The Rise of the White Huns
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
I really like the last update.
The new "Eftal" ethnicity will bear interesting fruit in the future I think.
fasquardon
The new "Eftal" ethnicity will bear interesting fruit in the future I think.
fasquardon
The fact that the Jewish state lasted like ten seconds is dissapointing, but not surprising.
Splinterings
Splinterings
Mihiragula died in 572, succeeded by his son Varhran, who was not his eldest but was perhaps the most like him of his sons. It might seem remarkable to some observers that this choice did not lead to civil war or conflict, but the Eftal laws of succession tended to permit no objection to the Shah's choice, and Varhran was given many offices shortly before the death of his father, offices that allowed him to consolidate his power.
Vinayaditha, Mihiragula's eldest son is the only one to remain in the historical record, a noted traveler and patron of the arts and sciences, presiding over the blossoming of art and culture in western Persia which would continue roughly until the end of the century. He spent his final years (it would seem he died relatively young) retired in the Vihara of Syarzur.
Varhran was not a capable administrator, though he seems to have been beloved by the Eftal elite. Inscriptions and monuments from his reign praise a variety of pagan gods, chiefly Mithra, who seems continually favored by the Eftal, but also "the fellowship in dharma, the gift of the dharma" and other Buddhist ideas - ideas which, co-opted by the Eftal Shahs, provided an ideological framework in which their polytheism could still endure.
Varhran was incapable it would seem, of maintaining the carefully orchestrated centralization of his predecessors. Increasingly the far-flung satrapies of his Empire were autonomous in all but name, and he was incapable of reigning in the Johiyava raiders. The plunder won by the various clans of the Johiyava served to allow Raja Anandakumara to increase his own power by extracting a tribute or tax upon the loot, and in time it was the Raja's own clansmen who were coming down from their mountain strongholds to take caravans. While the Johiyava did not leave a detailed record of their history, their stele record Anandakumara's "victories" in great detail, praising the gods for his conquests - conquests which seem to have in truth amounted to raids, but raids that nevertheless had a great disruptive effect on trade. The Kidarites were granted a tributary sort of sovereignty over the regions of Sakastan and Kerman in this time, an attempt to guard against the raids of the warlike clansmen of the Hindu Kush.
In 574, Eftal histories mark an attack of Piandjikent by a Turkic clan. An unimaginable event a few decades ago, the defeat of the Satrap of Sogdia left the region open to Turkic invasion. A Qa'an named Tulan, of unknown origin struck deep into the heart of the region, seemingly with the consent of the Gokturks, and though he was ultimately repulsed, even in defeat he sparked a great migration of refugees towards the safety of the west. It was around this time that the government in Susa began granting their vassals and Satrapies increased powers designed to curb perceived anarchy in the East.
Much of this newfound autonomy was because Varhran was struggling with affairs in the West - attempting to reform the tax code and bring in new revenue from trade. These attempts would be broadly unsuccessful, in no large part because Varhran had little understanding of mercantile affairs, and left his reform programs to cronies whose policies would have depressive effect on trade (while lining their own pockets) and lead to simmering resentment among the Iranian merchants of the Persian gulf. Ultimately, faced with declining revenue, Varhran turned to state-sponsored raiding of Rome, perhaps eager to relive his glory days as a cavalry commander rather than a Shah.
By 576, the Asvha seem to have been given the region of Xvaresm to rule as a vassal - a not uncommon arrangement similar to that struck with the Johiyava and the petty Shah of Farghana. Subsequent records would call the region, or perhaps merely the territory immediately to the north, around the Aral sea, Asvhastan, a name that seems to have stuck for some time.
This loss of prestige and central authority was by no means total. Although history records riots in the Mesopotamian city of Sumra, the West was relatively calm, although the Satrap of Edessa began raiding Syria and Asia Minor once more in the early 580's, and other border tribes followed suit not long afterwards. The notable efforts of atribal warlord named Heshana are first recorded in this time, during a period of relative anarchy in both the Eftal and Roman Empires where such independent figures could prosper. Although the East began to assert additional autonomy in the face of nomadic incursions, this autonomy also seems to have been largely successful in enabling the preservation of at least nominal Eftal authority in the region. Some of the eastern satraps might have been emboldened by newfound kingly powers, but they still used those powers to preserve the status quo, by and large.
Migrations
The Balkans, long depopulated, were saved from invasion during the Eftal-Roman war by adept diplomacy and clever trickery - Roman garrisons were made to seem far larger than they actually were, and the Roman army engaged in frequent patrols, giving the illusion of strength.
But in truth, such strength simply no longer existed. The devastated eastern regions of Anatolia were no longer available for mass recruitment, and Syria and Thracia were similarly depopulated by constant war. Paltry Roman garrison troops were the only reinforcements Emperor Kallinikos could expect if the barbarians crossed the Danube in force - the main body of his army was concentrated in the Orient, and when his advisors informed him that the situation in the Balkans was deteriorating, he was forced to deplete the army of the Orient to bring the Roman forces in the Balkans up to respectable levels.
Vitalian and Zeno had been willing to acknowledge the Langobards as Imperial allies in Pannonia and Dalmatia, and despite their best attempts to preserve the uneasy balance of power, the Langobards had only grown in strength, and when Audion, their loyal ally died in 568, the certainty of Langobard fidelity vanished overnight. Alboin, his son and heir, was a different, more ambitious figure even than his famously ambitious and successful father. To say that Alboin could not be relied upon to be a reliable Roman ally was an understatement.
Countless allies flocked to the new king's banner. What remained of the pagan Gepids were cowed by force into serving Alboin, and the Sklaveni and many Iranian Bulgar tribes were willing to work with him. With the Xasar-Sahu wreaking havoc on the steppe, the Khans knew their time was running out. Being on the other side of the ancient Roman fortifications looked to many disparate peoples to be the best way to avoid subjugation under the Xasar yoke.
And thus Alboin openly invaded his former allies, striking a devastating opening blow to an already devastated Empire. The Roman commanders generally refused to give him the field battle he desired, but the Langobards proved adept at besieging and taking Roman fortresses nonetheless. Certain cities, such as Thessalonica, Athens, and Corinth did not fall, but the hinterlands were nevertheless taken, and cities such as Sardike and Stoboi suffered sacks from which they did not quickly recover. In many cases the already small Greek populations, much diminished by constant raids and pillaging, were subsequently massacred, making way for Hunnic and Slavic settlers. The Langobards generally were less brutal in their conquests, but they displaced many Greeks nonetheless.
Kallinikos, who had originally based his claim to the Roman throne on his ability to push back the barbarians, was forced to respond - and yet his response came slowly, perhaps owing to his exhaustion after years of uninterrupted campaigning. He stalled, trying to raise additional forces to counter the Langobards and their countless allies. Despite a few early successes, which gave his men hope that he would repeat his great victories in the East here, he slowly retreated back towards Adrianople in the face of Alboin's army. At Adrianople, however, he fought a major battle against the Langobard King and won. His numerically inferior but disciplined veteran forces fought their way out of an encirclement by the enemy Bulgar cavalry and saved the day - but at a terrible cost. In the confused barbarian rout that followed, Kallinikos was knocked from his charging horse and suffered a terrible blow to the head.
Our Greek sources report the Emperor was not quite the same afterwards. His sub-commanders were forced to intercede, and though many of them were capable and experienced, they lacked the Emperor's personal charisma, and the tide of the barbarians was simply too great. They would ultimately retire to Constantinople, using the Roman fleet to ensure that the Peloponnese would not be taken, and reinforce the garrisons of many yet-untaken coastal cities.
Alboin never attempted to besiege Constantinople himself. After his defeat at Adrianople, he seems to have lost the confidence of his many allies, allies he desperately needed. The coalition he had designed was splintering, carving out their own autonomous tribal states. His own Langobards received the lion's share of course, choice lands in Thessalia, Macedonia, and Epirus, but his Slavic vassals would prove far more unruly in the north than he could have intended. The Kutrigurs themselves now ruled an expansive, wealthy territory on either side of the Danube and their Khan did not acknowledge Langobard superiority at all.
The long term ramifications of this invasion were huge. While the long-established, populous cities of the East proved relatively more invulnerable to Germanic and Slavic invasion than their western counterparts, and the Langobardi contented themselves with ruling the interior, the cultural heart of Hellenic civilization was forced to shift further East. The general devastation of the very center of Hellenism would mark the true "end of antiquity" and the emergence of something new. What the new era would bring was as of yet unclear, but it seemed certain that it would not be peaceful.
Two regions of the Empire were relatively unspoilt by war - the Diocese of Asia, and the Diocese of Egypt. Both were wealthy and ancient, heirs to far older traditions than that even of Rome, and both had avoided the worst of conflicts that had brought their neighbors to unprecedented lows. Egypt, however, had the unique distinction of being essential to the feeding of Constantinople- so essential to the continued function of the Empire was the province that the military and civil offices of the province were often combined - as indeed they were under the Prefect Anastasios, an old comrade-in-arms of Emperor Kallinikos, who was also the commander of the armies of the Diocese.
Despite the alienation the Miaphysite majority of Egypt had experienced under past Emperors, Anastasios proved to be a capable administrator and diplomat, finely attuned to the religious views of his majority populace. More than any religious council, he managed to reconcile the Miaphysites to a degree through clever negotiations and a willingness to give Miaphysite leaders positions within his administration. In no small part, Anastasios' negotiations and political savvy prevented the province from breaking into outright rebellion when the Eftal had invaded, despite a series of devastating riots in the countryside, riots only put down with the use of brutal force.
However, in 572, these riots occurred again, this time breaking out into open civil war. A massacre of Roman administrators in the province cut off the grain supply to Constantinople yet again during a time of crisis. The great cities of the Mediterranean were forced to buy vital foodstuffs from Berber merchants who made exploitative profits selling North African grain during the time of unrest. The government in Constantinople was forced to dispatch additional soldiers to Egypt, and dissent was brewing in the ranks.
The Anatolian army, having gone without pay for some time, erupted into open rebellion shortly thereafter, acclaiming one of their own sub-commanders, Constantine, as Emperor. Kallinikos, who seems to have been a mere figurehead after Adrianople, nevertheless maintained the fanatic loyalty of his forces in Constantinople and much of the fleet as well. Constantine, like Vitalian before him, was forced to consolidate his hold on Anatolia, but was unable to cross the Bosporus and take the Imperial capital. He was enormously fortunate, and perhaps crafty, in that the Eftal were too distracted to take advantage of the chaos in the Roman Empire, and his forces moved into Syria, wresting much of the devastated province of Oriens from Kallinikos' prefect there, Julian Menas.
The Emperor's advisors, however, began to see which way the winds of change were turning. In the night, they fled south with much of the fleet, arriving in Egypt, where Anastasios welcomed them hospitably. However, the Emperor did not live long after his flight, and seems to have passed away two years later, in 574 - and a final blow to his legitimacy came early in the same year, when Constantine finally was welcomed into Constantinople, having built his own fleet and pushed the Imperial fleet out of the Aegean, at least. Constantine seems to have had little desire to remain in Constantinople - he clearly had ambitions to retake the Balkans, but those came secondarily to restoring the supply of grain to the capital cut off when Kallinikos fled to Constantinople.
Anastasios ultimately would, at the urging of the late Emperor's staff and advisors, take on the mantle of Empire, but favored the Greek title of Autokrator. Ruling out of Alexandria, he secured Crete and Cyprus, and Palestine to his regime, but Anatolia and parts of Syria, as well as what remained of Greece, were lost to him. Constantine attempted to march south into Palestine in 575, and indeed, made it as far as Gaza before he was repulsed, and Anastasios never attempted a similar invasion, although he did take Damascus and Phoenicia back in the aftermath of Constantine's failed invasion. The two regimes regarded themselves warily across the Mediterranean, in time referred to by historians as the Anastasian and the Constantinian Roman Empires.
Constantine, for his part, barely held on to his throne in the aftermath of his failed invasion of Palestine. Despite a near-mutiny of his forces, and a rebellion in what remained of Roman Syria, he managed to retain control of the apparatus of state, and both Emperors were forced to acknowledge each other's dominion for the time being. No sooner than tentative peace was signed than Constantine was forced to march into Pontus to deal with Alan incursions there, a task he would only be partially successful in, due to minimal manpower and a small budget.
Almost none of the Emperor Constantine's reign would be spent in Constantinople, a city which declined in population during this period, failing to recover from the Egyptian Plague even in an era when many of the other cities of Asia Minor finally did so. It must be stressed this is due in no little part to the role which Anastasios played - maintaining an indefinite grain embargo cost the city dearly. Constantinople, like Thessalonica many other Roman cities, continued in unchecked decline as the Romans lost their influence in the Balkans and around the northern rim of the Black Sea. While these massive cities were still well-defended (Constantinople in particular famed for her land walls) and large compared to the urban centers of the West, they nevertheless suffered and lost much of their former prestige.
A Look to the West
Sicily, meanwhile, under the Prefect Maurice, at this point severed ties with Constantinople. It seems, from various Roman historians and inscriptions left in the city of Panormus, that Maurice began ruling with the title of Dux, and paying a small tribute to the Mauri Rex in Africa. Maurice, a capable administrator and general, is recorded as having defied a Gothic attempt to reclaim southern Italy, with no small assistance from the Mauritanians, who by 570 had truly begun projecting military power outside of their holdings in Africa.
