Isaac's Empire 2.0

[Basileus Giorgios]

Hopefully this will provide readers with their fill of hot barbarian action. Apologies in advance for what is quite a Henry-fest!

The accession in 1142 of King Robert II marked the arrival of a measure of stability to the English throne for the first time since the arrival of his great-grandfather William of Normandy[1] eighty years previously[2]. For one thing, unlike all three previous kings, his male-line ancestors, Robert came to the throne as an adult, a man of thirty four, albeit one who had spent the past twelve years of his life as a captive of his murderously paranoid father Richard, the Tyrant King. Despite this, Robert Ii quickly proved himself able to take on the legacy of his father, including most notably a superbly drilled and disciplined professional army, whose support he won shortly after taking the throne in a dashing campaign against his father in law, Henry III of Francia[3], which saw the Francian crown forced to acknowledge Norman control of much of the southern coast of the Channel, and Brittany besides, and furthermore provide Robert with a crown princess, Bertha, to marry.

A painful thorn nonetheless remained in Robert II’s side even after the conclusion of the savage war that had flared up in 1143 in Francia following the death of the late King Henry II[4]. North of his English holdings lurked his wily uncle William of Northumbria, one of the few men who had defied Richard the Tyrant and lived. In 1146, as the court celebrated the birth of a daughter, Matila, the Queen Bertha, William attacked, wreaking bloody devastation across central England and taking the garrison of Nottingham captive. A reprisal campaign in 1147 fell flat, and the following year William repeated his feats of 1146, this time seizing Chester[5] while the King of England rejoiced in the arrival of his son and heir, Henry. William would remain a maddening problem, inciting a revolt against Robert by the English army in the autumn of 1149 while the King was away in Normandy and supplies ran low. It would take two long years before Robert II could once again take full authority in his realm, and the effort of imposing loyalty ensured a further campaign against William would be out of the question. The Duke of Northumbria was therefore able to die peacefully in his bed in the spring of 1156, and his own son, William II, was soon busily reviving the dignity of the old Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, demanding and receiving a crown from a cowed Papacy in exchange for his acceptance of the decisions of the Third Council of Nicaea[6]. Such an uncompromisingly ambitious approach appears never to have occurred to the solid and traditional Robert II of England.

On balance, though, Robert could judge his reign a success when he did in 1159, at the age of fifty one. The English coffers were full, and his army remained the envy of Western Europe, having just begun at the time of the king’s death a campaign across the Irish Sea. Robert’s son Henry I was only eleven years old at the time of his accession, but in the capable of hands of his mother Bertha the realm continued to prosper. Herself a pawn of marital alliances, Bertha made sure to guarantee her son’s safety through them, marrying off her eldest daughter Matilda to Henry[7], son of the German Emperor Frederick, and promising Henry’s younger brother William to the daughter of Malcolm V, the King of Scots and the biggest ally of the Northumbrian kings. Henry was thus able to gradually take power as the 1160s unfolded into a peaceful realm, an irony given his later reputation.

For, before long, Henry of England was becoming hailed as “Henry the Conqueror”. In 1168, at the age of twenty, he had smashed the Northumbrian army at the Battle of Pendle, and forced his cousin William II to pay tribute to the English crown, and between 1171 and 1175 he busily mopped up resistance amongst the Welsh princes with the aid of his equally talented brother William[8]. His greatest triumph, though, was yet to come.

For despite the efforts of the English king’s great-grandfather Henry II of Francia seventy years previously, the male line of the Capetians of Francia was running perilously thin. Henry III had no sons, and many had presumed the crown would ultimately go to his young nephew Louis of Orleans. But Louis had died in 1177, leaving his father and namesake, the Francian king’s brother, with no discernable male heir. Problems began to brew as the grip of Henry III progressively slackened over Francia in the last years of that king’s life. In 1178, the young Duke of Aquitaine, irked by a perceived snub from the royal court at Paris transferred his allegiance to the English Henry, to be followed two years later by his counterpart the Count of Anjou, both of whom won themselves marital alliances for their trouble[9]. As Francia increasingly looked to a new champion, Paris could only watch and wait to see what happened.

Henry III of West Francia died peacefully in March 1182, at the age of seventy one. The crown passed to his equally elderly brother Louis VI, but Louis was a weak-willed man, dominated by his ambitious sons in law. War came quickly, as various other claimants began to press their claims to the throne. The fighting was savage, but in the end, there could only be one winner once the German Emperor Frederick II threw his men and money behind his uncle, Henry of England. The now elderly queen mother Bertha could enjoy the spectacle of her son and grandson working together to claim the Francian throne, and Henry III was duly crowned King of the Franks in autumn 1183, following the apparently peaceful death of Louis VI, having defeated his rivals.

There was, even for Henry the Conqueror, a price to be paid. Frederick was a wealthy and powerful monarch, and his support had been invaluable in gaining control of Francia. The price would be the cession of claims of authority of the Francian crown of a huge swathe of the eastern parts of the kingdom, with the royal domain itself partitioned. Paris would no longer sit snugly at the centre of Francia- instead, it would become a town close to the frontier between the Norman and the German worlds. Champagne, Bourgogne, and Flanders now increasingly began to turn towards the Teutonic world, and a new power in the land, the Bishop of Laon, a former Frankish capital to which Frederick III retreated in 1188 having thoroughly established his power over his vassals.

The Francian barons, of course, were unused to bowing the knee to any master, and it would take many years of war before the settlement of the 1180s could begin to calm down. In 1186, the Count of Toulouse broke away altogether, recognising his inevitable status as a very junior partner in the new Norman/German axis that divided Francia. It would not be long before a king sat in the halls of Toulouse, one who would demand the respect of his peers throughout the region. Nor was the division of Francia inevitable- in 1191, war had almost broken out between Henry the Conqueror and Frederick following the defection of several nobles notionally allied to the Germans. But, broadly, by 1190, the final shape of the old Roman province of Gaul had been hammered out. Only one piece of the puzzle remained to slot in- the rise of the Patriarchate of Paris.

[1] OTL’s William the Conqueror

[2] As a quick recap, here the English throne passed in 1066 to Edgar the Aetheling, a great-nephew of Edward the Confessor. Edgar’s shaky regime was quickly forced to call in Norman assistance, though, and the young king was forced to marry a daughter of Duke William in 1070. As soon as the marriage had produced a healthy son, Edgar was disposed of, with both Duke William and his son and namesake William Rufus serving as regent for Edgar’s young son Robert I.

[3] I’m deliberately shying away from using the term “France” or “French” here.

[4] Henry’s first wife, Eleanor the Occitan, provided only daughters and the marriage was frosty, prompting speculations of foul play after her death and replacement in 1108 by Beatrix of Blois, who promptly provided two healthy sons. When the elder of these, Henry III, took the throne in February 1143, the Occitan nobles rose up against him.

[5] At this time, Manchester and Liverpool were very small villages, with Chester being much the most important town of north-west England, distantly followed by Lancaster, Salford and Preston. Here, Lancaster is in Northumbrian territory and Preston is a hulking fortress town.

[6] The Council had taken place in 1150, but was always viewed with suspicion in northern and western Europe, as we shall see.

[7] We are going to end up with Henrys in power simultaneously in England, France, and Germany, I’m afraid. Sorry for the confusion!

[8] Wales had been partly subdued by Richard the Tyrant in 1141, but in Robert’s reign the grip had slackened to the extent that in 1170, a Welsh prince had dared name himself king. Henry the Conqueror proved himself Richard’s grandson when it came to defeating the revolt.

[9] Following the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1169, Henry remained unmarried, before finally accepting the hand in marriage of Adela of Aquitaine, the sister of Duke Philip. The surviving daughter of Henry’s first marriage, Adela, was married in 1181 at the age of twelve to Count Fulk of Anjou.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Fourteen: The Favour of Our God

"The Devil roamed at will across the lands in these years, and Christians in all corners were seduced by the vilest heresies"

Constantine X Palaiologos, Roman History​

For a few years, a sort of equilibrium now descended upon Eirene’s cowed court. The Empress was perhaps now finally comfortable in her own skin, and, with the death of her father Constantine in 1190 at the hands of a Bulgarian army, there was now no-one who could conceivably challenge her. Small mercies could now be seen, as when the disgraced general David Bringas was allowed to scurry into retreat in Venice early in 1191.[1] The Empress appeared to be content to rule quietly.

It would be unfair to Eirene to believe her to be the foolish tyrant that our sources, without exception, present her as. There was clearly, following the Bloodletting, a determined attempt to introduce a measure of stability on the empire’s foreign frontiers. In 1189, a marital alliance was proposed between Ivan of Bulgaria and the six year old Porphyrogenite princess Theophano. Negotiations broke down badly, ending with a brief war and the death of Eirene’s father, but even then, Eirene was not such a fool as to openly provoke Ivan. In the end, a lesser treaty was patched up in 1193, with one of Eirene’s relatives marrying Ivan’s younger brother.[2] In the East, meanwhile, Theodore Evagoras had apparently checkmated Kürboğa in Palestine, and in 1194 a three-year ceasefire was agreed.

It was a happy state of affairs that could not last. The destroyer of Eirene’s settlement was, perhaps inevitably, Prince Smbat of Syunik, who, late in 1196, seized the great city of Ani in a daring winter raid.[3] There, in the historic capital of the Armenian people, he named himself King of Kings, and declared a war of liberation against the Roman Empire.

In the past, Smbat had been a mere thorn in the side of various imperial generals, who could be dealt with in a single campaigning season: but no longer. In 1197, Armenia burst violently into flame, and it seemed as though the new King of Syunik was utterly unstoppable. When Nikēphoros Nafpliotis, Eirene’s cousin and Strategos of the Anatolikon marched against him, Smbat seized the opportunity to inflict upon the armies of the East a truly devastating defeat at Manzikert on Lake Van.[4] Nikēphoros himself escaped, but was badly wounded, and died during the harrowing retreat of the imperial armies into Cappadocia that autumn, shadowed all the way by Armenian raiders.

Smbat’s successes emboldened Kürboğa and Ivan, too. Evagoras had clearly expected a renewal of the treaty of 1194, and had therefore lent troops to Nafpliotis’ army. The Salghurid Sultan, though, had other ideas.[5] Peace, he declared, was impossible for as long as the infidels occupied lands once trodden by the heirs of the Prophet, and to that end he suggested the imperial evacuation of all land beyond the Taurus as the basis for a lasting peace.[6] Evagoras could do little but turn down this offer, but with insufficient men, even a capable general like he could do little but face repeated setbacks and embarrassments. In 1198, with news reaching him of defeat after defeat, the general was forced to turn tail, and flee to Cyprus.[7] He never returned to Syria.

The Empire’s enemies were triumphant: and worse still was to come. In 1196 Ivan had secured for himself a very different marital prize to young Theophano Komnena, in the form of Margit, the young daughter of King Ladislaus of Hungary. Three years, and two healthy sons, later the Tsar was emboldened to take the next logical step with his partners.

Events were dictated by affairs far to the West. In the 1180s, the old kingdom of West Francia had increasingly been drawn into the world of competing Norman and German monarchs, with the extinction of its own male royal line in 1183.[8] This had attracted plenty of opposition across the realm, with the fans being flamed, perhaps rather unwisely, by Pope Anacletus IV of Rome, a man of the line of the Counts of Toulouse, who had broken away from their Norman allegiance by 1186.[9] This had, not unnaturally, provoked much irritation from Henry “the Conqueror” and his allies, and by the early 1190s the allies of John of Florence were flourishing in the Norman court.[10]The alienation of the Norman King reached its conclusion in the autumn of 1197, when the Florentine ally Michael was placed on the vacant Episcopal throne of Paris and named the one truly Orthodox Patriarch in Christendom. Henry did this for political, not theological reasons, but the die was nonetheless cast. Never again would there be unity in Christendom: the Parisian Orthodox Church was born.

Immediately, the monarchs of Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria threw their support behind the new Patriarch of Paris, with only Ladislaus of Hungary doing so with much real theological conviction. Ivan of Bulgaria, certainly, had never once complained about theological troubles in his state, although the fact “Pope” Michael was more than willing to offer a junior Patriarchate for the Bulgarians was a major boost to the Tsar’s prestige. Naturally, all of this was greeted with horror by Anacletus IV of Rome and his backers in Constantinople, with Eirene immediately putting out a strongly worded message of condemnation in the name of her husband and son. It was all to no avail. In 1199, Ivan and Ladislaus, urged on by Pope Michael, declared Holy War on Constantinople. By the end of the year, the City was under siege.

The year 1200 marked a personal low for Eirene herself. With the City besieged by heretics, and the imperial armies apparently helpless to intervene, it was small wonder that her political enemies began to openly speculate as to whether God's favour had been withdrawn from the Empire. Sinister portents followed, with the Bithynian estates of the Nafpliotis family being terrorised by a monstrous leopard, and an Attic monk being devoured by a shark.[11] And if demons could terrorise the Empire in the form of animals, why not in the form of humans? Such were the fevered whispers within the besieged city.

Wild predictions of God's misfavour may have been exaggerated, however. Early in 1201, Kürboğa set out from Damascus, apparently with the idea in mind of restoring the Caliphate to glory by seizing Baghdad. Here, though, he would meet an opponent even he could not overcome: the Saljūq Sultan Kayqubād.[12] In a brilliant series of manoeuvres near Mosul, Kayqubād succeeded in cutting the Salghurid off from his army and then capturing him, before executing him as a threat to unity in the Caliphate. Kürboğa's head, preserved in salt, was thereafter swiftly despatched to Constantinople as a token of Baghdad's friendship. Eirene's allies were soon crowing, and they had yet more reason to be pleased when the besiegers suddenly began to fall to an outbreak of illness that ended up killing Tsar Ivan himself. With their new heir a five year old boy, the Bulgarians were in no position to continue the siege of Constantinople, and upped and left: although Ivan's foremost lieutenant Samuel of Pliska was able to inflict a sharp mauling upon an over-hasty imperial army led by Alexios Doukas.

The Empress had weathered a dangerous eighteen months by the summer of 1201, but it rapidly became clear that the genie was now well and truly out of the bottle. In 1203, Italy burst into revolt, led by the still notionally independent client state of Venice. Pope Anacletus IV was forced to flee to Dyrrachium, something of an embarrassing position for the heir of St. Peter: he died in exile there in January 1204, just too soon to hear about the capture and sack of Venice by imperial troops a few weeks later. In 1206, following the unlamented death of Alexander III, it was the turn of ibn-Yusuf to raise the standard of revolt, supported by Smbat of Syunik. Once again, luck intervened; the Arab general died choking on a grape in Iconium, while Smbat finally died the following year, succeeded by his rather less warlike son Roupen II.[13] Eirene remained secure, but as the whispering campaigns against her continued, she began to grow increasingly savage, lashing out at those, such as Alexios Doukas in 1210, who presumed to advise her to moderate her behaviour: Doukas had urged a peace treaty with Kürboğa's son Tuğtekin[14], but Eirene disagreed so violently that the unfortunate Doukas was scourged and castrated before his exile to Trebizond.

The surprising thing is that Eirene's downfall took as long as it did; but when it finally did come, it came quickly. Late in 1211, Italy erupted into revolt a second time, led by the elderly exile David Bringas and a collection of younger generals and leading men of the city states, who claimed the support of the Pope and an impressive number of Italian bishops. Avoiding the might of the imperial navy, Bringas' men marched overland through Bulgaria where they recieved a warm welcome from the teenage Tsar Symeon, as well as the addition of a number of Bulgarian troops to their army. In Thrace, Alexios' Doukas heir Constantine was quick to similarly offer his own support and money, and much of the imperial army of the West rapidly deserted to the rebels. Panicking now, Eirene sent increasingly shrill messages East, imploring the support of Theodore Evagoras, but the once dashing and bold young general preferred to watch and wait from Cyprus, and he did not stir from the island.

