The Rise of the White Huns
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
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.
I want even more Persian updates!
Also, late antiquity Rome gets far more love, so focusing on them would make your efforts alot less special.
fasquardon
Sahu Shah
And, we're back...
Sheskh's Vision
Shah Sheskh after Roshana's death in 598 ruled at first in an uncertain position. While he was Shah in his own right, acclaimed by his soldiers and quickly the primitive bureaucracy of his satrapy-cum-kingdom, he was also considered by some to be merely a regent for his young nephew Toramana. It was an arrangement which would not last. Sheskh had many sons and was married to an Armenian noblewoman, and had already proven himself energetic, capable, and ambitious. It should be no surprise that the child Toramana died, all-too-conveniently, before his first birthday. By 599, Shah Sheskh ruled in his own right one of the wealthier successor kingdoms. A year later he would make his own son, Khauwashta, his successor and subordinate Shah in his own right.
However, Sheskh also ruled a regime splintered by religious controversy. His Armenian subjects, whom he relied upon for military support, belonged to the miaphysite Church, a church which had increasingly broken away from Rome and forged its own path. This provided the Armenian people and aristocracy a kind of proto-nationalism based around a unique religious and linguistic identity, and made them insubordinate at the best of times. Thus Sheskh was opted to arrange, often with veiled threats, the taking of numerous young noble hostages to raise among the Eftal, a move which forestalled any threat of rebellion, and integrated his own tribal aristocracy with that of the Armenians.
The city of Huniyag, close to war-torn Asoristan but far enough north to avoid being raided, became Sheskh's base of operations for renewed war with Akhshunwar Malkha. The two kingdoms had previously concluded an uneasy peace under Roshana, but sensing weakness, Sheskh abandoned his sister's treaty and rode south, scoring major victories at twin battles in Kaskar and Karka. Both victories showcased Sheskh's capability for fighting sweeping battles of maneuver, wherein his Eftal cavalry, backed by Turkic archery and Armenian heavy armor, managed to isolate and massacre Akhshunwar's forces in detail. The cities along the Persian gulf surrendered quickly afterwards, which left only Susa, the royal capital.
Akhshunwar made preparations for a siege. He sent letters to the Kidarites begging for aid, and to the various satraps and tribes of the east. However, his Eftal companions defected en masse, and his Turkic mercenaries, unwilling to die for a ruler they had no personal stake in, surrendered Akhshunwar to Sheskh in 600. The mercenaries themselves would be handsomely rewarded and then sent far away at once, to counter raids engineered by Huviskha.
For even as these battles were being fought, Huvishka Prajana, ever the opportunist, took Shahrizor and much of central Persia. More than a mere King, he began to proclaim his right to the entire Eftal Empire, which he swore solemnly to restore. This left Sheskh in a difficult position. Huvishka Prajana and Akhshunwar Malkha could both tie themselves by blood to Akhshunwar I and his dynasty, and while the Eftal might have often cared more for personal merit, Sheskh had begun to fear that the vast number of Eftal who had defected to him were not truly loyal. A majority of them had kept to the worship of Mahadeva much as Akhshunwar had patronized and designed it, and this only exacerbated Sheskh's paranoia.
Executing Akhshunwar Malkha had given Sheskh an empire, but managing the complex and geographically distant state which he inherited was no mean feat. One of the greatest challenges he would face was a series of Zoroastrian-inspired uprisings of the common people, based around ridding the country of foreigners and preparing for the "Great Renovation" when evil would be driven the world by the forces of good. These uprisings, lacking the support of either the mercantile or aristocratic classes of Persian society (which were by and large merged with the Eftal by this point) had little hope of true success but were nevertheless devastating to the countryside and necessitated strong measures to put them down. Meanwhile, the Kidarites, lead by a man named Vinduyih, made a pact with Shah Huvishka and the Johiyava Raja and began raiding into Pars, driving a not insignificant portion of the wealthy population to flee towards the coasts, where the high-walled trading cities renovated and patronized by Toramana and Khauwashta almost a century ago offered superior protection from rural rebellion and banditry. Cities such as Mihirapat and Ram swelled in population but ultimately were forced to close their gates against the influx of refugees. Many who were turned away from the gulf cities fled across the gulf to Hatta or Mazun, where the local petty Shahs welcomed them with open arms and often recruited them for their feuds with the Hadhrami.
Sheskh lead the campaigns to put down the rebels, and did so with relative ease. Along the way he confiscated significant amounts of land, either abandoned by fleeing aristocrats or the peasant rebels, distributing it to those Eftal who had once been loyal to Akhshunwar, hoping to win them over with kingly generosity. However, the Kidarites proved a far greater challenge. Sheskh was incapable of pinning them down in a pitched battle, and he would die anticlimactically in a skirmish, where the Kidarite cavalry managed to attack the camp of his vanguard. Dying in 604, he left a dangerous situation for his son and heir.
Back in Huniyag, Khauwashta wasted little time attempting to assert his authority. He rode south to the royal palace at Susa and was quickly declared full Shah. He sent envoys east and made an unfavorable peace with the Kidarites, offering them a large tribute to curtail their raiding. Then, he gathered what forces he could and prepared for Huviskha's move. Huvishka had been wintering in Kermanshah, building up his own military. Sheskh's legacy was a state which was "hollow" - a vast crescent shaped territory from Armenia to Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. Huviskha by contrast controlled a contiguous, well-defended territory shielded by mountains on many sides.
Shah Huviskha's army was perhaps the largest raised since the legendary campaigns of Mihiragula, though few of his men had fought in them. His forces, despite a core of Eftal cavalry and Gilani footmen, were bolstered by his Avshastani allies and Turkic, Alani, and Balasagani mercenaries. Commanded by Huvishka's experienced son, Khingila, the swifter elements, the Turkic and Avsha cavalry broke out onto the plains of Mesopotamia, wreaking havoc and interrupting Khauwashta's attempts to muster forces from his far flung provinces. The army Sheskh had led against the Kidarites had largely melted away as well - the Turkic mercenaries defected en masse, just as Sheskh feared they would. Khauwashta was left with a relatively small force, and within a year of Sheskh's death Khauwashta personally controlled little more than the cities along the Persian gulf and Susa.
However, Khauwashta had inherited his father's skill in warfare and diplomacy. He succeeded in making Akhshunwar Malkha's companions his own, and retained the loyalty of the Armenian lords, whose raids would open an additional front and cause Huviskha no end of headaches on the homefront. Riding up the Tigris, he defeated Khingila in battle outside of Dastkart, and then again at Hulwan, his heavy cavalry punching through the center of Shah Huviskha's line and causing the "Universal Ruler in Fellowship" to flee the field. After this unacceptable display of cowardice, it was only a matter of time before the edifice came crumbling down. Many of Huviskha's Eftal allies deserted, the Avsha returned home, and the Turkic mercenaries murdered their former employer, only to find that Khauwashta was not as lenient as his father had been. He did not take the Huviskha's Turkic mercenaries into his service but rather massacred them, riding them down wherever he could find them and subjecting them to grisly punishments.
"This act, more than any, won him the friendship of the common man of Iran, who had long suffered at the hand of the Tujue..." one Eftal historian writes. However, this historian, flatters Khauwashta. Khauwashta would ultimately employ many Turks in his own army as well, settling them in certain depopulated regions of Persia much as his ancestors had settled Xionites and Gaoche, hoping that in time they would become loyal reserves of manpower indistinct from the Eftal warriors they served alongside.
By 605 Khauwashta ruled a "unified Empire, united in the fellowship of the Dharma and the patronage of the God", pardoned Huviskha's son Khingila for his "treason" and sent him to live out his days in a monastery. From the first moment he returned to Susa, Khauwashta tried to imitate the manner of the old Eftal Shahs, acting as if he had always been Shah, and that the war he fought against Huviskha was that of a rightful monarch suppressing a rebel. The world, however, would show how false that truly was. This was not a return to the old days. Distinct regional identities had had a generation to develop in the absence of a central authority not present since Mihiragula and the Reign of Sons. Khauwashta ruled a lesser territory than his predecessors, an Empire stripped of much of its periphery.
More crucial than the loss of the periphery was the development of regional identity. Buddhism was powerful and influential in the east and north, especially in the region the Greeks called Hyrcania, in but also in Sogdia and the satrapies around the Caspian. Further, the Gilani had served in important positions in Huviskha's government, but did not in Khauwashtas, and this would be a source of simmering resentment. Trade and industry flourished anew in the south, where Eftal and Persian identities were the most blurred - but this synthesis of culture excluded the Persianized but fundamentally different Eftal culture in Mesopotamia, Shahrizor, and the Iranian plateau. The "northern" Eftal were commonly more traditionally pagan and sometimes Christian. They had mixed with far more tribal groups from outside the traditional "White Huns" and lived a more traditional lifestyle, maintaining their cavalry traditions which the Gulf Eftal had begun to lose in their "decadent urban" lifestyle.
Armenia, though now tightly bound to the Eftal Shahdom, was similarly independent in their identity - and indeed had been even during Mihiragula's reign. Khauwashta granted them exceptional privileges and autonomy, as he did to the Kidarites when Vinduyih finally acknowledged his overlordship. Both regions maintained their own vassal Shahs, making Khauwashta little more than first among equals in the periphery of his regime. Concerned with the internal politics of his realm, Khauwashta would also never incorporate Osrhoene or Syria into his state, though monuments from his reign claim that Heshana paid him a magnificent tribute on several occasions.
The Sahushah - Statebuilding on the Steppe
The Sahu clan which came to give their name to the Sahu Shahs was, as mentioned before, a polyglot group. The Xasar-Sahu confederacy's sole commonality was being defeated by the first Khauwashta generations ago, and subsequently breaking out onto the Eurasian steppe, taking the Rav [IOTL Volga] and Don river plains and driving the Hunno-Bulgars and Avars west into conflict with the settled peoples they found there. But from there, the Xasar-Sahu would not merely pass into history like so many of their predecessors. Rather, they began to found something more enduring.
The Sahu, like the Eftal before them, were not opposed to urban settlement. Indeed they patronized it, modeling their new cities off a mixture of imported Persian style and the indigenous Greek designs which they encountered around the Crimea. Much trade flowed up and down the Dnieper, Volga, and Don rivers, and though their urban project began as merely a series of trading posts, these posts began to blossom into true cities, the largest of them being Tangravata, built over the ruins of the Greek city of Tanais. These cities were small affairs, often dingy and dirty, but the blossoming of the Sahu urban tradition was well underway by 590. Their subjugation of the Crimean Goths and the Greek population provided them with skilled builders as well, and allowed them to lay tariffs upon the traditional trade of the region - and from the "Sahu River Tolls" came a level of wealth which allowed the Sahu to further centralize and assert their dominion.
Slaves, amber, lumber and grain flowed south, and this trade with Constantinople and the cities of the Caspian sea benefitted all parties. By ensuring relative peace in the regions of their dominion, they imitated the success of the Silk Road, only with the added benefit of riverine transport. While Sahu dominion was often loose and chaotic, involving vicious tribal conflicts with their confederal allies and subjects, it also successfully imitated the Eftal style of statebuilding. The fortified palace city of Apaxauda (near to IOTL Sarkel) in particular gave the state a permanent, central hub, a place where six months out of the year petitioners could go and seek audience with the Sahu Shah.
