The Romans' Siege of Tyre dragged well throughout 921, just as the (First) Siege of Antioch had gone slowly and painfully before. Not only was Governor Abdallah stubborn and fiercely loyal to the Egyptian regime which appointed him in the first place, but the city's defenses were nearly as formidable as those of Antioch and the defenders were sitting on a sufficiently huge stockpile of supplies to endure siege conditions for a lengthy time period even without naval resupply (thanks to the Roman blockade established after their victories over the Islamic fleets), as befitting the largest Caliphal port in the Levant. Emperor Aloysius and his generals found themselves having to divide their attention between the siege itself and joint relief efforts by the Hashemites of Iraq & Egypt, which threatened their flanks and rear lines: consequently Aloysius himself would usually stay with the besieging army, which had little to do but sit and wait around Tyre itself, while detaching substantial forces under men such as the Pendragons to combat the Arabs in the countryside. No small number of the younger & more hot-blooded among the crusading knights & lords who stayed with the former complained about the experience in their writings, finding the boring tedium of siege warfare to be more unbearable than the heat of pitched battle and not at all what they had signed up for.
Roman ships, their progress throughout the Eastern Mediterranean now largely unhindered, bringing a new batch of supplies & reinforcements to the besiegers of Tyre
That said, the final victory of Kocel' at Byarukan and the following collapse of Islamic Arminiya did bring renewed hope & relief to the Christians. Leaving the defense of the Caucasian kingdoms to their restored kings in the knowledge that the Muslims were now too obviously busy on too many fronts to make a hard push back up north, the Emperor's brother-in-law moved the bulk of his army further south this year. His first task was breaking the Arabs' own siege of Antioch, which had been made all the easier by the withdrawal of contingents from their besieging army there to either support the counterattacks against Aloysius near Tyre or to help suppress the growing
zanj rebellion in southern Iraq. After routing the depleted army of the Turkic general Fakhr al-Din Mas'ud in the Battle of Antioch, Kocel' sent Aloysius Caesar down the Levantine coast with a detachment of 6,000 men to rejoin his father while taking all of his remaining troops on an offensive into Upper Mesopotamia, by which he hoped to definitively secure the crusaders' northern flank and restore the Ghassanids to their old dominion as he had just done for the Armenians & Georgians.
While Kocel' captured Tel-Bshir[1] (which the Frankish chroniclers recorded as 'Turbessel') for use as a staging ground into the rest of Upper Mesopotamia, the crusaders down south fought many battles against the Saracens across Phoenice and the northern Syrian coast to prevent Al-Farghani's and Ja'far's design of cutting them off from the rest of Christendom from coming into fruition. Aloysius Caesar made a good impression for his first-ever independent command of significance with a timely arrival in the Battle of Gibellum[2], where he turned the tide in favor of the outnumbered crusaders holding that town in his father's rear lines against the Iraqis. From there he worked with Boutros and Count Cassian to secure the crusaders' northeastern flank in the Battles of Arca Caesarea[3] and Hermel around the mountains of Lebanon, while the Pendragon father-and-son team prevailed over an Egyptian effort to circle around their eastern flank at the Battle of Marj Ayoun. Artur next presided over the surrender of the smaller city of Sidon, also trapped under crusader siege but lacking the resources of Tyre and the iron-necked leadership of a man like Abdallah, but this would be the final victory of the Emperor's uncle and champion from the Seven Years' War: the old
Ríodam was found to have died in his sleep just one day later. Brydany thus united the crowns of Britannia, England and Ireland into a 'Triune Monarchy' for the first time in history, and would have to work twice as hard to make up for the loss of as able a commander as his father.
In Cyrenaica, Stéléggu and the Moors made more incremental advances against the Islamic garrisons. Tocra finally fell in this year after running out of supplies under both the landward siege forces and a naval blockade by the Romans' Cretan squadron. From there the Christians surged across the coast to capture the port of old Ptolemais[4] and Apollonia, which the Muslims had rebuilt under the respective names of 'Tolmeita' and 'Soussa' before further converting them into fortresses. Apparently growing impatient with the pace of his push into eastern Libya & Egypt, Stéléggu led an assault on the former town and captured it much more quickly than he had Tocra, though the risks of doing so were manifestly obvious – he was wounded there, being struck in the chest with two arrows (though his armor saved his life), and unable to repeat his feat at Apollonia/Soussa any time soon. Furthermore the Africans were unable to take the inland fortresses at Barqa and old Cyrene itself, where they obviously could not call upon naval support like they could on the coast.