The ultimate reason for Bringas' triumph, though, was the religious feeling of the mob of Constantinople. BY 1212, there was a simple feeling that Eirene had lost divine favour, and if the Empire stuck with a woman sponsored by Satan it would be doomed; for the Byzantines, who saw themselves at the apex of a society of God's chosen people, this simply could not be allowed to happen.[15] Bringas brought with him impressive religious support that was probably far more important than his large army. After just a couple of weeks of siege, the gates of the City were opened, and Bringas' men captured Constantinople. The fate of Eirene has been mentioned above: swiftly executed and thrown into the sea. Her children were rounded up and each sent into monastic confinement. The old regime was now at an end.

It would not be David Bringas who succeeded Eirene, however: the Empire would have to wait another century for its first Emperor David. Instead, the prize went to a hitherto distinctly secondary young general named George of Genoa, who had caught the attention of the soldiery during a particularly daring assault on a section of the city wall prior to the opening of the gates. It was George of Genoa who was raised upon the soldiers' shields in the traditional Roman manner, and it was George of Genoa who was crowned, a few weeks later, as Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans and God's representative on Earth.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, brute force was not so useless in the quest to obtain the favour of God as Bringas and his assembled prelates might have hoped.



[1] Brought down in a coup amongst the Eastern armies in 1185, Bringas has been a prisoner in Constantinople ever since.

[2] Maria Nafpliotissa, the second daughter of Eirene’s cousin Leo. Not to be confused with Leo’s mother Maria.

[3] The largest city of the Caucasus, Ani was a former Armenian capital with a population possibly exceeding one hundred thousand. This rich prize was captured by the armies of Constantine IX in the 1040s. It sits on OTL's modern Turkish/Armenian frontier.

[4]TTL’s “Battle of Manzikert” (the earlier battle fought at the site in 1065 is largely forgotten, see Chapter Two) is a far bloodier affair than OTL’s, with thousands of men dead on the battlefield.

[5] To be fair to Evagoras, Kürboğa’s emissaries had been strongly hinting a renewal of peace was on the cards, prior to the news of Smbat’s dramatic successes reaching the Nile.

[6]Much of Syria fell to Kürboğa in 1186, but important strongholds including Antioch, Edessa and Emesa, and all of Cilicia, remain in the hands of Constantinople.

[7] The island is at least defensible, owing to Kürboğa’s lack of a serious fleet.

[8] As mentioned above, Henry “the Conqueror” of England is the grandson of the last West Frankish king, and Frederick Ii of Germany is his great grandson.

[9] Anacletus (1181-1203) is the uncle of the energetic and able Count Hugh of Toulouse (1182-1219).

[10] John himself, the great opponent of the compromises of the Third Council of Nicaea, died in Henry’s court in 1194.

[11] Leopards continued to exist in north western Anatolia until at least the 1970s IOTL. Great white sharks still inhabit the Mediterranean basin.

[12] Great nephew of the Sultan Maḥmūd (1132-1167) mentioned in chapter nine.

[13] Smbat had been placed on the throne of Syunik as a one year old baby in 1134 by Manuel Komnenos (see chapter eight). Seven decades on, he has established himself as the greatest survivor of Near Eastern power politics, and more than doubled his territory, at the expense of both Romans and Turks. Roupen II, named for his grandfather, inherits a formidable little kingdom.

[14] A savage civil war had consumed the Salghurid realm between 1201 and 1208, as various sons of Kürboğa jostled for position. The quiet and reserved Tuğtekin eventually prevailed through his natural caution and intelligence.

[15] I use “Byzantine” here as I have done above, to refer solely to the inhabitants of Constantinople. Citizens of the ERE in general did see themselves as God's chosen people, latter day Israelites.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

As promised, here's a short story from the IE universe. This is the first thing I've done in storybook format for years, so I'd really appreciate some feedback on this!

March 19th, 1212AD. Arkadioupolis, Thrace.​

This stank.

All through Alexander’s life, he had dreamed of the moment that now awaited him. He had been brought up on the tales of his father’s military greatness, how the great George Kantakouzenos had come to the attention of the Emperor John himself during the Ladies’ War, at the age of just sixteen. As a small boy, Alexander had played at battle with his brother in the great palace of the Kantakouzenoi that sat proudly upon the flat plain of Troy. But it had always been Theodosios who shone in battle, Theodosios who earned the approval of his father, Theodosios who had gone on to lead the shattered remains of the Army of the East away from Manzikert and be treated to an ovation in the streets of Antioch for bringing the soldiers home. Six years ago, their father had died beaming at the successes of his heir, and Theodosios had claimed leadership of the family too.

It would be unfair to say that Alexander hated his brother. Theodosios had always been kind to him, eager to help with whatever small problems his brother had confronted. When Alexander had come close to descending into a life of wine-soaked indolence, Theodosios had been on hand to guide his brother out, to intercede with their shocked father and the disapproving imperial authorities. When Alexander had been discovered in bed with the young priest from Sardis, Theodosios had made sure the story was discreetly hushed up, and the priest was safely sent somewhere where his story would never be told. Alexander’s brother had always been eager to lend a little of his natural talent to those in the family who stood in his shadow. And he never demanded anything in return.

Alexander ground his teeth, shifted in his saddle, and shivered against the chilly spring rain.

His own career had been a considerably more chequered one. He had discovered, in the aftermath of the incident with the priest, that his father had always intended for his younger son to take up a career in the clergy, and it was only the tearful intercession of his mother that had saved the infant Alexander’s balls. Maria the Cretan had been low born, a pretty peasant girl who had the good fortune to catch the eye of the newly promoted Governor of Chandax when George Kantakouzenos was still young and passionate. The marriage had caused a small scandal at the time: a rising star marrying so below his rank. It had been, so far as Alexander was aware, a happy union though. Maria had duly delivered four Kantakouzene children- Anna, Theodosios, Theodora and finally (after a delay of some ten years) Alexander. He would not have been the youngest, but Maria had died in childbirth the day before the old Emperor John died. The little boy that had survived her, was thereafter named a child of ill-repute: some of the servants even had whispered that his birth had been a sign of the innate disloyalty of George Kantakouzenos, who, it was said, had prayed to God and all the saints for the death of his Emperor in exchange for the life of his son. For that George had the servants flayed and blinded and thrown into the sea, but the boy died regardless. Alexander would be the last child of the noble Patrician George Kantakouzenos. He did not recall his mother.

But that was not to say his life had been free of strong female figures. When his father and brother had brought him to the City for the first time, it was not his namesake the Emperor who had truly ruled, but rather the Empress-Consort Eirene. Six months had passed since the great bloodletting that had claimed the life of the Empress Dowager and half of the imperial House of Komnenos, and the early snowdrifts that were already piling up that October seemed to act as an eloquent metaphor for the savage winter that had come for the old ruling classes. Eirene had been charmed by the young Alexander’s singing voice, and insisted he spend more time in the company of the little princess Theophano, a sweet child of four. At the time, Alexander had been thrilled. At nine, he only saw that the Empress favoured him, not that she was in effect claiming a hostage from one of the strongest supporters of the old order. For ten years, Alexander had enjoyed the comforts of the palace, the favour of the Empress, and the company of the imperial children. But then Theodosios, well meaning as ever, had proved the loyalty of the Kantakouzenoi on the march back from Manzikert, and Alexander was no longer needed. He had gone back to the family estates, and there the drinking had begun. He did not remember there being a sober moment in the next five years. Certainly, when the news came that the City was enrounded by barbarians, he had been drunk, and when the news of liberation came, he was drunker still, and got his young nephews (for by now, Theodosios’ perfect marriage had yielded two perfect sons) roaringly drunk for the first time. Eusthatios Kantakouzenos, just thirteen years old, had spent a week vomiting after that. Anna Maleina, their mother, had never spoken to Alexander again. On reflection, though, this was probably more down to the descent of the Bulgarian Plague the following month than any lasting enmity. Theodosios’ wife had always been much too understanding for that.

In any case, though the wine had faded, Alexander’s favour with the Empress had not recovered. He’d held a couple of desultory offices in the inner provinces, rising at one point to be the Governor of the Islands the year after his father’s death, but of course that had come too late for him to have been anything other than a slight disappointment to George Kantakouzenos. He was, so everybody said, a carbon copy of his father at his age, but the thirty year old George had had the favour of an Emperor. The Empress Eirene had never spoken to Alexander after his departure from the court. Until now.

The news of the Italian revolt had been initially greeted with a shrug of resignation in the City. David Bringas was yesterday’s man, old enough to be Alexander’s grandfather. Besides, the Italians had risen in revolt before, to say nothing of the revolt of Joseph the Arab. It was not until the news came through that the young lord of the Bulgarians had thrown his weight behind the rebels that Eirene belatedly realised that Bringas’ rebellion was the greatest threat to her hold on the Empire since the great bloodletting twenty five years before. All the dominoes had then begun to collapse rapidly. Christmas found the frontiers in a state of confusion: Bringas’ outriders were descending on Thessaloniki, so some said, to seize Greece, while others claimed the rebel had sailed for the Chersonese to enlist the support of the savage Rus. When the real news had come through six weeks ago, though, it was one to chill the blood. All had expected attacks upon the flanks, but few could have predicted that the centre would not hold. Constantine Doukas, Grand Domestic of the West, had defected to the rebels. Panicking, Eirene sent for Theodosios, but he was snowed in in the Cappadocian highlands, and it would be weeks before he and his armies could move. Theodosios, though, helpful as ever, made a suggestion. His little brother was a perfectly adequate commander, and a loyal friend of the Empress. Why not promote him to command? Eirene had agreed: and here Alexander found himself, supreme commander of the Western field armies of the Empire of the Romans. It was a triumph: at a stroke, he had leapt to a position his father could only have dreamed of. Confronted, though, with the reality that the army of the West had now shrunk to just a few thousand men, triumph seemed for Alexander distinctly hollow.

“The men are in formation, Domestikos” reported his second in command. Isaac Palaiologos was a distant kinsman of Alexander’s, a nephew of his aunt Angelina Palaiologina on her own side of the family. Before this battle, the two had only met briefly: Alexander had been present at the baptism of the infant Isaac, and had occasionally exchanged words with him at court. Isaac had always chosen Theodosios as the better distant cousin to ingratiate himself with, though. For this, Alexander could not blame the boy. And boy was the right word for Isaac: one of the most senior generals in the Empire was yet to hit his twentieth birthday. He did, at least, have enthusiasm, although his attempts at growing a beard struck Alexander as laughable.

“Thank you, cousin. Go and take up your pla...”

He had meant to send Isaac further down the wall, to keep an eye on the unruly men from the Thracian provincial levy, but at that moment, from out of the rain he heard the sound of shouting and screaming, alongside the trumpets and drums of the rebel army. Below him, his mare whickered nervously, pawing the ground in fright at the sound. And it was a fearful din if Alexander had ever heard one, like half of hell had been emptied onto the muddy Thracian plain. Somewhere down below he vaguely saw a gatekeeper break and run, before one of the mounted archers of his own bodyguard put a stop to that. If I’m going down, he thought grimly to himself, these peasant scum aren’t abandoning me to meet the Devil all alone.

The screaming stopped as soon as it had begun, but the drums continued to pound. The rain was now coming down more heavily, soaking the vast cloth icon Alexander’s standard bearer clutched in a shivering arm. Looking up at the icon, Alexander briefly wondered whether he had ever seen a gloomier looking Virgin Mother. The face of the Christ-bearer seemed to be drained of her colour, alongside the rest of the world. Was it this grey when you died in a puddle of bloody piss, father?

Still. They held the town, and no amount of screaming could change that. The gatehouse he stood on was stoutly equipped and newly built, to better protect against the incursions of the Bulgarians. Bringas’ men would struggle to launch a successful siege in this weather, and Eirene had hoped that the rebellion would be washed away with the rain and drowned in the mud. It was an optimistic strategy, but one, Alexander considered, had at least half a chance of success. Joseph the Arab had seemed formidable for a while, but his revolt had come to a quiet end when the old barbarian had choked on a grape. Why should David Bringas have been any different?

It was the last hopeful thought Alexander Kantakouzenos ever had.

Around him, he heard the sounds of swords being unsheathed. What’re they doing? The enemy’s not in sight yet!

“Come off your horse, cousin. I’m sorry. It’s over now.”

Alexander heard the words coming from the lips of Isaac Palaiologos, he even saw the boy’s lips moving. But he did not register things, until he was lifted bodily from the saddle by one of the burly Englishmen that made up his escort. The barbarian- was it Edward, or Edgar?- seemed barely to notice the weight of Alexander’s grand ceremonial armour, and placed him on the floor. The Grand Domestic tried to splutter out a few words of enquiry, but his mouth had gone oddly empty. All that came out was a faint gargling noise.

“I’m going to surrender the town, cousin, but Bringas needs some sort of trophy to show to his men: I’ve heard there are troubles in the ranks, and they’re struggling for glory like rats in a sack. I need to give the old man something to reassert his authority, and I need to show him I can be trusted.” Isaac gave Alexander a look that was clearly supposed to convey sadness. “You do understand don’t you?”

Alexander could do little but splutter and blink. The rain was still coming down, and the drums continued to boom. Somewhere, somewhere entirely separated from him, Isaac Palaiologos was speaking to one of the Englishmen.

All of a sudden, Alexander found himself. Spinning round, he thrust his great sword from its sheath, and plunged it into the belly of an Englishman, sending the guard to his knees with a surprised shout. The mare now shrieked in terror and rose, kicking another Englishman full in the face, and sending Isaac Palaiologos slippering to the ground. Alexander backed away and shouted something to the peasants, anything to rouse their attention to treachery. Another Englishman came at him roaring, but Alexander had been trained for this even if Theodosios had won most of the praise. The Englishman’s ornate axe was unwieldy, and the man’s balance was not what it could have been. Quick as a cat, Alexander ducked the blow and his sword bit into the Englishman’s thigh, causing the barbarian to drop to the floor screaming: screaming until Alexander finished him with a quick blow to the throat. For a second he felt exhilaration, his heart pounding as loudly as the oncoming drums of Bringas’ army.

But then the arrow punched him, square in the chest. Alexander Kantakouzenos grunted, slipped, and fell flat onto his arse, smacking into the stone with a splat. He looked up, and all around him were the glowering faces of the Englishmen, their savage weapons raised. For an eternity, he glanced at them, considering his fate, and musing on the rank unfairness of life. He swallowed. He sighed. And the blade of an axe bit into his neck.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

I liked your dissertation...

Well, I am glad!

Here are the Doukai. I have something longer written up on them, but that can come in the week. The important segment of the family are here, portrayed in ASOIAF appendix style.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Keep it up, BG!

Thanks!

Here's a bit of information on the Komnenoi and Doukai. Coming up in the next few days: the Kantakouzenoi and Nafpliotis families, then the Palaiologoi and Melissenoi, and then the more minor families, and then the next chapter! I'm aiming to get something new up on the thread every few days for the next few weeks, to compensate for lack of activity.

Any Greek speakers available to tell me what the plural of "Nafpliotis" would be? Nafpliotoi? Nafpliotai? Other?

THE NOBILITY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY​

Beginning in the early ninth century, imperial politics increasingly began to resemble a tug-of-war between various military baronial families, largely based in eastern Asia Minor, and the bureaucratic apparatus of the state back at Constantinople. This struggling reached a head in the tenth century, with the savage repression of the barons by the Emperor Basil II, but following Basil’s death, they began to spring back into life, although many of the old families, such as the Phokades and Skleroi would never regain the influence they enjoyed in the tenth century. New families arose in the post-Basil era, notably the Komnenoi and Palaiologoi, the former of whom seized the throne in 1057, and decisively defeated their rivals after the Battle of Claudiopolis in 1063. The Komnenoi generally managed to stay on top of their aristocratic rivals barring one savage flare-up in the reign of Isaac II (1117-22), but the other noble families continued to prosper, some more than others. This, then, is a brief guide to the major families encountered by George I when he took the throne in the autumn of 1212.