Traditionally considered the founder of the Sahu state, Shah Ayadhar cultivated a level of detachment from the other tribal lords who might have considered themselves his peers. One way in which this was achieved was by cultivating foreign relations and forbidding his allies from doing the same. During the glory days of Huviskha's monarchy, the Shah bragged of sending missionaries to Apaxauda, where they remained and founded a monastery. Ayadhar had an embassy in Constantinople, where he sent several of his sons to serve as mercenaries, and raided the Alans, supposedly at the behest of Emperor Ioannes. These raids would ultimately prove beneficial to the Sahu, pressing the Alans out of excellent grazing land, but forced more of the Alans to cross into the Caucasus and, though these refugees were much reduced in number, desperation would force them to attack the weakening Roman state.
Huviskha's propagandistic tale of spreading Buddhism seems to have not been false, but the Greek and Gothic peoples of the Crimea certainly were unimpressed by these Eftal missions, and some of the Turkic peoples among the Xasar-Sahu already worshipped their own synthesis of Buddhism which incorporated their own deities. Ayadhar's attempts to unify his people under a single faith seem to have been flawed - Manichaeans, Pagans of many backgrounds and Christians each made up a significant minority, and the Christians in particular were vital to the western half of his trade.
Shah Ayadhar is almost a mythic figure, only corroborated by the existence of his name in the records of many settled peoples around the same time. But his successors would step out of myth into history as a peoples located on the crossroads between civilizations. Administering the great rivers, the Sahu Shahs would be the conduit for a cultural exchange which would fundamentally change the character of the eastern Slavic peoples.
The West and Romanization
The succession of capable African Kings continued with Tamenzut (574-607) and then his son, Idirases. Tamenzut came to the throne inheriting a unified, powerful state with mercantile and hegemonic ambitions. Over his reign, he forged agreements which provided security for the Roman populations of the various western Mediterranean islands in exchange for a series of trade agreements which brought the urban Roman population in Africa prosperity.
When the Prefect of Sicily died of old age, in 602, he sent Idirases as his representative to Syracuse. Maurice had been an able friend of the Mauri, and had repulsed two Gothic invasions, but he had left almost nothing to account for his succession. He had two daughters, the younger of whom was unmarried, but he had left no indication of who should follow him. Immediately, Maria, the eldest daughter, and her husband Cometas sought to take the title of Doux of Sicilia, but Maurice's second-in-command and foremost general, Isidorus rebelled with the loyalty of most of his military. Idirases fled to Lilybaeum, and shortly thereafter returned to Syracuse, this time with a not insubstantial military and fleet of his own.
After a convoluted intrigue described in great detail by the Roman historian Martinus, Cometas was murdered, Maria married Idirases, and Isidorus fled to Naples, and then on to Ravenna, where he offered his loyalty and troops to the Gothic King Recared in exchange for support in being made Doux of Sicily. Recared rode south and met with Idirases. The two men reportedly despised one another, but a compromise was reached - Idirases would be Doux of Sicily, but would abandon all claims to the southern Italian cities Maurice had controlled. The entire Pennisula fell under the control of the Goths.
Apart from small Berber garrisons, the Roman cities under Berber rule, either in Africa or abroad continued much as they always had. Local governors paid taxes to a Rex, but there was no attempt to impose any sort of foreign settlement. In a sense, the Roman Empire continued in north Africa as well as Egypt and Asia Minor.
The trend of re-Romanization was also evident in Hispania. King Gesalec, the Gothic King of Hispania, ruled a territory that had been much reduced from its heydey. A series of battles had cost his predecessors all of Gaul beyond a few isolated coastal cities, and his father, Athanagild, had lost the rest shortly before his death. At the dawn of the seventh century, he was preoccupied with putting down rebellions, particularly in the south where the Roman population defied him, with, he suspected, assistance from the new Mauri King after he had wed an Ostrogothic Princess, an attempt at uniting the two realms in the face of Frankish aggression.In 608, he went to war with the Frankish King Clothar, who came south after a series of successful campaigns in the north against his various brothers, and, despite being by most accounts an uninspiring monarch and a coward, Gesalec won a major victory - keeping the Franks north of Pyrenees for the time being.
After this victory we can trace a significant change in policy. Increasingly, Gesalec chose to describe himself as the protector of Hispania from the northern barbarians. Realizing, perhaps, that he needed to keep the Romans on his side, he sought to bridge the gap between the Arians and the Chalcedonian Romans, trying to present himself as more Romanized than his rivals, drawing on the works of the Roman philosopher Cassiodorus whose effect on the Ostrogoths had been profoundly stabilizing. While he would never convert to Nicene Christianity (and indeed could not, if he wished to maintain his throne) he did patronize Nicene monasteries and the renovation of many Roman churches.
Sheskh's Vision
Shah Sheskh after Roshana's death in 598 ruled at first in an uncertain position. While he was Shah in his own right, acclaimed by his soldiers and quickly the primitive bureaucracy of his satrapy-cum-kingdom, he was also considered by some to be merely a regent for his young nephew Toramana. It was an arrangement which would not last. Sheskh had many sons and was married to an Armenian noblewoman, and had already proven himself energetic, capable, and ambitious. It should be no surprise that the child Toramana died, all-too-conveniently, before his first birthday. By 599, Shah Sheskh ruled in his own right one of the wealthier successor kingdoms. A year later he would make his own son, Khauwashta, his successor and subordinate Shah in his own right.
However, Sheskh also ruled a regime splintered by religious controversy. His Armenian subjects, whom he relied upon for military support, belonged to the miaphysite Church, a church which had increasingly broken away from Rome and forged its own path. This provided the Armenian people and aristocracy a kind of proto-nationalism based around a unique religious and linguistic identity, and made them insubordinate at the best of times. Thus Sheskh was opted to arrange, often with veiled threats, the taking of numerous young noble hostages to raise among the Eftal, a move which forestalled any threat of rebellion, and integrated his own tribal aristocracy with that of the Armenians.
The city of Huniyag, close to war-torn Asoristan but far enough north to avoid being raided, became Sheskh's base of operations for renewed war with Akhshunwar Malkha. The two kingdoms had previously concluded an uneasy peace under Roshana, but sensing weakness, Sheskh abandoned his sister's treaty and rode south, scoring major victories at twin battles in Kaskar and Karka. Both victories showcased Sheskh's capability for fighting sweeping battles of maneuver, wherein his Eftal cavalry, backed by Turkic archery and Armenian heavy armor, managed to isolate and massacre Akhshunwar's forces in detail. The cities along the Persian gulf surrendered quickly afterwards, which left only Susa, the royal capital.
Akhshunwar made preparations for a siege. He sent letters to the Kidarites begging for aid, and to the various satraps and tribes of the east. However, his Eftal companions defected en masse, and his Turkic mercenaries, unwilling to die for a ruler they had no personal stake in, surrendered Akhshunwar to Sheskh in 600. The mercenaries themselves would be handsomely rewarded and then sent far away at once, to counter raids engineered by Huviskha.
For even as these battles were being fought, Huvishka Prajana, ever the opportunist, took Shahrizor and much of central Persia. More than a mere King, he began to proclaim his right to the entire Eftal Empire, which he swore solemnly to restore. This left Sheskh in a difficult position. Huvishka Prajana and Akhshunwar Malkha could both tie themselves by blood to Akhshunwar I and his dynasty, and while the Eftal might have often cared more for personal merit, Sheskh had begun to fear that the vast number of Eftal who had defected to him were not truly loyal. A majority of them had kept to the worship of Mahadeva much as Akhshunwar had patronized and designed it, and this only exacerbated Sheskh's paranoia.
Executing Akhshunwar Malkha had given Sheskh an empire, but managing the complex and geographically distant state which he inherited was no mean feat. One of the greatest challenges he would face was a series of Zoroastrian-inspired uprisings of the common people, based around ridding the country of foreigners and preparing for the "Great Renovation" when evil would be driven the world by the forces of good. These uprisings, lacking the support of either the mercantile or aristocratic classes of Persian society (which were by and large merged with the Eftal by this point) had little hope of true success but were nevertheless devastating to the countryside and necessitated strong measures to put them down. Meanwhile, the Kidarites, lead by a man named Vinduyih, made a pact with Shah Huvishka and the Johiyava Raja and began raiding into Pars, driving a not insignificant portion of the wealthy population to flee towards the coasts, where the high-walled trading cities renovated and patronized by Toramana and Khauwashta almost a century ago offered superior protection from rural rebellion and banditry. Cities such as Mihirapat and Ram swelled in population but ultimately were forced to close their gates against the influx of refugees. Many who were turned away from the gulf cities fled across the gulf to Hatta or Mazun, where the local petty Shahs welcomed them with open arms and often recruited them for their feuds with the Hadhrami.
Sheskh lead the campaigns to put down the rebels, and did so with relative ease. Along the way he confiscated significant amounts of land, either abandoned by fleeing aristocrats or the peasant rebels, distributing it to those Eftal who had once been loyal to Akhshunwar, hoping to win them over with kingly generosity. However, the Kidarites proved a far greater challenge. Sheskh was incapable of pinning them down in a pitched battle, and he would die anticlimactically in a skirmish, where the Kidarite cavalry managed to attack the camp of his vanguard. Dying in 604, he left a dangerous situation for his son and heir.
Back in Huniyag, Khauwashta wasted little time attempting to assert his authority. He rode south to the royal palace at Susa and was quickly declared full Shah. He sent envoys east and made an unfavorable peace with the Kidarites, offering them a large tribute to curtail their raiding. Then, he gathered what forces he could and prepared for Huviskha's move. Huvishka had been wintering in Kermanshah, building up his own military. Sheskh's legacy was a state which was "hollow" - a vast crescent shaped territory from Armenia to Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. Huviskha by contrast controlled a contiguous, well-defended territory shielded by mountains on many sides.
Shah Huviskha's army was perhaps the largest raised since the legendary campaigns of Mihiragula, though few of his men had fought in them. His forces, despite a core of Eftal cavalry and Gilani footmen, were bolstered by his Avshastani allies and Turkic, Alani, and Balasagani mercenaries. Commanded by Huvishka's experienced son, Khingila, the swifter elements, the Turkic and Avsha cavalry broke out onto the plains of Mesopotamia, wreaking havoc and interrupting Khauwashta's attempts to muster forces from his far flung provinces. The army Sheskh had led against the Kidarites had largely melted away as well - the Turkic mercenaries defected en masse, just as Sheskh feared they would. Khauwashta was left with a relatively small force, and within a year of Sheskh's death Khauwashta personally controlled little more than the cities along the Persian gulf and Susa.