The Gothic Rex Theodoric II was killed in this war, beginning a period of fifteen years known as the "Regency" where his infant son was raised by his wife, Matasuntha, and she seems to have exercised relative power over the regime. It was, by all accounts, a peaceful era. The young Rex, Alaric, was betrothed to a Frankish princess from the age of five onwards, and the Ostrogoths and Franks solidified their border - something that cannot be said for their Hispanic cousins, who waged a series of bloody borders wars against the Franks, contesting the ownership of the city of Narbo and its hinterlands.
Matasuntha's regency was a time of peace and increasing Romanization. Gothic aristocrats with ever more Romanized names become more and more common, and despite religious differences, Italy in the late sixth century was a peaceful region recovering from the devastation of plague and war. With Berber grain, depopulated cities began to experience a revival. Between 575 and 590 was a period of uninterrupted prosperity, and though Rome might have been a shadow of her former glory kept aloft only by the Papacy, a traveler to sixth-century Ravenna or Milan might well have thought that the Roman Empire had never fallen.
[In response to the comments, Glad everyone still likes what's happening and sorry, Abe, the poor Jewish state was doomed from the outset - it barely even got to be a state before Kallinikos got at it again.
As for the next update, Constantine tries to retake the Balkans from the Lombard yoke, a look what's going on in Africa, and maybe some more India. Haven't quite decided yet.]
Mihiragula died in 572, succeeded by his son Varhran, who was not his eldest but was perhaps the most like him of his sons. It might seem remarkable to some observers that this choice did not lead to civil war or conflict, but the Eftal laws of succession tended to permit no objection to the Shah's choice, and Varhran was given many offices shortly before the death of his father, offices that allowed him to consolidate his power.
Vinayaditha, Mihiragula's eldest son is the only one to remain in the historical record, a noted traveler and patron of the arts and sciences, presiding over the blossoming of art and culture in western Persia which would continue roughly until the end of the century. He spent his final years (it would seem he died relatively young) retired in the Vihara of Syarzur.
Varhran was not a capable administrator, though he seems to have been beloved by the Eftal elite. Inscriptions and monuments from his reign praise a variety of pagan gods, chiefly Mithra, who seems continually favored by the Eftal, but also "the fellowship in dharma, the gift of the dharma" and other Buddhist ideas - ideas which, co-opted by the Eftal Shahs, provided an ideological framework in which their polytheism could still endure.
Varhran was incapable it would seem, of maintaining the carefully orchestrated centralization of his predecessors. Increasingly the far-flung satrapies of his Empire were autonomous in all but name, and he was incapable of reigning in the Johiyava raiders. The plunder won by the various clans of the Johiyava served to allow Raja Anandakumara to increase his own power by extracting a tribute or tax upon the loot, and in time it was the Raja's own clansmen who were coming down from their mountain strongholds to take caravans. While the Johiyava did not leave a detailed record of their history, their stele record Anandakumara's "victories" in great detail, praising the gods for his conquests - conquests which seem to have in truth amounted to raids, but raids that nevertheless had a great disruptive effect on trade. The Kidarites were granted a tributary sort of sovereignty over the regions of Sakastan and Kerman in this time, an attempt to guard against the raids of the warlike clansmen of the Hindu Kush.
In 574, Eftal histories mark an attack of Piandjikent by a Turkic clan. An unimaginable event a few decades ago, the defeat of the Satrap of Sogdia left the region open to Turkic invasion. A Qa'an named Tulan, of unknown origin struck deep into the heart of the region, seemingly with the consent of the Gokturks, and though he was ultimately repulsed, even in defeat he sparked a great migration of refugees towards the safety of the west. It was around this time that the government in Susa began granting their vassals and Satrapies increased powers designed to curb perceived anarchy in the East.
Much of this newfound autonomy was because Varhran was struggling with affairs in the West - attempting to reform the tax code and bring in new revenue from trade. These attempts would be broadly unsuccessful, in no large part because Varhran had little understanding of mercantile affairs, and left his reform programs to cronies whose policies would have depressive effect on trade (while lining their own pockets) and lead to simmering resentment among the Iranian merchants of the Persian gulf. Ultimately, faced with declining revenue, Varhran turned to state-sponsored raiding of Rome, perhaps eager to relive his glory days as a cavalry commander rather than a Shah.
By 576, the Asvha seem to have been given the region of Xvaresm to rule as a vassal - a not uncommon arrangement similar to that struck with the Johiyava and the petty Shah of Farghana. Subsequent records would call the region, or perhaps merely the territory immediately to the north, around the Aral sea, Asvhastan, a name that seems to have stuck for some time.
This loss of prestige and central authority was by no means total. Although history records riots in the Mesopotamian city of Sumra, the West was relatively calm, although the Satrap of Edessa began raiding Syria and Asia Minor once more in the early 580's, and other border tribes followed suit not long afterwards. The notable efforts of atribal warlord named Heshana are first recorded in this time, during a period of relative anarchy in both the Eftal and Roman Empires where such independent figures could prosper. Although the East began to assert additional autonomy in the face of nomadic incursions, this autonomy also seems to have been largely successful in enabling the preservation of at least nominal Eftal authority in the region. Some of the eastern satraps might have been emboldened by newfound kingly powers, but they still used those powers to preserve the status quo, by and large.
Migrations
The Balkans, long depopulated, were saved from invasion during the Eftal-Roman war by adept diplomacy and clever trickery - Roman garrisons were made to seem far larger than they actually were, and the Roman army engaged in frequent patrols, giving the illusion of strength.
But in truth, such strength simply no longer existed. The devastated eastern regions of Anatolia were no longer available for mass recruitment, and Syria and Thracia were similarly depopulated by constant war. Paltry Roman garrison troops were the only reinforcements Emperor Kallinikos could expect if the barbarians crossed the Danube in force - the main body of his army was concentrated in the Orient, and when his advisors informed him that the situation in the Balkans was deteriorating, he was forced to deplete the army of the Orient to bring the Roman forces in the Balkans up to respectable levels.
Vitalian and Zeno had been willing to acknowledge the Langobards as Imperial allies in Pannonia and Dalmatia, and despite their best attempts to preserve the uneasy balance of power, the Langobards had only grown in strength, and when Audion, their loyal ally died in 568, the certainty of Langobard fidelity vanished overnight. Alboin, his son and heir, was a different, more ambitious figure even than his famously ambitious and successful father. To say that Alboin could not be relied upon to be a reliable Roman ally was an understatement.
Countless allies flocked to the new king's banner. What remained of the pagan Gepids were cowed by force into serving Alboin, and the Sklaveni and many Iranian Bulgar tribes were willing to work with him. With the Xasar-Sahu wreaking havoc on the steppe, the Khans knew their time was running out. Being on the other side of the ancient Roman fortifications looked to many disparate peoples to be the best way to avoid subjugation under the Xasar yoke.
And thus Alboin openly invaded his former allies, striking a devastating opening blow to an already devastated Empire. The Roman commanders generally refused to give him the field battle he desired, but the Langobards proved adept at besieging and taking Roman fortresses nonetheless. Certain cities, such as Thessalonica, Athens, and Corinth did not fall, but the hinterlands were nevertheless taken, and cities such as Sardike and Stoboi suffered sacks from which they did not quickly recover. In many cases the already small Greek populations, much diminished by constant raids and pillaging, were subsequently massacred, making way for Hunnic and Slavic settlers. The Langobards generally were less brutal in their conquests, but they displaced many Greeks nonetheless.
Kallinikos, who had originally based his claim to the Roman throne on his ability to push back the barbarians, was forced to respond - and yet his response came slowly, perhaps owing to his exhaustion after years of uninterrupted campaigning. He stalled, trying to raise additional forces to counter the Langobards and their countless allies. Despite a few early successes, which gave his men hope that he would repeat his great victories in the East here, he slowly retreated back towards Adrianople in the face of Alboin's army. At Adrianople, however, he fought a major battle against the Langobard King and won. His numerically inferior but disciplined veteran forces fought their way out of an encirclement by the enemy Bulgar cavalry and saved the day - but at a terrible cost. In the confused barbarian rout that followed, Kallinikos was knocked from his charging horse and suffered a terrible blow to the head.
Our Greek sources report the Emperor was not quite the same afterwards. His sub-commanders were forced to intercede, and though many of them were capable and experienced, they lacked the Emperor's personal charisma, and the tide of the barbarians was simply too great. They would ultimately retire to Constantinople, using the Roman fleet to ensure that the Peloponnese would not be taken, and reinforce the garrisons of many yet-untaken coastal cities.
Alboin never attempted to besiege Constantinople himself. After his defeat at Adrianople, he seems to have lost the confidence of his many allies, allies he desperately needed. The coalition he had designed was splintering, carving out their own autonomous tribal states. His own Langobards received the lion's share of course, choice lands in Thessalia, Macedonia, and Epirus, but his Slavic vassals would prove far more unruly in the north than he could have intended. The Kutrigurs themselves now ruled an expansive, wealthy territory on either side of the Danube and their Khan did not acknowledge Langobard superiority at all.
The long term ramifications of this invasion were huge. While the long-established, populous cities of the East proved relatively more invulnerable to Germanic and Slavic invasion than their western counterparts, and the Langobardi contented themselves with ruling the interior, the cultural heart of Hellenic civilization was forced to shift further East. The general devastation of the very center of Hellenism would mark the true "end of antiquity" and the emergence of something new. What the new era would bring was as of yet unclear, but it seemed certain that it would not be peaceful.
Two regions of the Empire were relatively unspoilt by war - the Diocese of Asia, and the Diocese of Egypt. Both were wealthy and ancient, heirs to far older traditions than that even of Rome, and both had avoided the worst of conflicts that had brought their neighbors to unprecedented lows. Egypt, however, had the unique distinction of being essential to the feeding of Constantinople- so essential to the continued function of the Empire was the province that the military and civil offices of the province were often combined - as indeed they were under the Prefect Anastasios, an old comrade-in-arms of Emperor Kallinikos, who was also the commander of the armies of the Diocese.
Despite the alienation the Miaphysite majority of Egypt had experienced under past Emperors, Anastasios proved to be a capable administrator and diplomat, finely attuned to the religious views of his majority populace. More than any religious council, he managed to reconcile the Miaphysites to a degree through clever negotiations and a willingness to give Miaphysite leaders positions within his administration. In no small part, Anastasios' negotiations and political savvy prevented the province from breaking into outright rebellion when the Eftal had invaded, despite a series of devastating riots in the countryside, riots only put down with the use of brutal force.
However, in 572, these riots occurred again, this time breaking out into open civil war. A massacre of Roman administrators in the province cut off the grain supply to Constantinople yet again during a time of crisis. The great cities of the Mediterranean were forced to buy vital foodstuffs from Berber merchants who made exploitative profits selling North African grain during the time of unrest. The government in Constantinople was forced to dispatch additional soldiers to Egypt, and dissent was brewing in the ranks.
The Anatolian army, having gone without pay for some time, erupted into open rebellion shortly thereafter, acclaiming one of their own sub-commanders, Constantine, as Emperor. Kallinikos, who seems to have been a mere figurehead after Adrianople, nevertheless maintained the fanatic loyalty of his forces in Constantinople and much of the fleet as well. Constantine, like Vitalian before him, was forced to consolidate his hold on Anatolia, but was unable to cross the Bosporus and take the Imperial capital. He was enormously fortunate, and perhaps crafty, in that the Eftal were too distracted to take advantage of the chaos in the Roman Empire, and his forces moved into Syria, wresting much of the devastated province of Oriens from Kallinikos' prefect there, Julian Menas.
The Emperor's advisors, however, began to see which way the winds of change were turning. In the night, they fled south with much of the fleet, arriving in Egypt, where Anastasios welcomed them hospitably. However, the Emperor did not live long after his flight, and seems to have passed away two years later, in 574 - and a final blow to his legitimacy came early in the same year, when Constantine finally was welcomed into Constantinople, having built his own fleet and pushed the Imperial fleet out of the Aegean, at least. Constantine seems to have had little desire to remain in Constantinople - he clearly had ambitions to retake the Balkans, but those came secondarily to restoring the supply of grain to the capital cut off when Kallinikos fled to Constantinople.
Anastasios ultimately would, at the urging of the late Emperor's staff and advisors, take on the mantle of Empire, but favored the Greek title of Autokrator. Ruling out of Alexandria, he secured Crete and Cyprus, and Palestine to his regime, but Anatolia and parts of Syria, as well as what remained of Greece, were lost to him. Constantine attempted to march south into Palestine in 575, and indeed, made it as far as Gaza before he was repulsed, and Anastasios never attempted a similar invasion, although he did take Damascus and Phoenicia back in the aftermath of Constantine's failed invasion. The two regimes regarded themselves warily across the Mediterranean, in time referred to by historians as the Anastasian and the Constantinian Roman Empires.
Constantine, for his part, barely held on to his throne in the aftermath of his failed invasion of Palestine. Despite a near-mutiny of his forces, and a rebellion in what remained of Roman Syria, he managed to retain control of the apparatus of state, and both Emperors were forced to acknowledge each other's dominion for the time being. No sooner than tentative peace was signed than Constantine was forced to march into Pontus to deal with Alan incursions there, a task he would only be partially successful in, due to minimal manpower and a small budget.
Almost none of the Emperor Constantine's reign would be spent in Constantinople, a city which declined in population during this period, failing to recover from the Egyptian Plague even in an era when many of the other cities of Asia Minor finally did so. It must be stressed this is due in no little part to the role which Anastasios played - maintaining an indefinite grain embargo cost the city dearly. Constantinople, like Thessalonica many other Roman cities, continued in unchecked decline as the Romans lost their influence in the Balkans and around the northern rim of the Black Sea. While these massive cities were still well-defended (Constantinople in particular famed for her land walls) and large compared to the urban centers of the West, they nevertheless suffered and lost much of their former prestige.