HOUSE OF KOMNENOS​

The House of Komnenos claims descent from one Manuel Erotikos Komnenos, a general and friend of Basil II. Manuel died young around 1010, and his two sons John and Isaac were brought up by the great Emperor. Isaac later took Basil’s throne in 1057, but his own son had died long before this, and the remaining Komnenoi are the descendents of his brother John Komnenos and his wife Anna Dalassēnē, from whose line five further Komnenid Emperors emerged.

By 1212, the Komnenoi are largely extinct, thanks to the purges of the 1180s that saw most of them destroyed. The notional heir to the family is the young Isaac, a great-great-great grandson of Manuel Erotikos Komnenos, but Isaac has been forced into monastic exile by the incoming regime of George of Genoa. Besides Isaac, there are his three sisters, all of whom have been married off to allies of George (the youngest, Zoe, is the bride of the new Emperor) and the nun Anna Komnena, the daughter of Isaac’s cousin Michael, who was killed in 1187 as a member of a rival branch of the family. Michael’s two infant sons Basil and Constantine disappeared in 1187, but their bodies were never displayed by the Empress Eirene (a Komnenid only by marriage) and her allies, which has led to rumours of their survival. To all extents and purposes, though, the Komnenid name is now extinct, even if the bloodline lives on.

HOUSE OF DOUKAS​

Originally lords from the Anatolian marches, over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Doukai transferred their base further westward, to be centred on Thrace, for easy access to the capital. Though a very ancient family indeed, the current Doukai are all the descendents of another Basil II-era general named Andronikos Doukas, who participated in the Bulgarian wars of the early eleventh century. Andronikos’ two sons, Constantine and John, were significant figures at court in the early Komnenid period, allied especially to Michael Psellos. With the fall of the Psellos-led faction in the late 1070s, though, the Doukai found themselves being pushed somewhat into the background at court, and they reverted once more to largely holding military positions. The family heir, Constantine the Younger, died following his injuries sustained at the Battle of Haram in Serbia in 1130.

Leadership of the broader Doukas clan now passed to Constantine’s younger brother Bardas Doukas. Bardas was able to knit together close alliances with the other noble families of the empire, marrying off his son Michael to Eirene Melissene, the daughter of a disgraced but wealthy general named Theodosios, and his sister Theophano to Nikēphoros Bryennios the Younger, an ally of the imperial family. It is the line descended from Michael Doukas that is now the wealthiest, bringing together the combined might of the two ancient houses of Doukas and Melissenos, plus absorbing newcomers, notably the Photopouloi. With all of this wealth and power, Michael Doukas was able to act with plenty of eyebrow-raising swagger in the capital, notably naming his son and heir Theodosios after the boy’s anti-Komnenid rebel grandfather.

Theodosios was never a particularly strong supporter of John II or his successors, but by the marriage of his daughter Eirene Doukaina to a cousin, Alexios Doukas, from a lesser branch of the family, the Doukai were brought back into court politics, with Alexios being one of Eirene Nafpliotissa’s strongest supporters together with his brother-in-law Bardas and his son Constantine. This state of affairs continued right up to 1210, when Alexios was disgraced by the Empress Eirene. This foolish act cost her support of the powerful Doukai, who naturally threw their support behind the Bringas-led rebels (indeed, David Bringas himself was married to an aunt of Bardas Doukas) and were richly rewarded for it. Constantine Doukas can now count himself a member of George I’s family, being married to one of the last Komnenid princesses. The future for the Roman Empire’s “first family” undoubtedly looks bright.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Another mini section on aristocrats!

HOUSE OF KANTAKOUZENOS​

Like the Nafpliotis family, the Kantakouzenoi are minor Anatolian dynasts, coming to attention under Isaac I, when one Michael Kantakouzenos distinguished himself in battle at Claudiopolis. Thereafter, the family’s ascendancy was relatively rapid, although three of Michael’s four sons perished before their father, leaving only the youngest, George Kantakouzenos, to inherit the family’s large estates in Lydia in 1096. George was a noted opponent of Alexios Komnenos, and went so far in 1115 as to marry the daughter of the disgraced rebel Theodosios Melissenos and name his son after the rebel, in doing so anticipating a similar move by Michael Doukas a generation later.

The marriage of George’s youngest daughter Maria to Leo Nafpliotis, brother of the Italian Katepánō Constantine, in 1147 allowed the Kantakouzenoi a strong lock on power as Nafpliotis influence increased in the decades that followed. Maria Kantakouzene provided Leo Nafpliotis with five sons, who went out to become among the staunchest supporters of the Empress Eirene.

Young Theodosios, meanwhile, enjoyed an impressive career in civilian politics in Constantinople itself, initially under the tutelage of the elderly Parakoimomenos Basilios, which his sons George, John and Eutychios (a eunuch) would follow as the years went on. Theodosios into a mercantile family, spurning the offers of rival aristocratic clans, a shrewd move that greatly increased the wealth and influence open to the Kantakouzenoi; by the end of the 1170s they were by far the greatest of the Constantinople-based aristocratic families, with estates across the empire. Unlike their peers, the Kantakouzenoi felt very little attachment to their ancestral lands, with both George and John happily selling off their Lydian homelands for plots elsewhere.

By 1212, the family is headed by John Kantakouzenos, who holds a number of archaic offices in the Senate as well as a vast degree of influence across the city. John is supported by two nephews and a son of his own, plus his cousins Joseph and Athemios Nafpliotis. To an extent, the Kantakouzenoi can be seen as an extension of the Nafpliotidai, although they have links to other families, notably the Palaiologoi. Rich, forward-looking, and powerful, the future for the Kantakouzenoi is full of opportunity.

HOUSE OF NAFPLIOTIS​

The Nafpliotidai rocketed to prominence in the middle of the twelfth century thanks to the efforts of the father of their dynasty, Constantine Nafpliotis, who established close links with a number of leading figures in the regime of Manuel Komnenos thanks to his genial and personable nature. This perceived closeness to the Government aided Constantine further with a prestigious wife, Pulcheria, daughter of the great Norman general Jordan of Aversa. Jordan had hoped by the marriage he would save his crumbling political career in the early part of the reign of John II. The gambit failed, but Pulcheria gained her inheritance intact, and it passed on to the family, with Constantine taking care to provide for his younger brother Leo and Leo’s five sons.

As the Nafpliotis-led regime of Eirene settled into power over the 1180s, these five young men became amongst the most powerful in the Empire, bringing with it a degree of legitimacy. The trouble for the Nafpliotidai was a relative dearth of genuine talent: certainly the eldest of the brothers, Nikēphoros, proved himself militarily to be a disaster with his humiliating defeat in 1197. The second son, Leo, meanwhile made many enemies in Constantinople, to the extent that upon his natural death in 1211 rumours spread that he had been poisoned by an ally of Eirene, eager to rid the Empress of the embarrassing weight of her cousin. In Italy, meanwhile, the Katepánō Christopher was killed by mutinying soldiers early in 1212.

This leaves only two surviving Nafpliotidai left for the incoming George of Genoa to deal with: but the new regime must tread carefully, for Joseph Nafpliotis, the fourth brother, now controls the vast majority of the extensive family estates, and is a rather more balanced and capable character than his older brothers to boot. Joseph can also boast two legitimate sons, Leo and George, as well as a castrated bastard named Rōmanos. His younger brother Anthemios meanwhile holds the coveted office of Parakoimomenos, and is thus crucial in the court hierarchy of Constantinople. The Nafpliotidai may have lost a lot of their old swagger with the death of “their” Empress, but it would be a brave man who declared them to be written off entirely.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Interesting, and helps keep the players straight for those of us who are (relative) newbies.

Yup: that's what I aim for!

Anyway, here's what we're all here for: chapter fifteen!

Chapter Fifteen: The Calm Between Storms

"Some bad men murmured that the Empress should be cast aside and replaced with a broad-hipped wench of the tavern, but the pious Emperor, beloved of God, spat on their suggestions and sent them cringing from his glorious presence"

Xiphilinus the Lydian, Three Saintly Emperors​

George I was crowned Emperor of the Romans in September 1212 with minimal fuss, but the new monarch must have been abundantly aware that he had a mountain to climb in terms of dealing with the legacy of Eirene. All around the Empire, the Empress’ men remained in positions of power: even if she had angered the Doukai, others remained more than happy to support her, notably the houses of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos[1], to say nothing of the surviving members of the Nafpliotis clan. The thirty-four year old Italian can also hardly have been unaware of the uncomfortable precedent for Komnenids to emerge from monasteries and stir up havoc.[2] It was a difficult situation which required a delicate hand: fortunately, George I possessed this natural caution in abundance.

As things turned out, Eirene’s three daughters spent less than a month in their monasteries before being recalled to Constantinople to be married. Here, George took a calculated gamble. The eldest daughter, a proud young woman by the name of Theophano, was married off to Michael Bringas, the son of David and a man who might have hoped to be Emperor. Instead, he was awarded with the office of Katepánō of Italy and membership of the imperial house. This could have been risky, and a less confident man than George would have been wary about the marriage. But the two men had served together in the revolt, and the new Emperor probably knew Michael Bringas well enough to judge he would be satisfied with his reward. It was, as things turned out, the correct decision; Bringas went on to be a loyalist despite his wife, who in the event died in childbirth four years after the marriage. Meanwhile, the middle daughter, named Eirene for her mother, was married off to Constantine Doukas, the son of the Alexios who had so dramatically fallen from favour in the old regime. Once again, it was the correct decision: Constantine and Eirene fell deeply in love, and their marriage was long, happy, and most importantly, loyal.

The final marriage would be that of the Emperor himself. George had initially considered marrying a princess of the Doukai, on account of the Empress Eirene’s alleged devilry, but was assured by the Patriarch that such impurity could not have passed on to her daughters.[3] With this assurance there could only really be one choice: and the Emperor George was married to Zoe Komnena. Within a few months, the new Empress had a child in her belly.

There were plenty of other loose ends flickering in the wind, however. Most pressing of these were Eirene’s two surviving male cousins, Joseph and Anthemios Nafpliotis.[4] Anthemios, as a eunuch, could be treated leniently, and he was confirmed in his position as Parakoimomenos by the new Emperor, but Joseph was trickier, controlling as he did the great Nafpliotis family estates. In the end, George opted to appease Joseph Nafpliotis well, trusting that there would be no popular support for a return of the family to power. Named Domestikos tēs Anatolēs, Joseph was sent eastward with his bastard son Rōmanos to try and begin the process of restoring the frontiers there. His two sons, Leo and George, were kept behind by the Emperor- wisely, as it turned out. Early in 1213, George Nafpliotis attempted to ferment an uprising in the capital, which for a day or two seemed to seriously threaten the Emperor, before it lost steam and the young nobleman was captured and tortured prior to being paraded around the hippodrome and executed.[5]It was a salutary lesson for the last remaining potential threats. The young Isaac Komnenos, safe in monastic confinement, opted to pursue a career in the clerical hierarchy that would see him eventually become Patriarch of Antioch, while in Cyprus Theodore Evagoras finally fell into line and was rewarded with the hand in marriage of George’s sister Matilda.[6]

By the middle of 1213, the internal situation seemed stable enough for the Emperor to risk leaving the capital. His destination was, of course, the East, where the achievement of Kürboğa looked ripe for demolition. Eirene’s foreign policy decision to refuse considering a peace with the Salghurids was now appropriated by the new Emperor as a useful political tool. Messages were sent to the Sultan Tuğtekin, proclaiming the reasonableness of George and his eagerness for peace: all Tuğtekin would have to do would be to vacate his father’s conquests in their entirety.

In expecting this to be the basis of a lasting peace settlement, the Emperor was clearly pushing his luck. The plan seems to have been to use Tuğtekin’s indignant refusal as a pretext to sweeping the Salghurids out of Syria and Palestine in a couple of triumphant campaigns, but the Emperor George was no great battlefield commander: indeed, his tactical arrogance in military matters stood in stark contrast to his adroit and careful management of internal diplomacy.[7] A campaign into northern Syria in autumn 1213 met with embarrassing failure, with Rōmanos “the Bastard” being forced to step in to save his Emperor’s life. Rōmanos was a eunuch who had been intended for the clergy by his father, but at the age of just twenty six he was already showing himself to have more battlefield ability than anyone in the East since his distant kinsman Jordan of Aversa. In 1214, he achieved what George had failed to do by defeating Tuğtekin in pitched battle at Apameia on the Orontes, opening up northern Syria for conquest. In 1217, after two patient years of siege, Damascus fell, and the eunuch commander entered the city in triumph. Unlike his peers, Rōmanos realised just how badly the imperial armies had suffered in the previous years of repeated defeat, and urged his Emperor to conclude peace now, to avoid John II-style overstretch. Reluctantly, George was persuaded, and in 1218, a peace settlement was finally concluded that left the majority of Palestine under Salghurid control, but guaranteed Christian access to the holy places of Jerusalem. For the rest of George’s reign, the Syrian frontier would remain peaceful, testimony to the Emperor’s diplomatic skill in the face of his military ineptitude.

Following the defeat of 1213, George had retreated into Cappadocia to lick his wounds. While there, he was able to patch up a permanent peace treaty with Roupen II of Syunik, effectively granting the Armenian monarch control over all of the lands taken by his father in the past few decades. For his part, Roupen agreed to a peace treaty and sent his ten year old son Ashot to Constantinople for the boy’s “education”.[8] It was a deal that suited both Emperor and Armenian: after half a century of hostility, the Caucasus could now finally look forward to the fruits of peace, and indeed in the years after the treaty the region enjoyed an unprecedented period of commercial and artistic flowering.

The 1210s were, then, a relatively successful decade for the Empire, especially after the troubles of the previous years. For George I himself, though, they were tragic. Shortly after he had set out for the East his young wife Zoe Komnena had delivered him a healthy daughter, Theodora. The Basileus did not see the child at all until his return to the capital early in 1215, but the father-daughter relationship was strong according to all accounts. It was a good thing it was: because George and Zoe would have no other living children. Between 1215 and 1221 the Empress fell pregnant no less than five times, but all five children were either stillborn or died young. This was not merely a personal tragedy: without a male heir, the succession lay open to doubt.[9] By the time of Theodora’s tenth birthday, it was clear to all that Zoe would not bear another child, and attempts were apparently made to persuade the Empress to retreat into monastic obscurity and clear the way for a more fertile successor, but this Zoe angrily refused: not for nothing was she the daughter of Eirene Nafpliotissa. Indeed, the Emperor himself showed a distinct lack of interest in other women after his marriage, a restraint for which he would be praised by religious figures in the future. And so much devolved upon the young Theodora, a princess educated by one of the finest minds of the day, the Patriarch Nicholas V[10] and brought up by her mother to remember every drop of her imperial bloodline. If George could not have a male heir, he could at least make sure his daughter would be a capable player of the dangerous Constantinopolitan political game.

The rules of that game were, the Emperor resolved, in need of a serious update. Since the early tenth century, the Empire had been governed by the Basiliká, an update led by Leo VI of Justinian’s great compendium of Roman law.[11] But just as times had changed in the 350 years between Justinian and Leo, so had they in the three centuries between Leo and George. An update was badly needed, particularly with regard to dealing with the Empire’s greatly expanded territories in both East and West. Work seems to have begun on this in 1218, and it was completed in 1221, the year Zoe’s last child died. The Basiliká of George would serve as his heir just as much as Theodora would, enshrining as it did the Emperor’s legacy to the future. For the first time in centuries, the Code was printed in languages other than Romaic too: editions survive of the text in Latin and Armenian, and it was at least partially translated into Arabic too. George’s legal revisions speak of a new and revived Empire: outward looking, self confident, and at peace with itself.