However, Khauwashta had inherited his father's skill in warfare and diplomacy. He succeeded in making Akhshunwar Malkha's companions his own, and retained the loyalty of the Armenian lords, whose raids would open an additional front and cause Huviskha no end of headaches on the homefront. Riding up the Tigris, he defeated Khingila in battle outside of Dastkart, and then again at Hulwan, his heavy cavalry punching through the center of Shah Huviskha's line and causing the "Universal Ruler in Fellowship" to flee the field. After this unacceptable display of cowardice, it was only a matter of time before the edifice came crumbling down. Many of Huviskha's Eftal allies deserted, the Avsha returned home, and the Turkic mercenaries murdered their former employer, only to find that Khauwashta was not as lenient as his father had been. He did not take the Huviskha's Turkic mercenaries into his service but rather massacred them, riding them down wherever he could find them and subjecting them to grisly punishments.
"This act, more than any, won him the friendship of the common man of Iran, who had long suffered at the hand of the Tujue..." one Eftal historian writes. However, this historian, flatters Khauwashta. Khauwashta would ultimately employ many Turks in his own army as well, settling them in certain depopulated regions of Persia much as his ancestors had settled Xionites and Gaoche, hoping that in time they would become loyal reserves of manpower indistinct from the Eftal warriors they served alongside.
By 605 Khauwashta ruled a "unified Empire, united in the fellowship of the Dharma and the patronage of the God", pardoned Huviskha's son Khingila for his "treason" and sent him to live out his days in a monastery. From the first moment he returned to Susa, Khauwashta tried to imitate the manner of the old Eftal Shahs, acting as if he had always been Shah, and that the war he fought against Huviskha was that of a rightful monarch suppressing a rebel. The world, however, would show how false that truly was. This was not a return to the old days. Distinct regional identities had had a generation to develop in the absence of a central authority not present since Mihiragula and the Reign of Sons. Khauwashta ruled a lesser territory than his predecessors, an Empire stripped of much of its periphery.
More crucial than the loss of the periphery was the development of regional identity. Buddhism was powerful and influential in the east and north, especially in the region the Greeks called Hyrcania, in but also in Sogdia and the satrapies around the Caspian. Further, the Gilani had served in important positions in Huviskha's government, but did not in Khauwashtas, and this would be a source of simmering resentment. Trade and industry flourished anew in the south, where Eftal and Persian identities were the most blurred - but this synthesis of culture excluded the Persianized but fundamentally different Eftal culture in Mesopotamia, Shahrizor, and the Iranian plateau. The "northern" Eftal were commonly more traditionally pagan and sometimes Christian. They had mixed with far more tribal groups from outside the traditional "White Huns" and lived a more traditional lifestyle, maintaining their cavalry traditions which the Gulf Eftal had begun to lose in their "decadent urban" lifestyle.
Armenia, though now tightly bound to the Eftal Shahdom, was similarly independent in their identity - and indeed had been even during Mihiragula's reign. Khauwashta granted them exceptional privileges and autonomy, as he did to the Kidarites when Vinduyih finally acknowledged his overlordship. Both regions maintained their own vassal Shahs, making Khauwashta little more than first among equals in the periphery of his regime. Concerned with the internal politics of his realm, Khauwashta would also never incorporate Osrhoene or Syria into his state, though monuments from his reign claim that Heshana paid him a magnificent tribute on several occasions.
The Sahushah - Statebuilding on the Steppe
The Sahu clan which came to give their name to the Sahu Shahs was, as mentioned before, a polyglot group. The Xasar-Sahu confederacy's sole commonality was being defeated by the first Khauwashta generations ago, and subsequently breaking out onto the Eurasian steppe, taking the Rav [IOTL Volga] and Don river plains and driving the Hunno-Bulgars and Avars west into conflict with the settled peoples they found there. But from there, the Xasar-Sahu would not merely pass into history like so many of their predecessors. Rather, they began to found something more enduring.
The Sahu, like the Eftal before them, were not opposed to urban settlement. Indeed they patronized it, modeling their new cities off a mixture of imported Persian style and the indigenous Greek designs which they encountered around the Crimea. Much trade flowed up and down the Dnieper, Volga, and Don rivers, and though their urban project began as merely a series of trading posts, these posts began to blossom into true cities, the largest of them being Tangravata, built over the ruins of the Greek city of Tanais. These cities were small affairs, often dingy and dirty, but the blossoming of the Sahu urban tradition was well underway by 590. Their subjugation of the Crimean Goths and the Greek population provided them with skilled builders as well, and allowed them to lay tariffs upon the traditional trade of the region - and from the "Sahu River Tolls" came a level of wealth which allowed the Sahu to further centralize and assert their dominion.
Slaves, amber, lumber and grain flowed south, and this trade with Constantinople and the cities of the Caspian sea benefitted all parties. By ensuring relative peace in the regions of their dominion, they imitated the success of the Silk Road, only with the added benefit of riverine transport. While Sahu dominion was often loose and chaotic, involving vicious tribal conflicts with their confederal allies and subjects, it also successfully imitated the Eftal style of statebuilding. The fortified palace city of Apaxauda (near to IOTL Sarkel) in particular gave the state a permanent, central hub, a place where six months out of the year petitioners could go and seek audience with the Sahu Shah.
Traditionally considered the founder of the Sahu state, Shah Ayadhar cultivated a level of detachment from the other tribal lords who might have considered themselves his peers. One way in which this was achieved was by cultivating foreign relations and forbidding his allies from doing the same. During the glory days of Huviskha's monarchy, the Shah bragged of sending missionaries to Apaxauda, where they remained and founded a monastery. Ayadhar had an embassy in Constantinople, where he sent several of his sons to serve as mercenaries, and raided the Alans, supposedly at the behest of Emperor Ioannes. These raids would ultimately prove beneficial to the Sahu, pressing the Alans out of excellent grazing land, but forced more of the Alans to cross into the Caucasus and, though these refugees were much reduced in number, desperation would force them to attack the weakening Roman state.
Huviskha's propagandistic tale of spreading Buddhism seems to have not been false, but the Greek and Gothic peoples of the Crimea certainly were unimpressed by these Eftal missions, and some of the Turkic peoples among the Xasar-Sahu already worshipped their own synthesis of Buddhism which incorporated their own deities. Ayadhar's attempts to unify his people under a single faith seem to have been flawed - Manichaeans, Pagans of many backgrounds and Christians each made up a significant minority, and the Christians in particular were vital to the western half of his trade.
Shah Ayadhar is almost a mythic figure, only corroborated by the existence of his name in the records of many settled peoples around the same time. But his successors would step out of myth into history as a peoples located on the crossroads between civilizations. Administering the great rivers, the Sahu Shahs would be the conduit for a cultural exchange which would fundamentally change the character of the eastern Slavic peoples.
The West and Romanization
The succession of capable African Kings continued with Tamenzut (574-607) and then his son, Idirases. Tamenzut came to the throne inheriting a unified, powerful state with mercantile and hegemonic ambitions. Over his reign, he forged agreements which provided security for the Roman populations of the various western Mediterranean islands in exchange for a series of trade agreements which brought the urban Roman population in Africa prosperity.
When the Prefect of Sicily died of old age, in 602, he sent Idirases as his representative to Syracuse. Maurice had been an able friend of the Mauri, and had repulsed two Gothic invasions, but he had left almost nothing to account for his succession. He had two daughters, the younger of whom was unmarried, but he had left no indication of who should follow him. Immediately, Maria, the eldest daughter, and her husband Cometas sought to take the title of Doux of Sicilia, but Maurice's second-in-command and foremost general, Isidorus rebelled with the loyalty of most of his military. Idirases fled to Lilybaeum, and shortly thereafter returned to Syracuse, this time with a not insubstantial military and fleet of his own.
After a convoluted intrigue described in great detail by the Roman historian Martinus, Cometas was murdered, Maria married Idirases, and Isidorus fled to Naples, and then on to Ravenna, where he offered his loyalty and troops to the Gothic King Recared in exchange for support in being made Doux of Sicily. Recared rode south and met with Idirases. The two men reportedly despised one another, but a compromise was reached - Idirases would be Doux of Sicily, but would abandon all claims to the southern Italian cities Maurice had controlled. The entire Pennisula fell under the control of the Goths.
Apart from small Berber garrisons, the Roman cities under Berber rule, either in Africa or abroad continued much as they always had. Local governors paid taxes to a Rex, but there was no attempt to impose any sort of foreign settlement. In a sense, the Roman Empire continued in north Africa as well as Egypt and Asia Minor.
The trend of re-Romanization was also evident in Hispania. King Gesalec, the Gothic King of Hispania, ruled a territory that had been much reduced from its heydey. A series of battles had cost his predecessors all of Gaul beyond a few isolated coastal cities, and his father, Athanagild, had lost the rest shortly before his death. At the dawn of the seventh century, he was preoccupied with putting down rebellions, particularly in the south where the Roman population defied him, with, he suspected, assistance from the new Mauri King after he had wed an Ostrogothic Princess, an attempt at uniting the two realms in the face of Frankish aggression.In 608, he went to war with the Frankish King Clothar, who came south after a series of successful campaigns in the north against his various brothers, and, despite being by most accounts an uninspiring monarch and a coward, Gesalec won a major victory - keeping the Franks north of Pyrenees for the time being.
After this victory we can trace a significant change in policy. Increasingly, Gesalec chose to describe himself as the protector of Hispania from the northern barbarians. Realizing, perhaps, that he needed to keep the Romans on his side, he sought to bridge the gap between the Arians and the Chalcedonian Romans, trying to present himself as more Romanized than his rivals, drawing on the works of the Roman philosopher Cassiodorus whose effect on the Ostrogoths had been profoundly stabilizing. While he would never convert to Nicene Christianity (and indeed could not, if he wished to maintain his throne) he did patronize Nicene monasteries and the renovation of many Roman churches.
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I added in an additional blurb about the affairs of Europe and Africa. I apologize for keeping that stuff relatively surface level, but the Mauri/Berbers stuff is largely speculation and Franks and Visigoths are similar to OTL in a lot of respects, but suffering from butterflies nevertheless.
Next post will cover Italy, the Avars, and Alans.
Next post will cover Italy, the Avars, and Alans.
I imagine the great theme of this timeline will end up being the impact nomadic peoples can have.
Avars
It's back guys! And Soverihn is totally right. THE RIDE NEVER STOPS.
Rome holds the line
In 596 Anastasios' Empire signed a peace accord with the Heshana Shah and his Arab allies, acknowledging the territorial losses in exchange for a token yearly tribute - acting as if the Shah was a Roman ally rather than a conqueror, softening the blow to his prestige even as he acknowledged the impossibility of retaking Palestine or Syria at this point. The Autocrat of Egypt knew where his core territories lay, and they were along the rich banks of the Nile, not war-torn Syria. The periphery could be lost, but it would only be temporary - nomadic rulers rose and fell all the time. He could regroup and sweep back the whole Empire that was rightfully his in a period of his foes weakness.
