China, Ma began the arduous trek eastward along the Silk Road, using the gold which Strategius gave to him rather than send as tribute to recruit Sogdian & Tocharian mercenaries well before he started flipping the allegiance of the Later Han's westernmost garrisons (something which did not go unnoticed by previously-tame western barbarians, such as the Uyghurs). Certainly he had no intention of simply throwing out Zhang Ai and trying to 'purify' the Later Han court, his father's fate proved it was too late for that – no, he was coming to overthrow the Later Han altogether as Strategius recommended, and to that end he had the dragon-skull of the Tarim transported with him to impress common soldiers & peasants into joining his cause. Few wished to stand against this generally respected young general's march home, especially since his mission to avenge his father's death was in line with the Chinese cultural emphasis on filial piety and opposing him meant serving Zhang Ai's ends: those who did, were soon made an example of to induce further defections to his side. Thus the 'War of the White Horse' – so named as a pun on Ma Hui's own name, for 'ma' was also the Chinese word for 'horse' and the rebellious captain's helmet was decorated with a mane of white horse-hairs, hence 'baima' or 'white horse' – had begun. Strategius could only hope that it wouldn't take too long for Ma Hui to prevail...
Ma Hui riding back to China proper, intent on getting revenge for his father's death and setting himself up as the new Emperor. In so doing he has set in motion the great disaster of the eighth century for China – the only question was, would it be a bigger disaster than Xiaojing's reign had been up to this point?
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[1] Tangier.
[2] In modern-day Machico Municipality, Madeira.
[3] Historically it was the Taoist nun Yang Guifei who became the Fourth Beauty of ancient China in the mid-8th century. Completely unlike the TL's Si Lifei, she was a deeply loyal and loving partner to Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, to the point of committing suicide in an attempt to save the latter from the An Lushan Rebellion provoked in part by her cousin Yang Guozhong.
[4] An early version of the Portuguese
levadas, essentially.
[5] The Ryukyu Islands.
[6] Actually a
Tarbosaurus, basically the Chinese cousin of the T-Rex.
[7] Koblenz.
[8] Datong.