African forces launching an escalade against the walls of Ptolemais/Tolmeita
Meanwhile, the Zanj Rebellion continued to pick up steam in the marshlands of far-southern Mesopotamia. Following the great victory of the Chains, Abba Musa enjoyed explosive growth in recruitment, and his army effectively put the major cities of the region such as Basra, Al-Ubulla and 'Abadan under siege by gaining mastery over the countryside even without building actual siege camps: the Hashemite authorities could not move supplies or troops toward them by either canal or road without the insurgents noticing, and promptly arranging ceaseless ambushes for them. In rural areas, virtually no Arab plantation or camp escaped sack at the hands of the slave rebels, who in turn gained recruits & supplies for their own cause with each small victory.
The first Hashemite regular army to reach the region (a force about 5,000 strong, whose rather low size indicated Kufa's continued underestimation of the scale of the rebellion) this year defeated a
zanj raiding force of 3,000 that had strayed too far north in the Battle of Al-Madhar, entirely annihilating these comparatively ill-equipped and trained rabble outside of their favored swampy fighting ground and mounting their heads on spears to intimidate their brethren. However this victory made the Caliphal forces overconfident and it would be they who were massacred to the last man when Musa led a surprise night attack on their encampment at Badhaward to the south a few weeks later. News of this victory and the existence of the rebellion reached even the ears of Aloysius IV this year, at which point the
Augustus Imperator duly congratulated the rebels and made public his wish for their success in making Mesopotamia Christian again.
Christian forces finally made progress against the defenders of Tyre on the first of May 922, when Roman siege engines successfully created a breach in the walls and a catapulted pot of Greek fire caused a devastating fire within the city itself. Sensing opportunity, Aloysius and his generals escalated their assault and managed to overwhelm the defenders by sunset: the Romans took most of the already-burning city and once more sacked it in a fury after having spent so long fruitlessly besieging the place while Governor Abdallah, a few hundred Egyptian soldiers and some fortunate Tyrian citizens continued to hold out in the citadel of old Tyre. Even they surrendered a week later though, once it became apparent that no help would be forthcoming by land or sea, and were granted safe passage back to Egyptian territory as part of the deal they struck with the Emperor.
With Tyre having fallen back into Roman hands (even if much of the city had been reduced to cinders), the Saracens' hold on Phoenice was definitively broken and the main crusading host was now free to advance further toward Jerusalem. However, some of the toughest battles of the campaign lay ahead of them – understanding the value of the city to the Christians and the heightened vulnerability of Egypt itself should said Christians open up a second front on its eastern flank after taking back Filastin, Al-Farghani had also put a significant amount of work into buttressing the region's defenses and stationed significant reinforcements there. They were further joined by Al-Dawla's troops who had retreated from Phoenice after the fall of Tyre, as well as Iraqi Hashemite forces creeping up from the Hejaz, and of course the Egyptian & Iraqi forces based out of Damascus & Aleppo continued to pose a threat to the crusaders' flank.
A Turkic heavy cavalryman and Arab (probably Banu Hilal) light spearman of the 'Misri', or Egyptian army of Lashkar Al-Farghani and his Hashemite figurehead Abd al-Aziz. The Egyptians' possession of Libya, Filastin and everything in between – which is to say everything the crusaders were really after this round – ensured that whether they wanted to or not, they'd have to bear the brunt of the First Crusade
All this said, momentum was on the crusaders' side and enthusiasm for their cause was only growing as each victory brought them closer to the ultimate prize. Roman naval control of the eastern Mediterranean, further solidified by their capture of Tyre, made it trivial for Aloysius to continue transporting reinforcements who had finished training in Europe by sea; together with local Christian recruits raised from the reconquered territories like Boutros' militia, he was able to semi-comfortably replenish the losses he had incurred on this long road to Jerusalem, which normally would not have been something to sneeze at. After Aloysius Caesar led the Christian vanguard to victory over the Egyptian generals Al-Dawla and Jamal al-Din Is'mail in the Battle of Wadi al-Mafshukh[4], the Romans pushed onward to the coastal city of Acre, whose defenders stood down in a negotiated surrender after a two-month siege shortly before the end of the year. With this victory, Aloysius IV now had his bridgehead into Palaestina and a convenient port for additional supply drops.