It was, all in all, just as well. No-one in Constantinople could possibly have known it: but the Empire of the Romans was about to enter into a death struggle with a truly implacable and terrifying foe. Perhaps on the eastern frontier they might have had the first indication of what was to come, marked by the crowds of terrified refugees streaming out of the Saljūq lands. For Iran was burning.
_________________________________________

[1] The Kantakouzenoi enjoyed a period of spectacular ascendancy IOTL following the Fourth Crusade, but they, like the Palaiologoi, had been players since the eleventh century.

[2] See the antics of Theodora the Younger in chapter thirteen.

[3] Doctrinal making-it-up-as-you-go. The Devil’s influence is held to have entered Eirene as she lived, and it was not an inherent thing.

[4] Originally there were five Nafpliotis brothers, sons of Leo Nafpliotis and Maria Kantakouzene. Of these, Nikēphoros died in 1197 following his defeat at Smbat’s hands, Leo the Younger died naturally in 1211, and Christopher was killed by the rebels in January 1212, when he attempted to put down rebellion in Sicily.

[5] A typical treatment for pretenders.

[6] Evagoras is some thirty years older than the unfortunate Matilda. The marriage only lasts five years before the death of the Grand Duke of Cyprus, allowing Matilda to bring up their son George Evagoras (named for his uncle the Emperor) practically as an independent monarch.

[7] This mismatch is not uncommon: it’s very rare to get a leader who’s brilliant both on the battlefield and in the political arena.

[8] This happened quite commonly. In the event, Ashot remains in Constantinople for a decade, and becomes known as one of the city’s biggest playboys.

[9] Succession issues have been covered in IE before. The Romans never developed a formalised system of succession, although from Augustus onward the idea that a member of the Emperor’s bloodline had a degree of priority was circulating. Leo VI went to extraordinary lengths in the early tenth century to secure a male heir, although by contrast his great-grandsons Basil II and Constantine VIII barely bothered.

[10] Nicholas V (1209-1229) was a monk from Bithynia who had risen to prominence thanks to his links to the Nafpliotidai: he was often rumoured to be a bastard son of Eirene’s cousin Nikēphoros. He had been raised to the Patriarch by Eirene, but was never particularly close to her, and quite happily turned on the Empress to back the new regime in 1212. His intercession was instrumental in saving the lives of the other members of the Nafpliotis house, however.

[11] Leo’s code essentially stripped out the elements of Justinianic law that had become surplus by his day, as well as removing unnecessary duplications and updating definitions to suit better tenth century realities.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Sixteen: The Khan and the Queen

"In ten years, Allah utterly brought low the land of the Iranians, and we wept bitter tears, for the rule of the savage heathens had come"​

Kadi Fuzuli, Iranian poet of the 1250s: Iranshahr​

The precise circumstances that brought the Jušen from the icy wastes of north-eastern China to the burning plains of the Iranian plateau need not concern us here.[1] Suffice it to say that, following a brief period of hegemony on the steppes to the north of a rapidly disintegrating Chinese Empire in the middle of the eleventh century, they suffered a number of defeats and by the 1190s the shattered remnants of their empire were led west by a visionary leader named Ātái Khan. In 1213 they wrested Chachqand, on the frontier of Saljūq Iran, from its local governor, but they suffered a heavy defeat in 1215 at the hands of the Sultan Kayqubād when they attempted to march further to Samarqand, thus preventing a generalised loss of Sogdiana.[2] There, the broken heirs of Ātái sat and brooded. Hopes of a return to the sun for the Jušen people appeared to be utterly in vain.

Yet events to the south would soon allow the Jušen journey to resume. In 1217, Kayqubād died at the age of just forty six, and his legacy was immediately contested by three squabbling sons. The youngest of these sons, Mehmed, seized Mesopotamia and with it the support of the 'Abbasid Caliph, while the middle son, Kayqubād’s favoured heir and namesake opted to consolidate Iran proper. It seemed as though the eldest son, Baqtash, a man with a formidable temper and little support within the Empire, was doomed to be excluded from power altogether. Baqtash, though, would not give up so easily, and an offer from Kayqubād II to join forces was scornfully dismissed. Instead, Baqtash had chosen a very different ally: one whose support would put him on an Iranian throne built of Muslim blood and bones.

In 1219, Mehmed and his 'Abbasid backers shattered Kayqubād’s army at the Battle of Arraĵān in western Persia[3], and the twenty one year old was quickly acknowledged as Sultan, with ambassadors from Constantinople and Cairo hastening to Baghdad to offer their congratulations. Mehmed largely ignored his surviving brother, who had holed himself up in Samarqand surrounded by a small group of close friends and advisers. Several insulting messages were sent to Baqtash, insisting that he came to heel, but Baqtash dug in his heels and ignored them. It was only early in 1222, when a messenger from Baghdad arrived carrying a letter that called Baqtash “Swineherd”, that the Sultan’s brother snapped. He marched out from Samarqand soon afterward, at the head of an army of (reputedly) ninety thousand Jušen.[4]Initially, Mehmed dismissed the threat, preferring to busy himself with a dashing little war against the rebellious ātābeg of Ardabil. He would soon have cause to learn his mistake. In the terrifying campaign of summer 1222, Baqtash and his Jušen warriors seized and sacked city after city in Iran: Isfahan, Qumm, Hamadan and Rayy all fell. Belatedly, Baghdad woke up to the scale of the problem, but by this time it was too late. In 1223, Baqtash triumphantly led his men into Mesopotamia, where Baghdad surrendered without a fight. Mehmed scrambled for safety as a refugee in the court of the Emir of Aleppo[5], but his backer the Caliph was not so lucky: Baqtash had the unfortunate Commander of the Faithful drowned before selecting his own candidate.

So far, so unexceptional: the Saljūq Sultanate had come through similar bouts of violence a century before, and there can have been little reason for the inhabitants of Iran and Mesopotamia to do much more than breathe a sigh of relief that the violence this time had only gone on for a few years, rather than the decades of the first half of the twelfth century. Unfortunately, however, this would be more than just a conventional civil war. Only a few days after the entry of Baqtash into Baghdad, a disagreement had broken out between the new Sultan and the leader of his Jušen warriors. The disagreement did not end well for Baqtash: after just six weeks as Sultan he experienced the same fate as the Caliph. His murderer was perhaps the most extraordinary figure of the thirteenth century: Šurhaci Khan.

Šurhaci was just twenty four years old at the time of the murder of Baqtash. He had used the opportunity of the Saljūq civil war to defeat his father and brothers for the leadership of the Jušen inherited from his grandfather Ātái, who had died in 1218. A ferocious individual by temper, Šurhaci physically towered above his squat countrymen, and claimed descent from the ancient Han Emperors of China. It was a penetrating intelligence and willingness to act decisively that had won him the leadership of the Jušen, however, not any regal descent. Šurhaci had furthermore succeeded where his predecessors had failed; for the first time in generations, the Jušen controlled a mighty empire reaching from the mudflats of Mesopotamia deep into the steppes of the north.

For the Iranians themselves, the Jušen occupation was hardly a disaster once the initial violence of conquest was over. After all, Greeks and Arabs had long since been absorbed by the great mass of the Iranian people, and the Saljūqs were well on their way towards it before their abrupt demise: there was no reason why the Jušen should be any different: so, at least, must have been the thoughts of Iranian nobles trying to comfort themselves at the imposition of a regime ruled by barbarian pagans. Šurhaci Khan, a cultured man, was well aware of this, and opted to play along with Iranian and Islamic sensibilities. Though he himself haughtily refused to convert away from his own shamanistic beliefs in the “Heavenly Mother” Abka Hehe, the incoming Jušen administration refrained from harassing Muslims or the significant Zoroastrian minority.[6]A new Caliph was duly appointed as a loyal ally of Šurhaci, and the Khan took pains to patronise the religious leadership of all his peoples, building several new fire temples in the course of his reign.[7] There were limits to tolerance, of course, thanks to Šurhaci’s personality: a Nestorian bishop suffered the indignity of being trampled to death by horses in 1226 after attempting to stir rebellion against the Khan.[8] But, by and large, the residents of the old Saljūq Empire eventually adapted reasonably well to their alien rulers. With his new homeland secured, Šurhaci could look further afield.

His target was an obvious one. In 1224, the Armenian King of Kings Roupen II had died in mysterious circumstances, causing his eldest daughter Alinakh and her children to flee to the court of the ātābeg of Ardabil Mu'ayyad, who had survived his war against the Saljūq Mehmed to become a loyal client of Šurhaci. Alinakh had made an ill-advised play for power in the Armenian court at Yerevan, which ended with the death of her husband David and the imprisonment of dozens of her friends and allies by her teenage brother Ashot, who duly took the Armenian throne.[9] Alinakh, however, was not willing to peacefully allow her little brother the right to reign, and so appeals were sent to Šurhaci, offering him the wealth of Armenia in exchange for placing Alinakh on the throne as Queen of Kings.

It was an offer the Jušen Khan seized eagerly, although Alinakh would have to wait for matters in Iran to calm down before Šurhaci was willing to properly begin an invasion. For several years, she and her children became regular fixtures at the Khan’s mobile court, leading to scurrilous tales by Muslim writers that the “Christian witch” had seduced their ruler who, as rumour had it, was on the verge of converting to Islam.[10] Finally, in the spring of 1227, the invasion of Armenia began.

The Jušen, as nomads from the steppes, might have been expected to struggle with the mountainous terrain of Armenia, and indeed those loyal to Ashot scored a handful of victories against horse archers. Šurhaci, though, was a seasoned warrior, and after the setbacks of 1227 reassessed his strategy, standing down the majority of his own Jušen warriors and instead relying upon native Iranian troops to form the bulk of his army, alongside the native Armenian nobles, the Nakharars, who had flocked to Alinakh’s cause. It did not help matters that King Ashot, a vainglorious seventeen year old, possessed all of the courage of his grandfather Smbat but only a fraction of the talent. Ashot’s armies were destroyed at the Battle of Nakhichevan to the south of his capital in June 1228, with the young King of Kings himself being cut down in battle by a humble Azeri spearman.[11] In less than two years, Šurhaci had managed to do what generations of Roman commanders had failed to, and subdued Armenia. Alinakh duly took the throne as merely Queen of Syunik, accepting the Jušen Khan as her overlord.

There remained, though, a loose end. Shortly before the fall of Yerevan, it had been the turn of Ashot’s wife Miriam and their baby son to flee. In a mirror of the flight of Alinakh, Miriam quickly travelled west, accompanied by a small guard of loyalist Nakharars. At Theodosiopolis, they threw themselves upon the mercy of the Imperial governor Leo Nafpliotis, who promised them the protection of Constantinople, and furthermore recognised the infant, named Smbat, as rightful heir to Armenia.[12] Šurhaci, notionally speaking on behalf of his vassal, ordered the surrender of the baby boy, but met with a point blank refusal from Nafpliotis, whom the young Miriam seems to have seduced (following once again the example of her successful sister-in-law).

The news, when it reached Constantinople, was greeted with horror by the Emperor George, who had been watching the developments in Iran with increasing unease. For the past decade, the Emperor had spent his time in domestic administration and attempting to build a successful balance of power in the western Mediterranean.[13]Now, though, the long awaited crisis was at hand. In March 1229, the long line of beacons that dotted Anatolia began to blaze in alarm, Šurhaci Khan and his undefeated armies had begun the long march west with one objective: Constantinople.

__________________________
[1] I’m deliberately not using the term “Manchuria” here, as it would probably not emerge in the IE universe. That’s the Jušenhomeland, though. And yes, the Jušen are the people known to OTL as the Jurchens.

[2] Chachqand is OTL’s Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Sogdiana is a culturally Iranian region of south-central Asia, to the north-east of Iran proper.

[3] Arraĵān is modern Behbahan in Khuzestan. The original city, a Sasanian foundation, went into decline IOTL in the fourteenth century, with Behbahan emerging as its successor.

[4] The figure is probably inflated, but there can be no doubt that Baqtash’s new allies were a truly formidable army, even if much depleted from their glory days eighty years earlier. Why exactly the Jušen decided to commit in such number to the cause of Baqtash remains uncertain, although omens may have played a part.

[5] The Emir is, of course, a vassal of Constantinople.

[6] A note on religion. Abka Hehe is the primordial Manchurian goddess, the epitome of goodness and mother of humanity. Regarding Iranian religions, at this point Sunnis probably made up a majority of the population, although the Zoroastrians probably still made up more than a fifth. There were also minorities of Shiites, Jews, and various Christian sects of whom the Nestorians were by far the most important.

[7] Jušen occupation does much to help the Zoroastrians of Iran, by putting them on a level pedestal officially with Muslims. Iranian Zoroastrianism therefore remains a much more significant minority in IE than in OTL, more comparable to the Egyptian Copts than the OTL tiny rump of Iranian Zoroastrians.

[8] As suggested by 037771, this is of course a famously favoured method of execution amongst steppe peoples.

[9] Although his father Smbat had preferred Ani for his last decade in power, Roupen II established his court at the more centrally located Yerevan, fearing Ani’s location right on the Roman border could spell its downfall.

[10] This is wishful thinking on the part of the Muslims: Šurhaci showed very little interest in converting to either Christianity or Islam at any point.

[11] Nakhichevan is the OTL Azeri enclave of Nakhchivan. Ashot’s killer was richly rewarded by Alinakh, with the revenues of the town of Nakhichevan donated to him and his family in perpetuity.

[12] This is Leo Nafpliotis “the Youngest”, now head of the much diminished family following his father Joseph’s death three years earlier.

[13] George is, as a Genoan, considerably more interested in the politics of Francia and Iberia than any of his predecessors, and adopts a policy throughout the 1210s and 1220s of intervening diplomatically in the region.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Seventeen: Flame and Saltwater

"The Roman Empire was beaten, and bloodied, and raped in those years, and every dishonour befell God's chosen people for their sins"

Theodore Ritsos, Epirot monk of the fifteenth century, On the Scythian Wars​

Nowhere, in 1229, better symbolised the return of Roman power and glory that the reign of George of Genoa had brought than the great fortified centre of Germanikeia.[1] Fifteen years previously, Rōmanos the Bastard had based himself at the then relatively small town prior to his great victory over the Sultan Tuğtekin at Apameia, and the victory had widely been credited to the blessings of the town’s bishop and its enthusiastic population. Following the fall of Damascus, the confiscated wealth of Syria’s unfortunate Muslim communities had flowed into Germanikeia, with the eunuch general lavishing fountains, churches and high new walls upon the fortunate city. Even the minorities benefited: in 1226, the city’s Jews were granted permission by the Bastard to construct for themselves a particularly lavish new synagogue, decorated with mosaics and marble. Such was the prosperity of Germanikeia that the Patriarch of Antioch himself had found excuses buy a splendid estate in its environs. The Empire, so it must have seemed by the 1220s, had resoundingly struck back.

It was then perhaps unsurprising that Šurhaci Khan, seeking to achieve a quick surgical strike to the imperial defences should have aimed not for one of the traditional centres, but Germanikeia. Sure enough, by late spring, when the city’s fertile fields should have been being planted by the local peasantry, an observer from the battlements would have seen only smoke and dust. The Jušen were coming.

