The Viking Era
The start of the Viking Era in Western Europe is traditionally dated to the raid on the young monastery of Mount Saint Michael in France in 789. However, in truth it had been ongoing for some time. The Vikings were if nothing else opportunists - the relative weakness of Eastern Europe invited many early raids. Trading ports were taken, sacked, and sometimes retained by the northmen. The Pomeranians and Obodorites suffered perhaps the worst, but also gained the earliest reprieve - by the dawn of the ninth century, the Vikings were primarily going further afield.
The first Viking raid on Anglo-Saxon England was the sack of Streanœhealh (Whitby) in 785. The divided kingdoms of the Pentarchy made easy prey for their longships. Seizing islands off the coast such as the Hebrides (822) and the Orkneys (810), they gained an excellent base from which to launch intensified and larger-scale raids on Scotland and Ireland as well. In Ireland the Viking impact was particularly strong, with them establishing or conquering cities such as Vedrafjordr and Dyflin.[1] These cities would become both colonies and trade hubs - an outlet for people who had little awaiting them back home and no reason not to migrate to a more temperate country where opportunity abounded.
In the east, other colonies were established. Most prominent among these was the "kingdom" of Gardveldi, carved out of the dominions of the northern Slavs. The early kingdom was little more than riverine trade posts and small hill forts - a level of development not distinct from the Slavic peoples they conquered - but Gardveldi would grow at a much more rapid rate than other Norse colonies in the west. Trade with the Khirichanid Turks to their south brought previously unknown luxuries north along the network of rivers. While the Great Votive War had constricted trade to some degree, the flow of goods quickly bounced back to its pre-war levels - the Frankish and Roman conquerors would have been foolish not to allow their people and the Sahu to continue their immensely profitable trade.
As in so many other periods of history this new burst of trade, whether it was spurred on perhaps by the swift-river vessels designed by the Norse, or perhaps just the emergence of a new market, also caused ideas and culture to spread. The Norse of Gardveldi quickly adopted Slavic customs and culture where it suited them, but more enduringly, the first Buddhist missionaries from the Xasar-Sahu would visit Gardveldi in this time. It is from them we have the most accurate accounts of the region, but though these earliest missionaries were greeted with curiosity and respect, they seem to have made little headway in converting any but the lowest-status members of society.
If the Norse were more receptive to these foreign ideas than the indigenous Slavic inhabitants, we should not be too surprised. Though Slavic tribes often collaborated with the Khirichan and the Sahu, this never developed into a very positive relationship. The Slavs saw the Khirichan as raiders and slavers from the south, an experience that the Norse never shared. To them the entire world was filled with opportunity. When Sahu missionaries brought them tales of golden cities far to the south, these tales would spread like wildfire and merely entice further expeditions of both exploration and plunder.
As certain [fake] theorists have claimed,[2] perhaps the best way to understand the Norse civilization is by contrasting it to the other great civilization of Europe - Latin Christendom, a term that can also encompass the Irish and Germans and all others it ultimately assimilated. In the past century, the Latin world had become increasingly insular and militant. The siege mentality it suffered would only grow as the Norsemen began to raid its shores. The Roman Empire it had known was destroyed not once but twice, and it had perhaps never truly recovered from the cultural shock of its loss. The traditional way which it had spread its borders and faith was peaceful - relying on the strength of its culture and traditions, it had assimilated those who meant to conquer it and even beyond. However, the Eftal conquests had perhaps unconsciously made Latin civilization doubt that strategy - the Eftal had not easily been assimilated. If they had been Romanized it was only minimally. The retreat into militarism and holy war can be seen as a broader sign of a civilization losing faith in its own identity.
By contrast the Norse civilization was adventurous and mercantile. It had little past to look back on beyond the mythic. They were forward-thinking, innovative, and curiously democratic. If they lacked centralization or complex state apparatuses, these traits seemed to favor their wandering mentality. Their religious and cultural tradition was equally ancient, if not as universalist. What was more, the centralized states of the south, Francia and Rome, were no more prepared to deal with the Norse raids and conquests than the more decentralized and tribal civilizations of the north. The infrastructure and armed strength that might have allowed Latin civilization to mount a defense against the Norsemen was massively atrophied and what remained was squandered in massive backwards-looking expeditions against the Eftal. When the Latin civilization encountered the Norse it did not do so with the same spirit that allowed it to subsume the barbarians of past centuries but rather with a militant rage all the more visible for its total impotency.