As for Egypt's western front, the Africans succeeded in capturing old Cyrene late this year, thereby eliminating a prominent threat behind their new front lines. They were not successful in taking Barqa however, which was the bigger prize on account of it being the Islamic capital of Cyrenaica: urban governor Al-Nu'man ibn Al-Tayyib cast out thousands of Muslim refugees who had fled before the slow but steady Christian advance through the Cyrenaican Pentapolis region, and though those refugees were promptly massacred or enslaved by the Moors, this move achieved its intended goal of conserving his limited supplies at a time when he could not possibly expect resupply from Egypt proper. Al-Farghani also directed extensive raids against the southern Christian army as (aside from the division left behind to besiege Barqa, which was led by Stéléggu's son Sémon) it tried to advance past the now mostly-cleared Pentapolis, making good use of the displaced & vengeful Banu Hilal on one hand while further slowing & frustrating Stéléggu's already grinding push toward Egypt itself on the other.
In Mesopotamia, the
zanj of Abba Musa racked up their first significant conquests as of 922. No fewer than 20,000 freedmen gathered for a major attack on Al-Ubulla this year, taking advantage of the weakened state of the city militia which had yet to recover from the Battle of the Chains, and rather than risk being worn down by attrition or exposing himself to Iraqi government forces descending from the north, Musa resolved to gamble on an immediate assault. The night after personally catching an unusually massive carp (known to the Arabs as a
shabout), he claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke to him in a dream and informed him that their victory would be guaranteed if they adorned their standard with the sign of the fish (
icthys), just as Constantine the Great was once told that he would conquer while fighting under the chi-rho. Thus the symbol of the Zanj Rebellion, a cross enclosed within an
icthys, was born; and indeed under a banner bearing that symbol the
zanj successfully stormed Al-Ubulla that very day, in the process accidentally setting fire to most of the city's wooden structures and killing most of the inhabitants. 'Abadan by the coast surrendered in terror soon afterward, leaving Basra direly isolated among a sea of insurgents toward the end of 922.
Standard of the zanj rebels, combining the icthys (formerly used as a symbol by crypto-Christians under persecution) with a simple cross. It will remain associated with the cause of Christian liberty and its variants reused by freedmen, abolitionists and their allies time & again, long after Abba Musa and his followers have become only a memory
Finally, trouble began to stir in the eastern provinces of the Caliphate in earnest. The Indo-Roman court in Peucela was alerted to the pileup of Christian victories to the west and the state of disarray the Islamic world was now in by merchants who had traveled through Khazaria to China and were now looping back west through their lands, and the
Basileus Belisarios III determined that the time to strike back against the forces of Islam was finally upon them. A daring Indo-Roman attack through the mountains out of Adinapura succeeded in taking back Kabul, much to the shock of the Alids – and in a further blow, Belisarios' Salankayana allies also began to move against their positions in northern India. The Alid governors were able to limit their losses at this stage through quick thinking and careful coordination, effectively acclaiming Abu al-Faraj Muhammad ibn Yahya to direct their northern forces against the Indo-Romans and Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Ali to direct southern defensive operations against the Indians, but the loss of Kabul already demonstrated that their defense was not as strong as it should have been and it was exceedingly unlikely that any help would be forthcoming from further west.
The primary crusading host departed from Acre in 923, beginning the most arduous but also most heavily anticipated part of their long march: the push on Jerusalem itself. Fierce Saracen resistance directed by Al-Dawla, Jamal al-Din and other Egyptian generals ensured this (hopefully final) stretch of the campaign would be a lengthy and grueling slog for the Christians, who had to strive mightily to prevail in battles such as Beth-Anath[5], Mount Meron and the Belus River[6]. Many Christian or Jewish towns in the area had been reduced to pale shadows of their former selves from centuries prior if not to outright desolate ruins, lasting marks of the devastating Romano-Turkic wars and then the grinding Islamic conquests of the seventh to eighth centuries; those Arab settlers who weren't nomadic Bedouins had preferred to build their own villages, and the remaining cities also included significant populations of Jews – descendants of the Galilean Jews expelled by Aloysius I and Helena who had returned with the Islamic forces, as well as some of their Babylonian cousins. Suffice to say, though they would still recruit smaller numbers of local Christians to their banner, nothing like the Maronite uprising in Phoenice was likely to be replicated here.