A Look to the West
Sicily, meanwhile, under the Prefect Maurice, at this point severed ties with Constantinople. It seems, from various Roman historians and inscriptions left in the city of Panormus, that Maurice began ruling with the title of Dux, and paying a small tribute to the Mauri Rex in Africa. Maurice, a capable administrator and general, is recorded as having defied a Gothic attempt to reclaim southern Italy, with no small assistance from the Mauritanians, who by 570 had truly begun projecting military power outside of their holdings in Africa.
The Gothic Rex Theodoric II was killed in this war, beginning a period of fifteen years known as the "Regency" where his infant son was raised by his wife, Matasuntha, and she seems to have exercised relative power over the regime. It was, by all accounts, a peaceful era. The young Rex, Alaric, was betrothed to a Frankish princess from the age of five onwards, and the Ostrogoths and Franks solidified their border - something that cannot be said for their Hispanic cousins, who waged a series of bloody borders wars against the Franks, contesting the ownership of the city of Narbo and its hinterlands.
Matasuntha's regency was a time of peace and increasing Romanization. Gothic aristocrats with ever more Romanized names become more and more common, and despite religious differences, Italy in the late sixth century was a peaceful region recovering from the devastation of plague and war. With Berber grain, depopulated cities began to experience a revival. Between 575 and 590 was a period of uninterrupted prosperity, and though Rome might have been a shadow of her former glory kept aloft only by the Papacy, a traveler to sixth-century Ravenna or Milan might well have thought that the Roman Empire had never fallen.
[In response to the comments, Glad everyone still likes what's happening and sorry, Abe, the poor Jewish state was doomed from the outset - it barely even got to be a state before Kallinikos got at it again.
As for the next update, Constantine tries to retake the Balkans from the Lombard yoke, a look what's going on in Africa, and maybe some more India. Haven't quite decided yet.]
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I'll definitely throw some more into the next update about it, but here's some basic stuff.
The traditional religion of the Hephthalites was a the cult of fire/the sun, combined with worship of traditional pagan gods like Mithra.
Competing scholarly opinions argue that the Hephthalites either supported or, as they were famous for historically, persecuted Buddhism. While contemporary sources often talked about the Hephthalites destroying Buddhist temples, there's no real evidence for this outside of propaganda (created oftentimes by the Indian Rajas opposing them... I wonder what their agenda could be?), and there's material evidence supporting Hephthalite patronage of Buddhism.
In our timeline, at least a significant portion of the later Hephthalites were also Nestorian Christian, although our main source of that seems to be a biased Armenian historian, and while undoubtedly there were Nestorians among the Hephthalites, among my Eftal, Persian and Indian religious influence wins out for the majority and most importantly for the ruling class.
In this timeline, the Hephthalites, lasting longer than they did historically, are even more exposed to the Buddhist religion and Buddhist ideas which are commonplace in central Asia, to the point that most ultimately convert to Buddhism. Eftal religion is a bit of a confusing affair, because in addition to organized Buddhism and Christianity, there's also a strong current of polytheistic, or perhaps monotheist, Mithra/Sun/Fire worship. The Mithra/Sun/Fire worship gets tied up with Indian ideas about reincarnation (although critically caste never becomes a part of the Eftal worldview) and also Buddhist philosophy - and thus ultimately Eftal Buddhism (for lack of a better word) continues to include sacrifices and prayers to uniquely Eftal interpretations of gods like Shiva and Ahura Mazda, and perhaps most importantly, Mithra.
Over time this will of course change and solidify. I can see movements to eliminate these pagan elements from either Nestorian or Buddhist directions eventually coming to the forefront, but they could also endure for a long while, since the worship of these gods in some form or other is part of their shared Iranian heritage.
The traditional religion of the Hephthalites was a the cult of fire/the sun, combined with worship of traditional pagan gods like Mithra.
Competing scholarly opinions argue that the Hephthalites either supported or, as they were famous for historically, persecuted Buddhism. While contemporary sources often talked about the Hephthalites destroying Buddhist temples, there's no real evidence for this outside of propaganda (created oftentimes by the Indian Rajas opposing them... I wonder what their agenda could be?), and there's material evidence supporting Hephthalite patronage of Buddhism.
In our timeline, at least a significant portion of the later Hephthalites were also Nestorian Christian, although our main source of that seems to be a biased Armenian historian, and while undoubtedly there were Nestorians among the Hephthalites, among my Eftal, Persian and Indian religious influence wins out for the majority and most importantly for the ruling class.
In this timeline, the Hephthalites, lasting longer than they did historically, are even more exposed to the Buddhist religion and Buddhist ideas which are commonplace in central Asia, to the point that most ultimately convert to Buddhism. Eftal religion is a bit of a confusing affair, because in addition to organized Buddhism and Christianity, there's also a strong current of polytheistic, or perhaps monotheist, Mithra/Sun/Fire worship. The Mithra/Sun/Fire worship gets tied up with Indian ideas about reincarnation (although critically caste never becomes a part of the Eftal worldview) and also Buddhist philosophy - and thus ultimately Eftal Buddhism (for lack of a better word) continues to include sacrifices and prayers to uniquely Eftal interpretations of gods like Shiva and Ahura Mazda, and perhaps most importantly, Mithra.
Over time this will of course change and solidify. I can see movements to eliminate these pagan elements from either Nestorian or Buddhist directions eventually coming to the forefront, but they could also endure for a long while, since the worship of these gods in some form or other is part of their shared Iranian heritage.
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Nice TL.
Every region feels like an important and active player here. Good that you avoided wanking to.
I'm kind of curious as to how strong the newest splinter and player on the Eftal side is currently(African Shahs)? How small was Kaosha's band ? And is the Eftal-Persian element starting to dominate the horn region culturally? Or is it the southern Arabic customs and languages instead?
Every region feels like an important and active player here. Good that you avoided wanking to.
I'm kind of curious as to how strong the newest splinter and player on the Eftal side is currently(African Shahs)? How small was Kaosha's band ? And is the Eftal-Persian element starting to dominate the horn region culturally? Or is it the southern Arabic customs and languages instead?
Deleted member 67076
Fascinating developments. The Balkans are once more going to be an unstable mess, especially once the Avars come in. I suspect despite the various depopulations of the Balkans the various invaders will be somewhat hellenized in culture as time passes, as Rome still has quite a lot of prestige, and Greek is very much a lingua franca for most of the peoples they encounter. Would lead to very interesting mixes.
One thing that I do find a bit weird is that the Gothic lands haven't been invaded by the various Slavic and Eastern German peoples. Italy was also a very rich land and was periodically raided from time to time.
One thing that I do find a bit weird is that the Gothic lands haven't been invaded by the various Slavic and Eastern German peoples. Italy was also a very rich land and was periodically raided from time to time.
Kaosha's band would have been small by the standards of the big powers clashing around the Mediterranean, but I imagine he set sail with a thousand soldiers or more, and eventually the allegiance of certain interior tribes. The South Arabian and Eftal cultures represent a small elite over a culturally proto-Somali people. Its a primitive sort of caste structure, enforced by hydraulic control and brute force.
They'll be covered in the next update.
Oh the invaders will definitely experience strong Hellenic influence. As for the Avars, I imagine they'll definitely exploit the power vacuum left by the tribes moving south. Italy itself was spared from more than the occassional raid because currently its strong and also relatively defensible compared to the broad frontier the Romans had to guard.
They'll be covered in the next update.
Oh the invaders will definitely experience strong Hellenic influence. As for the Avars, I imagine they'll definitely exploit the power vacuum left by the tribes moving south. Italy itself was spared from more than the occassional raid because currently its strong and also relatively defensible compared to the broad frontier the Romans had to guard.
Heshana Shah
Next post, and well... it's a big one. Didn't get to many of the things I'd like to cover, and didn't cover others in nearly as much detail. I'm going to need to go back and fill in some of the blanks, and also I think it's about time I make a map about what's going on.
Kaosha's Legacy and African Trade Revisited
Alone of the regions impacted by the Eftal, the Eastern shore of Africa remains shrouded in myth. Although the late sixth century is the era in which the region which would become known as Awalastan came into its own, its true founding is obscured by local history of questionable authenticity. From the city of Amoud, Kaosha Shah changed history, but the narratives of his life are of unknown authorship, although his followers might have claimed that Sattiga, the "Teacher" wrote them.
Kaosha came into his own against a backdrop of rising Hadhrami and declining Axumite fortunes - and thus it can be little surprise that almost until the end he remained aligned with the Malik of Hadhramwt and his interests, and fought Axum, or "Harsha" at every turn. His armies enjoyed qualitative superiority over the locals, and he made great use of that - his elite band winning triumphs over much larger armies time and again, even until his death. Kaosha ultimately broke the tribal society that governed the rural hinterlands, creating a hydraulic empire based upon urban developments. It was no easy task, but it was an impressive legacy.
But this period of glory could not last. Kaosha had a son, Nijara, named after his grandfather, whose rule would be not that of a holy figure but rather a secular ruler by all accounts. Taking power in 575, Nijara was a young man born into a society that would have been utterly alien to his ancestors, a fascinatingly bizarre mix of Persian and Arabian rites, all overseen by the now decrepit figure of Sattiga, and his "limitless divine" to which the Shah and his retainers paid tribute. Indian travelers and merchants, often heterodox themselves, nevertheless found the world of Nijara Shah an incredibly strange one. Awalastan was a land of scattered entrepot cities dominated by control of water and a small, privileged cultic elite, and though it was in the midst of transformative flux and radical centralization, the trends begun here would carry resonance across the African continent.
Further south, the same merchants who patronized Awalastan were founding colonial ports. Increasingly these Arab and Hindu merchants were settling down, building temples to their gods, but more importantly, infrastructure to regulate and promote commerce with the tribes of the interior. Ivory and gold, jewels and spices would make these merchants (and to a lesser degree the tribal groups they aligned themselves with) incredibly wealthy - especially the Arabs, who opened this new market up to the insatiable desire of Egypt and by extension the entire European West.
It was a polyglot land, a land settled by Arabian pagans and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus who crossed the black water. The polities that would eventually develop would be Indianized to varying degrees, but their language would co-opt words most liberally from Arabic, and their culture would be an unrecognizable synthesis of ideas from across the world. By the mid-seventh century, they would call themselves Savahila, and their city states formed a coalition of interlinked, truly global and cosmopolitan trade powers in a region otherwise filled with petty kings focused on regional interests. Across the sea ruled the Rajas of Shakilava, on the island the Arabs called Al-Komr, and the Hindus called Karnara. Their rule was not absolute, but a hegemony of tribes. They farmed rice and many fruits adjusted well to their tropics, and traded wood and precious metals.
Migrations and Consolidation
It is difficult, for various reasons, to discuss the existence of states in the Balkans. While there were certainly monarchs, most notably Alboin of the Langobards and the Khan of the Kutrigurs, the Slavic and Gepidae tribes tended to raid and move as they chose, with little regard for these hierarchies. Alboin's own Langobardi had established the rudiments of a centralized, almost proto-feudal state, their warriors providing garrisons for the Roman cities they conquered and taking for themselves land grants, but this did not prevent the Slavs from raiding, both into what constituted Roman territory and also north on occasion, into Gothic Italy. While many tribes, notably the White Sklaveni and Vaioniti, were willing to serve Langobard interests, many others did not.
To his north, Khan Bayan ruled over the Danube forts, but it seems under his rule they fell into a state of relative disrepair. In contrast to Alboin, who seems to have ruled as a settled lord after the initial invasion, the Kutrigurs kept many rich pasturelands and their Khan and his warriors remained mobile. Many of the Slavic tribes were forcibly made vassals of the Kutrigurs, including the Dragoviti and Marvatsi. With these vassals, Khan Bayan was able to successfully push south and sack Adrianople, which at the time was still Roman city loyal to Constantine. The path now lay open to Constantinople as well - but such a siege was beyond the capacity of the Kutrigurs, who like the Langobards were more concerned with solidifying their power.
Further, the Pannonian provinces of the Langobard patrimony were under attack at this same time - the Avars exploited the power vacuum to great effect, subduing those Germanic and Slavic peoples they found residing in a broad swath of territory west of the Carpathians. A scattering of Langobardi federates were defeated at the Battle of the Tisia River were the only major opposition they faced - Alboin was too busy fighting in Macedonia to react quickly to their incursions, and the Avars and their allies raided as far as Aemonia before they were turned back. They took ancient Tarsatica and Siscia as well, and after Khagan Anakuye made a pact with the Kutrigur Khan, King Alboin realized the threat might well be a mortal one. He and his warriors turned north, but after an indecisive campaign he was forced to return south. He would winter his troops in Dyrrhachium during the notably hard winter of 576, and the next summer he would attempt to negotiate with both his fellow warlords, with limited success. In the end he would be forced to concede the loss of Pannonia, and it was perhaps not the blow the histories seem to make it out to be - refugees fleeing the Avars were quickly and easily incorporated into his army, and despite his failed campaign, his army swelled with their numbers. These new recruits, despite their mixed origins, would prove far more loyal than the tribal "vassals" who prided themselves on relative independence.