There are certainly some good points to this theory - the Latin world was weakened fundamentally, and it does certainly seem to have been unsure of itself in the wake of the Eftal. But this theory discounts demographic shifts and climate patterns which played an equally significant role. The expanding Norse population ensured that both civilization would come into conflict. Technological advantages in shipbuilding and navigation ensured that the Norse would outmatch the Latin civilizations in many critical respects, and the damage done to their civilization by Turkic raids and their own infighting would likely play a larger role than any lack of spirit.
India - the revolution spreads outwards
The social revolution begun in the early half of the eighth century would spread and further entrench in its latter half. The massive urban centers of India dominated society. Armed clashes between these centers and the rural peoples as well as armed clashes between polities both declined significantly as borders became stable. The equal-kingdoms, as they were known, began to establish a system of embassies and regular correspondence. Treaties regulating trade and defining borders were important to ending the anarchy that had followed the collapse of the Maukhani.
While the guild system had ensured population growth, it could not always ensure employment. Accordingly, people were often forced to seek opportunities elsewhere. Some of the few continually growing professions were mercantile or colonial ventures. Overseas merchant communities, which had existed for centuries saw the increased demand among the growing Indian population for foreign (especially Chinese) goods and accordingly needed to massive expand their enterprises. As more and more people demanded Arabian spices, African ivory,[3] or Chinese porcelain, these trading communities became essential, and grew rapidly.
For the first time, cities that could properly be described as colonies began to develop along the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. These colonies had generally speaking only limited political ties to their motherland, typically being founded as the project of guilds working in concert. They attracted primarily those of more heterodox beliefs, those unconcerned with caste or those whose caste was low, due to lingering superstitions about crossing the "black water." The exception was those migrants from South India, who disregarded the superstitions entirely, and Buddhists, who represented a large percentage of the population to begin with.
Ports along the coast of [Burma] developed to faciliate trade with the Indianized Pyu polities of the Irawaddi valley - a key overland route to China during those times that the Uighur-raided silk road became untenable. Cities such as Sudhammapura and Pulapali would grow into major port towns and useful entrepots for connecting India to the massive Srivajiyan Empire to the south. In turn, the establishment of these colonies would help unify the southern Pyu. The powerful city-state of Kusimanagara was able to spread its loose hegemony northwards, stabilizing the region and helping to facilitate trade.
At the invitation of the albudhist tribe known as Al-Azd, a group of Gujarati guild-merchants settled the small but prosperous port town of Musqata [literally "Anchorage"], known for its important natural harbor. The subsequent influx of Gujarati settlers would allow the Al-Azd to defeat Mezun, the traditional Eftal-dominated port of the region. However, by the time of the ninth century, the two most populous destinations for those seeking a better life and prosperity were the Hawiya Kingdom and the cities of Savahila. This expanding diaspora of colonists and traders would rewrite the demographics of the western Indian Ocean forever.
Like the Norse in northern Europe, maritime technology and unchecked population expansion combined to ensure regional dominance. However, unlike the Norse, the Indian expansion was rarely violent. Outside of small-scale border clashes and the semi-regular tribal warfare the Savahila found themselves entangled in, it was a relatively peaceful expansion. Furthermore, unlike the Norse, there was no one even roughly-unified Indian culture. The Gujarati colonists differed substantially from the Tamil who migrated to Sumatra, or the Tamralipti guilds who were the primary inhabitants of the Burmese colonies. Despite the hegemonizing effects of three successive universal Indian Empires, the languages and cultures of these peoples were drifting rapidly apart. Sanskrit as a lingua franca was a declining language of the intellectual elites. If anything, the guilds exacerbated this sentiment, emphasizing local and ethnic ties over any sort of universal imperial tendency.
[1] Feel free to think of the situation on the British isles as not too fundamentally different to OTL.
[2] What follows is me trying to do a more "old fashioned" sounding analysis of the two cultures. Let's not necessarily take it as gospel.
[3] It's a curious and apparently actually true fact that there does seem to have been a market for African ivory in India.
[It's a short update cause I'm strapped for time. But I hope it sheds some light on the alt-Viking era and what's going on India, which I've been neglecting horribly recently in my recent narrow focus on the Votive War.]
), a Franco-Slavic-Greek-Turkish language developing in Constantinople, and a whole lot of other weird mish mashes. When the Viking's strike, there's now the chance for a Norse-Buddhist pantheon to develop if they reach as far as Crimea.