Nevertheless, by weight of numbers and the able leadership of their own generals, the Romans did succeed in making some further headway into Palaestina proper this year. Among their roster of great captains, aging veterans of the Seven Years' War like Brydany were now joined by a new generation of younger talents who were cutting their teeth on the battlefields of the Holy Land: both great princes such as Aloysius IV's sons, Brydany's eldest son & heir Elan of Dumnonia, Count Germain of Flanders and Sigisvulto della Grazia as well as lowlier knights who nevertheless demonstrated great martial ability such as Pietro Selvo, Sigmar von Feuchtwangen and Iljko of Knin. By the end of 923 the Christians had secured much of Galilee, despite the added difficulty of the rough terrain, and certainly including holy sites of great spiritual importance to them (even if these places were otherwise in ruins or, at best, modest villages) such as Capernaum and Nazareth. Indeed, the Emperor had the great honor of witnessing his second son Charles being knighted in the hometown of Jesus early in December of this year.
Prince Elan of Dumnonia, heir to Britain, Brittany & England (and Tara, but probably not the whole of Ireland) overthrows an Islamic champion or 'mubariz' in battle near Nazareth
Another factor slowing the Christians' southward thrust toward Jerusalem was found in Arab attacks from the east, as Ja'far and Abd al-Aziz signed a peace treaty with the Khazars which conceded northern Azerbaijan down to Baku to them. This freed up additional Arab reinforcements to fight both the
zanj and the crusaders, and so the joint Egyptian-Iraqi attacks out of Damascus escalated in this year. To counter the backbiting Syrian offensives targeting their overland connection to the rest of the Holy Roman Empire through Phoenice, additional crusaders were detached from the main force to bolster the rearguard under Count Cassian & Boutros, delaying the pace of their advance through Palaestina but ensuring that their rearward supply lines wouldn't be getting cut off any time soon. The two also coordinated with a new 'northeastern' division detached from Aloysius' host, led by the Spanish Count Ansemundo de Llíria, to take the Golan Heights in order to secure the flank of the Palestinian army against Syrian attacks bypassing Phoenice: with their support, Ansemundo was able to prevail in the Battle of Paneas this year.
In an encouraging development for the Christian forces in North Africa, the Christians of Nubia opened another front against Egypt this year. In spite of their prior success in keeping Roman spies & diplomats from reaching that far southern country, the Egyptians could not interdict traveling merchants following the sea route of the Silk Road on their return from distant China, who inevitably spilled the beans about the successful Christian offensives in the north to the Nubian court. King Hêlias ('Elias') of Nubia promptly prepared incursions both down the Nile and into the eastern Abyssinian Highlands, hoping to push the Muslims back in this part of the world for the first time in centuries, and achieved some success on both fronts upon launching those attacks this year. By the end of 923 Nubian forces got as far as Aswan, which they still knew by the old Greek name of 'Syene', and also celebrated Mass in Lalibela for the first time in approximately 300 years.
Having taken nearby Al-Ubulla and 'Abadan in the previous year, the
zanj insurgents now set their sights on the big prize in far southern Mesopotamia: Basra, the last significant Arab stronghold in that region. The city's defenders had already been weakened by disease and famine, brought about by rebel control of the countryside which had made it nigh-impossible for the central authorities in Kufa to send them any more food and reinforcements. A relief force from the north was lured into the marshes and destroyed early this year, while another one comprised of hastily-raised Arab tribesmen from the deserts west of Iraq proved no match for the increasingly battle-hardened rebels on terrain which favored the latter and routed near Az Zubayr. Under such circumstances the governor of Basra, Ja'far's nephew Ibrahim ibn Jul'an, found himself compelled to negotiate Basra's surrender with Abba Musa, who had since surrounded the city with as many as 25,000 warriors.