As Alboin licked his wounds, he would find that there was no rest for him - the Emperor Constantine and a small but veteran force would land at Thessalonike, from there planning to strike at the very heart of the Langobard threat, before Alboin's consolidations turned to renewed aggressive campaigning. The Emperor was a battle-tested companion, and following in Kallinikos' footsteps he was willing to lead armies personally. Winning easy early victories, he secured the Thermaikos Bay and Demetrias. In his wake, Alboin laid siege to Thessalonike, but was unable to take it - the city was well defended and supplied by ship.
Zvonomir, a slavic warlord of indeterminite origin meanwhile attacked the previously unmolested Peloponnese. Landing by way of a small group of ships in Achaea, he burned and pillaged his way across the lightly-defended region. His raid would become a more permanent victory, as he came to reside in the city of Patrae. A sizable company of Bulgars allied with him, and when Constantine dispatched troops to repulse Zvonomir's raiding party, they found themselves outnumbered and unable to do more than hold what territory had not yet been lost - notably the city of Corinth.
If 577 saw only minor victories for Constantine, 578, according to our Roman historians, was a year of triumphs. Reportedly, he won a crushing victory over the Langobardi and Slavs, retaking Thessalia and much of Makedonia, before marching north and defeating Bayan Khan at the battle of Trimontium. The Khan retreated to Sardike, which Constantine besieged, along with Adrianople in the south. It seemed the tide had turned. The Bulgars were in chaos, and indeed Bayan Khan, according to our Roman historians, committed suicide not long after, being replaced by his cousin Kubrat, who was "as savage and warlike a man as any, a pagan who burned churches and slaughtered priests." This portrait of him seems inaccurate, perhaps informed more by the hatred of the Romans than any truth, but at any rate, Kubrat rallied the Bulgar army and forced Constantine south - but the Emperor did not attempt to retreat to Thessalonike, still besieged by Alboin, but rather towards Constantinople. From there, the Bulgars hemmed him in.
The next three years would see Constantine forced to devote attention to the rest of his Emperor. The siege of Thessalonike dragged on, and despite Bulgar raids which came within sight of Constantinople, the city was never seriously threatened. Zvonomir was finally forced to flee Patrae, but he would return a year later, in 581, this time perhaps for good. He defeated the local Roman commander and captured Corinth after a short siege - unlike his previous incursions, Zvonomir was now concerned with long-term occupation - he looted far less and instead appointed trusted commanders to oversee the various towns and cities he captured, and petitioned Alboin to accept him as a federate ally, a petition which was accepted.
In 582, Constantine returned with a larger army, and met the Bulgar Khan in battle at Arkaidioupolis. He had spent his reign wisely - naming his younger brother Ioannes co-Emperor, giving him broad authority to organize the defenses of the East and indeed administer his portion of the Empire, restructuring the tax system and levying new tariffs on valuable eastern commodities imported from Eftal territories. However, for all this work, Khan Kubrat seems to have made better use of his time, and the Bulgar army that met Constantine was prepared and indeed significantly larger than the Roman force.
Arkaidiouspolis was a crushing blow to the Empire. Constantine was defeated after his cavalry was routed and the infantry surrounded, and indeed the would-be Emperor was captured. The terms of his release were crippling, and though the Emperor had little intent to actually abide by them, the whole of Thrace was lost save Constantinople and its environs, and the Emperor was forced under duress to confirm the Bulgar Khanate's right to a broad and expansive territory. Humiliated, Constantine returned to Constantinople, only to be murdered there. According to legend, the act was done by a frustrated mob, and even by the vicious standards of the Constantinopolitan mob, it was a brutal one.
No sooner did Emperor Anastasios hear of his rival's capture than he launched a renewed invasion. Sending the Prefect of Syria, Julian, in command of a large army, Ioannes retreated before him, but ultimately would lay an ambush for Julian, defeating the Prefect and scattering the Anastasian forces with a small but elite force. After a hasty truce was established, Emperor Anastasios would have to confront the inferiority of his officer corps and army, who despite having lost far fewer battles than the beleaguered, often understrength units of Constantinians, also lacked that critical experience. A few units of Anastasios' army might have seen action, but many were freshly raised Egyptian levies.
Collapse
The latter raids of the Eftal Shah were not as ambitious as those of later eras, and mostly served to further devastate an already devastated region. Apart from a single major campaign in 582 between the competing Roman Empires, major military engagements were rare, but vicious back-and-forth raids and counter-raids were commonplace, but the Eftal Shahdom in the east had reached a state of terminal decline. Most notably, it seems that the satrap Sogdia began minting independant coinage sometime around 583, and these coins refer to "Shah Tarkhsuna" who seems to have been totally independent. Tarkhsuna was of Eftal origin, but he married into the Sogdian merchant class, and employed many Turkic mercenaries in his various wars against the Qangli and later the Gokturks.
The newly emerging eastern powers were very fluid in their borders. Tarkhsuna captured much of Baktria after defeating Varhran in battle in 585, only to himself be deprived of at least a portion of his conquests by the aggressively expanding Johiyavan clansmen. The Asvha as well continued their expansion, striking into the Iranian heartlands. While the Kidarites maintained the at least nominal fiction of obedience to the Eftal, their own semi-autonomy and relative unwillingness to assist Shah Varhran meant that it was no more than a fiction.
And Varhran had other worries. Smelling weakness and seeking to fulfill his own Imperial ambitions, the satrap of Pars, Akhshunwar Malkha rebelled with the help of the local Persian aristocracy and his own coalition of loyal Eftal tribes. A distant relative of Akhshunwar I's dynasty, he won followers by promising a return to the glory days. Moving north, he captured much of the Mesun province and its satrap, whom he captured and kept as an honored "guest" in comfortable confinement.
Varhran rushed back from the East to confront the newest rebel claimant to the throne, but he was too late. Susa had already fallen by the time he arrived. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, he fled north with a core group of loyal guards and retainers but was captured and executed. While this may appear an uncharacteristic move from a heroic warrior-king, Varhran's portrayal as such was an attempt by certain Eftal and Persian historians to characterize him as the last capable Shah, and while he was undoubtedly a warrior, we know little of the actual state of his army beyond that it was defeated but a year earlier in Sogdia.
Akhshunwar Malkha, however, would prove to be not a restoration of the old days, but rather the final nail in the coffin. Formally taking power in 587, his claim to be a restoration of the old dynasty was not taken seriously. The nature of Eftal power was, in this moment of sudden crisis, revealed to be not, as Akhshunwar had assumed, based entirely on dynastic prestige and historical legitimacy so much as clever coalition building and oftentimes personal loyalty, and Akhshunwar does not seem to have had the loyalty of the many tribes and ethnic groups beyond his immediate region. His ascendency is marked by near total anarchy as pretenders emerged from the woodwork across "his" Empire.
If Akhshunwar is to have a positive legacy, it should be known that his portion of the Empire does not seem to have suffered unduly. While much of the northern and western parts of the Empire suffered from war and migrations, the cities of the Persian Gulf remained a prosperous manufacturing hub, and this, more than anything, allowed Akhshunwar to maintain a larger army and retain more Turkic mercenaries than his competitors.
One of the pretenders, an Eftal Christian by the name of Isaiah emerges onto the historical scene for a time as a conqueror who united much of northern Mesopotamia behind him. His greatest victory came with his capture and sack of Tesifon in 590. However, as Nestorian Christian, his appeal was simply not widespread, and he failed to unite the Empire behind him, and he died in 591 and his dominions would be absorbed by the satrap of Arbayestan, who, despite remaining under the authority of Akhshunwar had sufficient power to refuse all requests of the Shah in Susa.
Much of the north broke away under another pretender who ruled from Afrahrot, whose name was Huvishka Prajana. A devout Buddhist, his reign was marked by massive donations to temples and monasteries, constant proselytizing, and also a series of major urban construction projects. His Shahdom encompassed the whole of the Caspian sea, and having at his disposal a vast force of Gilani mercenaries, his own conquests united much of northern Persia. Across the Empire, satraps began asserting their independence where these pretenders could not reach.
Over time, these varying pretenders would gradually morph into successor states, characterized primarily by their intensely personal nature - rarely did these smaller kingdoms outlive the deaths of their leaders. While often various satraps did pay some form of allegiance to the government in Susa, the existence of pretenders and powerful de facto independent satraps served to divide loyalties and create chaos.
Heshana - a Shah in Syria
Since around 582, a tribal Eftal warlord named Heshana had come to increasing prominence as a brigand and mercenary. Raiding the retreating army of Julian in the service of Ioannes, eventually Heshana broke that contract and began to gather Bedouin and Eftal, Christians and Pagans, horse thieves and professional soldiers to his banner. Of mixed origin himself, a descendent of the Gaoche and Eftal only on his mother's side, as the anarchy grew he managed to begin taking cities, turning a profitable business of raiding into the more profitable business of conquest.
With the collapse of the central Eftal state into civil war, he grew more brazen, taking Edessa itself, and the next year, Samosata. An expedition in 585 lead by a general of Anastasios' army was repulsed by the wily commander, who began minting coins calling himself Shah and striking deep into Roman and Eftal territory quite indiscriminately. Fortune seemed to favor him - his victories he attributed to Mithra, but they are an excellent example of just how much power a charismatic leader with proven success could amass.
By 587, he had taken Nisibin, the major fortress-city left massively undermanned in the wake of Shah Isaiah's conquests. Despite an attempt by the Shah to retake it, the fortress did not fall a second time, and Isaiah found it more profitable to continue his expansion in Mesopotamia. Shortly thereafter, Heshana gained the loyalty of Alan mercenaries settled in the area, and with these newfound allies, the stage was set for further conquests. Experience fighting Anastaios convinced him that the Roman Empire was an easy target, and despite his still relatively small force, Heshana was confident that he could succeed where Mihiragula had failed.
Kaosha's Legacy and African Trade Revisited
Alone of the regions impacted by the Eftal, the Eastern shore of Africa remains shrouded in myth. Although the late sixth century is the era in which the region which would become known as Awalastan came into its own, its true founding is obscured by local history of questionable authenticity. From the city of Amoud, Kaosha Shah changed history, but the narratives of his life are of unknown authorship, although his followers might have claimed that Sattiga, the "Teacher" wrote them.
Kaosha came into his own against a backdrop of rising Hadhrami and declining Axumite fortunes - and thus it can be little surprise that almost until the end he remained aligned with the Malik of Hadhramwt and his interests, and fought Axum, or "Harsha" at every turn. His armies enjoyed qualitative superiority over the locals, and he made great use of that - his elite band winning triumphs over much larger armies time and again, even until his death. Kaosha ultimately broke the tribal society that governed the rural hinterlands, creating a hydraulic empire based upon urban developments. It was no easy task, but it was an impressive legacy.
But this period of glory could not last. Kaosha had a son, Nijara, named after his grandfather, whose rule would be not that of a holy figure but rather a secular ruler by all accounts. Taking power in 575, Nijara was a young man born into a society that would have been utterly alien to his ancestors, a fascinatingly bizarre mix of Persian and Arabian rites, all overseen by the now decrepit figure of Sattiga, and his "limitless divine" to which the Shah and his retainers paid tribute. Indian travelers and merchants, often heterodox themselves, nevertheless found the world of Nijara Shah an incredibly strange one. Awalastan was a land of scattered entrepot cities dominated by control of water and a small, privileged cultic elite, and though it was in the midst of transformative flux and radical centralization, the trends begun here would carry resonance across the African continent.
Further south, the same merchants who patronized Awalastan were founding colonial ports. Increasingly these Arab and Hindu merchants were settling down, building temples to their gods, but more importantly, infrastructure to regulate and promote commerce with the tribes of the interior. Ivory and gold, jewels and spices would make these merchants (and to a lesser degree the tribal groups they aligned themselves with) incredibly wealthy - especially the Arabs, who opened this new market up to the insatiable desire of Egypt and by extension the entire European West.
It was a polyglot land, a land settled by Arabian pagans and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus who crossed the black water. The polities that would eventually develop would be Indianized to varying degrees, but their language would co-opt words most liberally from Arabic, and their culture would be an unrecognizable synthesis of ideas from across the world. By the mid-seventh century, they would call themselves Savahila, and their city states formed a coalition of interlinked, truly global and cosmopolitan trade powers in a region otherwise filled with petty kings focused on regional interests. Across the sea ruled the Rajas of Shakilava, on the island the Arabs called Al-Komr, and the Hindus called Karnara. Their rule was not absolute, but a hegemony of tribes. They farmed rice and many fruits adjusted well to their tropics, and traded wood and precious metals.
Migrations and Consolidation
It is difficult, for various reasons, to discuss the existence of states in the Balkans. While there were certainly monarchs, most notably Alboin of the Langobards and the Khan of the Kutrigurs, the Slavic and Gepidae tribes tended to raid and move as they chose, with little regard for these hierarchies. Alboin's own Langobardi had established the rudiments of a centralized, almost proto-feudal state, their warriors providing garrisons for the Roman cities they conquered and taking for themselves land grants, but this did not prevent the Slavs from raiding, both into what constituted Roman territory and also north on occasion, into Gothic Italy. While many tribes, notably the White Sklaveni and Vaioniti, were willing to serve Langobard interests, many others did not.
To his north, Khan Bayan ruled over the Danube forts, but it seems under his rule they fell into a state of relative disrepair. In contrast to Alboin, who seems to have ruled as a settled lord after the initial invasion, the Kutrigurs kept many rich pasturelands and their Khan and his warriors remained mobile. Many of the Slavic tribes were forcibly made vassals of the Kutrigurs, including the Dragoviti and Marvatsi. With these vassals, Khan Bayan was able to successfully push south and sack Adrianople, which at the time was still Roman city loyal to Constantine. The path now lay open to Constantinople as well - but such a siege was beyond the capacity of the Kutrigurs, who like the Langobards were more concerned with solidifying their power.