The army that was descending upon Germanikeia was perhaps the largest and most formidable army that had marched out of Mesopotamia since the glory days of the Abbasid Caliphs. At its centre lay a core of veteran Jušen warriors, perhaps ten thousand strong. Alongside them, Šurhaci had called up levies from all of his subjects and hired mercenaries, so that the army was swelled by Iranians, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and a whole host of other peoples.[2] Naturally, supreme command was held by the Khan himself but he was ably supported by his two young nephews, Abatai and Wúqǐmǎi. But the peoples of Germanikeia did not panic. Their city, as had been so clearly shown fifteen years before, had the favour of God, and in any case, their great general and his army were only a few weeks away. Germanikeia had enough stores to sit and wait for God’s inevitable retribution to fall upon the whore-worshipping barbarians.[3]

This strategy, though, relied on Germanikeia being a happy and united city, which, beneath the facade, it clearly was not. Germanikeia’s prosperity had been built on the backs of conquered Muslims, and it was unfortunate that in this city, unlike many others in the East, a large Islamic community continued to exist, even if it was trodden quite brutally underfoot by the haughty imperial authorities.[4] And predictably it would be the Muslims who spelt the downfall of the “Flower of the East”.[5] To their horror the citizens of Germanikeia awoke just a week into the siege to find the gates of their city had been opened by traitors within, and the Jušen army duly descended, aided by the gleeful Muslims. Germanikeia’s cathedrals and palaces were looted, its nuns raped, and prayers were offered to Allah and Muhammad in every Christian building that could be found. It was not only Muslims who profited. The Armenian contingent of the Jušen army, cheated of being able to seize the pretender prince Smbat due to their overlord’s grander designs, proved perfectly happy to take out their frustration in the name of Christ by beheading each and every monk they found in the large Chalcedonian monastery set up by the Patriarchate of Antioch. Nearly eight hundred years after the council of Chalcedon, some wounds still ran deep.

For the imperial authorities, the fall of Germanikeia to an army of pagans, Ishmaelites and heretics was a nightmare of biblical proportions: and worse was to come. In August, with the main Tagmata of the East assembled, two large armies set out, commanded by Rōmanos the Bastard and a protégé of his, one Eusthatios Kantakouzenos, respectively. The plan was for Kantakouzenos’ lightly equipped troops to harry and harass the Jušen force as it marched ponderously westward towards the wealthy cities of the Orontes Valley, before Rōmanos’ armies closed to deliver a neat kill. This strategy, cautious and methodical, had served Rōmanos well in his campaigns against the Salghurids, but Šurhaci Khan was a very different opponent. Employing speed and cunning, he contrived to avoid Eusthatios Kantakouzenos altogether, leaving the junior commander and his army blundering around the deserts without any clear idea of what to do next. Rōmanos now had to face the full might of the Khan alone, and here, his skills as a commander deserted him. Just fifteen miles downriver from the scene of his great triumph at Apameia, the Empire’s greatest general was cornered and annihilated, together with some eight thousand crack troops. The bloody head of the Bastard was sent to his half brother Leo Nafpliotis, with an order to surrender Prince Smbat. Šurhaci had done his homework well. Not only had he opened up the whole East to conquest more comprehensively than even Kürboğa: he had also taken steps to rip apart the united front of the Roman nobility so painstakingly reassembled by the Emperor.

The wave of bad news now came thick and fast. In December 1229, Antioch surrendered peacefully to Šurhaci, and duly reaped the rewards: the great Jušen army retreated from its walls, and the Khan himself, with just a few retainers and guards, entered the city with gifts for the Patriarch and local nobles. News of the extraordinarily generous treatment offered to Antioch soon saw most of the cities of Syria open their gates to the enemy, with the notable exception of Damascus, where an imperial garrison installed by Rōmanos twelve years before attempted to hold out. It was a disaster: Wúqǐmǎi and his men stormed the city, and subjected it to a sack even more savage than that which had befallen Germanikeia. With the Tagmata cut to bloody ribbons, and the guarantee of good treatment in case of peaceful surrender, it is hardly surprising that the whole frontier should have simply melted away. Come Easter 1230, Šurhaci Khan and his army were taking on provisions in Cilicia, and crossing the Taurus. A leisurely campaign of destruction across the Anatolian plateau then followed, with Iconium becoming the third city to act as an example to others. Stoutly fortified Caesarea was able to beat off a Jušen assault, thanks to the belated arrival of Eusthatios Kantakouzenos and his men, but Šurhaci was perfectly happy to place Kantakouzenos and his army under siege and retreat to Cilicia for the winter. The unfortunate general was forced to spend his Christmas and Epiphany celebrations dining on rats and vultures.

Šurhaci, meanwhile, had bigger plans in mind. With the Emperor George’s ability to respond now effectively paralysed, the Khan could prepare for the final humbling of the Roman Empire at his own pace. Accordingly, in 1231 an eerie silence fell across Anatolia. The great barbarian army never descended, and the surviving shivering peasants had only the wheeling birds and their scattered flocks for company as they wandered the desolate and smoking landscape. Kantakouzenos, the last great hope of the East, managed to escape Caesarea, but when he eventually reached Constantinople, he was a broken man. George could hope for no help from that quarter. God, it seemed, had abandoned the Empire utterly.

The following year, the hammer blow finally fell. Led by Abatai and Wúqǐmǎi, a Jušen army of some sixty thousand men wound its way through the Taurus passes, passed the blackened ruins of what had been Iconium, and then descended into the fertile lowlands of Bithynia. In May, the fields should have been being worked intensively in the good wealth, but instead a scene of weed-strewn abandonment greeted the brothers. The outlying communities had retreated two years previously to the great fortresses, and few had dared emerge since. Where once peasants had tilled the fields, and ambitious priests had sought plum seats, there was only silence and despair.

Accordingly, it proved little effort to wrest from the control of the locals the fishing towns of Abydos, Cyzicus and Moudania[6], with all of the villages in between them turned over to the supply of the bloated occupying army. With the coast secured, Abatai and Wúqǐmǎi began to requisition ships and boats, to begin a truly impressive feat of engineering on behalf of their uncle.

Šurhaci Khan had not allowed his time in Antioch to go to waste, and had taken care to acquaint himself with the history of the peoples he aimed to conquer. In his quest to knit Iran and Europe together into one realm, Šurhaci was most impressed by the behaviour of the ancient kings of Persia and accordingly portrayed himself, particularly to Iranian audiences, as the avenger of Greek injustices. Following this example, a fateful decision was made. Šurhaci would invade Europe by means of a colossal, man-made land bridge, with ships being sent from the captured ports of Cilicia and Syria to aid with construction.[7] By the end of July, preparations were complete, and the Khan himself set off from Cilicia to bear witness to the great crossing. Crossing Anatolia at double speed, the Khan and a picked group of a hundred or so close bodyguards arrived at Abydos in time to see the taming of the sea itself before Jušen power.

Šurhaci Khan himself was the first man to cross the bridge, the first of his people to set foot in Europe. Pointedly, he made a firm indication of his view of this new continent, pissing over the graveyard of a small ruined monastery on the European side of the straits. But by this point, on the sixteenth of August 1232, the light was fast failing, and a wind was sweeping down from the north-east disturbing the calm conditions. Accordingly, the Khan retreated to the Asian side of the pontoon to await the dawn.

With the seventeenth dawning into a hot and dry day, the crossing began. Initially, the Jušen horsemen, who formed the vanguard of the army, made slow progress, reassuring their nervous mounts as they passed along the line of boats. By mid-morning, though, the Kurdish and Armenian contingents had been able to start moving over. Everything was progressing smoothly before the Khan’s eyes: until the first ship appeared from the north-east.

How the ships had been concealed was unclear to the Jušen, and is indeed not mentioned in any of our otherwise unusually specific sources. What happened next, though, is doubted nowhere. As more ships emerged into view and swept down towards the suddenly horribly exposed Jušen column, a dazzling orange flame began to blaze into life, fanned by the hot wind. Mounted on the prows of the warships were a complicated system of pumps, canisters and nozzles, from which emanated a horrifyingly viscous boiling liquid. Panic rapidly began to break out along the length of the column, with warriors near the end leaping into the water with the hope of swimming to shore. It was all in vain, for the secret weapon of the Roman Empire burned even on the surface of the water. Within minutes, the Jušen bridge was aflame and falling apart, as the surface of the sea boiled and churned. The air was filled with screams, and the salt tang of the morning sea was rapidly replaced by the harsh scent of oil and burning human flesh. From the Asian shore, Šurhaci Khan could only watch in horror as his years of success came to a horrifying conclusion.

There was another observer to the Battle of Abydos. Some way back, upon a particularly large Roman ship, the Emperor George was watching, clutching an icon of the Virgin Mary. And the Emperor at that moment knew a truth, a truth that would soon spread to all of the communities of his shaken Empire. The Empire of the Romans was guarded by God, and the Romans were God’s chosen people. Doubt that fact, and God would rain down fury and death upon the Christian world. But hold true to the sacred allegiance of Heaven and Empire, and all would be well, for now, and forevermore.

Who, watching the death of Šurhaci Khan’s dreams of world empire amidst flame and salt water, could have possibly disagreed?


______________________________
[1] The Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş in modern OTL.

[2] Jušen armies are notably heterogeneous.

[3] Naturally, the principle Jušen deity, the sky-goddess Abka Hehe, is presented by bishops and priests as being nothing but a demonic prostitute.

[4] Generally, Islamic communities seem to have fled northern Syria when the Byzantine armies returned in the ninth and tenth centuries IOTL, testament to the fact that the religion was still small and lightly established even as late as three centuries after Muhammad’s death. It seems unlikely to me, however, that all Muslims would have left, especially with the profits to be made acting as middlemen between Constantinople and its Islamic neighbours.

[5] Even today, Kahramanmaraş is known for the production of orchids.

[6] Mudanya, on the Marmara, in modern OTL.

[7] Following the example of Xerxes of Persia, as told by Herodotus. The idea of “avenging Alexander” is also far from a new one.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Eighteen: The Search for Stability

"...The lord Rōmanos the Emperor was an idiot and an illiterate man, neither bred in the high imperial manner, nor following Roman custom from the beginning, nor of imperial or noble descent, and therefore the more rude and authoritarian in doing most things ... for his beliefs were uncouth, obstinate, ignorant of what is good, and unwilling to adhere to what is right and proper..."

Constantine VII, sole Emperor 945-959, For His Own Son, Rōmanos (De Administrando Imperio)​

George I returned to Constantinople a triumphant victor at Christmas 1232, after spending the autumn pursuing the remnants of Šurhaci Khan’s great army as far as the Anatolikon. Once it was clear that the enemy had retreated across the Taurus, the Emperor gave thanks to God, and ordered the construction of a colossal new monastic complex at Abydos, paid for by the melted down treasure and weaponry of the Jušen royal army. God’s favour had returned, and his Regent on Earth was duly grateful.

It must have come as a rude shock, therefore, when in the spring of the following year a new Jušen army descended the Taurus passes and spent the summer on a leisurely tour around Cappadocia, extorting money and slaves from the terrified villages. The war, it seemed, would not end so swiftly, and this came to the Emperor as a bitter blow. In the autumn of 1233, it is reported, he began to sink into a kind of madness, and his collapse was rapid, such that by Christmas the Empire was effectively in the hands of a Regency council, dominated by the ambitious new Patriarch of Constantinople Theodotos II[1]. The circumstances are murky, but by February George had retreated to his new monastery at Abydos, never to return. He left no sons, and had never designated a co-Emperor. Who would be his heir?

The obvious precedent from history was to raise to power the retired Emperor’s twenty-year old daughter Theodora, but this was strongly opposed by Theodotos. Twenty years after her death, the shadow cast by the God-accursed Eirene still hung over Constantinople, and in a time where the Almighty had quite clearly showed himself to be distinctly unhappy with the direction of affairs in His Empire, was it really wise to tempt fate by offering him another weak and feeble woman to rule?[2] Patriarch Theodotos and his allies certainly thought not, and instead offered the throne to an elderly and undistinguished noble named Leo Zaoutzes[3] who was, nonetheless, a distant descendant of Alexios Komnenos.[4] Within a month of ascending the throne as Leo VII, however, the old man was dead. This, Theodora’s party was loud to claim, was clear evidence of divine will, and, reluctantly, the Patriarch gave way, the better to protect his eyes. Theodora would rule.

But she could not hope to do so alone. Very soon after her mother’s death she took to husband one Isaac Palaiologos, who duly became Isaac III.[5] Despite the fact that Palaiologos was a man twenty years her senior, and a notable betrayer of her Nafpliotid family, the marriage proved a surprisingly happy one, and a measure of much-needed peace and stability descended. Theodora, urged on by her formidable mother Zoe, learned the lessons of her ancestors, and kept well out of public power, allowing the five-year peace treaty arranged with Šurhaci Khan in 1235 to be presented to the Constantinopolitan masses as entirely the work of her husband and his allies alone.[6] Instead, she devoted her energies to the important business of dynastic politics, and notably succeeded where her father had failed: three daughters and two sons were born to the happy couple. In 1238, their eldest son Constantine was associated on the throne with his father at the age of two, stamping dynastic stability upon the Palaiologoi. Meanwhile, the once powerful Nafpliotidai withered, especially following the death of their patriarch Leo in 1237. A new era, it seemed, was dawning.

The second half of the 1230s was genuinely a time of peace and prosperity, but increasingly for Isaac III’s government, problems were becoming apparent. The Empire’s fabulously wealthy Syrian provinces remained under tight Jušen control, with the Eastern frontier effectively reduced to the point it had been at the height of Arab expansion half a millennium previously. Italy was dangerously restive, with its cities perceiving the events of 1233 as an Anatolian coup against an Italian Emperor: a situation only exacerbated in 1242 with the death of the regime’s last important Italian in Patriarch Theodotos.[7] By this point, however, the real hammer blow had already fallen. In 1241, the Empress had died in childbirth, with the baby boy only living a few days. Isaac bore the loss relatively stoically and certainly avoided any sort of mental collapse, but his hold on the throne became increasingly queried, especially following the renewal of Jušen raids in 1243. It was probably fortunate for Isaac III that he died when he did, in the spring of 1245 at the head of an army headed East to face the Empire’s new perennial foe. He was remembered as a decent man who struggled manfully in a difficult situation: but not as the hero the Empire needed.

That hero was waiting in the wings, but to trace the extraordinary story of the man who is known to history simply as “the Uncle”, we must backtrack thirty years.

In 1211, with the regime of Eirene Nafpliotissa falling apart in all directions, unmarried daughters rapidly became the most valuable commodity of any nobleman who had been too closely associated with the Empress. One such noble was John Palaiologos, who had initially fought against Eirene and her allies but had quickly come to an agreement with them in the 1180s.[8] In 1211, seeing which way the cards were likely to fall, John changed his allegiance once again, urging his son Isaac to join the Italian rebels, while simultaneously promising his daughter Zoe to one of the rebels’ Bulgarian allies. This was enough to earn John and his family amnesty under George I, but a nasty spanner was thrown in the works when the young Zoe, a headstrong fourteen year old, spurned her Bulgarian match to marry a common soldier named Demetrios Simeopoulos, one of her escort, before the eyes of an obliging (and Bulgarian hating) Thracian priest. Thus ordained before the eyes of God, the marriage could hardly be set aside, especially a Government such as that of George I, which explicitly aimed for piety in all things. John Palaiologos, so we are told, had raged himself to an early death in 1216, while Zoe and Demetrios settled down to enjoy a life of happy, although childless, obscurity in Adrianople.

With the accession of Zoe’s brother to the purple in 1234, the couple’s quiet existence was rapidly transformed. Zoe was quickly moved up the court hierarchy, being named Augusta by her “beloved sister” Theodora in 1239, while her husband found himself as captain of the Varangian guard.[9] After Theodora’s death, Zoe replaced her as the main Empress for acts of ceremonial, and seems to have acted as a mother figure to her nieces and nephews. Remarkably, this couple now stood just a hair’s breadth from power, and with Isaac’s death, they moved quickly to seize it. Demetrios seized the young Emperor Constantine X and fled with him to Hagia Sophia, emerging some hours later with papers apparently signed by Isaac III and confirmed by Constantine naming him sole Regent.

Uproar immediately broke out amongst the aristocracy, who were horrified at the idea of the young imperial Porphyrogenitoi being brought up by a pair of up jumped commoners. Serious trouble began to brew very rapidly, and within a few weeks, one Constantine Nafpliotis, backed by a variety of important nobles, had issued from Sebastea a list of demands “for the good of the God-blessed Emperor”, top of which was the removal and trial of the Regent Demetrios, “a most common and illiterate fellow”.[10] Demetrios, not unreasonably fearing the consequences of deposition, refused to budge, and demanded Nafpliotis and his allies stand down and return to court peacefully. There was no reply.