Now despite his hatred for the elite of the city which had most directly oppressed him for most of his life, Musa agreed to try to negotiate a peaceable handover of the city over having to take it by storm or siege, for much the same reason that he wanted to take Al-Ubulla quickly before. However, Ibrahim did not intend to discuss terms in good faith with an infidel slave who had dared raise arms in defiance against his master, and attempted to murder Musa over the negotiating table outside the city walls with a spear. He did not calculate that Musa would also expect treachery on the part of his oppressors, and thus wore armor looted from a fallen Ubullan militia captain under his clothes. The
zanj won the desperate fight which followed, raced back to their lines and spread news of the attempted Hashemite backstab throughout the rebel camp, firing up the many thousands of freedmen already gathered there with vindictive intent. The slave army promptly stormed Basra from multiple directions in a rage and overwhelmed the defenders, who in addition to being heavily outnumbered were also now leaderless; upon winning the battle, they sacked the city as they had Al-Ubulla and put its mosque (among many other buildings) to the torch. Amid the bloodied and partially burnt palace of Basra Musa proclaimed the foundation of a free state which he dubbed 'Chaldea', after the ancient name for far-southern Mesopotamia, and himself as its God-ordained 'Great Holy Judge'.
Suffice to say, the Great Holy Judge Musa was not in any mood to render merciful judgment unto Basra after the Vizier's nephew Ibrahim ibn Jul'an tried to assassinate him under a flag of parley, which he wrathfully considered to be the last insult his former masters would ever get to throw in his face
The struggle for the Holy Land continued to build up toward its climax throughout 924. Up north, Kocel' captured Edessa this year and installed Nikephoros Gassanídes – great-grandson of the last Ghassanid king Al-Harith VIII, who himself had grown up at Constantinople and spoke primarily Greek – to rule this last seat of his forebears, albeit as a mere count and not an actual king like his ancestors. Before they could renew the push on Jerusalem itself, the Christians had to finish locking down Galilee to ensure that there would be no Muslim forces striking at the rear of their lines from those fortresses which they still occupied, of which the largest was Tiberias. Though a cavalry force under Aloysius Caesar was able to quickly ride from Nazareth to take Sepphoris (Fra.: 'La Saforie') near Tiberias, where the prince would sponsor the construction of a church dedicated to Saint Anne atop the purported site of her home & that of her daughter the Virgin Mary, they were initially unable to do the same unto Tiberias. Instead the Romans had to besiege that well-watered fortress by the Sea of Galilee, though fortunately the Muslims within were neither numerous nor bold enough to try any strategy beyond passively sitting behind their (admittedly stout) walls. Moving unhindered through the Galilean heartland, the Romans soon established siegeworks manned by 14,000 men around Tiberias, transporting water from Sepphoris and other nearby springs as necessary to slake the soldiers' thirst.
While the Siege of Tiberias was ongoing, the crusaders fought their largest battles in Galilee around & atop Mount Tabor slightly southeast of Nazareth, where Al-Dawla had established a formidable defensive position and – quite unlike the garrison of Tiberias – was not content to simply sit there, but used it as a forward base from which to aggressively harass the Christians & contest control of the central-southern Galilean countryside with them. Initial Roman attempts to first draw the Saracen army out in force so that they might be vanquished on the field of open battle failed, and efforts by detachments of Spanish, Magyar and South Slavic horsemen to combat Muslim raiding parties across Galilee also proved inconclusive. Not to be deterred, Brydany proposed a daring stratagem to his cousin: he would launch a feint against the mountain holdfast with the British contingent, draw out Al-Dawla and the vast majority of his men – and then defeat them, alone, on ground of his choosing while Aloysius would not march to reinforce him, but instead attack Mount Tabor's depleted defenses with the bulk of the Christian forces.
Brydany shadowed and eventually attacked a party of Turkic raiders near Nazareth with his own detachment of 2,000 knights and mounted infantry (mostly longbowmen), then chased them almost all the way up to Mount Tabor's gates before falling back under a hail of missiles from the walls & towers. The sight of Brydany's dragon banner drew Al-Dawla's interest and he duly gave chase, while the Britons hurriedly retreated to a pre-planned defensive position further down the River Kishon where their infantry had dug trenches & spike pits, sprinkled caltrops and erected outward-pointing rows of sharp stakes in the river valley, with the Kishon protecting one flank and the forested hillside further protecting the other. Even better, it had rained shortly before Brydany's arrival on that St. George's Day (April 23) – not enough that the Kishon should overflow and drown the Saracens as it once had the Canaanites (the Britons could only wish to be so lucky), but enough to make the battlefield a muddy one. Still, the British contingent numbered fewer than 10,000 men at this point while Al-Dawla had taken with him 18,000, leaving a tenth of his strength behind on Mount Tabor; thus, he was confident of victory and committed to an attack – waiting around was not an option both since he needed to get back to Mt. Tabor sooner rather than later (aware that this was a good time for Aloysius to attack it as well), and since the British longbowmen outranged his own archers & had wasted little time in opening fire on his ranks.