Further, the Pannonian provinces of the Langobard patrimony were under attack at this same time - the Avars exploited the power vacuum to great effect, subduing those Germanic and Slavic peoples they found residing in a broad swath of territory west of the Carpathians. A scattering of Langobardi federates were defeated at the Battle of the Tisia River were the only major opposition they faced - Alboin was too busy fighting in Macedonia to react quickly to their incursions, and the Avars and their allies raided as far as Aemonia before they were turned back. They took ancient Tarsatica and Siscia as well, and after Khagan Anakuye made a pact with the Kutrigur Khan, King Alboin realized the threat might well be a mortal one. He and his warriors turned north, but after an indecisive campaign he was forced to return south. He would winter his troops in Dyrrhachium during the notably hard winter of 576, and the next summer he would attempt to negotiate with both his fellow warlords, with limited success. In the end he would be forced to concede the loss of Pannonia, and it was perhaps not the blow the histories seem to make it out to be - refugees fleeing the Avars were quickly and easily incorporated into his army, and despite his failed campaign, his army swelled with their numbers. These new recruits, despite their mixed origins, would prove far more loyal than the tribal "vassals" who prided themselves on relative independence.
As Alboin licked his wounds, he would find that there was no rest for him - the Emperor Constantine and a small but veteran force would land at Thessalonike, from there planning to strike at the very heart of the Langobard threat, before Alboin's consolidations turned to renewed aggressive campaigning. The Emperor was a battle-tested companion, and following in Kallinikos' footsteps he was willing to lead armies personally. Winning easy early victories, he secured the Thermaikos Bay and Demetrias. In his wake, Alboin laid siege to Thessalonike, but was unable to take it - the city was well defended and supplied by ship.
Zvonomir, a slavic warlord of indeterminite origin meanwhile attacked the previously unmolested Peloponnese. Landing by way of a small group of ships in Achaea, he burned and pillaged his way across the lightly-defended region. His raid would become a more permanent victory, as he came to reside in the city of Patrae. A sizable company of Bulgars allied with him, and when Constantine dispatched troops to repulse Zvonomir's raiding party, they found themselves outnumbered and unable to do more than hold what territory had not yet been lost - notably the city of Corinth.
If 577 saw only minor victories for Constantine, 578, according to our Roman historians, was a year of triumphs. Reportedly, he won a crushing victory over the Langobardi and Slavs, retaking Thessalia and much of Makedonia, before marching north and defeating Bayan Khan at the battle of Trimontium. The Khan retreated to Sardike, which Constantine besieged, along with Adrianople in the south. It seemed the tide had turned. The Bulgars were in chaos, and indeed Bayan Khan, according to our Roman historians, committed suicide not long after, being replaced by his cousin Kubrat, who was "as savage and warlike a man as any, a pagan who burned churches and slaughtered priests." This portrait of him seems inaccurate, perhaps informed more by the hatred of the Romans than any truth, but at any rate, Kubrat rallied the Bulgar army and forced Constantine south - but the Emperor did not attempt to retreat to Thessalonike, still besieged by Alboin, but rather towards Constantinople. From there, the Bulgars hemmed him in.
The next three years would see Constantine forced to devote attention to the rest of his Emperor. The siege of Thessalonike dragged on, and despite Bulgar raids which came within sight of Constantinople, the city was never seriously threatened. Zvonomir was finally forced to flee Patrae, but he would return a year later, in 581, this time perhaps for good. He defeated the local Roman commander and captured Corinth after a short siege - unlike his previous incursions, Zvonomir was now concerned with long-term occupation - he looted far less and instead appointed trusted commanders to oversee the various towns and cities he captured, and petitioned Alboin to accept him as a federate ally, a petition which was accepted.
In 582, Constantine returned with a larger army, and met the Bulgar Khan in battle at Arkaidioupolis. He had spent his reign wisely - naming his younger brother Ioannes co-Emperor, giving him broad authority to organize the defenses of the East and indeed administer his portion of the Empire, restructuring the tax system and levying new tariffs on valuable eastern commodities imported from Eftal territories. However, for all this work, Khan Kubrat seems to have made better use of his time, and the Bulgar army that met Constantine was prepared and indeed significantly larger than the Roman force.
Arkaidiouspolis was a crushing blow to the Empire. Constantine was defeated after his cavalry was routed and the infantry surrounded, and indeed the would-be Emperor was captured. The terms of his release were crippling, and though the Emperor had little intent to actually abide by them, the whole of Thrace was lost save Constantinople and its environs, and the Emperor was forced under duress to confirm the Bulgar Khanate's right to a broad and expansive territory. Humiliated, Constantine returned to Constantinople, only to be murdered there. According to legend, the act was done by a frustrated mob, and even by the vicious standards of the Constantinopolitan mob, it was a brutal one.
No sooner did Emperor Anastasios hear of his rival's capture than he launched a renewed invasion. Sending the Prefect of Syria, Julian, in command of a large army, Ioannes retreated before him, but ultimately would lay an ambush for Julian, defeating the Prefect and scattering the Anastasian forces with a small but elite force. After a hasty truce was established, Emperor Anastasios would have to confront the inferiority of his officer corps and army, who despite having lost far fewer battles than the beleaguered, often understrength units of Constantinians, also lacked that critical experience. A few units of Anastasios' army might have seen action, but many were freshly raised Egyptian levies.
Collapse
The latter raids of the Eftal Shah were not as ambitious as those of later eras, and mostly served to further devastate an already devastated region. Apart from a single major campaign in 582 between the competing Roman Empires, major military engagements were rare, but vicious back-and-forth raids and counter-raids were commonplace, but the Eftal Shahdom in the east had reached a state of terminal decline. Most notably, it seems that the satrap Sogdia began minting independant coinage sometime around 583, and these coins refer to "Shah Tarkhsuna" who seems to have been totally independent. Tarkhsuna was of Eftal origin, but he married into the Sogdian merchant class, and employed many Turkic mercenaries in his various wars against the Qangli and later the Gokturks.
The newly emerging eastern powers were very fluid in their borders. Tarkhsuna captured much of Baktria after defeating Varhran in battle in 585, only to himself be deprived of at least a portion of his conquests by the aggressively expanding Johiyavan clansmen. The Asvha as well continued their expansion, striking into the Iranian heartlands. While the Kidarites maintained the at least nominal fiction of obedience to the Eftal, their own semi-autonomy and relative unwillingness to assist Shah Varhran meant that it was no more than a fiction.
And Varhran had other worries. Smelling weakness and seeking to fulfill his own Imperial ambitions, the satrap of Pars, Akhshunwar Malkha rebelled with the help of the local Persian aristocracy and his own coalition of loyal Eftal tribes. A distant relative of Akhshunwar I's dynasty, he won followers by promising a return to the glory days. Moving north, he captured much of the Mesun province and its satrap, whom he captured and kept as an honored "guest" in comfortable confinement.
Varhran rushed back from the East to confront the newest rebel claimant to the throne, but he was too late. Susa had already fallen by the time he arrived. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, he fled north with a core group of loyal guards and retainers but was captured and executed. While this may appear an uncharacteristic move from a heroic warrior-king, Varhran's portrayal as such was an attempt by certain Eftal and Persian historians to characterize him as the last capable Shah, and while he was undoubtedly a warrior, we know little of the actual state of his army beyond that it was defeated but a year earlier in Sogdia.
Akhshunwar Malkha, however, would prove to be not a restoration of the old days, but rather the final nail in the coffin. Formally taking power in 587, his claim to be a restoration of the old dynasty was not taken seriously. The nature of Eftal power was, in this moment of sudden crisis, revealed to be not, as Akhshunwar had assumed, based entirely on dynastic prestige and historical legitimacy so much as clever coalition building and oftentimes personal loyalty, and Akhshunwar does not seem to have had the loyalty of the many tribes and ethnic groups beyond his immediate region. His ascendency is marked by near total anarchy as pretenders emerged from the woodwork across "his" Empire.
If Akhshunwar is to have a positive legacy, it should be known that his portion of the Empire does not seem to have suffered unduly. While much of the northern and western parts of the Empire suffered from war and migrations, the cities of the Persian Gulf remained a prosperous manufacturing hub, and this, more than anything, allowed Akhshunwar to maintain a larger army and retain more Turkic mercenaries than his competitors.
One of the pretenders, an Eftal Christian by the name of Isaiah emerges onto the historical scene for a time as a conqueror who united much of northern Mesopotamia behind him. His greatest victory came with his capture and sack of Tesifon in 590. However, as Nestorian Christian, his appeal was simply not widespread, and he failed to unite the Empire behind him, and he died in 591 and his dominions would be absorbed by the satrap of Arbayestan, who, despite remaining under the authority of Akhshunwar had sufficient power to refuse all requests of the Shah in Susa.
Much of the north broke away under another pretender who ruled from Afrahrot, whose name was Huvishka Prajana. A devout Buddhist, his reign was marked by massive donations to temples and monasteries, constant proselytizing, and also a series of major urban construction projects. His Shahdom encompassed the whole of the Caspian sea, and having at his disposal a vast force of Gilani mercenaries, his own conquests united much of northern Persia. Across the Empire, satraps began asserting their independence where these pretenders could not reach.
Over time, these varying pretenders would gradually morph into successor states, characterized primarily by their intensely personal nature - rarely did these smaller kingdoms outlive the deaths of their leaders. While often various satraps did pay some form of allegiance to the government in Susa, the existence of pretenders and powerful de facto independent satraps served to divide loyalties and create chaos.
Heshana - a Shah in Syria
Since around 582, a tribal Eftal warlord named Heshana had come to increasing prominence as a brigand and mercenary. Raiding the retreating army of Julian in the service of Ioannes, eventually Heshana broke that contract and began to gather Bedouin and Eftal, Christians and Pagans, horse thieves and professional soldiers to his banner. Of mixed origin himself, a descendent of the Gaoche and Eftal only on his mother's side, as the anarchy grew he managed to begin taking cities, turning a profitable business of raiding into the more profitable business of conquest.
With the collapse of the central Eftal state into civil war, he grew more brazen, taking Edessa itself, and the next year, Samosata. An expedition in 585 lead by a general of Anastasios' army was repulsed by the wily commander, who began minting coins calling himself Shah and striking deep into Roman and Eftal territory quite indiscriminately. Fortune seemed to favor him - his victories he attributed to Mithra, but they are an excellent example of just how much power a charismatic leader with proven success could amass.
By 587, he had taken Nisibin, the major fortress-city left massively undermanned in the wake of Shah Isaiah's conquests. Despite an attempt by the Shah to retake it, the fortress did not fall a second time, and Isaiah found it more profitable to continue his expansion in Mesopotamia. Shortly thereafter, Heshana gained the loyalty of Alan mercenaries settled in the area, and with these newfound allies, the stage was set for further conquests. Experience fighting Anastaios convinced him that the Roman Empire was an easy target, and despite his still relatively small force, Heshana was confident that he could succeed where Mihiragula had failed.
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Honestly, a pretty terrible time to be alive. Prosperity in the Roman and Persian Empires is definitely taking a dive, and if you live in the Balkans, you're liable to have a lot of pillaging armies coming through.
That said, Egypt and indeed a large part of Asia Minor are still doing pretty well for themselves. And the Romans bounced back from much worse in our timeline - but if they don't reunite, they'll continue to suffer, especially because Anastasios has no intent to let up the grain embargo. The bureaucracy in Cairo imagines they can starve their northern rivals into submission.
That said, Egypt and indeed a large part of Asia Minor are still doing pretty well for themselves. And the Romans bounced back from much worse in our timeline - but if they don't reunite, they'll continue to suffer, especially because Anastasios has no intent to let up the grain embargo. The bureaucracy in Cairo imagines they can starve their northern rivals into submission.
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Realm Divided
A short post detailing some of the more recent changes in the Balkans and the Eftal realm.
Consolidation Continued
The Lombards and Bulgars took very different approaches to rulership of the vast territory they found themselves holding in the wake of the Roman collapse. Twenty years into their reign, these differences were become more and more marked. While the Langobards took to their position as settled rulers with increasing ease, the Bulgars seem to have had greater difficulty adapting their regime to one of settlement and permanent conquest.
King Alboin had often referred to himself by the title of Doux, and it seems this did not change after his conquests. Acting the part of a Germanic king to his nobles and a Roman provincial governor to the Greek population was essential to his regime, as was maintaining the urban power structures in the regions which he ruled over. In the countryside, he might have apportioned to his loyal soldiers large grants of land, replacing the rural aristocracy wholesale, but his approach to the cities was a temperate, moderate one. After initial sacks, largely carried out by his slavic allies, he restrained his troops. Having grown up in Dalmatia, surrounded by Romans, speaking both Greek and Latin as well as his own tongue, he chose to present himself as a defender of Roman traditions, rather than a conqueror.
While it is unclear to what degree the locals bought into this, they were nonetheless complicit. Roman officials became his tax collectors and governors. His tribal vassals were managed as federate allies, encouraged not to overstretch the bounds of their demesne, and though they were often unruly, he did his best to make them understand that their conquered territory was a grant of land from the King to them - oftentimes resorting to force when diplomacy failed.