Despite his military background, Demetrios Simeopoulos was not a man popular with the troops: in the Western Tagmata, he was disliked as a man who had deserted them to abscond with a noble girl, while in the East he was disliked merely as a Westerner.[11] Even when faced with a revolt that threatened to put a determinedly Eastern regime back in control of the capital, then, the Western Tagmata sat on their hands, their generals busying themselves with a suddenly crucial little war in Serbia and ignoring summons from Constantinople. The Regent would have to look elsewhere for support.

His eventual response was a masterstroke of diplomacy. In exchange for vague promises of giving up the long-insignificant Armenian exile Smbat, Demetrios gained a new and valuable ally: the most talented of the ailing Šurhaci Khan’s nephews, Wúqǐmǎi.[12]In 1246, a Jušen army once again crossed the Taurus to destroy a Roman one, but this time, it did so with the support of Constantinople. Never a gifted general, Constantine Nafpliotis was surrounded and cut down while attempting to retreat to Ankyra, before being sent back to Šurhaci as a slave. With him went several high-flying young aristocrats, exactly the sort of men who would have provided the most dangerous opposition to Demetrios’ regime. Wúqǐmǎi, for his part, made a return to the straits where fourteen years previously George’s warships had rained fire and death down upon the Jušen host. This time, though, the Jušen warlord was feted as a hero by George’s grandchildren, garlanded with flowers and gold, and even baptised by Demetrios’ personal priest, the same man who had wedded them a generation before.[13] A new peace treaty was put together, this time grandly touted as “Peace without End”.[14] Peace and prosperity were what Demetrios the Uncle promised the Roman people: and only time would tell if those promises could truly be realised.

____________________________________
[1] OTL’s Theodotus II reigned in the 1150s. This Theodotus, born in 1168, was originally Bishop of Ravenna and a supporter of the coup against Eirene, before being elevated to the Patriarchate in 1231 (after a two year vacancy) by George.

[2] Especially as, it should be remembered, Theodora is Eirene’s granddaughter and bears a strong resemblance to her Nafpliotid kin.

[3] The Zaoutzes family were important under Basil I and Leo VI before falling from favour and largely disappearing from the OTL historical record.

[4] Leo is Alexios’ great-great-grandson through the line of his daughter Anna and her husband Basil Palaiologos (see chapter seven) and their granddaughter Euphemia, who married into the largely impoverished Zaoutzes clan following the collapse of marriage negotiations with the King of Hungary (see chapter ten).

[5] Something of an irony, given the shared Palaiologan roots of Isaac III and his short-reigned predecessor.

[6] Šurhaci is at this point busily engaged in attempting to conquer the Arabs of the Persian Gulf.

[7] This isn’t altogether unreasonable on the part of the Italians, with the exact circumstances of George’s apparent mental collapse being so hazy to everyone ITTL.

[8] See chapter twelve.

[9] By the middle of the thirteenth century, the old name is retained, but not a lot else: like the Excubitores before them, the Varangoi have become merely a group of particularly well paid and favoured nobles.

[10] The phrase I’ve taken from a particularly bitter reference from Constantine VII to his overbearing father-in-law Romanos I.

[11] As we’ve seen, there’s long been a strong rivalry between the armies of east and west.

[12] Smbat, now nineteen, originally was the cause of hostilities between the Romans and Jurchens back in 1229 as a baby with a claim to the Armenian throne. It of course helps that his major supporters have always been Nafpliotids, and Smbat is married to Constantine Nafpliotis’ sister Danielis.

[13] Wúqǐmǎi seems to have taken his baptism seriously, worshipping Christ alongside the traditional Jušen sky-goddess Abka Hehe, although perhaps not seriously enough for his shocked Roman godparents.

[14] The deal is something of a rotten one for the Empire, involving the formal surrender of much of the occupied East. Demetrios, though, is a not a man with much sympathy for Anatolia and its magnates.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Now for the Emperors and pretenders...

House of Komnenos
Isaac I: 1057-1075
(Rōmanos Skleros): 1063
Michael VII Psellos: 1075-1078
Alexios: 1075-1117
Isaac II: 1117-1122
(Basil Palaiologos): 1117-1119
Manuel I: 1122-1152
John II: 1152-1180
Michael VIII: 1180-1181 as sole Emperor, 1181-1187 as a junior monarch.
Alexander III: 1181-1206
(Theodora Komnena): 1187
Eirene Nafpliotissa: 1187-1212. Technically an Empress-consort until 1206, but in supreme power from 1187.

Non Dynastic Interlude
George I: 1212-1234
(George Nafpliotis): 1213
Leo VII Zaoutzes: 1234

House of Palaiologos
Isaac III: 1234-1245
Constantine X: 1245-

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Patriarchs, and some foreign monarchs...

Patriarchs of Constantinople
Michael I: 1043-1058
Constantine III: 1058-1070
John VIII: 1070-1076
John IX: 1076-1120
Antigonos I: 1120-1133
John X: 1133-1135
Andronikos I: 1135-1139
Sergius III: 1139-1148
Luke: 1148-1151
Nicholas III: 1151-1154
Antony IV: 1154-1157
Stephen III: 1157-1162
Alexios II: 1162-1178
Andronikos II: 1178-1187
Nicholas V: 1209-1229
Theodotos II: 1231-1242
Nicholas VI: 1242-

Rulers of Hungary
Andrew I: 1046-1060
Solomon I: 1060-1126
Solomon II: 1126-1136
Andrew II: 1136-1159
Solomon III: 1159-1160
Sophia I and Géza I: 1160-1161
Piroska (as Regent for Alexander Komnenos): 1161-1180
Alexander I Komnenos: 1180-1183
Piroska (as Queen): 1183-1186
Ladislaus I: 1186-1216
Andrew III: 1216-1243
Stephen II: 1243-

Rulers of Germany
Henry IV: 1056-1106
Conrad II: 1106-1145
Frederick I: 1145-1161
Henry V: 1161-1179
Frederick II: 1179-1224
Frederick III: 1224-1232
Otto IV: 1232-1239
Charles IV: 1239-1242
Otto V: 1242-

More to be added!

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

I'm still waiting on my Eirene bio snip.

Ahhh yes! I'll get onto it at some stage, don't worry.

For now, here's something completely different.

Stephen III, King of Croatia​

Stephen III, known as Stephen the Great, was King of Croatia from 1219 until 1253. During this time, he brought the Kingdom of Croatia to its greatest extent, ruling over most of the old Roman provinces of Illyria and Dalmatia.

Stephen unexpectedly succeeded his father, the weak king Petar II after the death of his three elder brothers. Due to the new king's youth and inexperience (he was just sixteen upon taking the throne) he was initially underestimated by his rivals. In 1220, he almost lost his throne due to the revolt of an older cousin, Krešimir. The failure of the revolt, and the bloody treatment of Krešimir that followed did much to consolidate Stephen's rule, and marked him out as a leader to be respected. In 1221, he married the Bulgarian Maria Prienensis, the recently widowed twin sister of Tsar Symeon II, thus drawing himself into the affairs of the Bulgarian kingdom.

Though notionally a vassal of the Roman Emperor at Constantinople, Stephen failed to provide troops to contribute to the war effort against the Jušen in Anatolia in the 1220s and 1230s, and thereafter conducted himself as an independent monarch. He was supported in this by the kings of Hungary and the Parisian Papacy, although Stephen himself never explicitly rejected the doctrines of the Eighth Ecumenical Council. His strategy as a monarch was generally to attempt to steer an independent path to avoid drawing attention from more powerful rivals who generally had their own concerns.

In 1226, Stephen's brother-in-law Symeon II of Bulgaria died young, leaving behind him two young daughters and no male heir. With the Romans increasingly distracted by affairs to the East, Stephen took the opportunity to intervene in Bulgarian politics, marching into Bulgaria to champion the claim of his stepson Ivan, the only child of Maria Prienensis' first husband. The ensuing conflict, known as the War of the Margus after the river system in western Bulgaria, lasted nearly three years, and eventually saw the victory of the Croatian king and his son-in-law, who ruled Bulgaria thereafter as Ivan III. In exchange for his crown, Ivan ceded a large chunk of the western part of the Tsardom to Stephen, who thus gained dominion over a mixed population of Croats, Serbs and Bulgarians.

This great success gave Stephen III a great deal of prestige, and from 1232 onwards he began to claim, on occasion, an imperial title as well as a royal one. The Roman held enclaves of coastal Dalmatia certainly used a style of address towards him hitherto reserved for the monarch of Constantinople, though they stopped short of hailing Stephen as Basileus. In 1236, the Serbs rose up against him, perhaps with Roman support, but the revolt faded away quite quickly: the last Serbian strongholds fell in 1238.

The last decade of Stephen's reign was dominated by increasingly difficult diplomatic relations with the Hungarian monarchy under first Andrew III and then the Croat king's namesake, Stephen II. A surprise Hungarian attack in 1240 pushed back the Croats and seized a number of northern towns, and it would be 1246 before the Hungarians were entirely expelled. A succesful Croat offensive was mounted in 1247, but this failed to gain much ground due to the displeasure of the German Emperor Otto V, a cousin of the Hungarian king.

Despite this, Stephen can be judged to be the most succesful monarch in Croatian history, by some way. Upon his death, he left a full treasury, a strengthened monarchy, and an adult male heir in his son, Petar III. Croatian power would recede after him, but the seeds of decline cannot be attributed to Stephen.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Hmmmm, no love for Croats, then? How about some Bulgarian stuff?

Symeon II Prienensis, Bulgarian Tsar
​

Symeon II (1198-1226) was the third and last Bulgarian Tsar of the Prienensid dynasty, ruling Bulgaria from 1210 until 1226.

The second son of the Armeno-Roman general John of Priene who had taken the throne as Tsar Ivan I, Symeon had come to power unexpectedly following the deposition of his older brother Ivan II at the hands of the Bulgarian aristocracy, who resented their foreign rulers. A brief interregnum followed, in which there was a standoff between the native nobles (Boyars), and the army, who largely supported the memory of John of Priene. In the end, a compromise was agreed, with the twelve year old Symeon being restored to the throne and married off to Anna, the daughter of one of the most powerful boyars. For Symeon's first six years as Tsar, power was held by a regency council made up of twelve boyars.

Symeon was something of a weak figure, and generally was dominated by the aristocracy even after his minority ended. He ruled in his own right for ten years, and in that time Bulgaria was largely peaceful, although there were flares of religious trouble in 1219 and again in 1223, when bishops protested the Bulgarian Tsar's allegiance to the Latin-speaking Parisian Patriarchate.

In 1226 Symeon died while hunting, at the age of just twenty eight. He left no male heirs behind him: despite nine pregnancies, his wife Anna had only produced two surviving children, both daughters. The ensuing conflict, known as the War of the Bulgarian Succession, would tear apart the Tsardom and end the Prienensid dynasty in the male line.

Prienensid Dynasty​

The Prienensid dynasty is a term used by historians to denote the first three Tsars of the Second Bulgarian Empire, although they never used this family name themselves. The dynasty was founded by Ivan I, an Armeno-Roman general who claimed the vacant Bulgarian throne in the summer of 1183. Ivan was able to secure the loyalty of the local aristocracy through military success and the granting of a Bulgarian Patriarchate by Patriarch Michael I of Paris in 1198. He died in plague in 1201, however, with both of his sons young children without native ties to Bulgaria, prompting a revolt of the aristocracy in 1210 against the elder, Ivan II. The dynasty ended with John's younger son Symeon II, who died in 1226, although future Bulgarian monarchs would continue to descend from him through the line of his daughter Maria.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Nineteen: Demetrios the Regent

"All profit made by trading was regarded as dishonourable for the patricians"

Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome​

With the flower of the warrior aristocracy cut down in the badlands of the Anatolian plateau, and the remainder thoroughly cowed, the Regent Demetrios could settle down to rule without fear of any further upset. It was hardly a prospect, one imagines, that he could ever have imagined as a young man, but the practicalities of governance came naturally to the Thracian peasant (i) and he governed the Empire with a sure and steady hand.

Unsurprisingly, given his background, the new Regent had a distinct suspicion of the landed aristocracy, who in turn generally disliked him. It is little surprise, then, that much of his time in power was marked by a search for talented commoners, and a celebration of those who had prospered before him. In 1248, for example, Demetrios embarked upon a major restoration of the four hundred year old New Church of Basil I, and to it relocated the tomb of the great Parakoimomenos Basilios, in doing so bringing together the two men on whom Demetrios seems to have explicitly modelled himself upon (ii). That Christmas, he caused a minor scandal by using the Twelve Days of celebration to indulge in what seems to have been a sort of talent contest amongst the urban poor, to find boys to be brought up in the Palace as elite administrators. The magnates were appalled, but luck was not with them. Demetrios would go on to demonstrate clear divine approval for his programme.

Early in 1249, the commander of Demetrios’ five thousand or so Jušen mercenaries revolted over a dispute over pay. We know frustratingly little about this commander: even his birth name is a mystery, although he was baptised (unhelpfully, for narrative purposes) as Demetrios, taking the name of his godfather the Regent (iii). Whoever he was, the Jušen commander caused havoc in Thrace that spring, and came close to securing an alliance with the young and ambitious Bulgarian Tsar Ivan III (iv). Only the early death of the Tsarina Dorothea stopped the threat of a permanent Jušen base in Bulgaria, with the fractious Bulgarian aristocracy descending into another brief bout of civil war. With Bulgaria in chaos, Demetrios the Jušen fled north and crossed the Danube into the loose Cuman kingdom of Wallachia (v). There, Jušen hegemony was quickly established.

Demetrios the Jušen was not the only warlord of his kind nibbling at the fringes of Europe. The last years of Šurhaci Khan’s remarkable reign were largely focused on the Caucasus, and the intervention in Rhomania in 1246 is best understood in the context of an all-powerful monarch securing the loyalty of his various clients and vassals (vi). In that same year, another young Jušen commander, who took the Arabo-Iranian name of Jalāl (vii), subdued the three Kartvelian kingdoms of Kartli, Lazikē and Tao (viii) and in an obscure campaign soon afterward he also managed to smash the power of the restive ātābeg of Ardabil.

The death of Šurhaci in 1250 brought a brief halt to Jušen expansion in the region, and also provided a crucial bit of breathing space for the beleaguered Regency government in Constantinople. Wúqǐmǎi might have been Šurhaci’s favoured and most capable heir, but he had to deal with an array of problems in the opening years of his reign, as other family members challenged him, and Islamic uprisings wracked the Jušen Khanate. The Romans might have been thoroughly cowed, but their armies remained intact, and Wúqǐmǎi Khan was sufficiently wary to offer huge cash amounts to Demetrios the Regent in exchange for peace. These Demetrios used to good effect, engaging in a programme of public works across the Empire intended to demonstrate God’s support for his regime. The ruse worked, although a flare up in the Peloponese in 1251 was only prevented from developing into a full blown revolt by the death of its instigator, the messianic preacher Paul of Messenia (ix) and the quick intervention of the imperial armies thereafter.

By this point, the young Emperor Constantine X was rapidly approaching his maturity. In January 1254, shortly after Constantine’s eighteenth birthday, Demetrios formally divested himself of his duties as Regent, and instead settled for a much lower office, that of the Grand Logothete. It was a shrewd decision. By placing himself in the court position that headed much of the bureaucracy Demetrios could ensure a continuing degree of control over the government while avoiding the ire of the nobility. Initially, the dynasts welcomed the new state of affairs, but within a year it was becoming increasingly clear that Constantine lacked much interest in the business of ruling and preferred instead to paint, sing and write, while all the while returning ever more responsibility to his uncle.