What followed was one of the finest hours in medieval British military history. An initial cavalry charge was mauled by the Britons' traps & arrows before being quickly repelled by the heavy infantry, as even if the Muslim riders wore sufficient armor and padding to withstand the British arrows their unarmored horses were trivially shot out from underneath them, and so Al-Dawla ordered massed infantry attacks instead. But the muddy terrain slowed his men down and tired them out, the relentless volleys of British arrows coming down upon them whittled their numbers down, and once they did reach the British shield-wall after first walking around or over a growing amount of their own dead – not only did the dismounted British chivalry, English housecarls and supporting legionaries & auxiliaries prove once more that they were no slouches in close combat, but the narrowness of the front between the Kishon & the hillside funneled the Saracens directly into the teeth of the English defense, making it impossible for them to maneuver and use their far greater numbers effectively. Worse still the British archers joined the melee with long knives, axes and even camping implements once they ran out of arrows.
Contemporary depiction of the Battle of the Kishon, or 'Flumen Sanguinis' ('river of blood') as the Christians would call it. Additional crusaders can be seen departing Galilee for Mount Tabor in the background
Witnessing the disaster unfold and realizing that his absence from Mt. Tabor was almost certainly intended by his enemies, Al-Dawla fled later in the day with his still-intact cavalry, leaving the infantrymen who comprised the majority of his army to die beneath British blades. And die they did, quite a few not even from direct combat with the Britons, but from either falling and drowning in the muck or from being pushed into (and then drowning) in the Kishon toward the end of the fighting; the British meanwhile pursued but, lacking the ability to re-mount quickly enough to chase after the Egyptian cavalry, they contented themselves with massacring the routing infantry instead, being hardly in any mood to take prisoners. Many thousands of Saracens perished in the Battle of Flumen Sanguinis, the 'river of blood' as the Romans called this engagement (fittingly, the Kishon's Hebrew name meant 'river of slaughter'), and to heap injury upon injury Al-Dawla found the main body of the imperial Roman army beginning to besiege Mt. Tabor when he returned. Knowing full well that there was no salvaging this situation & that Al-Farghani was not a forgiving master – given his record of executing other lieutenants who'd failed him in previous years – Al-Dawla sent all but 100 volunteers among his army to join Jamal al-Din in the defense of Filastin before mounting a suicidal charge against Aloysius IV's army in hopes of finding a worthy death with sword in hand, which he and those few still with him did within a few minutes.
Off to the east, as the Alids came under mounting pressure from both the Indo-Romans and the Salankayanas they resolved to dispatch a message to Kufa, calling upon the Caliphal government there to march to their aid. Ja'far penned a reply which was equal parts accusatory and dismissive, bluntly informing the Alid emirs that there was no way he could spare any troops right now between the crusader armies battering down the gates of Al-Sham & Filastin as well as the escalating Zanj Rebellion and thus they would have to see to their own defense. He also took the time & words to further slam them for presuming to think their senior in Kufa was under any obligation to assist them after they had spent years flouting Caliphal authority, lagging in paying taxes, and indeed hardly contributing to the defense of Anatolia, Arminiya & now the Holy Land in the west.
Now the junior branch of the Banu Hashim (and the many junior branches that had spun out of it) had expected such a reply, and took it as an opportunity to formally renounce their allegiance to Kufa. Abu al-Faraj and Abu Ja'far (not to be confused with the Vizier) were acclaimed as the first Alid 'Sultans' – 'strongmen' – by their subordinates and relatives in Herat & Mansura respectively. Both men hoped to claim the mantle of Caliph in due time, even to fight one another for the crown of their common ancestor, and had already begun to sow the seeds of an anti-intellectual, more meritocratic, and (even) more militaristic sect to challenge the presently dominant 'Ilmi orthodoxy of Kufa, which future generations will know simply as 'Ghazi Islam'; but first, they had no small number of Christians and Hindus to fight in the east.