It would never happen. Anastasios died a year later of a disease linked by historians to the Egyptian Plague of 540, and his son, Theodotus took power. A mystic with Miaphysite leanings, Theodotus was profoundly distracted from worldly affairs, regularly fasting to the point of incredible weakness and spurning the attention of women, especially his famously manipulative wife, Maria. He was not popular with the military or the bureaucrats, but the Coptic religious establishment and the common people tended to hold him in high esteem, and both bureaucrats and military alike quickly learned how easy it was to administer affairs without him. However, against the wishes of the military, Theodotus re-affirmed the peace with Heshana, leaving Emperor Ioannes to face the Arabo-Eftal hordes alone.
Around 599 there was an attempted coup attempt by a cabal of ranking Greek officers, but it was foiled by Theodotus' guards and a prominent court faction who had been profiting excellently from Theodotus' detachment from the world. The aftermath of this coup attempt was a vicious purge of many of the higher-ranking officers in the Alexandrine military, leaving the Egyptian empire in even worse shape than before.
Meanwhile, Constantinople was at this point a shadow of its former glory, but it was still a great city, the greatest in the Balkans, and there were indications it might recover - trade with the Sahu provided cheaper grain than had once been available, and with relative peace between Romans and Bulgars, people had begun to return. It remained well-fortified. Ioannes invested great sums in restoring the Anastasian wall, a possible first line of defense against attack. Further, by retaining an army in Constantinople, he kept a dagger pointed at the Bulgar Khaganate's heart. This allowed him to negotiate a treaty with Khan Kubrat which ceded a series of coastal cities including the port of Heraclea back to the authority of Roman administrators, gaining more through diplomacy than his predecessor had with arms. Twenty years of peace in the Balkans benefitted Rome as much as it did Kubrat, whose attempts to order a state composed of so many chaotic and multicultural elements were often difficult.
The Romans thus turned their full focus against Heshana, abandoning their dreams of recovering the Balkans. Ioannes settled a massive band of Alan refugees, lead by a man named Vanyuk in Cappadocia and the western parts of Roman Armenia, regions heavily depopulated by Mihiragula's savage warfare and Heshana's raiding. These new Alanian settlers deeply angered the Roman populace, but Emperor Ioannes had few options. His own manpower was depleted, and the Alanians were willing and excellent soldiers, capable of more than holding their own against the Eftal raids.
With these fresh troops, he sent the Isaurian commander Dioskoros against Heshana, and the general circumvented the Eftal defenses in Cilicia, striking at Melitene. Edessa, still notionally Heshana's capital, was perilously close, and the Eftal warlord rushed back with a large force of Arab and Eftal cavalry. After a period of indescisive skirmishing, both men realized neither was willing to commit to a potentially costly engagement, and Dioskoros settled in to the siege of Melitene, using Alan raiders to guard his baggage train and keep Heshana from encircling his forces. After thirty three days of siege, the city fell when the Romans within the city rose up against the small Eftal garrison and butchered them.
From Ioannes' standpoint, this was the sort of vital symbolic victory he'd been looking for. The Emperor quickly made peace. Seeing that there was now a dagger pointed at Edessa, Heshana decided to move his court to a more southern and defensible location. Emesa, once a holy city of the Sun, became his new capital. Heshana valued its strategic central position from which he could watch over his Arab vassal-allies and also reside further from the frontier. He now had many subordinates, including an excellent raider in Hujr ibn Wa'il, and, perhaps seeking to temper their ambitions he encouraged them to raid from the uplands of Cilicia into Asia Minor, and these raids, while sometimes countered by Alan horsemen, nevertheless had the effect of pushing the Roman population further towards the larger cities and safer lands of the west, placing ever greater strain on the agriculture of the region.
This shift in population would further contract and centralize the rump Empire. While the Empire's tax revenues remained strong, a critical lack of manpower forced the Ioannes to rely more and more on Sahu and Alanian mercenaries. The now aging Roman general, exhausted by the struggle of holding together his regime against this shifting tide, would take little aggressive action. The Balkan peninsula's loss was all but acknowledged - and while many Romans would dream of a reconquest, it would not come in the life of the beleaguered Basileus. Ioannes would pass away in 607, succeeded at first by a nephew of his, Justin, who would die a few days into his reign.
A pause for breathing
The reign of Khauwashta, son of Sheskh, and his brother Mihiradata was characterized by a remarkable period of peace and internal unity. The sole threat in Khauwashta's reign would prove to be the Gokturk Khaganate, but even they preferred stability along the major overland trade routes, and the brief interruptions of that trade would prove sufficiently costly to their incomes that ultimately in 609, the two states signed an "eternal peace" accompanied by an exchange of hostages.
The burden of ruling even the much diminished Eftal Empire was high. Many of the peoples within it had become accustomed to relative autonomy or dreams of independence. The Eftal had always been somewhat decentralized by nature, never quite giving up their nomadic notions of loyalty, but it was unique to see the many conquered peoples of their empire pressing for increased influence at court. The tradition structure, wherein Eftal tribal loyalties ruled, was disintegrating. Much of Khauwashta's reign was characterized by elaborate ritual and these attempts to distance himself from his subordinates with increasingly elaborate court ceremony.
Khauwashta's brother Mihiradata was indispensible to the regime. Where Khauwashta cultivated semi-divine aloofness, especially to his various vassal Shahs, Mihiradata provided a personal touch, touring the expanse of the Empire so as to hear petitions and address local grievances. Further, he commissioned a series of fortresses in Mesopotamia, knowing that with Osrhoene lost to Heshana their borders were remarkably weakened. Nasibin and Dara had long been the fortified frontier of the empire, but now both cities were in the hands of an oft-unreliable vassal.
Around the Persian Gulf, the wealthy merchant potentates who had been supporters of Akhshunwar Malkha continued to grow both in number and in wealth, and their mystic religion endured even if it took on a uniquely Persian dualism. Ahuramazda and Mahadeva become synonymous in the new cult. The reunification of the Eftal Shahdom made trade safe, and there was sufficient food imports from Mesopotamia to support significant urban growth of the cities there, and allowed many of the refugees who had fled from the Iranian plateau during the wars to remain and find work amongst the urban artisan class. Khauwashta properly recognized these merchants and artisans as indispensible and loyal supporters, rewarding the most important of them with positions in the local government, and making their relatives part of his bureaucracy.
The Avars
Emerging into the historical record as an organized state in the last twenty years of the sixth century, the Avar Khaganate has unclear origins. The communities of Pannonia maintained close contact with the Roman Empire until the loss of the Balkans, but also with the Germanic world of the Franks, and at this crossroads of cultures, the Avars left their bloody mark. Much like the Sahu, the Avar Khagan was part of a relatively small but militarily powerful tribal elite, with various federated tribes, some nomadic, others settled, beneath him. Unlike the Sahu, the Avar displayed little interest in settling down or city-building. They were far less influenced by the Eftal or even the Bulgars.
The Avars were an entirely nomadic people, moving seasonally with herds. The conquest of the Germanic and Roman peoples within Pannonia brought them a permanent base from which to launch attacks, as well as the sort of long-term wealth that could be extracted from a sedentary population, but little more. Their economy was entirely based around plunder and exploitation, but they were experienced warriors and quite capable of maintaining such a system. Their Khagan, Anakuye, lead near-constant raids, pressing south into Illyria and also Italy and the Germanic tribes to their north.
Italy in particular was a profoundly appealing target for them. Striking south, they wreaked havoc along the Po valley, at first in small, disorganized bands, mixed companies of Slavic and Avar warriors. The wealthy monasteries of the region, benefitting from decades of patronage by the Ostrogothic Kings were prime targets, as were the wealthy rural manors populated by a motley mix of Gothic and Roman aristocrats - by this point near unrecognizable in their minimal distinctions. The high-walled cities were at first ignored, but in time as the plunder of each expedition seemed only to increase, the Avars penetrated Italy in greater force, prompting a response by the King.
The Avar invasion of Italy in 604 was reportedly a force of some six thousand cavalry, disparate raiding groups drawn together and reinforced by a central core of the Khagan's companions. Cautious but believing the odds to be in his favor, the Gothic king Recared assembled what forces he could at short notice - still perhaps double what the Avars had raised, with his own large contingent of cavalry. They met the Avars not far from Placentia.
The Khagan was ready. Slaughtering the scouts of the hastily assembled force, he reached the Gothic Rex's camp at dawn, but finding it well fortified and the Goths prepared, he refused to attack. Instead, he arrayed the bulk of his horse in three columns and allowed the Goths to sally from their camp and attempt to drive him off. When they did, their heavy cavalry charged his center, which loosed arrows and retreated, allowing the other two elements to envelop the Gothic cavalry and bleed them badly before being forced to retreat by the Gothic infantry, who formed solid defensive formations "bristling with spears in all directions".
Anakuye 's cavalry archers harassed these formations, but to little effect. Frustrated and hoping that the Goths had been weakened by the arrow volleys, he sent his best cavalry into the center of the Gothic force, where they broke through the Gothic formation and wreaked havoc. Despite being a prepared line of infantry, the death of King Racared and the Avars totally outflanking the semicircular Gothic formation caused the Goths to break hard. The Avars rode down almost the entire force, taking thousands of captives, many of them aristocratic, and killing almost as many, and plundering the camp for additional supplies, armor and equipment.
After Placentia, the Gothic nobility was nearly annihilated. Chaos in the one prosperous realm followed, especially after the ambitious Doux Isidorus in Naples persuaded the local populace to back a bid of his for power in Italy. With the decline of Roman prestige in the East, perhaps he even had Imperial ambitions. Though he had a small force, he needed little more to complete a swift reunification of the southern half of the Pennisula, and from there marched on Rome, where the Senate welcomed him with open arms - here was a fellow Roman, a liberator, and a Nicene Christian. In Rome, as in many cities, the Romans fell upon their Gothic garrisons and slaughtered them when Isidorus arrived outside the gates. Thin on the ground in Southern Italy, the Goths had little recourse. The only response from Ravenna, was to send a prominent member of the royal family, Alaric, with three thousand men. While by some accounts this force actually outnumbered the troops available to Isidorus, it was nowhere near what would be required to besiege Rome, and when Isidorus sallied out, he put the levied force to rout.
Meanwhile, one of the Khagan's nephews, Bati Apsih, rode south and opened negotiations with Isidorus. The era of Gothic Italy was all but over. The peninsula would be in time divided between the Berbers, Romans, and Avars.
(And that's the way the news goes. Stay tuned for even more stories of civilized people being defeated by warlike hordes. Also does anyone have any areas they'd particularly like to see visited?)
Rome holds the line
In 596 Anastasios' Empire signed a peace accord with the Heshana Shah and his Arab allies, acknowledging the territorial losses in exchange for a token yearly tribute - acting as if the Shah was a Roman ally rather than a conqueror, softening the blow to his prestige even as he acknowledged the impossibility of retaking Palestine or Syria at this point. The Autocrat of Egypt knew where his core territories lay, and they were along the rich banks of the Nile, not war-torn Syria. The periphery could be lost, but it would only be temporary - nomadic rulers rose and fell all the time. He could regroup and sweep back the whole Empire that was rightfully his in a period of his foes weakness.