It was perhaps just as well. By 1255, Wúqǐmǎi Khan had thoroughly established his control over his empire, in the process displacing a number of younger relatives and rivals and their supporters. Foremost amongst these was Jalāl, the dashing young naturalised Jušen who had subdued the Kartvelians a decade previously. Expelled from the Khanate’s Mesopotamian heartlands, Jalāl and his retinue of several thousand warriors retreated to the Caucasus, but there was little obvious reason for them to stay in a region that would always struggle to feed a large host. In 1257, therefore, Jalāl crossed the Caucasus mountains and marched north-west, towards the tempting target of Kievan Rhos (x). The fate that had befallen the Saljūq Turks was repeated on a smaller scale to the unfortunate Rhos. Divided by civil war, the Jušen armies went through the hastily arranged forces of the unfortunate Rhos like a knife through butter. By the end of the decade, Jalāl, for evermore known to posterity as “Jalāl the Scythian” (xi) had full control of most lands north of the Black Sea. To add to his domains, an alliance was signed with the Wallachian kingdom of Demetrios the Jušen, linking together the two realms in a great confederacy in which Demetrios accepted Jalāl’s notional authority in exchange for a marriage pact for his beloved daughter. A great predatory new state now greedily eyed up the lands of Europe.

This is not the time or place to discuss the enormous changes riven on central and eastern Europe by the emergence of the Jušen Khanate of Kiev (xii). Suffice it to say that for a generation, Jušen warriors would repeatedly humiliate the armies of the Polish, Hungarian and German monarchs, as well as extending their dominion over the remaining free Rhos princes: all of which would prompt a massive degree of institutional and ideological restructuring in the affected states. Constantinople was able to avoid these attentions, but only due to the humiliation of being viewed by all of the Jušen entities as another vassalised kingdom. (xiii)

With hindsight, Roman writers would see the time as one of unbridled humiliation and shame, but the truth is that the 1250s and 1260s were actually decades of relative prosperity, in which the Empire was able to recoup many of the losses of the difficult half century that had preceded them. This was possible due to an important new development that arose due to the happy confluence of three factors: the dispossession of large numbers of eastern aristocrats thanks to Jusen success, the Empire’s inclusion into a Jusen dominated world that stretched from the Carpathians deep into Central Asia, and finally the political dominance of Demetrios Simeopoulos.

Mercantile trade had always been sneered at by the old elites of the Empire, a distaste that dated back to the days of classical Greece and the Roman Republic (xiv). Their wealth was based on the land, and the rents and profits they derived from it. Commerce, while it undoubtedly flourished, was largely left in the hands of the lower classes and especially the Italian client states. Although seeds of change can be detected earlier, a real step-change in attitudes took place in the reign of Constantine X, largely thanks to the influence of his uncle. With the vast domains of the Jušen now a great market, the profits merchants could make began to spiral. Previously this had counted for little- even rich men of commerce were frowned upon- but Demetrios, a keen patron of men like himself, took active steps to ensure the success of the emerging commercial classes. Witnessing profits being made, and eager to find a new source of income to replace their lost Syrian estates, the noble families began to dip a toe into the murky waters of international trade. By 1270, commerce was coming to play an active role in financing the Government, to the delight of the Grand Logothete, who was collecting unprecedented sums in taxation.

Demetrios Simeopoulos died in 1272, at the age of eighty. Despite the considerable challenges he had faced, he could look back proudly on a quarter of a century of quietly effective administration. His leadership had led to the Empire turning a new corner, surviving and thriving in a difficult world through embracing change. This is not to state that the man was a revolutionary. Far from it: Demetrios brutally crushed the nascent movement that would become the truly revolutionary Helots (xv) and was always happy to rule through his nephew, a man of such pedigree his blood practically ran purple. But unlike so many of his rivals, Demetrios was able to view the world as it existed in the middle years of the thirteenth century with a keen and dispassionate eye, rather than harking back to a halcyon age that had never truly existed, and in doing so directed the forces that ruled his world for the benefit of the Roman Empire that he ran. He can thus justly claim to perhaps be the greatest Emperor that Constantinople never had- without doubt he was the first great Grand Logothete, and his example would do much to inspire future generations.

Meanwhile, the Empire he had left behind him could face the future with a degree of confidence that was, on the face of it, less than well-founded. Constantine X, for all his cultured amiability, was a weak Emperor without a male heir (xvi) and the state he ruled was one with less control over its own destiny than it had had at any point since the ninth century. The Empire’s wellbeing depended largely on the goodwill of the Jušen Khan and, following the death of Wúqǐmǎi in 1274, this could no longer be guaranteed. Demetrios Simeopoulos had left a golden legacy: but it would be for a new generation to take his settlement into an uncertain and dangerous future.
__________________________

(i) Demetrios’ precise origins are a matter of debate, with three competing versions existing: he may have been the son of a farmer, a butcher, or a crofter.

(ii) This church, the Nea Ekklesia, was consecrated in 880 by the common-born Emperor Basil I as part of his programme to emulate the acts of Justinian. In OTL, it never really achieved the prominence Basil had hoped for, but ITTL the church has a glowing future ahead of it, thanks in large part to Demetrios’ admiration for Basil and his works.

(iii) The baptism presumably took place at the same time as that of the Jurchen leader Wúqǐmǎi, in autumn 1246.

(iv) The grandson of John of Priene through his daughter Maria, Ivan III took the throne after the early deaths of both of his uncles.

(v) The Cumans settled into Wallachia in the later eleventh century. Missionary efforts from Bulgaria in the twelfth, as well as the policies of the Komnenid Emperors and Bulgarian Tsars of TTL have seen a loose kingdom emerge in the region, which largely holds to Christianity.

(vi) That’s how the Jurchens see things, of course: the Romans would certainly never begin to agree with this interpretation.

(vii) This third generation of Jurchen immigrants generally took “native” names.

(viii) Quite a footnote heavy update! The term “Georgia” is not one used by the Georgian people themselves, who call themselves Kartvelians. ITTL, the native name for the people and country is used. Medieval Georgia was united IOTL around the turn of the millennium, but Roman intervention ITTL saw it break up again around a century later into three kingdoms, all ruled by rival princes of the Bagrationi dynasty.

(ix) Paul’s teachings will rapidly become important.

(x) Another ATL term. In the IE universe, the Greek term “Rhos” is used instead of OTL’s “Rus’”.

(xi) Byzantine chroniclers referred to any and all steppe peoples indiscriminately as Scythians, in imitation of classical Greek writers.

(xii) It WILL be discussed elsewhere though.

(xiii) The Jušen of eastern Europe still see themselves as being notionally the followers of the distant Jušen of Baghdad, and therefore see Constantinople as one of their own clients, as well as a client of a rival.

(xiv) Roman Senators of the Republic were actually banned (at least in theory) from being involved in commercial deals.

(xv) The followers of Paul of Messenia: we’ll see more of them.

(xvi) Constantine’s marriage is childless, and his brother George died young, producing only a single daughter.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Twenty: Ākǔttǎ Khan

"This man fancied himself the Great Alexander reborn... and was to other barbarians as a bull is to a lamb"

Eumathios the Librarian, fifteenth century Cypriot historian​

In the spring of 1268, the Prince of Tao, David VIII Bagrationi rose up in revolt against his Jušen masters. An army despatched by Wúqǐmǎi Khan was routed, and the newly independent prince claimed for himself the lost glories of the kingdom of Kartvelia. For one brief summer, David’s independence thrived, but it could not last. Then a second Jušen army marched north in October, and this time the rebels’ luck ran out. The principality’s armies were destroyed in detail in half a dozen battles, and its fields and towns put to the torch. David Bagrationi himself was brought back to Baghdad and sacrificed to the spirit of the Jušen sky goddess, Abka Hehe. Disloyalty, for a vassal of the Great Khan, would not be tolerated.

It was a lesson well noted in Constantinople. Shortly after the death of David Bagrationi, an embassy was despatched by Demetrios Simeopoulos in the name of Constantine X to the Khan’s court. Led by one Nikēphoros Synadenos (i), a minor noble who had risen high under the regime of the Uncle, it lavished the Great Khan and his court with gold, precious silks, and soaring panegyric. Four years later, with Simeopoulos dead, the same policy was repeated, this time with Nikēphoros’ younger brother John leading the expedition. When it came to relations with the Empire’s most dangerous neighbour, the policy of Constantinople was simple: avoid hostility, whatever the cost.

Yet as John Synadenos and his companions would find out, this was a task that was becoming increasingly difficult. The embassy arrived in Baghdad in the last weeks of December 1273, to find the city gripped by a sense of deep foreboding. The Great Khan Wúqǐmǎi was now in his late sixties and had not been seen outside his palace since the summer, and the rumours were that he had fallen deeply ill. Lining up succeed him were an array of Jušen princelings, the Khan’s sons and nephews by Arabs, Iranians and Armenians. When news of Wúqǐmǎi’s death finally reached the city on the tenth of January, there was uproar. The Great Khan’s funerary celebrations were interrupted by fractious squabbling by the men who aspired to be his heir: one nephew was actually butchered on the day of the funeral and burnt alongside Wúqǐmǎi (ii).

Weeks more furious and violent squabbling continued unabated. The ambassadors found themselves trapped within the fevered atmosphere of the Round City, and their writings back to Constantinople began to take on a distinctly more agitated tone. “I pray that God defend us”, wrote John Synadenos in late March, “for the fury of the Scythians knows no bounds on this Earth”. Synadenos’ prayers went unanswered. By April, a clear candidate had emerged to succeed Wúqǐmǎi: a talented twenty four year old who unusually retained his native Jušen name of Ākǔttǎ. Ākǔttǎ largely could thank his dominance on the reliability of a large host of Arab heavy cavalry, provided by the King of Oman (iii). Such a force did not come cheap, however, and Ākǔttǎ had also racked up debts paying off his rivals. A ready source of disposal income was required, and to find it, the new Khan looked to the hitherto-forgotten Roman embassy. The demand went out that Constantinople would begin paying back the sums Wúqǐmǎi had provided twenty years before- and at a crippling rate of interest. When John Synadenos tried to protest, he was thrown into jail, along with the majority of the other ambassadors. Only one of their number, a young man named Michael Photopoulos, was allowed to return to Christian territory to repeat the terms (iv).

In the court of Constantine X, the demands of Ākǔttǎ Khan were heard in shocked silence. The Emperor himself apparently favoured paying the sums, but few listened to the words of plump, gentle Constantine. In the absence of Demetrios effective power in Constantinople had come to rest on the shoulders of the Caesar Gregory Maleinos, the husband of Constantine’s elder sister Helenē. Maleinos was a military man from a middle ranking noble family and in the absence of any heir from Constantine himself was confidently expected to take the throne in turn. Tough and experienced in the ways of war, the Caesar had little time for the demands of an untested young barbarian. The order went out: the days of capitulation were over, and it was time for war.

The regime of Demetrios the Uncle had largely been interested in peace, and the Tagmata had not conducted large scale operations for a generation by the middle of the 1270s, but Gregory Maleinos was undaunted. In a series of small wars on the Bulgarian frontier the armies had shown that their old power was not to be taken for granted, and an attack by the Salghurids on the strongly fortified Syrian coastal city of Laodicea had been beaten back in 1267 with relative ease (v). The Caesar calculated that this was enough of a show of force to make even the mighty Great Khan pause and consider: and, for a while, he appeared to be right. The demands were quietly dropped, and a very relieved John Synadenos finally arrived back in Constantinople in the autumn of 1276.

Ākǔttǎ Khan however was still in need of money, and quickly: for the patience of his Omani backers was reaching its end. With his rivals claiming their new Khan to be nothing more than a money-grubbing coward, Ākǔttǎ was in urgent need of a triumph. Fortunately for him, there was another option. The Roman Empire might have been trickier to bully than the Khan had imagined, but it was not the other state to his west that was not all that it had been.

By the 1270s, the rule of the Salghurid Dynasty in Egypt had visibly run its course. Though the dynasty would always be remembered for the daring exploits of its greatest leader Kürboğa, his immediate successors had hardly been slackers either. Kürboğa’s son Tuğtekin and his own son Ahmed had ably held together the Salghurid realm. But with the death of the Sultan Ahmed in 1265, things had begun to slide. Ahmed’s heir was his decadent playboy of a son Tutuş, who had done very little besides reviving the ancient Egyptian wine industry and masterminding the failed attack on Christian Laodicea. Tutuş was murdered in 1268 while in a drunken slumber by a cousin: another Ahmed, who attempted to impose strict religious law while reigning as Ahmed II. But Ahmed II’s reign was even shorter than before: he was himself murdered, reputedly by a slave girl, in 1270 (vi). Ahmed was followed by his two equally unsuccessful brothers, who fought a four year civil war which killed them both and saw a nine year old son of the deposed Tutuş imposed as Kürboğa II. The anarchy left Egypt’s armies shattered, its fertile fields and irrigation systems destroyed, and its cities in ruins.

It was, in short, a perfect opportunity for an opportunistic predator. And to sweeten the pill for the Great Khan even further, he had a perfect motive to invade, given Ahmed II and his dead brothers had been the nephews of Ākǔttǎ‘s Omani ally. As John Synadenos made his way west from Baghdad in 1276, he was accompanied by an enormous Jušen army, stiffened as usual by reinforcements from the Christian client states. Sailing round the coast of Arabia, meanwhile, was the large Omani fleet, laden with provisions to keep the invaders fully supplied. All was perfectly prepared to ensure that the hapless Salghurids would be utterly flattened.

As things turned out, victory was easier than anyone could have predicted. Damascus surrendered without a fight, as did the old Salghurid capital of Jerusalem, where Ākǔttǎ Khan entered in the fifteenth of September, the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the city to the Emperor John II (vii). Unlike John, the Khan had little intention of marching on the fortified Gaza, although he did send several thousand soldiers west in an attempt to draw out the remains of the Salghurid forces, which had massed there. Battle was joined and the Jušen were duly routed: but the boy-Sultan in Cairo had no opportunity to celebrate. For Ākǔttǎ had marched the greater part of his army south to the Sinai, and there rendezvoused with the Omani fleet and crossed to Egypt. A harsh march across the eastern desert followed, but the Jušen were well provisioned and suffered minimal casualties. Cairo was taken almost unawares and quickly stormed. The child Sultan Kürboğa II was sent back to Baghdad a prisoner, but died en-route. Ākǔttǎ, meanwhile, had proved himself to be a commander of daring and talent: and had doubled the size and wealth of his empire at a stroke.

Like any great conqueror, though, Ākǔttǎ Khan was not sated by one conquest. His armies had been barely blooded by the expedition and remained in a state of battle-readiness, and his supplies of grain and gold had been immeasurably strengthened. Already master in theory of all the Jušen people, the Great Khan began to harbour an intoxicating dream: why not make himself master in reality too? If Egypt could be brought into the fold with a minimum of fuss, why not too his compatriots in Kiev and their own rapidly expanding domain? (viii)

Ākǔttǎ, like most of his people, had absorbed much of the knowledge and history of the lands he ruled over. The great pyramids of Egypt he treated with especial awe, going so far as to ostentatiously restore a number of the country’s greatest monuments, including the rapidly decaying Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse of Alexandria (ix). In 1278 he crossed to Mecca, and entered the city in triumph, to the horror of Islamic opinion. Muslims need not have feared: the Khan treated their holy sites with reverence, and even lavished new buildings on them. The following year, it was the turn of Jerusalem and the Holy Land for a respectful pilgrimage from the would-be world conqueror. Warlord Ākǔttǎ Khan might have been, but he was determined to fully understand all the ancient wisdom of the globe he aimed to make his own (x).

In Constantinople, it came as cold comfort to hear of the great Khan’s learning and wisdom- if anything, each story of his just moderation inspired more fear amongst the courtiers of Constantine X. The Salghurids had been the great enemies of the grandfathers of these men, but their passing was deeply mourned by the Romans, now the Empire found itself facing for the first time in five centuries a power that controlled both Mesopotamia and Egypt. News from the north was hardly more encouraging: in 1277 the Bulgarian Tsar had formally submitted himself to Jušen rule as a client, and the news coming out of Germany was a cause for horror (xi). The mood was apocalyptic, a mood best encompassed by the rise of the Helots. Former followers of the preacher Paul of Messenia, the Helots modelled themselves explicitly on the slave-race of ancient Sparta, arguing that all men should enslave themselves to God by giving up property in service to the poor. More menacingly, the Helots were happy to forcibly encourage rich men into this. Across the Empire, the wealthy found themselves more and more under siege from a movement that could claim the tacit support of even some bishops, and thus a degree of legal immunity.