Abu al-Faraj, now a Sultan in name as well as in fact, assumes a crown & robes of higher office with the support of his new royal court in Herat
Following the victory of the British contingent at the Battle of Flumen Sanguinis in the previous year, early in 925 the crusaders were able to secure the surrender of both Tiberias and Mt. Tabor's remaining defenders, suppressing the last Islamic presence of any significance in the Galilee region. With this out of the way, they were able to resume the march on Jerusalem where Jamal al-Din was waiting for them and had been further bolstered by Egyptian reinforcements, enthusiastic but disorderly and inexperienced Iraqi-led allied troops raised from Arabia, and the remnants of Al-Dawla's Galilean army. He initially tried to contend with the Romans and stymie their advance at the Battles of Haifa (which the Romans officially still called Porphyrea, though the common Frankish crusaders had dubbed it 'Caiphas') and Beisan[7] ('Scythopolis' to the Romans), but failed on both counts – momentum and numbers were both on the side of the Christians, and in apparently overwhelming amounts at that.
From Haifa and the recovered Decapolis region, the Christians pressed on across a broad front stretching from the coast to the inland region of Samaria, led respectively by Aloysius IV and Aloysius Caesar. More fierce battles were fought at Mount Carmel, Jaffa, the Forest of Sharon[8], Jenin ('Ginae' to the Romans), As-Sāmira[9] ('Sebasteia' to the Romans) and finally Nablus ('Neapolis' to the Romans and another 'Naples' to the Franks). In every case Jamal al-Din and his various captains strove mightily to try to derail the crusaders' progress toward their destination by every means they could think of, ranging from attempting to set fire to the forested mountainside of Mt. Carmel while the Christian army was pushing up toward their positions (only for sudden rain to put their flames out) to the deployment of the Bedouins on loan from Iraq in aggressive skirmishes & raids (which got many of said Bedouins killed, as the demilitarization of the Arab tribes left them at a disadvantage compared to the veteran crusaders) to an attempted last stand at Nablus (delaying the crusaders and inflicting grievous losses on their storming force, but ultimately a worse and more irreplaceable loss for the Saracens).
Suffice to say that despite his efforts, Jamal al-Din was not successful and by autumn both crusading forces were approaching striking range of Jerusalem. Aloysius IV approached from the west, marching inland from Jaffa, while Aloysius Caesar pushed in from the north after sacking Nablus: theoretically at this point Jamal al-Din may have had better chances of defeating either army if he concentrated his full strength against them one at a time, but fearing that the unengaged enemy host would steal a march on Jerusalem while he was occupied as had previously befallen Al-Dawla's fort on Mount Tabor, he made the decision to split his army up and try to engage both at the same time instead. Consequently he met the primary crusading host of the
Augustus Imperator at the Battle of Ramla that September, while his second-in-command Nasir al-Islam Berkyaruq engaged the latter's son in the Battle of Bethel north of Jerusalem. This division of the already outnumbered Islamic army proved most unwise as they were defeated in both battles, and by the end of 925 the crusaders had finally converged to give thanks to God & begin erecting siegeworks before Jerusalem itself, which would have to be defended against their 33,000-strong army by some 4,000 men trapped behind its walls under the command of Nasir al-Islam; Jamal al-Din, meanwhile, had been summoned back to Egypt to face the wrath of Al-Farghani for his failures.
Inspired by the True Cross, Aloysius Caesar leads the Christians in surging forward to rout their Saracen foes at the Battle of Bethel, thereby breaking the last Egyptian obstacle before Jerusalem itself
Al-Farghani himself was inclined to get off his luxurious cushion in Al-Qadimah and assume direct command of the remaining Islamic forces in Filastin at this point, but the ongoing African and Nubian pushes against his core domain of Egypt compelled him to appoint another lieutenant in Nur al-Islam Toghrul to that task and hope that this man would prove more capable at his job than his predecessors. In the meantime, the Egyptian generalissimo first rode southward to arrest the downriver advance of the Nubians, thwarting Hêlias in the Battle of Al-ʾUqṣur[10] (formerly Greco-Roman Thebes-in-Egypt) and pushing them back up the Nile toward Edfu ('Apollinopolis Magna' to the Romans). With that done and the Nubians contained in the first half of 925, Al-Farghani next turned his attention to dealing with the Africans, who had successfully captured Baritun and in so doing began to break into Lower Egypt proper. If Filastin was doomed to fall, as seemed increasingly likely, then he would have to make sure Misr at least remained part of the Dar al-Islam.