It would never happen. Anastasios died a year later of a disease linked by historians to the Egyptian Plague of 540, and his son, Theodotus took power. A mystic with Miaphysite leanings, Theodotus was profoundly distracted from worldly affairs, regularly fasting to the point of incredible weakness and spurning the attention of women, especially his famously manipulative wife, Maria. He was not popular with the military or the bureaucrats, but the Coptic religious establishment and the common people tended to hold him in high esteem, and both bureaucrats and military alike quickly learned how easy it was to administer affairs without him. However, against the wishes of the military, Theodotus re-affirmed the peace with Heshana, leaving Emperor Ioannes to face the Arabo-Eftal hordes alone.
Around 599 there was an attempted coup attempt by a cabal of ranking Greek officers, but it was foiled by Theodotus' guards and a prominent court faction who had been profiting excellently from Theodotus' detachment from the world. The aftermath of this coup attempt was a vicious purge of many of the higher-ranking officers in the Alexandrine military, leaving the Egyptian empire in even worse shape than before.
Meanwhile, Constantinople was at this point a shadow of its former glory, but it was still a great city, the greatest in the Balkans, and there were indications it might recover - trade with the Sahu provided cheaper grain than had once been available, and with relative peace between Romans and Bulgars, people had begun to return. It remained well-fortified. Ioannes invested great sums in restoring the Anastasian wall, a possible first line of defense against attack. Further, by retaining an army in Constantinople, he kept a dagger pointed at the Bulgar Khaganate's heart. This allowed him to negotiate a treaty with Khan Kubrat which ceded a series of coastal cities including the port of Heraclea back to the authority of Roman administrators, gaining more through diplomacy than his predecessor had with arms. Twenty years of peace in the Balkans benefitted Rome as much as it did Kubrat, whose attempts to order a state composed of so many chaotic and multicultural elements were often difficult.
The Romans thus turned their full focus against Heshana, abandoning their dreams of recovering the Balkans. Ioannes settled a massive band of Alan refugees, lead by a man named Vanyuk in Cappadocia and the western parts of Roman Armenia, regions heavily depopulated by Mihiragula's savage warfare and Heshana's raiding. These new Alanian settlers deeply angered the Roman populace, but Emperor Ioannes had few options. His own manpower was depleted, and the Alanians were willing and excellent soldiers, capable of more than holding their own against the Eftal raids.
With these fresh troops, he sent the Isaurian commander Dioskoros against Heshana, and the general circumvented the Eftal defenses in Cilicia, striking at Melitene. Edessa, still notionally Heshana's capital, was perilously close, and the Eftal warlord rushed back with a large force of Arab and Eftal cavalry. After a period of indescisive skirmishing, both men realized neither was willing to commit to a potentially costly engagement, and Dioskoros settled in to the siege of Melitene, using Alan raiders to guard his baggage train and keep Heshana from encircling his forces. After thirty three days of siege, the city fell when the Romans within the city rose up against the small Eftal garrison and butchered them.
From Ioannes' standpoint, this was the sort of vital symbolic victory he'd been looking for. The Emperor quickly made peace. Seeing that there was now a dagger pointed at Edessa, Heshana decided to move his court to a more southern and defensible location. Emesa, once a holy city of the Sun, became his new capital. Heshana valued its strategic central position from which he could watch over his Arab vassal-allies and also reside further from the frontier. He now had many subordinates, including an excellent raider in Hujr ibn Wa'il, and, perhaps seeking to temper their ambitions he encouraged them to raid from the uplands of Cilicia into Asia Minor, and these raids, while sometimes countered by Alan horsemen, nevertheless had the effect of pushing the Roman population further towards the larger cities and safer lands of the west, placing ever greater strain on the agriculture of the region.
This shift in population would further contract and centralize the rump Empire. While the Empire's tax revenues remained strong, a critical lack of manpower forced the Ioannes to rely more and more on Sahu and Alanian mercenaries. The now aging Roman general, exhausted by the struggle of holding together his regime against this shifting tide, would take little aggressive action. The Balkan peninsula's loss was all but acknowledged - and while many Romans would dream of a reconquest, it would not come in the life of the beleaguered Basileus. Ioannes would pass away in 607, succeeded at first by a nephew of his, Justin, who would die a few days into his reign.
A pause for breathing
The reign of Khauwashta, son of Sheskh, and his brother Mihiradata was characterized by a remarkable period of peace and internal unity. The sole threat in Khauwashta's reign would prove to be the Gokturk Khaganate, but even they preferred stability along the major overland trade routes, and the brief interruptions of that trade would prove sufficiently costly to their incomes that ultimately in 609, the two states signed an "eternal peace" accompanied by an exchange of hostages.
The burden of ruling even the much diminished Eftal Empire was high. Many of the peoples within it had become accustomed to relative autonomy or dreams of independence. The Eftal had always been somewhat decentralized by nature, never quite giving up their nomadic notions of loyalty, but it was unique to see the many conquered peoples of their empire pressing for increased influence at court. The tradition structure, wherein Eftal tribal loyalties ruled, was disintegrating. Much of Khauwashta's reign was characterized by elaborate ritual and these attempts to distance himself from his subordinates with increasingly elaborate court ceremony.
Khauwashta's brother Mihiradata was indispensible to the regime. Where Khauwashta cultivated semi-divine aloofness, especially to his various vassal Shahs, Mihiradata provided a personal touch, touring the expanse of the Empire so as to hear petitions and address local grievances. Further, he commissioned a series of fortresses in Mesopotamia, knowing that with Osrhoene lost to Heshana their borders were remarkably weakened. Nasibin and Dara had long been the fortified frontier of the empire, but now both cities were in the hands of an oft-unreliable vassal.
Around the Persian Gulf, the wealthy merchant potentates who had been supporters of Akhshunwar Malkha continued to grow both in number and in wealth, and their mystic religion endured even if it took on a uniquely Persian dualism. Ahuramazda and Mahadeva become synonymous in the new cult. The reunification of the Eftal Shahdom made trade safe, and there was sufficient food imports from Mesopotamia to support significant urban growth of the cities there, and allowed many of the refugees who had fled from the Iranian plateau during the wars to remain and find work amongst the urban artisan class. Khauwashta properly recognized these merchants and artisans as indispensible and loyal supporters, rewarding the most important of them with positions in the local government, and making their relatives part of his bureaucracy.
The Avars
Emerging into the historical record as an organized state in the last twenty years of the sixth century, the Avar Khaganate has unclear origins. The communities of Pannonia maintained close contact with the Roman Empire until the loss of the Balkans, but also with the Germanic world of the Franks, and at this crossroads of cultures, the Avars left their bloody mark. Much like the Sahu, the Avar Khagan was part of a relatively small but militarily powerful tribal elite, with various federated tribes, some nomadic, others settled, beneath him. Unlike the Sahu, the Avar displayed little interest in settling down or city-building. They were far less influenced by the Eftal or even the Bulgars.
The Avars were an entirely nomadic people, moving seasonally with herds. The conquest of the Germanic and Roman peoples within Pannonia brought them a permanent base from which to launch attacks, as well as the sort of long-term wealth that could be extracted from a sedentary population, but little more. Their economy was entirely based around plunder and exploitation, but they were experienced warriors and quite capable of maintaining such a system. Their Khagan, Anakuye, lead near-constant raids, pressing south into Illyria and also Italy and the Germanic tribes to their north.
Italy in particular was a profoundly appealing target for them. Striking south, they wreaked havoc along the Po valley, at first in small, disorganized bands, mixed companies of Slavic and Avar warriors. The wealthy monasteries of the region, benefitting from decades of patronage by the Ostrogothic Kings were prime targets, as were the wealthy rural manors populated by a motley mix of Gothic and Roman aristocrats - by this point near unrecognizable in their minimal distinctions. The high-walled cities were at first ignored, but in time as the plunder of each expedition seemed only to increase, the Avars penetrated Italy in greater force, prompting a response by the King.
The Avar invasion of Italy in 604 was reportedly a force of some six thousand cavalry, disparate raiding groups drawn together and reinforced by a central core of the Khagan's companions. Cautious but believing the odds to be in his favor, the Gothic king Recared assembled what forces he could at short notice - still perhaps double what the Avars had raised, with his own large contingent of cavalry. They met the Avars not far from Placentia.
The Khagan was ready. Slaughtering the scouts of the hastily assembled force, he reached the Gothic Rex's camp at dawn, but finding it well fortified and the Goths prepared, he refused to attack. Instead, he arrayed the bulk of his horse in three columns and allowed the Goths to sally from their camp and attempt to drive him off. When they did, their heavy cavalry charged his center, which loosed arrows and retreated, allowing the other two elements to envelop the Gothic cavalry and bleed them badly before being forced to retreat by the Gothic infantry, who formed solid defensive formations "bristling with spears in all directions".
Anakuye 's cavalry archers harassed these formations, but to little effect. Frustrated and hoping that the Goths had been weakened by the arrow volleys, he sent his best cavalry into the center of the Gothic force, where they broke through the Gothic formation and wreaked havoc. Despite being a prepared line of infantry, the death of King Racared and the Avars totally outflanking the semicircular Gothic formation caused the Goths to break hard. The Avars rode down almost the entire force, taking thousands of captives, many of them aristocratic, and killing almost as many, and plundering the camp for additional supplies, armor and equipment.
After Placentia, the Gothic nobility was nearly annihilated. Chaos in the one prosperous realm followed, especially after the ambitious Doux Isidorus in Naples persuaded the local populace to back a bid of his for power in Italy. With the decline of Roman prestige in the East, perhaps he even had Imperial ambitions. Though he had a small force, he needed little more to complete a swift reunification of the southern half of the Pennisula, and from there marched on Rome, where the Senate welcomed him with open arms - here was a fellow Roman, a liberator, and a Nicene Christian. In Rome, as in many cities, the Romans fell upon their Gothic garrisons and slaughtered them when Isidorus arrived outside the gates. Thin on the ground in Southern Italy, the Goths had little recourse. The only response from Ravenna, was to send a prominent member of the royal family, Alaric, with three thousand men. While by some accounts this force actually outnumbered the troops available to Isidorus, it was nowhere near what would be required to besiege Rome, and when Isidorus sallied out, he put the levied force to rout.
Meanwhile, one of the Khagan's nephews, Bati Apsih, rode south and opened negotiations with Isidorus. The era of Gothic Italy was all but over. The peninsula would be in time divided between the Berbers, Romans, and Avars.
(And that's the way the news goes. Stay tuned for even more stories of civilized people being defeated by warlike hordes. Also does anyone have any areas they'd particularly like to see visited?)
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Red Sea
The Great Raid
Shah Heshana fell sick in early 617. An adventurer who had carved out his expansive levantine dominion at the expense of one of the most powerful Empires in the world, he would be lucky to die in his sleep, surrounded by his extended family. And yet as his death loomed ever closer, his closest followers became nervous. His Eftal-born wife Natigaya had borne him a son, now seventeen years of age - a year older than when Heshana began his career as a bandit. Named Syavush, the boy showed promise. And yet the Eftal had no law governing succession, and Heshana seemed loathe to speak on the matter. His illness robbed him of his voice and quickly vultures moved in.