Demographics were simply on the side of the conquerors here. Unlike the Eftal conquest of Persia, this was not a nomadic people impressing their will upon a vast settled population - the Germanic people might have been uprooted, or come as refugees in some cases, but the lands they moved into were often made vacant by the Slavic invasions of previous decades, and where they were not, the Germanic peoples tended to live alongside the Greek population, although violence did break out on the communal level often enough.
Alboin was concerned also with making a fleet. His long siege of Thessalonike, and frequent Roman naval operations convinced him that he would not have true security without one. It was for this reason that he began hiring Greek shipbuilders and sailors to outfit a new fleet, and though the small naval force did not actively contest the Aegean against the far more formidable Roman fleet, its mere existence was part of the actively shifting balance of power.
The Bulgars, by contrast, seemingly had little interest in fleet-building, nor in settling down. Their society was at least partially a nomadic one, and though they now found themselves the garrison-masters of cities, it was often their slavic subjects who were called upon to fill the role of town guards and low-level administrators. The Bulgar regime was based more upon plunder than taxation, and for this reason and many others, they were often willing to raid into Lombard territory as well as what remained of Roman lands. While they were not afraid to attack Constantinople's suburbs, the city itself intimidated them, a people still relatively unfamiliar with siegecraft.
The Khan of the Kutrigurs (who by 590 was Khan of the whole Hunno-Bulgar Confederation) settled in the city of Adrianople, but the Hunno-Bulgar allies of his regime remained nomadic, and though he might have had ambitions of an ever-greater dominion, his power was limited by their limitations. The extent of Bulgar settlement never extended too far beyond good pastureland. Even as his slavic subjects slowly began to assimilate into the Greek world that they now lived in, and his own people began to consider settling down, they remained relatively aloof and distinct from the conquered people.
And yet for all of this, Khan Kubrat was the one who craved Roman acceptance, making their recognition of his conquests a key term in the peace treaty they had arranged, being named an "Archon" over a vast territory, much of it actually in the hands of the Langobards. The wealth, power, and order of the Empire impressed him. Beautiful churches and cathedrals, elaborate villas and palaces, even devastated and ruined by his pagan invaders still did strike him. The "God of the Greeks" had once owned many great things, and his victories over the soldiers of that god served merely to confirm the relative greatness of his own pagan gods, notably Tangra, the great God of the Sky.
A Realm Divided
Even as Persian philosophers charted the motion of the stars, designed ever more advanced mathematics, and created great works of literature, their world was falling apart. The adoption of Indian numerals developed under Gupta patronage lead to the development of algebra, and revolutions in medicine lead to the repudiation of the Greek system of humors. The writing of these great thinkers however, stops short in many cases of true revolutions in medicine and science because of the spontaneous collapse of the civilization which patronized them.
This was an era of mercenaries, hired from amongst the Gilani and the Turks, the Alans and the Arabs. A multitude of Eftal tribes sought mercenaries as a way to augment their forces, frequently offering plunder as the greatest incentive for service, and in turn these Eftal tribes would serve local leaders in exchange for pay, middlemen in the destructive wars that ravaged Persia.
The Turks in particular joined the warring with great enthusiasm. Numerous and exceptionally warlike, they were the most prized of the mercenaries that served alongside the Eftal. Primarily Buddhists and Tengrist pagans, after their service many tribes would settle across Persia, further altering the demographics of the region. By contrast, the Indian-influenced Persian Gulf would see the increasing triumph of Mahadeva as a sole God, often with Mithra and other Iranic gods described as aspects of him. Divorced from his Indian context, this version of Shiva would become uniquely Eftal, clad in a lion's skin and a radiant sunburst halo, holding a cudgel and spear in his more warlike aspect, or cross-legged in meditative bliss in his more mystical interpretation.
The personal god of Akhshunwar Malkha, Mahadeva would gain great popularity after the Shah entreated his companions subjects to swear their devotion to him, one of the only cases of a mass conversion in the history of the typically cosmopolitan and pluralistic Eftal Shahdom. For a time too, Akhshunwar was seen as triumphant over the other pretenders - Isaiah was crushed quickly (leaving Mesopotamia much reduced in his wake) and Huvishka Prajana was on the retreat. However, in a mere moment, Akhshunwar undid all his progress by attempting to bring the Satrap of Arbayestan more firmly under his control.
The Satrap, named Yaghar, rebelled, and, holding much of Mesopotamia, was capable of raising an impressive army, sustained by the plunder gained from his savage defeats of Isaiah and a comprehensive and devastating pillage of Ctesifon from which the city never truly recovered. Akhshunwar's campaign to unseat Yaghar was halted by an invasion of Turkic and Gilani mercenaries loyal to Huvishka Prajana. Yaghar was independent for a time before ultimately he was murdered by a jealous male lover, at which point his wife, Roshana, commanded the lover put to death and indeed ruled the satrapy between 594-597. Her brother, Sheskh, turned out to be a brilliant commander and quite capable of scoring major victories both against Akhshunwar and later Persarmenia, which he subdued and added to his sister's dominion. Sheskh's legacy would long outlive that of his sister, as he left monumental inscriptions to mark his victories, and after his sister's death in childbirth, declared himself formally a Shah. His other great legacy would be as a persecutor of Christians, and although many of the claims made against him seem exaggerated with the benefit of hindsight, he did not allow them to hold office or fight in his armies. He was recorded as being present at one of Akhshunwar's early mass conversions, but it is unclear what his actual religious beliefs were.
In the core territories of Shah Huviskha, the Persian intellectual revolution continued. His demesne around the Caspian sea was untouched by war, even as he sent mercenaries south to plunder and cause chaos in the territory of his enemies. He married one of his daughters to a scion of the Asvhastani Shah, and his personal rule was characterized by leniency and mercy (if hypocrisy, considering the devastation he inflicted upon those territories not under his control) and his propaganda often couches his various wars in the language of "spreading harmony" - a significant change, considering that no previous Eftal ruler, no matter how religious, had really bothered seeking religious ethical justification for their war.
Consolidation Continued
The Lombards and Bulgars took very different approaches to rulership of the vast territory they found themselves holding in the wake of the Roman collapse. Twenty years into their reign, these differences were become more and more marked. While the Langobards took to their position as settled rulers with increasing ease, the Bulgars seem to have had greater difficulty adapting their regime to one of settlement and permanent conquest.
King Alboin had often referred to himself by the title of Doux, and it seems this did not change after his conquests. Acting the part of a Germanic king to his nobles and a Roman provincial governor to the Greek population was essential to his regime, as was maintaining the urban power structures in the regions which he ruled over. In the countryside, he might have apportioned to his loyal soldiers large grants of land, replacing the rural aristocracy wholesale, but his approach to the cities was a temperate, moderate one. After initial sacks, largely carried out by his slavic allies, he restrained his troops. Having grown up in Dalmatia, surrounded by Romans, speaking both Greek and Latin as well as his own tongue, he chose to present himself as a defender of Roman traditions, rather than a conqueror.
While it is unclear to what degree the locals bought into this, they were nonetheless complicit. Roman officials became his tax collectors and governors. His tribal vassals were managed as federate allies, encouraged not to overstretch the bounds of their demesne, and though they were often unruly, he did his best to make them understand that their conquered territory was a grant of land from the King to them - oftentimes resorting to force when diplomacy failed.
Demographics were simply on the side of the conquerors here. Unlike the Eftal conquest of Persia, this was not a nomadic people impressing their will upon a vast settled population - the Germanic people might have been uprooted, or come as refugees in some cases, but the lands they moved into were often made vacant by the Slavic invasions of previous decades, and where they were not, the Germanic peoples tended to live alongside the Greek population, although violence did break out on the communal level often enough.
Alboin was concerned also with making a fleet. His long siege of Thessalonike, and frequent Roman naval operations convinced him that he would not have true security without one. It was for this reason that he began hiring Greek shipbuilders and sailors to outfit a new fleet, and though the small naval force did not actively contest the Aegean against the far more formidable Roman fleet, its mere existence was part of the actively shifting balance of power.
The Bulgars, by contrast, seemingly had little interest in fleet-building, nor in settling down. Their society was at least partially a nomadic one, and though they now found themselves the garrison-masters of cities, it was often their slavic subjects who were called upon to fill the role of town guards and low-level administrators. The Bulgar regime was based more upon plunder than taxation, and for this reason and many others, they were often willing to raid into Lombard territory as well as what remained of Roman lands. While they were not afraid to attack Constantinople's suburbs, the city itself intimidated them, a people still relatively unfamiliar with siegecraft.
The Khan of the Kutrigurs (who by 590 was Khan of the whole Hunno-Bulgar Confederation) settled in the city of Adrianople, but the Hunno-Bulgar allies of his regime remained nomadic, and though he might have had ambitions of an ever-greater dominion, his power was limited by their limitations. The extent of Bulgar settlement never extended too far beyond good pastureland. Even as his slavic subjects slowly began to assimilate into the Greek world that they now lived in, and his own people began to consider settling down, they remained relatively aloof and distinct from the conquered people.
And yet for all of this, Khan Kubrat was the one who craved Roman acceptance, making their recognition of his conquests a key term in the peace treaty they had arranged, being named an "Archon" over a vast territory, much of it actually in the hands of the Langobards. The wealth, power, and order of the Empire impressed him. Beautiful churches and cathedrals, elaborate villas and palaces, even devastated and ruined by his pagan invaders still did strike him. The "God of the Greeks" had once owned many great things, and his victories over the soldiers of that god served merely to confirm the relative greatness of his own pagan gods, notably Tangra, the great God of the Sky.
A Realm Divided
Even as Persian philosophers charted the motion of the stars, designed ever more advanced mathematics, and created great works of literature, their world was falling apart. The adoption of Indian numerals developed under Gupta patronage lead to the development of algebra, and revolutions in medicine lead to the repudiation of the Greek system of humors. The writing of these great thinkers however, stops short in many cases of true revolutions in medicine and science because of the spontaneous collapse of the civilization which patronized them.
This was an era of mercenaries, hired from amongst the Gilani and the Turks, the Alans and the Arabs. A multitude of Eftal tribes sought mercenaries as a way to augment their forces, frequently offering plunder as the greatest incentive for service, and in turn these Eftal tribes would serve local leaders in exchange for pay, middlemen in the destructive wars that ravaged Persia.
The Turks in particular joined the warring with great enthusiasm. Numerous and exceptionally warlike, they were the most prized of the mercenaries that served alongside the Eftal. Primarily Buddhists and Tengrist pagans, after their service many tribes would settle across Persia, further altering the demographics of the region. By contrast, the Indian-influenced Persian Gulf would see the increasing triumph of Mahadeva as a sole God, often with Mithra and other Iranic gods described as aspects of him. Divorced from his Indian context, this version of Shiva would become uniquely Eftal, clad in a lion's skin and a radiant sunburst halo, holding a cudgel and spear in his more warlike aspect, or cross-legged in meditative bliss in his more mystical interpretation.
The personal god of Akhshunwar Malkha, Mahadeva would gain great popularity after the Shah entreated his companions subjects to swear their devotion to him, one of the only cases of a mass conversion in the history of the typically cosmopolitan and pluralistic Eftal Shahdom. For a time too, Akhshunwar was seen as triumphant over the other pretenders - Isaiah was crushed quickly (leaving Mesopotamia much reduced in his wake) and Huvishka Prajana was on the retreat. However, in a mere moment, Akhshunwar undid all his progress by attempting to bring the Satrap of Arbayestan more firmly under his control.
The Satrap, named Yaghar, rebelled, and, holding much of Mesopotamia, was capable of raising an impressive army, sustained by the plunder gained from his savage defeats of Isaiah and a comprehensive and devastating pillage of Ctesifon from which the city never truly recovered. Akhshunwar's campaign to unseat Yaghar was halted by an invasion of Turkic and Gilani mercenaries loyal to Huvishka Prajana. Yaghar was independent for a time before ultimately he was murdered by a jealous male lover, at which point his wife, Roshana, commanded the lover put to death and indeed ruled the satrapy between 594-597. Her brother, Sheskh, turned out to be a brilliant commander and quite capable of scoring major victories both against Akhshunwar and later Persarmenia, which he subdued and added to his sister's dominion. Sheskh's legacy would long outlive that of his sister, as he left monumental inscriptions to mark his victories, and after his sister's death in childbirth, declared himself formally a Shah. His other great legacy would be as a persecutor of Christians, and although many of the claims made against him seem exaggerated with the benefit of hindsight, he did not allow them to hold office or fight in his armies. He was recorded as being present at one of Akhshunwar's early mass conversions, but it is unclear what his actual religious beliefs were.
In the core territories of Shah Huviskha, the Persian intellectual revolution continued. His demesne around the Caspian sea was untouched by war, even as he sent mercenaries south to plunder and cause chaos in the territory of his enemies. He married one of his daughters to a scion of the Asvhastani Shah, and his personal rule was characterized by leniency and mercy (if hypocrisy, considering the devastation he inflicted upon those territories not under his control) and his propaganda often couches his various wars in the language of "spreading harmony" - a significant change, considering that no previous Eftal ruler, no matter how religious, had really bothered seeking religious ethical justification for their war.
The way trends seem to be going, it seems that the Eastern Roman Empire is due for an earlier disintegration, and the Balkans seemed to have deteriorated especially quickly.
It seems we're also looking at a much earlier Turkic incursion into Persia. With all these groups moving in, in fact we could be looking at a more permanent factionalization of the Persian realm into ethnic units that become multiple small kingdoms more representative of Europe.
Also god help the Romans and the Eftal if an equivalent Islam emerges...