The Roman Empire thus entered the 1280s besieged from within and without, and led by an Emperor who, to say the least, failed to inspire confidence. Given more time, perhaps affairs might have sorted themselves out. Constantine, after all, had three capable nephews, any one of whom would have made a good soldier Emperor. But time had finally run out. In the spring of 1281, Ākǔttǎ Khan finally concluded an alliance with his Kievan counterpart and declared war. All the world was marching on the Queen of Cities.
_______________________________

(i) Nikēphoros’ sister is the widowed sister-in-law of the Emperor Constantine.

(ii) Jurchen funerary traditions seem to have involved cremation.

(iii) Previously under the loose control of the Turks, Jurchen conquest allowed for the Omani Arabs to secure a shaky independence. As in OTL, they rule a rather secular and tribal state, styling themselves as “King” (Malik) rather than “Emir” or “Sultan”.

(iv) Michael Photopoulos, the son of a glass merchant, was one of the low-born men raised up by Demetrios Simeopoulos. He also featured in the first version of IE, if anybody recognises the name.

(v) Laodicea is one of a handful of fortified port cities of the Levantine coast that are all that remain of the great conquests of John II a century previously. It is administered by the Grand Duke of Cyprus, George Evagoras, nephew of the Emperor George I.

(vi) The story goes that Ahmed II’s killer was a slave girl who had been married in secret to Tutuş and was killing Ahmed for her baby son. It’s only recorded from sources writing two centuries later, however.

(vii) Why exactly the Khan chose to do this is nowhere mentioned. Perhaps he hoped to lure the Salghurids into a false sense of security by aping an invader who had ultimately been defeated by the first Kürboğa.

(viii) The Khanate of Kiev is at its apogee in the 1270s.

(ix) is a slip into the perspective of TTL. “Great Pyramid” is singular because the Khan partially pulled down the other two to restore the limestone casing of the main pyramid: and the remains were then slowly nibbled away at as the centuries progressed. IOTL, the limestone casing only began to really decay in 1300, but from the POV of the IE universe, the Khan is the great restorer of the Pyramid singular. As for the lighthouse, it really was in decay by the thirteenth century, and collapsed in the fourteenth. Not here.

(x) Most Jurchens from the first generation onwards have received a thorough literary education. This is largely based on Islamic Iranian historians, but there’s a significant amount of Greek and Christian influence too.

(xi) This will be explored in more detail in a future update.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Here's the family tree of the Emperor Constantine X Palaiologos: hopefully this'll demonstrate his relations to previous characters, as well as setting out just how blue blooded the Emperor and Autocrat is. Happy to answer any comments/queries.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

I don't suppose you might seek out spin-off posts on the subject when it rolls around, in a similar vein to Ares' contributions on Sweden (or Byzantine Caesar's series on the Empire of Opará for the old version)?

Oh, absolutely. I'd be very happy to accept spin-off posts from anyone and everyone.

I've done another of those ASOIAF-style character appendices, centring on the court of Constantinople in the late summer of 1281. It contains one or two minor spoilers for the next update. Enjoy!

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Chapter Twenty One: The Storm Breaks

“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Matthew 7:27, Parable of the Builders​

Ākǔttǎ Khan had no intention of repeating the mistakes of his forebear Šurhaci.[1] The great failure there, Ākǔttǎ reasoned, had been the failure to properly engage with the Roman navy, and the fact that Šurhaci had engaged in a one-sided assault. The story of Constantinople’s defences was legendary, and the Great Khan was more than shrewd enough to realise that a simple blunt attack would end in certain defeat. He decided, therefore, that a multiple pronged attack was the best strategy. In the circumstances, it had its difficulties- most obviously, his total inability to co-ordinate the attacks with his allies in anything like a detailed manner. But it was a gamble he had to take if he wanted to rule the world.

Unfortunately for the Romans, things went better than the Great Khan could have hoped. As soon as spring allowed, a Jušen host, together with several thousand Bulgarians, descended into Roman territory with a clear target in mind: Thessalonica, second city of the Empire.[2] By early summer, the city was thronged with immigrants, desperately seeking safe passage and a new life on the Aegean Isles, protected by the fearsome Imperial navy. By the time the enemy had descended, the city was packed to bursting with peasants and their animals, with precious few soldiers to defend them.

Thessalonica’s walls were formidable and had stood the city in good stead before, but ultimately the siege could only end one way. A direct order by Constantine X, countermanding his brothers-in-law, saw the arrival of perhaps twenty warships in the harbours of the city in late June, and hundreds of women and children were evacuated: but thousands more remained. Meanwhile, the Jušen were bringing up a terrifying new weapon that they had acquired from the Far East: firelance technology.[3] These early firelances were primitive weapons, prone to explosion and backfiring, but the psychological impact the massive tubes that launched thunder and death upon the defenders could not be overestimated. Behind its walls, Thessalonica increasingly began to collapse into anarchy. Dark tales would circulate afterward about the roving bands of cannibals that prowled the city’s streets, seeking easy meat. Whatever the truth in them, the fact that such stories were considered at all is illustrative of the mood: Thessalonica was being besieged by all the forces of Hell.

In such circumstances, then, it is surprising that men of the Cross should be the ones to bring the siege to an end, but that was what the city’s leading Helots did.[4] Claiming that Thessalonica needed to be purged of its sins by fire and ordeal, the Helots opened the gates, and bid the leader of Jušen host, a swaggering sky-worshipper who nonetheless took the thoroughly Russian name of Igor, sack the city. Igor was only too happy to oblige. Thessalonica was torn apart, its people carted off to slavery or simply butchered in the streets. No Roman city had suffered so savage a sack since the triple examples of Germanikeia, Damascus and Iconium two generations before.[5]

With Constantinople’s attention thoroughly captured by the horrors befalling Thessalonica, ĀkǔttǎKhan launched his next attack. A second huge Jušen army crossed the Taurus in May 1281, and marched rapidly across the plateau: so rapidly, in fact, that a very large army of several regiments of Tagmata led by the former envoy Michael Photopoulos missed it altogether and found itself arriving at Caesarea a week after the Jušen had passed by to the West.

Photopoulos had failed to prevent the next great thrust of the plan. At the time the imperial navy was split between ships evacuating Thessalonica, others guarding Constantinople and others harassing Jušen positions on the Bulgarian coast: a mess of a strategy that owed much to divisions between Constantine Palaiologos and his brothers-in-law. With the navy divided, a large and freshly constructed Jušen fleet had passed into the Aegean without trouble, pausing only to overwhelm the island of Crete and ransack it for provisions before raising the banners of the Khan over the island’s capital at Chandax. It met with the Great Khan’s land army at Smyrna, and while there was not time to ferry across the whole Jušen host Ākǔttǎhimself together with a picked retinue was able to make the crossing to Europe, where they met with Igor’s blooded troops at Trajanopolis.[6]

It is said that the Great Khan fell to his knees and kissed the earth when he arrived in Europe. Trajanopolis surrendered almost immediately and was treated with conspicuous kindness for doing so- Ākǔttǎ reputedly ordered that the plunder Igor had taken from Thessalonica be used to beatify the town’s largest monastery and to feed the poor. It is a mark of the respect the Great Khan held that Igor, an experienced warlord who had never even met Ākǔttǎ before, was willing to obey the order without question. Next to a conqueror of the world, even the greatest of warlords was only a servant.

It was by this point July, and Ākǔttǎ was eager to press on to Constantinople before effective imperial resistance could be gathered together and while the terror of the Jušen was at its peak. More importantly, he was determined to take the city quickly before the bad weather of winters on the Bosphorus did the damage to his armies that no enemy army had so far inflicted.[7] Outriders fanned across Thrace to take the riches of the province’s autumn harvest, while the main body of the Jušen army marched on the Queen of Cities herself.

The Great Khan was no man’s fool, and his deep appreciation for feats of engineering and architecture meant he was well aware of the defences that awaited him at Constantinople, but even so, the sight that greeted the vanguard of the Jušen army when it arrived upon the Bosphorus in August 1281 must have given even a conqueror like Ākǔttǎ momentary pause for thought. Before him rose the triple defences of the Land Walls of Theodosius: first a deep trench, then a formidable twenty-five foot high stone wall that, for all its strength, was dwarfed by forty-foot tall Great Wall.[8] Upon the battlements were an array of catapults and thousands of defending soldiers, supplied by several acres of agricultural land between the walls and the city proper. Constantinople was, quite simply, the most formidably defended city a Jušen army had ever come across.

An obvious counter to this, though, is the fact that no Jušen army before had had a leader quite as inventive and intelligent as ĀkǔttǎKhan. Determined to avoid the mistakes of previous would-be conquerors of the city, the Great Khan worked methodically to seal off Constantinople from the outside world by seizing fleeing merchants, cutting the city’s main aqueduct, and defeating a small mixed force of Thracian provincial levies and rebellious Bulgarians.[9] These men he then impaled before the walls of the city, in full view of the defenders, while at the same time offering them generous terms for their surrender and opening the gates. Simultaneously, a force of cavalry swept north around the Golden Horn to attempt to harass Roman ships sheltering in the great harbour and prevent them departing to attack Jušen vessels in the Aegean. Within a couple of weeks, the noose had been drawn well and truly tight, and Ākǔttǎ settled down to let hunger and fear do their work. In Constantinople, meanwhile, the Emperor Constantine made a show of leading the city in prayer, beseeching the intervention of the Virgin Mary to save the city as she had done so many times before.[10]

On September 26th 1281, it began to rain.

Initially, the downpours were no more than an irritant to the Great Khan and his men, and something of a deliverance to the Emperor, who saw Constantinople’s great cisterns filled to the brim with fresh water just as the autumn harvest had been collected. By the end of the second week of constant rainfall, however, things were becoming more difficult. Anticipating the difficulty of a winter on the Straits Ākǔttǎ had made a point of seizing the autumn harvests of much of the Haemic peninsula to properly sustain his army if a quick conquest of Constantinople proved to be impossible. A large amount of fodder had duly been collected, but the vast Jušen baggage trains had been greatly slowed down by a combination of roads turned to liquid mud and roaring rivers that had burst their banks. Furthermore, the persistent damp was doing much to spoil what crops had made it to the main siege camp.

It was not only on the Bosphorus that the weather was bad: the rains had spread down into the Aegean as well, pinning the Jusen fleet down at Smyrna where it had been due to carry across the remainder of Ākǔttǎ’s army. There, disaster struck. Michael Photopoulos, eager to assuage the embarrassment of failing to contain the initial Jusen crossing of the Taurus, had spent the summer slowly gathering together men and shadowing the Great Khan across the plateau. His final rally point had been Chonae[11] in the Thracesion, where he had amassed a formidable force perhaps approaching thirty thousand armed soldiers of the Tagmata, plus a number of mercenary divisions, most notably several hundred Kartvelian heavy cavalrymen eager to avenge the humiliation their countrymen had suffered back in 1268.[12]

Vengeance was exactly what Photopoulos delivered. Conveying his army to the walls of Smyrna in such terrible weather amply proved his capability as a commander, and doing it without detection by the Jušen soldiers and sailors who were encamped outside and within the city proved his genius. The Romans fell upon their adversaries with a savagery that, as even supportive writers would later write, “shamed Christians everywhere”.[13]Shameful or not, the butchery of half of the Great Khan’s army and the seizure of his fleet as it lay at anchor in Smyrna’s harbour was the greatest victory a Roman army had seen in generations, and would forever after be seen as the most important stepping stone on Photopoulos’ road to the pinnacle of imperial politics.

With communications slowed by the weather, news of the disaster at Smyrna was slow in reaching Ākǔttǎ and his main army, who in any case had an even more pressing problem to deal with: snow. As October gave way to November so the rains appeared, briefly, to halt, encouraging the Great Khan to make a show of force, launching a number of attacks on the walls that did much to restore morale in the besiegers’ camp and lower it for the citizens of Constantinople, who were especially terrified of the thunder of the Jušen firelances. The respite for the Great Khan, however, was only to be a limited one. Within a couple of weeks, the bad weather returned: and this time, it was snow that descended. It only took a few days for both the Jušen camp and the city of Constantinople to be shrouded in an icy white blanket. Ākǔttǎ himself was prepared for this, as was the leader of the Kievan Jušen Igor, but for soldiers who had proved their mettle in the conquest of Egypt the early arrival of horrendous winter weather came as deeply unpleasant shock. In Constantinople, the Emperor could and did make an ostentatious show of taking in the homeless to abandoned rooms of the Great Palace and sharing his food[14], but no such option was available to Ākǔttǎ, who had always believed in the virtue of living cheek by jowl with his soldiers. By suffering with his men, the Great Khan proved himself unable to ease their burden.

It was this perceived helplessness than did more than anything else to doom the greatest leader of his age. The glue that held Ākǔttǎ’s relatively rickety coalition together was his record of success, and once this began to fade, morale quickly started to tumble. The news of the Battle of Smyrna, which reached the Jušen high command early in December, proved to be the final straw. Accounts of what happened next are confused, but the final results are not. A brawl of some sort developed in a meeting between Ākǔttǎ and his lieutenants, most notably Igor of Kiev, that ended with half of the leadership dead. The Great Khan himself escaped the scene alive, ushered out by a bodyguard, but was then repeatedly stabbed to death by that same bodyguard, who fled the scene, reputedly to his native Bulgaria where, according to one tradition, he hid inside a tree and will emerge again when a new great enemy of the Christian people arises.[15] Whatever the case, Ākǔttǎ Khan died on December 7th 1281, and the Jušen siege dissolved almost immediately. Constantinople was liberated: and a new golden age was about to begin.
_______________________________



[1] The two probably were blood relatives, but the exact relation is unclear: the Jurchens of TTL have a habit of officially claiming after their ascension to power to be the son of their forebear.

[2] Thessalonica was probably one of the largest cities in Europe until the thirteenth century: it may have had a population of over 50,000, about the same size as contemporary Rome or Venice.

[3] “Firelances” is the generic term employed ITTL for gunpowder weapons.

[4] We met the Helots in the last chapter: they’re a radical sect calling for an end to property in the cause of slavery to the Kingdom of Heaven.

[5] See Chapter Seventeen.

[6] A city founded, surprise surprise, by the Emperor Trajan. It’s in the region we call Rhodope, and the Byzantines called Macedonia, to the south-west of Adrianople. See Ares’ map.

[7] Bosphorus winters are surprisingly harsh, as icy winds whip down across the Black Sea. The Arab army outside the gates in 717 was torn apart by the weather, an experience a cultured man like the Great Khan is well aware of.

[8] The inner wall is a little bigger taller than IOTL, owing to a major renovation and improvement of the walls back in the reign of the Emperor Manuel Komnenos in the late 1120s.

[9] Constantinople was largely watered by the Aqueduct of Valens. It was initially cut in 626 and restored by Constantine V.

[10] Most notably from during the Avar/Iranian siege of 626.

[11] The modern OTL Turkish town of Honaz, known in antiquity as Colossae.

[12] See Chapter Twenty.

[13] The writer in this case is a man named George of Cherson, a politician and writer of the sixteenth century that we met in the first Isaac’s Empire.

[14] A very characteristic bit of behaviour from Constantine, who, whatever his failings as Emperor, always showed an unfailing concern for his peoples.

[15] I intend to cover all of this in another POV narrative chapter, through the eyes of this Bulgarian, whose name is Symeon. The prophecy I based on the one about the monks who fled into the walls of Hagia Sophia in 1453, to return when a Christian Emperor does.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

And here's the completed map.