Standing in Syavush's way was the aging but brilliant administrator Narsai bar Aprem, a childhood companion of Heshana's and, when his friend was away, the de facto ruler of the state. Narsai favored a cousin of Heshana's, a captain in the Shah's army by the name of Nanivadh for rulership. He approached Nanivadh and brought him before the Shah, seeking to have the young man named co-Shah before Heshana passed away. He was unsuccessful. On his arrival at many-templed Emesa, the Shah had already passed away, and Natigaya had outmaneuvered him. Marrying Syavush to a daughter of Hujr ibn Wa'il, her son now had the acclamation of his father's polyglot army. According to the Roman historians, he quickly won their allegiance and love through a dramatic display of mourning and two months of lavish funeral games. Happening contemporaneously with a vast expansion of Emesa into a proper royal capital, it was not long before the plunder-laden coffers of the Shahdom began to strain. Coupled with an extravagant tribute to the Eftal in the east, the situation could not last.
It was Narsai who brought this to the young Shah's attention. Further, their truce with the various Roman states would not last forever. The past twenty years of Theodotus' reign had seen Heshana's Eftal cheerfully end their tribute without a response while the Emperor's corrupt advisors blundered from mistake to mistake. From the opulent palace-city of al-Jabiyah, Hujr could see an opportunity, and the two aging advisors set aside their differences and recommended that the young Shah cement his reign with the prize of Egypt.
It was not improbable that Narsai had ulterior motives. A failed campaign by Syavush might see the boy dethroned in short order, paving the way for Nanivadh to summarily take power. Further, whatever intelligence Narsai had suggested that the remaining orthodox elements of the army were distinctly displeased with the state of affairs in the capital.
Over the years since Theodotus' purge, they had not had any reason to love their Autocrat, and they had in secret appealed to Basileus Justin that he come south and liberate Egypt from the Monophysite Theodotus. Justin however, had more conservative ambitions, and saw in Egypt much potential risk and a sink for soldiers he could ill afford. While the soldiers did not turn to the pagan Syavush or the heretic Arabs for aid either, their poor performance in the invasion of Egypt is easily explained by a combination of poor leadership and low morale.
The army Theodotus assembled to stop Syavush's march on Egypt was a mixed bag. The core of his force were veterans but hugely apathetic to his regime. His rather more loyal native Egyptian soldiers were still not wholly impressed by him, and he was forced to command the force in person for lack of trustworthy commanders who wouldn't alienate even further some part of his army. His wife accompanied him as well, much to the derision of his men.
By the time Syavush marched on Egypt, the situation would have been unrecognizable to Anastasios. The Roman coastal cities, even the great fortress of Gaza, fared very poorly. Their new constructions and defenses were torn down by trained siege engineers. While Syavusha' s force had a strong component of light cavalry recruited from Arabia and the western Eftal and Alans, his infantry resembled in dress and equipment the Romans they so commonly fought. In his latter years, Heshana and Hujr had even trained a unit of elite heavy cavalry in the manner of Cataphracts.
Theodotus would meet Syavusha at Pelousion. The Nile was not due to flood for some time, and at the advice of one of his few trusted generals, Eudoxios he allowed Syavusha to take the city and cross the river. The autocrat wagered that a swift, decisive battle would be preferable to a protracted campaign. Showing confidence in this situation would raise the morale of his troops and rumor had it that Syavush had prepared for the long haul, bringing a vast supply train across the desert at great expense. Both men had wagered everything.
The Romans collapsed with remarkable swiftness once battle was joined. The veteran Greeks on Theodotus' left were outmanuevered by Hujr's swift cavalry and suffered grievous losses. As Syavush brought up his heaviest cavalry he personally lead a charge straight at Theodotus' command, but it was blunted and the young Shah barely escaped with his life. Some historians, most typically those who seek to paint Narsai as a scheming and disloyal subordinate have claimed this was part of a plan to secure the throne, but in any event Syavush survived, and it was Theodotus who would be betrayed. Eudoxios led his contingent, primarily Egyptian, from the field in good order without even engaging. A legate by the name of Paulos followed suit, taking the cavalry from the field and allowing the Eftal cavalry to surround Theodotus' remaining forces.
The collapse of the Roman line was inevitable. Soon after, the collapse of Roman Egypt followed. Syavush's army plundered up and down the Nile, and Eudoxios surrendered Alexandria without a fight, having negotiated lenient terms for the treatment of the Egyptian people. These terms were at least partially followed, but in many cases they were not. The wealth of the city, especially what remained of its famous library, was taken back to Emesa to further enrich the capital. The Patriarch fled to Cyprus, but many of the common people were not so lucky. It would take a further two years to finish mopping up all resistance, at which point Syavush left all of Egypt in the hands of Hujr and rode north to Emesa.
As opposed to Syria and Palestine and the general Eftal practice of settling their kinsmen in conquered territory, Syavush, perhaps feeling overstretched, simply levied taxes upon the already plundered territory. Garrisons were established, and cleverly Syavush ensured that these were drawn from various rivals of Hujr, preventing his aging father-in-law from exercising effective military control of the province in the most subtle way possible. The newly-minted Shah of Egypt and Syria had enriched himself and proven a force to be reckoned with - and yet his vast new territory would prove tough to hold. Even those Arabs and Eftal under his command who worshiped Christ were rarely considered anything but heterodox, and the majority of Eftal and Alans were still various forms of "pagan" in the eyes of the Copts. Syavush, in the tradition of the Eftal Shahs, was tolerant of all faiths, if sometimes ignorant of their particulars.
Red Sea trade and the Savahila
Perhaps the greatest value to maintaining control of Egypt lay in controlling one of the two major trade lanes between orient and occident - and the only lane not within the hands of the often chaotic Eftal Shahdom. In the era of Anastasios and Theodotus, Egypt had remained wealthy on both its own produce and this elaborate trade network, stretching from the Cushitic city states of Savahila in the far south and Al-Komr (Madagascar) to the remaining trading centers of the Mediterranean.
Chief among the cities of Savahila was white-walled Shangani, a federate of Awalastan. Awalastan was in the year 600 still ruled by the enigmatic Nijara Shah, an on-again off-again rival of the hegemonic Hadhrami power in the south. From time to time the Awali would patronize Makkah and al-Ta'if in their raids on Hadhrami caravans or try to incite rebellion amongst the Jewish population of Aden, as it was generally to the profit of all to avoid open war. Through the sixth century, both powers recognized their part in the complex network of trade which brought profit to both - allowing the Hadhrami to maintain their narrow hydraulic hegemony and the Awalastanis their wars against Axum. But by the third decade of the seventh century, this balance would change.
Despite their incredible early successes under Kaosha, Awalastan in 630 was a state on the decline, pressured by the more numerous and agriculturally prosperous Axumites, and slowly cut out of their share trade by the more savvy Hadhrami merchants. Cities such as Amoud and Shangani would prosper, but they would do so as clients of Axum or the Hadhramut. The great cosmopolitan libraries and universities Amoud would later become known for would develop under the patronage of Hadhrami merchant families, not the insular, warlike cult of Sattiga's interpretation of "Mahadeva". And yet the cult's influence would nevertheless endure in the martial spirit of the peoples who dwelled outside the city's walls, enough that Awali mercenaries became highly prized in the armies of the "civilized" states nearby.
The power vacuum left by the collapse of Awalistan would serve the interests of the Eftal Shahs in distant Susa, whose machinations and concurrent reduction of taxes on merchants saw the oversea lanes decline, leading towards the rise of the Banu Thaqif, who in 624 conquered the pilgrimage site of Makkah in the name of a god/goddess our Persian sources call Alilat or Mihir. Dominating both overland trade and pilgrimage, they became fabulously wealthy and more brazen, striking deep into Hadhrami territory on raids for slaves and plunder.
The Thaqif would in time become allies of Syavush's Shahdom to the north, a pact which would only further strengthen their overland trading network. Poets patronized by the Thaqif, including the famous ibn Sakhr would travel north into Palestine, bringing Arabic poetry into vogue in the garden courts of al-Jabiyah, a place ibn Sakhr would compare to heaven itself. It was the beginning of the end of centralized Hadhrami hegemony. As the Eftal began to withdraw their patronage, even the long-monopolized trade in Arabic spices began to slide under the control of petty, local powers. The Malik became more and more a figurehead for influential local families jockeying for influence between the great powers, and the potential wealth of the Savahila cities rendered cities such as Shangani more important entrepots in any case. The Hadhramut Kingdom would not fall so much as peter out, replaced by a more competitive and decentralized system which did not bring the same degree of royal revenue, but enriched a larger percentage of the population at the expense of military power projection.
In the far south, in cities such as Rhapta, Tanga, Kintradoni, and Mzishima, (the last two roughly OTL Mombasa and Dar es Salaam) Indian culture was spreading much as it had through Southeast Asia, Baktria, and to a lesser extent eastern Persia. In time the Arab and Indian merchants had allowed a loose but nevertheless enforced caste system to develop, separating themselves from the indigenous peoples, who themselves had long had distant links to the peoples of Southeast Asia. Ruled by local oligarchs, the "Malikiya" these city-states would prosper and develop into a loose confederation of sorts, lead by a Mzishima merchant named Citrasena.
Across the sea, in an island called by its inhabitants Izao Riaka (but by the Arabs Al-Komr) the Austronesian peoples had prospered - trade had allowed them to develop a far more complex agricultural package on the islands. Cattle and citrus fruit allowed a more balanced diet but only contributed to the deforestation of the island and the near-elimination of its megafauna, who among other things were traded as novelties to the courts of potentates in far away Susa and Pataliputra. It was an era of population growth and prosperity, but with this prosperity came consolidation. One tribe was becoming predominant: known as the Sakalava, the people of the long valleys, they had been fierce raiders in the time before the coming of the foriegners across the great water. The Sakalava had long been the bane of the more prosperous highland tribes, but in time would prove to benefit most from the introduction of cattle and, from this prosperity would overrun most of the highlands, establishing a loose hegemony and tribute from the scattered other tribes. As part of this tribute came slaves, and thus the Sakalava found their way into the world of global trade developing around them. Young men of the Merina tribe found their way as far as Sopara, where they formed the elite bodyguard of the Raja there.
Shah Heshana fell sick in early 617. An adventurer who had carved out his expansive levantine dominion at the expense of one of the most powerful Empires in the world, he would be lucky to die in his sleep, surrounded by his extended family. And yet as his death loomed ever closer, his closest followers became nervous. His Eftal-born wife Natigaya had borne him a son, now seventeen years of age - a year older than when Heshana began his career as a bandit. Named Syavush, the boy showed promise. And yet the Eftal had no law governing succession, and Heshana seemed loathe to speak on the matter. His illness robbed him of his voice and quickly vultures moved in.