It seems we're also looking at a much earlier Turkic incursion into Persia. With all these groups moving in, in fact we could be looking at a more permanent factionalization of the Persian realm into ethnic units that become multiple small kingdoms more representative of Europe.
Also god help the Romans and the Eftal if an equivalent Islam emerges...
Fall of Syria
Heshana Shah
Heshana's conquests left him with a small territory, but one which was only barely centrally organized. A charismatic leader of men, Heshana was characterized by handsome features and personal bravery, but his prowess did not extend to governing the territories he gained - he was merely the king of bandits, and aspired to little greater than that status. Cities such as Edessa were made tributaries of a mobile horde, not incorporated into a greater state.
Heshana might have been called Shah, but there is little evidence that he himself had that idea. Clever administrators, including Narsai bar Aprem, who held an indeterminate role as some sort of second in command, were behind the organization of his regime from the early days. But these were not bureaucrats, but rather murderous brigands with slightly more ambition than average - men such as Narsai established their position by force and kept it by adeptly maintaining the fiction of a centralized monarchy until it became a reality. By making the extortion of major cities along the Euphrates into a "tribute" Heshana's dominion was solidified. Coins could commemorate victories, such as the 585 victory over the Prefect of Syria, or the 587 taking of Nisibin, the great armories of which, when opened to organized plunder, armed and equipped Heshana's forces to a relatively more uniform and high standard.
After Nisibin, Heshana's standing forces numbered perhaps eight thousand - a paltry force, but almost entirely mounted, and under a commander who understood well how to utilize those forces to stunning effect. The "Shah of Osrhoene" was perhaps the weakest and poorest of the Eftal successor Kings, but his army was capable and, with the establishment of an organized system of taxation, no longer merely dependent on plunder for their loyalty.
Local tyrants, recruited from Heshana's direct companions, were placed over small regional commands, given small retainers of soldiers. It was Narsai who had the notion to ensure that these retainers were ethnically mixed and lacked kinship, ensuring both the spread of an Eftalized version of Persian (the language of Heshana's closest companions) as a lingua franca even amongst the Arabs and Alans, and that the only functioning tribal loyalty was to Heshana's own people, regardless of background or language of birth.
There might have been some dissent in the ranks but for the continued profitability of Heshana's conquests and his willingness to divide the loot generously. Disorder only became an issue as conquest and the river of plunder which had made rich men of Heshana's followers began to dry up. For these reasons as well as titanic ambition, Heshana began to contemplate raids on the Roman Empire itself. At first, these raids represented little more than a continuation of the Eftal-Roman border raids, but they would grow from there, particularly as certain marginalized Arab tribal groups unaffiliated with the Romans found common cause with him and began to turn on the Romans and Ghassanids.
The fall of Syria
Julian Menas was still in charge of the Diocese of the East, and despite numerous failures and reversals he had just barely maintained his position. He had connections and was an amiable, scholarly man, with a bookish, thin face. He had the loyalty and close personal friendship of many in Anastasios' military, and the Emperor in Egypt feared to remove him, knowing that Julian Menas, another of Emperor Kallinikos' former friends, had every bit as much legitimacy to the Imperial mantle as he did - which was to say little. As such, the Emperor did not ask for his resignation, even when Constantine wrested the entire region from him, or Ioannes ambushed and destroyed nearly the entire Imperial army.
Rather, he wrested military command from him, undoing the reforms of Kallinikos and making Julian Menas merely a governor of the province rather than a prefect with broad extraordinary powers. If Julian objected to this change it is unknown, but a loyal companion of the Emperor, Proklos of Damascus, was given overall military command, and surviving letters between Emperor and General indicate that Julian's command had deteriorated significantly from its paper strength, and not truly recovered. Fresh soldiers were raised to fill the gaps, and Proklos set about constructing a series of border fortifications along the border with Cilicia, still occupied by Ioannes' forces and locked in an uneasy truce.
After a period of a few months, Julian was summoned to Alexandria, and there he seems to have lived out his life in relative comfort with his family and young children. His replacement for governor of Syria was an Egyptian bureaucrat named Bonus, and with the perceived threat taken care of, Anastasios felt that he could rest easy.
Unfortunately, he could not. Heshana's raiders were moving into Syria in force by the spring of 590. Despite overtures to the Banu Ghassan for assistance, the traditional buffer state was enfeebled by on-and-off war with the Bedouin of the interior - Proklos was on his own.
However, the Emperor's companion was, unlike his predecessor, quite capable. A strong, barrel-chested Greek, he won the loyalty of Julian's men and gave Heshana hell as the Eftal warlord attempted to break into Syria, blunting the advance totally. After this unexpected reversal, Proklos marched north and besieged Edessa. The city held however, and despite a few months of siege and internal chaos (the locals reportedly attempted to massacre Heshana's men and give the city to Proklos) Heshana endured. A few weeks after the worst of the rioting, Proklos retreated, and Heshana's men rallied and harassed the Romans as they fell back southwards. Reportedly, there were also a series of massacres in Edessa, and the city remained significantly reduced in size for some time to come.
The reason for Proklos' retreat remains unclear. Heshana was on his last legs, a nomadic raider bound up in the defense of a walled city that seized even the narrowest opportunity to try to murder him. But the warlord would endure. Proklos would never again have such a good opportunity to end the threat and expand the Anastasian half of the Roman Empire. The following year, Narsai travelled south, uniting a group of Arab clans in a coalition against the Banu Ghassan and their Roman allies. Lead by the Banu Kalb, this coalition scored a few minor victories against Proklos' forces and formed a major distraction.
In 592, Palmyra and Bostra, both long diminished from their historical apogees, were taken by Arab raiders. Proklos was personally distracted by Heshana's resurgent campaigns, and his lieutenants were incapable of stopping the invasion. Shortly thereafter Al-Jabiyah fell and the Ghassanid King, Al-Mundhir, fled to Alexandria where he would live out the rest of his life with his family. With the fall of Al-Jabiyah, the traditional residence of the Ghassanid kings, the multitude of Arab tribes could raid with impunity - as could Heshana.
However, Heshana's plan assumed that Emperor Ioannes in Asia Minor would be too distracted with the deterioration of the Balkans to intervene. And it was true that much of the Roman army was away, including the Emperor, who, breaking from the trend established by his predecessors preferred to not take the field, and indeed after his victory over Julian Menas would never again lead an army in person. However, despite the absence of the main body of the Roman army, a small expeditionary force under the Cilician comtes Baduarios with some six thousand men, most of them mounted, struck into Heshana's territory. His force was small, largely because most of the soldiers in Asia Minor were guarding against the Alans and thus not prepared for an expedition to Syria.
Marching through Syria, Baduarios encountered an Anastasian ambush near Issos and repelled it in good order, opening the entirety of Syria to him. Antiokhea opened its gates to him, as did the coastal cities along his route. Then, Baduarios, his lines of supply secured, swept south and endeavored to cut off Heshana from Osrhoene. Heshana was forced to ride north and deal with this new threat, barely persuading his Arab allies to accompany him north. Hujr, their leader, had his own ambitions, but was temporarily willing to concede that the threat Baduarios posed was too great to ignore.
Both the Arab and Eftal cavalry rushed north, reaching the wealthy regional hub of Apamea in the midst of a scorching summer. There, Baduarios intercepted them, and though he was repulsed after some initial skirmishing, he left Apamea well garrisoned and well-supplied, and the city refused to surrender. Baduarios retreated into a nearby well-watered valley, and from his base in the hills struck at Heshana's siege. The Shah's men lacked siege equipment and, as a mostly mounted force, found their attempts to capture the city futile. Narsai and Hujr agreed that the best course of action would be to ride into the hills and deal with the Roman field army, but Heshana refused. Baduarios was a capable commander, he argued, and there could be any number of ambushes waiting for them in the hills.
While Heshana stalled, Baduarios persuaded another Roman force stationed at Kaiseria and numbering some five thousand, to march on Edessa. This army had a corps of engineers and was lead by Hypatios the Black, a veteran of the Roman defense of Thessalonike. By the time a rider managed to inform Heshana, Edessa itself was under siege.
Heshana was forced to act quickly. Leaving Hjur to besiege Apamea, he rode into the hills to confront Baduarios. His vanguard appeared to be nothing but a scout party, and the Romans descended on it in ambush - allowing Heshana to in turn surround the Roman forces. This would prove to be a costly victory for Heshana however - perhaps one in every four of his own men died, but the Cilician general was himself slain. The surrendered Romans were executed and their arms, horses, and armor were looted.
Heshana then rode into Orshoene with all haste, slaughtering the supply columns and outriders which maintained Hypatios' forces. Combined with a fortuitous outbreak of disease, Hypatios' forces starved and died far quicker than the garrison of Edessa, which this time had no issues with the much-diminished civilian population. When Heshana's victory came, it was total, although Hypatios himself would escape west to the town of Dolikhe before he would be captured and ransomed back to the Emperor.
These victories proved the critical flaw with the divided Roman Empire. Had Anastasios and Ioannes merely worked together, Heshana's small force and the even smaller forces of his Arab allies could never have triumphed - but instead the two Empires only acted independently and occasionally fought, harassed each others efforts, and most importantly did not coordinate their attacks but rather went up against Heshana one at a time with far inferior manpower. As such, in the aftermath of his triumphs Heshana was capable of capturing the whole of Syria, raiding with impunity into Cilicia and finally in 593 taking Melitene and Anazarbos. Meanwhile, his Kalbid allies, with the help of a second force commanded by Narsai and now equipped with their own corps of Persian engineers, effected the capture of Damascus.
Anastasios however, was not slow to respond to this new invasion. His fleet was capable of supplying the coastal cities such as Tyros indefinitely, and Kaiseria and Gaza underwent new fortification projects - the riches of Egypt proving more than capable of providing fresh soldiers for their defense. However, the interior was all but lost it seemed - and despite a Roman punitive attack on Al-Jabiyah which leveled the city, the raids continued, and Damascus remained out of the Emperor's reach. Further, the Emperor's recruitment of fresh troops was stymied by his fear of the Miaphysite population of Egypt rebelling against their primarily Orthodox leaders who no longer had the rest of the Empire to call upon for support. Anastasios maintained an uneasy balance but his attempts to mend the schism fell short of the endorsement of the Coptic church seemingly demanded of him.
Johiyava and Sogdia
Anandakumara Raja died peacefully in his sleep at the age of fifty six, in 595. He was succeeded by his son Visvajita, whose first act as Raja was to kill his brother Pulindaka. According to the Eftal historians, Pulindaka attempted to organize a coup against his dying father and take power with the help of a clan of Turkic mercenaries - but Visvajita, being informed by Pulindaka's barber, struck first, summoning his brother to court at sword-point and having him executed. However, Kudhipasri, Pulindaka's son, fled south and became a great warrior-prince among the Kidarites.
If this story is true is immaterial. Kudhipasri in particular seems wholly invented, What it represents is far more important - the Eftal fears. Ambitious Turkic mercenaries attempting to play Kingmaker. Dynastic disputes leading to exiled sons who carve out their own states. Even the power and prestige of the court Visvajita rules over is a source of anxiety for the anonymous Eftal writer, who was a companion of Tarkhsuna Shah, the warlord who ruled Sogdia. Tarkhsuna both paid Turkic mercenaries to fight the Johiyava and also paid tribute to the Gokturks. His kingdom was squeezed between those two powers, and Tarkhsuna saw no escape, choosing the distant confederacy of the Turks over becoming a satrap of the aggressive power on his doorstep.
His son and heir Gokharna, however, was perhaps more clever than Tarkhsuna. Aligning himself with the Asvha through marriage, Gokharna was able to assert greater independence against the Turks. Though he would still pay a tribute to the Gokturks and the Johiyava, the reign of Gokharna was one of peace backed up by force. Only once did the Johiyava provoke him to war - in 596, and that war would prove devastating. The Johiyava fell back into their mountains and when Gokharna pursued, they destroyed his army and after a year long siege captured Balkh and made vassals of many of the Baktrian tribes. Visvajita forced the Shah to pay an enormous tribute for the first five years of his reign.
However, on the domestic front, Gokharna overcame this inauspicious start. Piandjikent was restored to its former glory, and peace was good for prosperity and trade. The silk road reopened, allowing goods to flow from the Rouran Khaganate in northern China to Persia. There, the Rourans had begun to settle down and co-opt the traditional Chinese system of governance, patronizing Buddhist monasteries and beginning bureaucratic examinations which were at first shunned by the indigenous aristocracy but slowly accepted as a method of advancement. These examinations required familiarity with traditional Confucian and Buddhist texts, and were somewhat different than those of the Liang dynasty in the south.
Heshana's conquests left him with a small territory, but one which was only barely centrally organized. A charismatic leader of men, Heshana was characterized by handsome features and personal bravery, but his prowess did not extend to governing the territories he gained - he was merely the king of bandits, and aspired to little greater than that status. Cities such as Edessa were made tributaries of a mobile horde, not incorporated into a greater state.
Heshana might have been called Shah, but there is little evidence that he himself had that idea. Clever administrators, including Narsai bar Aprem, who held an indeterminate role as some sort of second in command, were behind the organization of his regime from the early days. But these were not bureaucrats, but rather murderous brigands with slightly more ambition than average - men such as Narsai established their position by force and kept it by adeptly maintaining the fiction of a centralized monarchy until it became a reality. By making the extortion of major cities along the Euphrates into a "tribute" Heshana's dominion was solidified. Coins could commemorate victories, such as the 585 victory over the Prefect of Syria, or the 587 taking of Nisibin, the great armories of which, when opened to organized plunder, armed and equipped Heshana's forces to a relatively more uniform and high standard.
