The birth of the western Slavic states
The ninth century was a time of increasing centralization for the western Slavic peoples. The tribal identities which had characterized their governments up until this time remained important but slowly lost precedence in favor of strong central authority which was more capable of responding to incursions by the Christian Germanic dukes.
The most well-documented of these central authorities was the King of Great Moravia, Moymir (Saint Moymir the Great) Ascending the throne in 840, within two years he personally converted to Christianity, establishing Bishoprics in both Nitra and Praha. Accordingly, his life has been the subject of many legends and exaggerations, relating to the famous riverine baptism of his nobles and his many wars against the pagans of his own kingdom. What we can learn from these legends is that his Christianization policies were met with strong internal resistance. Becoming a Christian lessened the pressure from the west but it threatened on many occasions to tear the young kingdom of Moravia apart entirely.
Moravia was organized, in contrast to the Wendish or Polish kingdoms, in imitation of her Frankish neighbors. The Kral of Moravia was called by the German princes a "Duke" and his retainers worked in a similar style to the magisters and palatine counts of the Frankish realm. However, if Moymir was a patron of Christendom, he did not employ these magistrates in the persecution of the old Slavic religion - quite the opposite, indeed. The forest temples and holy sites of their faith were preserved and untarnished for at least several more decades, before slowly mounting social pressure from a growing population of genuine converts saw the majority of the sites abandoned and traditional rituals replaced by Christian practices.
Mostly, the Moravian state is understood by way of its diplomatic ties to the Christian world. A royal marriage with the Duke of Bavaria, an acknowledgement of its (nominal) subordination to the Frankish King. We have scant historical records. As the frontier of Latin Christendom moved east, communities of Cassiodorian monks would establish communities in the vast hinterlands of Moravia, providing some of the clearest views of the Moravian society in transition. The fortified hill-towns were gradually pushing their boundaries - suburban communities gathered outside the traditional walls and established rough palisade barriers on the low terrain beyond their houses. In time, monasteries and churches would become equally important centers of communities.
To the east of Moravia, on the broad plains of Polans, a different sort of consolidation was taking place, based not around Christianity but Buddhism. Since at least the 800s, there had been small but influential Buddhist communities on the Vistula river - the religion had some four decades to synthesize with local beliefs and customs before King Czcibor of Polans united the "people of the plains" under his own banner. In some senses, Slavic Buddhism was a purer version of the Hinayana creed that had gained early popularity on the Vistula. Brought directly by travelling monks and missionaries, it did not carry as much of the baggage of Iranian paganism, and where it did, it was quick to draw comparisons between Iranian deities and the local Slavic ones. Buddhism, like Christianity, provided a social glue to unite local tribes into a larger framework.
Unlike Moymir, Czcibor conquered his kingdom at sword-point. It was only after the last of these conquests, in 853, that he began to promote Buddhism. Stone monuments from the time period speak of the edicts of the "Emperor and champion of the dharma" and describe the Czcibor's "universal rule" - a true revolution in the language used to describe Kings. Czcibor seems to have repudiated offensive war shortly after his conversion. Conveniently he had already conquered a vast empire, and settling down to manage it was perhaps a prudent action.
Alone of the Western Slavs, the Wendish, or Veleti Kingdom, did not abandon its traditional religion or social structure. It could not afford to - the Wendish king had less authority than his counterparts in Poland or Moravia. His authority directly stemmed from the Slavic priesthood and the rituals which preserved the social unity of his people. Furthermore, among the Veleti there was no single potent tribe which could establish a dominant or hegemonic role. The Veleti "High King" was chosen from a weak tribe, theCircipani. He could only act with the complicity of one or more of the greater tribes - meaning he could generally only act when the entire confederal system came under direct existential threat.
Existential threats were rare. The almost total annihilation of the pagan Saxons had shocked the Veleti, but the Franks quickly became more distracted with affairs in the south and the routine threat of the Norsemen. Invading the deep forests was widely considered unprofitable and pointless - border raiding would continue but it would never escalate far beyond that.
The Wendish religion, however, was under threat regardless. Christian missionaries gained some converts, especially among border communities pragmatically hoping that conversion would spare them future Frankish raids. And yet the greatest threat was not these missionaries or pragmatism but simply the slow divorce between the ritualistic, formal political religion developing among the tribal elite and the folk religion of the common people. Over the decades since the founding of Veletia as a confederal kingdom, the people began to feel increasingly disconnected from the major shrines, which became political power-brokers, and drawn more towards localized folk observances. Individual communities became more and more distinct from any broad identity as "Wends" or even their larger tribal affiliations.
While their neighbors were bound together, the Wends slowly drifted apart.
India - the revolution continues
If the Guild Era began in the north, along the rich lands of the Ganges, it was the south which harnessed its full potential. Generally speaking, south India was less densely populated and less inherently productive than the wealthy Indo-Gangetic plain. Accordingly, it had more room to grow and develop as it moved from tenant farming and the pseudo-feudal land structures of the late Imperial era into the guild organized systems that followed. By giving the local populations a direct stake in the development of the land and the communal resources to properly develop it, production increased significantly. The vast expansion of agricultural production freed up more land for cash crops such as spices and cotton the latter of which fuelled a large-scale urban textile industry.
With these innovations, the power of urban manufactory guilds increased rapidly. The remaining monarchies of the region found themselves increasingly under the sway of these guilds, and attempts by the Rajas to assert their independence from their ostensible subjects often resulted in the establishment of further guild republics.