Standing in Syavush's way was the aging but brilliant administrator Narsai bar Aprem, a childhood companion of Heshana's and, when his friend was away, the de facto ruler of the state. Narsai favored a cousin of Heshana's, a captain in the Shah's army by the name of Nanivadh for rulership. He approached Nanivadh and brought him before the Shah, seeking to have the young man named co-Shah before Heshana passed away. He was unsuccessful. On his arrival at many-templed Emesa, the Shah had already passed away, and Natigaya had outmaneuvered him. Marrying Syavush to a daughter of Hujr ibn Wa'il, her son now had the acclamation of his father's polyglot army. According to the Roman historians, he quickly won their allegiance and love through a dramatic display of mourning and two months of lavish funeral games. Happening contemporaneously with a vast expansion of Emesa into a proper royal capital, it was not long before the plunder-laden coffers of the Shahdom began to strain. Coupled with an extravagant tribute to the Eftal in the east, the situation could not last.
It was Narsai who brought this to the young Shah's attention. Further, their truce with the various Roman states would not last forever. The past twenty years of Theodotus' reign had seen Heshana's Eftal cheerfully end their tribute without a response while the Emperor's corrupt advisors blundered from mistake to mistake. From the opulent palace-city of al-Jabiyah, Hujr could see an opportunity, and the two aging advisors set aside their differences and recommended that the young Shah cement his reign with the prize of Egypt.
It was not improbable that Narsai had ulterior motives. A failed campaign by Syavush might see the boy dethroned in short order, paving the way for Nanivadh to summarily take power. Further, whatever intelligence Narsai had suggested that the remaining orthodox elements of the army were distinctly displeased with the state of affairs in the capital.
Over the years since Theodotus' purge, they had not had any reason to love their Autocrat, and they had in secret appealed to Basileus Justin that he come south and liberate Egypt from the Monophysite Theodotus. Justin however, had more conservative ambitions, and saw in Egypt much potential risk and a sink for soldiers he could ill afford. While the soldiers did not turn to the pagan Syavush or the heretic Arabs for aid either, their poor performance in the invasion of Egypt is easily explained by a combination of poor leadership and low morale.
The army Theodotus assembled to stop Syavush's march on Egypt was a mixed bag. The core of his force were veterans but hugely apathetic to his regime. His rather more loyal native Egyptian soldiers were still not wholly impressed by him, and he was forced to command the force in person for lack of trustworthy commanders who wouldn't alienate even further some part of his army. His wife accompanied him as well, much to the derision of his men.
By the time Syavush marched on Egypt, the situation would have been unrecognizable to Anastasios. The Roman coastal cities, even the great fortress of Gaza, fared very poorly. Their new constructions and defenses were torn down by trained siege engineers. While Syavusha' s force had a strong component of light cavalry recruited from Arabia and the western Eftal and Alans, his infantry resembled in dress and equipment the Romans they so commonly fought. In his latter years, Heshana and Hujr had even trained a unit of elite heavy cavalry in the manner of Cataphracts.
Theodotus would meet Syavusha at Pelousion. The Nile was not due to flood for some time, and at the advice of one of his few trusted generals, Eudoxios he allowed Syavusha to take the city and cross the river. The autocrat wagered that a swift, decisive battle would be preferable to a protracted campaign. Showing confidence in this situation would raise the morale of his troops and rumor had it that Syavush had prepared for the long haul, bringing a vast supply train across the desert at great expense. Both men had wagered everything.
The Romans collapsed with remarkable swiftness once battle was joined. The veteran Greeks on Theodotus' left were outmanuevered by Hujr's swift cavalry and suffered grievous losses. As Syavush brought up his heaviest cavalry he personally lead a charge straight at Theodotus' command, but it was blunted and the young Shah barely escaped with his life. Some historians, most typically those who seek to paint Narsai as a scheming and disloyal subordinate have claimed this was part of a plan to secure the throne, but in any event Syavush survived, and it was Theodotus who would be betrayed. Eudoxios led his contingent, primarily Egyptian, from the field in good order without even engaging. A legate by the name of Paulos followed suit, taking the cavalry from the field and allowing the Eftal cavalry to surround Theodotus' remaining forces.
The collapse of the Roman line was inevitable. Soon after, the collapse of Roman Egypt followed. Syavush's army plundered up and down the Nile, and Eudoxios surrendered Alexandria without a fight, having negotiated lenient terms for the treatment of the Egyptian people. These terms were at least partially followed, but in many cases they were not. The wealth of the city, especially what remained of its famous library, was taken back to Emesa to further enrich the capital. The Patriarch fled to Cyprus, but many of the common people were not so lucky. It would take a further two years to finish mopping up all resistance, at which point Syavush left all of Egypt in the hands of Hujr and rode north to Emesa.
As opposed to Syria and Palestine and the general Eftal practice of settling their kinsmen in conquered territory, Syavush, perhaps feeling overstretched, simply levied taxes upon the already plundered territory. Garrisons were established, and cleverly Syavush ensured that these were drawn from various rivals of Hujr, preventing his aging father-in-law from exercising effective military control of the province in the most subtle way possible. The newly-minted Shah of Egypt and Syria had enriched himself and proven a force to be reckoned with - and yet his vast new territory would prove tough to hold. Even those Arabs and Eftal under his command who worshiped Christ were rarely considered anything but heterodox, and the majority of Eftal and Alans were still various forms of "pagan" in the eyes of the Copts. Syavush, in the tradition of the Eftal Shahs, was tolerant of all faiths, if sometimes ignorant of their particulars.
Red Sea trade and the Savahila
Perhaps the greatest value to maintaining control of Egypt lay in controlling one of the two major trade lanes between orient and occident - and the only lane not within the hands of the often chaotic Eftal Shahdom. In the era of Anastasios and Theodotus, Egypt had remained wealthy on both its own produce and this elaborate trade network, stretching from the Cushitic city states of Savahila in the far south and Al-Komr (Madagascar) to the remaining trading centers of the Mediterranean.
Chief among the cities of Savahila was white-walled Shangani, a federate of Awalastan. Awalastan was in the year 600 still ruled by the enigmatic Nijara Shah, an on-again off-again rival of the hegemonic Hadhrami power in the south. From time to time the Awali would patronize Makkah and al-Ta'if in their raids on Hadhrami caravans or try to incite rebellion amongst the Jewish population of Aden, as it was generally to the profit of all to avoid open war. Through the sixth century, both powers recognized their part in the complex network of trade which brought profit to both - allowing the Hadhrami to maintain their narrow hydraulic hegemony and the Awalastanis their wars against Axum. But by the third decade of the seventh century, this balance would change.
Despite their incredible early successes under Kaosha, Awalastan in 630 was a state on the decline, pressured by the more numerous and agriculturally prosperous Axumites, and slowly cut out of their share trade by the more savvy Hadhrami merchants. Cities such as Amoud and Shangani would prosper, but they would do so as clients of Axum or the Hadhramut. The great cosmopolitan libraries and universities Amoud would later become known for would develop under the patronage of Hadhrami merchant families, not the insular, warlike cult of Sattiga's interpretation of "Mahadeva". And yet the cult's influence would nevertheless endure in the martial spirit of the peoples who dwelled outside the city's walls, enough that Awali mercenaries became highly prized in the armies of the "civilized" states nearby.
The power vacuum left by the collapse of Awalistan would serve the interests of the Eftal Shahs in distant Susa, whose machinations and concurrent reduction of taxes on merchants saw the oversea lanes decline, leading towards the rise of the Banu Thaqif, who in 624 conquered the pilgrimage site of Makkah in the name of a god/goddess our Persian sources call Alilat or Mihir. Dominating both overland trade and pilgrimage, they became fabulously wealthy and more brazen, striking deep into Hadhrami territory on raids for slaves and plunder.
The Thaqif would in time become allies of Syavush's Shahdom to the north, a pact which would only further strengthen their overland trading network. Poets patronized by the Thaqif, including the famous ibn Sakhr would travel north into Palestine, bringing Arabic poetry into vogue in the garden courts of al-Jabiyah, a place ibn Sakhr would compare to heaven itself. It was the beginning of the end of centralized Hadhrami hegemony. As the Eftal began to withdraw their patronage, even the long-monopolized trade in Arabic spices began to slide under the control of petty, local powers. The Malik became more and more a figurehead for influential local families jockeying for influence between the great powers, and the potential wealth of the Savahila cities rendered cities such as Shangani more important entrepots in any case. The Hadhramut Kingdom would not fall so much as peter out, replaced by a more competitive and decentralized system which did not bring the same degree of royal revenue, but enriched a larger percentage of the population at the expense of military power projection.
In the far south, in cities such as Rhapta, Tanga, Kintradoni, and Mzishima, (the last two roughly OTL Mombasa and Dar es Salaam) Indian culture was spreading much as it had through Southeast Asia, Baktria, and to a lesser extent eastern Persia. In time the Arab and Indian merchants had allowed a loose but nevertheless enforced caste system to develop, separating themselves from the indigenous peoples, who themselves had long had distant links to the peoples of Southeast Asia. Ruled by local oligarchs, the "Malikiya" these city-states would prosper and develop into a loose confederation of sorts, lead by a Mzishima merchant named Citrasena.
Across the sea, in an island called by its inhabitants Izao Riaka (but by the Arabs Al-Komr) the Austronesian peoples had prospered - trade had allowed them to develop a far more complex agricultural package on the islands. Cattle and citrus fruit allowed a more balanced diet but only contributed to the deforestation of the island and the near-elimination of its megafauna, who among other things were traded as novelties to the courts of potentates in far away Susa and Pataliputra. It was an era of population growth and prosperity, but with this prosperity came consolidation. One tribe was becoming predominant: known as the Sakalava, the people of the long valleys, they had been fierce raiders in the time before the coming of the foriegners across the great water. The Sakalava had long been the bane of the more prosperous highland tribes, but in time would prove to benefit most from the introduction of cattle and, from this prosperity would overrun most of the highlands, establishing a loose hegemony and tribute from the scattered other tribes. As part of this tribute came slaves, and thus the Sakalava found their way into the world of global trade developing around them. Young men of the Merina tribe found their way as far as Sopara, where they formed the elite bodyguard of the Raja there.
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A shoddy (it doesn't have enough landmarks for me to figure out if I put cities in the right place) map of the world as of the latest post. India will become more fleshed out as soon as I can do some research. And maybe I'll finally get around to discussing briefly what's going on in Rouran-ruled northern China, or figuring out if the Liang Dynasty is still around.
Primary sources, especially accurate ones, are few and far between, (well, there's the Periplus of the Red Sea) but let me just say there's a reason I go into rather sparse detail there and rely on ahistorical events such as Kaosha's conquest or more vigorous Indian ocean trade spurred on by the Eftal-patronized Hadhramaut for ideas on what to do. I've been able to find enough random books and articles to piece together a vague summary.
The names are generally warped versions of names either from the periplus or historical names from the region itself. Most every single accurate name I've been able to find in the region came after the founding of Islam, and thus I'm loathe to use them. It gets easier as you go because more and more things are entirely invented, but the struggle then becomes "did I invent this thing plausibly" rather than "is this event plausible for this historical figure". Especially at this juncture as actual historical figures are few and far between. (Thanks butterfly effect!)