After Nisibin, Heshana's standing forces numbered perhaps eight thousand - a paltry force, but almost entirely mounted, and under a commander who understood well how to utilize those forces to stunning effect. The "Shah of Osrhoene" was perhaps the weakest and poorest of the Eftal successor Kings, but his army was capable and, with the establishment of an organized system of taxation, no longer merely dependent on plunder for their loyalty.
Local tyrants, recruited from Heshana's direct companions, were placed over small regional commands, given small retainers of soldiers. It was Narsai who had the notion to ensure that these retainers were ethnically mixed and lacked kinship, ensuring both the spread of an Eftalized version of Persian (the language of Heshana's closest companions) as a lingua franca even amongst the Arabs and Alans, and that the only functioning tribal loyalty was to Heshana's own people, regardless of background or language of birth.
There might have been some dissent in the ranks but for the continued profitability of Heshana's conquests and his willingness to divide the loot generously. Disorder only became an issue as conquest and the river of plunder which had made rich men of Heshana's followers began to dry up. For these reasons as well as titanic ambition, Heshana began to contemplate raids on the Roman Empire itself. At first, these raids represented little more than a continuation of the Eftal-Roman border raids, but they would grow from there, particularly as certain marginalized Arab tribal groups unaffiliated with the Romans found common cause with him and began to turn on the Romans and Ghassanids.
The fall of Syria
Julian Menas was still in charge of the Diocese of the East, and despite numerous failures and reversals he had just barely maintained his position. He had connections and was an amiable, scholarly man, with a bookish, thin face. He had the loyalty and close personal friendship of many in Anastasios' military, and the Emperor in Egypt feared to remove him, knowing that Julian Menas, another of Emperor Kallinikos' former friends, had every bit as much legitimacy to the Imperial mantle as he did - which was to say little. As such, the Emperor did not ask for his resignation, even when Constantine wrested the entire region from him, or Ioannes ambushed and destroyed nearly the entire Imperial army.
Rather, he wrested military command from him, undoing the reforms of Kallinikos and making Julian Menas merely a governor of the province rather than a prefect with broad extraordinary powers. If Julian objected to this change it is unknown, but a loyal companion of the Emperor, Proklos of Damascus, was given overall military command, and surviving letters between Emperor and General indicate that Julian's command had deteriorated significantly from its paper strength, and not truly recovered. Fresh soldiers were raised to fill the gaps, and Proklos set about constructing a series of border fortifications along the border with Cilicia, still occupied by Ioannes' forces and locked in an uneasy truce.
After a period of a few months, Julian was summoned to Alexandria, and there he seems to have lived out his life in relative comfort with his family and young children. His replacement for governor of Syria was an Egyptian bureaucrat named Bonus, and with the perceived threat taken care of, Anastasios felt that he could rest easy.
Unfortunately, he could not. Heshana's raiders were moving into Syria in force by the spring of 590. Despite overtures to the Banu Ghassan for assistance, the traditional buffer state was enfeebled by on-and-off war with the Bedouin of the interior - Proklos was on his own.
However, the Emperor's companion was, unlike his predecessor, quite capable. A strong, barrel-chested Greek, he won the loyalty of Julian's men and gave Heshana hell as the Eftal warlord attempted to break into Syria, blunting the advance totally. After this unexpected reversal, Proklos marched north and besieged Edessa. The city held however, and despite a few months of siege and internal chaos (the locals reportedly attempted to massacre Heshana's men and give the city to Proklos) Heshana endured. A few weeks after the worst of the rioting, Proklos retreated, and Heshana's men rallied and harassed the Romans as they fell back southwards. Reportedly, there were also a series of massacres in Edessa, and the city remained significantly reduced in size for some time to come.
The reason for Proklos' retreat remains unclear. Heshana was on his last legs, a nomadic raider bound up in the defense of a walled city that seized even the narrowest opportunity to try to murder him. But the warlord would endure. Proklos would never again have such a good opportunity to end the threat and expand the Anastasian half of the Roman Empire. The following year, Narsai travelled south, uniting a group of Arab clans in a coalition against the Banu Ghassan and their Roman allies. Lead by the Banu Kalb, this coalition scored a few minor victories against Proklos' forces and formed a major distraction.
In 592, Palmyra and Bostra, both long diminished from their historical apogees, were taken by Arab raiders. Proklos was personally distracted by Heshana's resurgent campaigns, and his lieutenants were incapable of stopping the invasion. Shortly thereafter Al-Jabiyah fell and the Ghassanid King, Al-Mundhir, fled to Alexandria where he would live out the rest of his life with his family. With the fall of Al-Jabiyah, the traditional residence of the Ghassanid kings, the multitude of Arab tribes could raid with impunity - as could Heshana.
However, Heshana's plan assumed that Emperor Ioannes in Asia Minor would be too distracted with the deterioration of the Balkans to intervene. And it was true that much of the Roman army was away, including the Emperor, who, breaking from the trend established by his predecessors preferred to not take the field, and indeed after his victory over Julian Menas would never again lead an army in person. However, despite the absence of the main body of the Roman army, a small expeditionary force under the Cilician comtes Baduarios with some six thousand men, most of them mounted, struck into Heshana's territory. His force was small, largely because most of the soldiers in Asia Minor were guarding against the Alans and thus not prepared for an expedition to Syria.
Marching through Syria, Baduarios encountered an Anastasian ambush near Issos and repelled it in good order, opening the entirety of Syria to him. Antiokhea opened its gates to him, as did the coastal cities along his route. Then, Baduarios, his lines of supply secured, swept south and endeavored to cut off Heshana from Osrhoene. Heshana was forced to ride north and deal with this new threat, barely persuading his Arab allies to accompany him north. Hujr, their leader, had his own ambitions, but was temporarily willing to concede that the threat Baduarios posed was too great to ignore.
Both the Arab and Eftal cavalry rushed north, reaching the wealthy regional hub of Apamea in the midst of a scorching summer. There, Baduarios intercepted them, and though he was repulsed after some initial skirmishing, he left Apamea well garrisoned and well-supplied, and the city refused to surrender. Baduarios retreated into a nearby well-watered valley, and from his base in the hills struck at Heshana's siege. The Shah's men lacked siege equipment and, as a mostly mounted force, found their attempts to capture the city futile. Narsai and Hujr agreed that the best course of action would be to ride into the hills and deal with the Roman field army, but Heshana refused. Baduarios was a capable commander, he argued, and there could be any number of ambushes waiting for them in the hills.
While Heshana stalled, Baduarios persuaded another Roman force stationed at Kaiseria and numbering some five thousand, to march on Edessa. This army had a corps of engineers and was lead by Hypatios the Black, a veteran of the Roman defense of Thessalonike. By the time a rider managed to inform Heshana, Edessa itself was under siege.
Heshana was forced to act quickly. Leaving Hjur to besiege Apamea, he rode into the hills to confront Baduarios. His vanguard appeared to be nothing but a scout party, and the Romans descended on it in ambush - allowing Heshana to in turn surround the Roman forces. This would prove to be a costly victory for Heshana however - perhaps one in every four of his own men died, but the Cilician general was himself slain. The surrendered Romans were executed and their arms, horses, and armor were looted.
Heshana then rode into Orshoene with all haste, slaughtering the supply columns and outriders which maintained Hypatios' forces. Combined with a fortuitous outbreak of disease, Hypatios' forces starved and died far quicker than the garrison of Edessa, which this time had no issues with the much-diminished civilian population. When Heshana's victory came, it was total, although Hypatios himself would escape west to the town of Dolikhe before he would be captured and ransomed back to the Emperor.
These victories proved the critical flaw with the divided Roman Empire. Had Anastasios and Ioannes merely worked together, Heshana's small force and the even smaller forces of his Arab allies could never have triumphed - but instead the two Empires only acted independently and occasionally fought, harassed each others efforts, and most importantly did not coordinate their attacks but rather went up against Heshana one at a time with far inferior manpower. As such, in the aftermath of his triumphs Heshana was capable of capturing the whole of Syria, raiding with impunity into Cilicia and finally in 593 taking Melitene and Anazarbos. Meanwhile, his Kalbid allies, with the help of a second force commanded by Narsai and now equipped with their own corps of Persian engineers, effected the capture of Damascus.
Anastasios however, was not slow to respond to this new invasion. His fleet was capable of supplying the coastal cities such as Tyros indefinitely, and Kaiseria and Gaza underwent new fortification projects - the riches of Egypt proving more than capable of providing fresh soldiers for their defense. However, the interior was all but lost it seemed - and despite a Roman punitive attack on Al-Jabiyah which leveled the city, the raids continued, and Damascus remained out of the Emperor's reach. Further, the Emperor's recruitment of fresh troops was stymied by his fear of the Miaphysite population of Egypt rebelling against their primarily Orthodox leaders who no longer had the rest of the Empire to call upon for support. Anastasios maintained an uneasy balance but his attempts to mend the schism fell short of the endorsement of the Coptic church seemingly demanded of him.
Johiyava and Sogdia
Anandakumara Raja died peacefully in his sleep at the age of fifty six, in 595. He was succeeded by his son Visvajita, whose first act as Raja was to kill his brother Pulindaka. According to the Eftal historians, Pulindaka attempted to organize a coup against his dying father and take power with the help of a clan of Turkic mercenaries - but Visvajita, being informed by Pulindaka's barber, struck first, summoning his brother to court at sword-point and having him executed. However, Kudhipasri, Pulindaka's son, fled south and became a great warrior-prince among the Kidarites.
If this story is true is immaterial. Kudhipasri in particular seems wholly invented, What it represents is far more important - the Eftal fears. Ambitious Turkic mercenaries attempting to play Kingmaker. Dynastic disputes leading to exiled sons who carve out their own states. Even the power and prestige of the court Visvajita rules over is a source of anxiety for the anonymous Eftal writer, who was a companion of Tarkhsuna Shah, the warlord who ruled Sogdia. Tarkhsuna both paid Turkic mercenaries to fight the Johiyava and also paid tribute to the Gokturks. His kingdom was squeezed between those two powers, and Tarkhsuna saw no escape, choosing the distant confederacy of the Turks over becoming a satrap of the aggressive power on his doorstep.
His son and heir Gokharna, however, was perhaps more clever than Tarkhsuna. Aligning himself with the Asvha through marriage, Gokharna was able to assert greater independence against the Turks. Though he would still pay a tribute to the Gokturks and the Johiyava, the reign of Gokharna was one of peace backed up by force. Only once did the Johiyava provoke him to war - in 596, and that war would prove devastating. The Johiyava fell back into their mountains and when Gokharna pursued, they destroyed his army and after a year long siege captured Balkh and made vassals of many of the Baktrian tribes. Visvajita forced the Shah to pay an enormous tribute for the first five years of his reign.
However, on the domestic front, Gokharna overcame this inauspicious start. Piandjikent was restored to its former glory, and peace was good for prosperity and trade. The silk road reopened, allowing goods to flow from the Rouran Khaganate in northern China to Persia. There, the Rourans had begun to settle down and co-opt the traditional Chinese system of governance, patronizing Buddhist monasteries and beginning bureaucratic examinations which were at first shunned by the indigenous aristocracy but slowly accepted as a method of advancement. These examinations required familiarity with traditional Confucian and Buddhist texts, and were somewhat different than those of the Liang dynasty in the south.
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Things just seem to be getting worse and worse for the Romans - more territory lost and now it being split into an Anatolian Roman Empire and an Egyptian Roman Empire. If the situation goes on long enough, we could be looking at a permanent split.
By the way, have you ever read Romulus Augustus' Western Roman Empire TL? I wanted to know what your opinion was on it and that maybe it could offer some ideas.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=278876
By the way, have you ever read Romulus Augustus' Western Roman Empire TL? I wanted to know what your opinion was on it and that maybe it could offer some ideas.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=278876
I haven't seen it before, but it looks really cool. I'll definitely have to devote time to reading it, particularly the latter parts which seem to focus my Eftal.
Incidentally, the amount of pro-Eastern Roman and anti-Persian sentiment that commenters in that thread have might indicate that I should have gone in a direction that saw Rome rise higher, rather than become weaker, if I wanted to have a truly popular thread.
Also, I do very much like where he took things. I think that my initial point of divergence might have been a bit too extreme (initially I let the Eftal pretty much take the Persian Empire by fiat) and because I've been learning so much about the time period as I went, there's a lot more stuff that gets glossed over early on. The author of that TL seems to have a much better grasp on the history in a fair number of places. Also because his history of the East has diverged less, he can get away with making up less stuff.
Incidentally, the amount of pro-Eastern Roman and anti-Persian sentiment that commenters in that thread have might indicate that I should have gone in a direction that saw Rome rise higher, rather than become weaker, if I wanted to have a truly popular thread.
Also, I do very much like where he took things. I think that my initial point of divergence might have been a bit too extreme (initially I let the Eftal pretty much take the Persian Empire by fiat) and because I've been learning so much about the time period as I went, there's a lot more stuff that gets glossed over early on. The author of that TL seems to have a much better grasp on the history in a fair number of places. Also because his history of the East has diverged less, he can get away with making up less stuff.
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No, I actually think that you've made a very engaging and realistic storyline, and I could definitely see such a fate happening to Rome. In fact, I really have to commend you on such an in depth devotion to the Eftals, especially considering the fact there aren't as many primary sources on the subject and that you have to speculate on a lot of what is going on there.