A ways in the east, the Zanj state of Chaldea continued to consolidate, and with it Abba Musa's own religious doctrine – which evolved in a, to put it mildly, rather heterodox direction. Having originally been born and raised in the Swahili coast before being shipped off to Iraq by Arab slavers on the edge of puberty, he never abandoned some of the pagan beliefs & ideas which he still shared with many of his fellow Bantu
zanj, and in the years since being secretly baptized in the swamp beyond his former plantation by Christian hideaways of the Babylonian rite he tried to mash those beliefs with Christianity. Now that he had won some breathing room, the newly-minted Great Holy Judge of Chaldea decided this would be a good time to unveil the supposed religious truths which he had long held close to his heart. Musa's teachings included: the pagan Swahili belief in spiritual possession, which he merged with the loosely continuationist belief of the Ionians regarding the continued provision of spiritual gifts from Heaven since the end of the Apostolic Age[11]; his own belief that he was the vessel of the Holy Spirit, and indeed this third of the Trinity incarnated to purify the Earth ahead of the coming of the Son; and that all who followed him would share in the miraculous gifts & powers of the Spirit.
The Ionians of Mesopotamia were naturally disturbed by the religious & social practices of their freedman allies, which ranged from concubinage and communal property ownership (whereas they sought to reclaim their homes, churches & other personal property from the Muslims) to strange rituals such as snake-handling, raving mass dance processions, and ecstatically thrashing about on the ground while speaking in tongues, which Musa praised as evidence that the speakers too had been gripped by the Holy Spirit and were communicating in the language of the angels. Distressed Ionian priests & other notables who had emerged from hiding when the rebels first came knocking and assisted them in overthrowing Islamic control over Chaldea now had a representative of theirs, Shimoun Yabhallaha write to the Emperor, warning that the
zanj could not exactly be described as good Christians (indeed their more bizarre practices were likened to the scandalous
bacchanalia of pagan Rome, the closest point of reference he could think of for Aloysius' benefit) and that they feared the freedmen were possessed by something that most definitely wasn't the Holy Spirit.
Aloysius IV, for his part, didn't much like what he was hearing about these Chaldeans and certainly thought Musa's claim to be the Holy Spirit incarnate contradicted Ionian orthodoxy as well as his & the Heptarchy's headship over the Church, but still considered them a useful ally against the Muslims. Besides, he was busy trying to besiege Jerusalem and hardly in a position to do anything about Musa's eccentricities right now, so the most he could & did do instead was appoint Yabhallaha to the vacant bishopric of Basra with the support of the other Babylonian bishops in exile. And Musa, in turn, sought to expand his dominion toward Al-Ahwaz to the east and Babylon & Kufa in the north; aside from claiming all Mesopotamia for his growing kingdom, he also apparently hoped to eventually persuade the Emperor of his claim to divinity and get the latter to abdicate leadership of all Christendom to him by way of a one-on-one conversation, which seemed more than a little optimistic on his part to say the least. He viewed Yahballaha and the other Ionians of Chaldea as competitors for converts among the
zanj, and potentially even a future threat to his rule, but was not inclined to attack them at this time for fear of both the vengeful Islamic armies gathering to the north and the thought of alienating the Romans – though it gradually grew more tenuous, their alliance would hold for a few more years still.
Mar Shimoun Yabhallaha, Bishop of Basra and leader of the Ionian faithful among the Chaldean rebels, working to sway the zanj toward Christian orthodoxy and against the teachings of Abba Musa, who he considered a useful (for now) but dangerous madman
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[1] Gündoğan, Oğuzeli.
[2] Jableh.
[3] Arqa.
[4] The Ga'aton River.
[5] Bi'ina.
[6] The Na'mein River.
[7] Beit She'an.
[8] Between modern Netanya and Kfar Yona, neither of which exist as of the tenth century.
[9] Ancient Samaria, now modern Sebastia in the West Bank.
[10] Luxor.
[11] 'Continuationism' is the theological position that God still works through miracles & imparts spiritual gifts (prophesying, faith healing, exorcism, speaking in tongues, etc.) even after the last of Christ's Twelve Apostles died. Its most extreme and visible form is associated with modern Pentecostals, but less extreme forms of this doctrine is common across most Christian sects, including Catholics (and ITL, Ionians) and enjoyed support from early pre-Schism Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr. The opposite doctrine, 'cessationism' (the idea that the genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit no longer persist in the church post-Apostolic Age and will only re-emerge at the end of the world), is mostly associated with Calvinists.