In the waning era of the Maukhani Empire, the Yuvaraja dynasty ofVinukonda was able to assert their independence, but the times were simply unsuited to the sort of imperial pretensions the Yuvaraja dynasty offered. Under the latter Andhran Maharaja Vikramaditya (778-801) the Andhran monarchy attempted to conquer the republican city-states of Trikalinga only to exhaust themselves utterly and become deeply indebted to the very trading guilds who they had attempted to rule. After Vikramaditya's death, Andhra's rapid transition into a Ganarajya-style republic was almost inevitable.
Vikramaditya's replacement was an orator and poet by the name of Hasti, a member of the brahmin administrative class whose persistence in Andhra allowed the "Andhran revolution" as later ideologues would describe it to effectively be little more than a palace coup with few immediate social changes. The social and economic revolution of later decades should not be falsely assumed to have begun with Hasti's ascension, even if he did quickly develop a reputation as a reformer. After Hasti died in 817, he was replaced with Jayasimha, the son of Visnuvarma, a warrior-guild general, a choice undoubtedly inspired by renewed warfare with Trikalinga.
On the Deccan plateau, the rise of urban polities was far more limited. Instead a new sort of empire emerged, one founded by a group of exiled Gurjar tribesmen. Called the Chandratreya Empire after its founding dynasty, it was centered around the old city of Pratisthana. Despite the relatively poor soil of the Deccan, it was exceptionally mineral rich, and the local guilds accordingly became exceptionally wealthy off of mining and the associated artisanal industries. Unlike on the Ganges, military guilds here did not form autonomously but rather were local militias, and accordingly the state did not fall into the trap of relying on these guilds but rather preserved its own professional mercenary armies without guild allegiance.
The Chandratreya Empire, as with all post-imperial polities, had its powers limited by the republican institutions of the guilds. In many senses, later historians have often considered it more of a mercantile alliance than an empire at all. In Gujarat, the city of Bharuch, which by 800 was the largest port in the world, was a federate of the Empire - and yet also considered a part of the Ganarajya of
Surastra, and simultaneously a potent city-state in its own right. To the southwest, the Kuntala dynasty ruled as nominal vassals and allies of the Chandratreya, and yet often made policy decisions independently of their supposed overlords in Pratisthana.
When the Aghatsaghids were driven from the subcontinent, no region suffered more than Sindh. Local violence against the Turko-Iranian landlord class was brutal and uncompromising, and left a power vacuum with none to fill it. Unlike the generally pluralistic Indian religious world, Sindh was and firmly Buddhist - but the Buddhist clergy, despite their instrumental role in organizing the rebellion, rapidly lost control of it as they condemned the excesses and violence.
Sindh accordingly did not remain independent for long. Akadadeva Dauwa, one of the many Gurjar warlords living in the marginal territory of the Thar led, according to legend, some seventy men to Mulasthanapura (Multan) and seized the city by stealth, allowing his nearby tribe to capture the surrounding land and turn overnight from herders to conquerors. From there his conquests snowballed down the Indus. By 830, the Dauwa ruled all of Sindh. Their legacy was as patrons of international trade, expanding the river-ports that linked the Indus valley to the wider world. Infrastructure development, long neglected by the Aghatsaghids was a priority of the Dauwa, who sought to, through enormous public works, win the loyalty of their subjects and prove that they were more than another foreign occupier.
The religious geography of the subcontinent was largely inherited from the nondualistic and monistic scholars patronized by the Maukhani. This universalist Hinduism remained a common trend in the new and pluralistic post-Imperial India. The idea of all gods and souls as aspects of a singular, impersonal divine truth (Brahman) allowed the priestly classes to compete with Buddhism. By linking their complex theologies to the devotional cultic movements, the Hindu priestly classes appealed to the common man and the intellectual classes alike. However Buddhism was a force to be reckoned with. Many powerful guilds patronized Buddhist monasteries and for those at the bottom of the social spectrum, the egalitarian aspects of Buddhism had far more appeal.
It is difficult to speak broadly of the Indian religions. The sheer multiplicity of belief systems and schools of thought only became more complex and interlinked throughout this era, as travel and trade allowed the communication of ideas. Even without touching on Hindu-inspired religions such as Bhakti which had their origins on the subcontinent but became popular mostly in Africa, the web of competing and complimentary philosophies is difficult to unravel.
Despite the regionalization of politics, the relative interconnection of the subcontinent ensured that regional trends in religion still had a global audience. Competing guilds still maintained their local cults, but these local cults were understood to be part of a broader framework. By the end of the eighth century and the dawn of the post-imperial era many new religious texts had been compiled. Called the Dharmasukta, they built on the accumulated mysticism of the Upanishads and the rituals of Brahamanic Hinduism to create the groundwork of what would eventually be considered "modern" Hinduism. The deification of the Buddha as an aspect of Vishnu was but one part of this new synthesis.
[I confess to not being an expert on the Dharmic religions, but this post was long overdue. Essentially what happened was that the Bhakti movements didn't catch on and Puranas were never written because of the very different past couple centuries and the Maukhani trying to make a universal umbrella version of Hinduism underwritten by a monist ideology. These ideas stuck and were eventually compiled into texts called the Dharmasukta.
By the post Imperial era, regionalism in religion becomes more commonplace, but it's largely done within the framework of the Dharmasukta rather than the Puranas. Competing with Buddhism rather than Islam means that there's no future for personal devotional religion, and so the Bhakti movement is largely a bunch of exiles who eventually move to East Africa, where it turns out to be a lot more appealing.
Theoretically you could also consider the Mahadevists an early Bhakti offshoot, but nobody does because they're basically Indianized Zoroastrians and by 800 they don't exist anymore as a meaningful movement.]
So much of the Arab migrations of TTL are spread more to the south rather than west. I think that the mix of Hawiya Arabs and Aksumites in East Africa will not just disappear in 20 years time... they will tend to disperse south into the fledgling states of East Africa. 