Also I've been fortunate enough to accumulate a lot of period-accurate maps, which really helps me in visualizing Persia and India and the Mediterranean.
First mention of a universal ruler
The Sahu revisited
In the north, the Xasar-Sahu state was in the beginning of a golden age of sorts. Ayadhar's semi-mythic legacy of statebuilding had become a centralized reality. Cities such as Apaxauda and Tangrabat which once had been little more than fortified trade hubs now hosted significant urban populations, fed by the bounty of the Don and Volga rivers expanded by royal irrigation projects. In the half-century after Ayadhar's death in 598, the Sahu became more and more capable of exerting their influence on the various steppe peoples and the Greek colonies beneath their hegemony, transforming tribute to direct administration. Part of the secret of this dominion lay in the influence of Persian merchants, who in time would become colonists and no small part of the urban makeup of these new cities.
But what was the trade that so enriched the Sahu, and allowed them to construct these great cities and monasteries? In no small part it was a blossoming slave trade, as the eastern Slavs were transported south to work estates in Egypt, Asia, and Mesopotamia. Decades of near-constant war had left even the most populous regions depopulated, and also at least among the Eftal had created a new victorious aristocracy in dire need of laborers. And thus the vast steppe and forests of Eastern Europe became an integral part of the growing Eurasian trade network.
While the more mercantile Greek colonists of the Crimea remained and prospered from this arrangement, living in harmony with these relative newcomers as they had for centuries, the Crimean Goths fought back. After the Kutrigurs went south, the Goths had enjoyed relative independence from both the Romans and the steppe tribes. This situation was not to last. Shah Qarajar rode south in 618 and, with the help of Roman engineers he besieged and took fort after fort from the Goths, massacring or selling them into slavery en masse. By 624, the Sahu Shah had appointed a "satrap" over the region out of his own family, and the region was subdued. The Gothic population would slowly merge into that of the Greek colonists and would never again trouble the Sahu.
The Sahu, like the Eftal, were a tolerant people, but Buddhism prospered under their patronage to a far greater extent than Christianity. Despite the traditional staying power of Christianity, and its resilience to persecution, the Sahu remained part of the Indo-Iranian world, and part of a worldview which was more Eftal than Roman. The philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, adapted for the steppe, allowed Anahita, Mihir and other Iranic gods to retain their traditional places of importance. While some important subjects, of the Sahu were Christian and Manichaean, neither of these religions would be able to gain the patronage of the tribal elites whose carefully structured alliances and river tolls dominated Sahu society. Christianity remained the faith of the influential Greek minority and some of the remaining Alan tribes.
Rise of the Universal Ruler - a tale of two Rajas
Maharaja Visvajita of Purushapura had every reason to feel content with his legacy. The past few decades had seen the Johiyava expand their power by leaps and bounds. The wily Eftal warlord Gokharna had passed away, taking an unlucky arrow in the eye fighting the Qangli Turks. He had died instantly, and in his wake the Gandharan Johiyava had only pressed their power further into Baktria, arriving at a sort of natural limit to their westward expansion. In 602, Sabuhrakan had fallen into their sphere of influence, and in the years that followed his brother had taken the cities along the Hari river, most notably Pusang.
And yet this period of peace and prosperity bred complacency. Along the Gangetic plain, a new power was rising. The scattered, fragmented states of the Indo-Gangetic plain would become slowly unified by a new, ambitious ruler named Rajyavardhana who styled himself as Chakravartin, or Universal Ruler. Tracing his origin back from one of many petty Rajas, his rise to power was meteoric. Through shrewd alliances he found himself the Maharaja of Pataliputra, displacing a feeble Gupta ruler whose territory barely extended beyond the capital, but his real capacity lay in military tactics, leading a small army to victory after victory. By the age of eighteen he had conquered Gauda and Kamarupa. By twenty he had unified the petty states of the Ganges and made Sakala on the Indus his westernmost frontier.
His rise was unprecedented in Indian history. Empires rose and fell across the subcontinent, but rarely had one ascended so quickly. While many of his contemporaries were quick to attribute Rajyavardhana's victories purely to his own greatness, the truth is rather more complex. Rajyavardhana was a talented and capable commander and an adept ruler, whose personal charisma did wonders for his power. But he also was able to hijack and restore the failing Gupta state, and many of his nearby rivals were relatively small, and did not band together against him until it was too late. Any notion that Rajyavardhana could not be defeated is little more than an illusion. After his meteoric rise he had trouble sustaining his momentum. His state further would live in the shadow of the more prosperous Gupta, and he spent little time attempting to revitalize the economy, preferring to remain constantly on some grand conquest or other.
The Chalukya would be his true rival, and despite early successes, here Rajyavardhana would meet his match. Maharaja Pulakesi ruled a large empire straddling the Deccan, and after Rajyavardhana's conquest of Gujarat in 622, he was spurred into action. The remarkable chain of conquests ended. In 625, the "Universal Ruler" limped back to Pataliputra and would never again mount another campaign into the Deccan. Four years later, he would march on Takasila, one of the great cities of the Johiyava. An aging Visvajita met him in battle, and despite what our Eftal sources describe as an uninspired strategy, Visvajita was able to wear down Rajyavardhana with mercenary Turkic and Eftal horse-archers and finally charge home with his own fierce cavalry. The intercession of Rajyavardhana's elephants saved his army from a rout, driving off the Johiyava cavalry. In yeas following this battle, Sindh and Punjab fell into his grasp, but Takasila remained in the hands of the Johiyava.
The Chakravartin was wounded in battle however, and the last ten years of his reign (until 639) would prove tedious to a man whose life had been warfare. He was said to have travelled his Empire extensively, and given up some of his more martial inclinations, but he would ultimately die relatively young, leaving a vast and unwieldy Empire for his young nephew (having never had children of his own.) On account of the influence of his sister, he was a great patron of esoteric gurus which he encountered on his travels, and patronized both Buddhists and Vedanta scholars heavily.
Replacing the Gupta as he did, Rajyavardhana is often seen as the transition point between periods in Indian history, a conqueror emblematic of the Imperial era to come. And yet for all his rapid campaigns, and his reunification of the Indo-Gangetic plain, little changed culturally or socially as a result of his reunification. Since the Saka there had been no great flow of foreign culture or ideas into India. The Eftal had only a passing impact on the vast subcontinent. Those changes happening to India amounted to a bloody restoration of the Gupta-era status quo, except on the coasts - coasts which remained on the periphery of his river-valley focused Empire. If one was to look at the world as Rajyavardhana saw it from his death bed, one would barely see the new India that was to come.
(And that's the way alternate history version of Harsha happens. A restoration of the Gupta Empire in a sense, but ultimately less interesting, if only because the "Sveta Huna" never penetrated the subcontinent. Instead you have a Hindu dynasty projecting power out of Afghanistan and India remains rather more insular and rather less feudal that IOTL. But society is seriously changing along the coasts, and we've successfully butterflied the rise of feudalism and also the Islamic invasions, which should only do good things for the prosperity of India.
Y'all may have started noticing that part of this timeline is a reaction to how many "no Islam, Christianity spreads everywhere" timelines exist. Ideally I'm going to try to avoid wanking any single religion in this timeline, and especially not some of the weird syncretic cults I've made up. In the next post we'll look in depth at Nestorian Mesopotamia and Egypt under her Eftal-Arab conquerors, where Christianity still remains strong. But for the foreseeable future, it doesn't look like Christianity is going to make it to the steppe in force.)
In the north, the Xasar-Sahu state was in the beginning of a golden age of sorts. Ayadhar's semi-mythic legacy of statebuilding had become a centralized reality. Cities such as Apaxauda and Tangrabat which once had been little more than fortified trade hubs now hosted significant urban populations, fed by the bounty of the Don and Volga rivers expanded by royal irrigation projects. In the half-century after Ayadhar's death in 598, the Sahu became more and more capable of exerting their influence on the various steppe peoples and the Greek colonies beneath their hegemony, transforming tribute to direct administration. Part of the secret of this dominion lay in the influence of Persian merchants, who in time would become colonists and no small part of the urban makeup of these new cities.
But what was the trade that so enriched the Sahu, and allowed them to construct these great cities and monasteries? In no small part it was a blossoming slave trade, as the eastern Slavs were transported south to work estates in Egypt, Asia, and Mesopotamia. Decades of near-constant war had left even the most populous regions depopulated, and also at least among the Eftal had created a new victorious aristocracy in dire need of laborers. And thus the vast steppe and forests of Eastern Europe became an integral part of the growing Eurasian trade network.
While the more mercantile Greek colonists of the Crimea remained and prospered from this arrangement, living in harmony with these relative newcomers as they had for centuries, the Crimean Goths fought back. After the Kutrigurs went south, the Goths had enjoyed relative independence from both the Romans and the steppe tribes. This situation was not to last. Shah Qarajar rode south in 618 and, with the help of Roman engineers he besieged and took fort after fort from the Goths, massacring or selling them into slavery en masse. By 624, the Sahu Shah had appointed a "satrap" over the region out of his own family, and the region was subdued. The Gothic population would slowly merge into that of the Greek colonists and would never again trouble the Sahu.
The Sahu, like the Eftal, were a tolerant people, but Buddhism prospered under their patronage to a far greater extent than Christianity. Despite the traditional staying power of Christianity, and its resilience to persecution, the Sahu remained part of the Indo-Iranian world, and part of a worldview which was more Eftal than Roman. The philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, adapted for the steppe, allowed Anahita, Mihir and other Iranic gods to retain their traditional places of importance. While some important subjects, of the Sahu were Christian and Manichaean, neither of these religions would be able to gain the patronage of the tribal elites whose carefully structured alliances and river tolls dominated Sahu society. Christianity remained the faith of the influential Greek minority and some of the remaining Alan tribes.
Rise of the Universal Ruler - a tale of two Rajas
Maharaja Visvajita of Purushapura had every reason to feel content with his legacy. The past few decades had seen the Johiyava expand their power by leaps and bounds. The wily Eftal warlord Gokharna had passed away, taking an unlucky arrow in the eye fighting the Qangli Turks. He had died instantly, and in his wake the Gandharan Johiyava had only pressed their power further into Baktria, arriving at a sort of natural limit to their westward expansion. In 602, Sabuhrakan had fallen into their sphere of influence, and in the years that followed his brother had taken the cities along the Hari river, most notably Pusang.
And yet this period of peace and prosperity bred complacency. Along the Gangetic plain, a new power was rising. The scattered, fragmented states of the Indo-Gangetic plain would become slowly unified by a new, ambitious ruler named Rajyavardhana who styled himself as Chakravartin, or Universal Ruler. Tracing his origin back from one of many petty Rajas, his rise to power was meteoric. Through shrewd alliances he found himself the Maharaja of Pataliputra, displacing a feeble Gupta ruler whose territory barely extended beyond the capital, but his real capacity lay in military tactics, leading a small army to victory after victory. By the age of eighteen he had conquered Gauda and Kamarupa. By twenty he had unified the petty states of the Ganges and made Sakala on the Indus his westernmost frontier.
His rise was unprecedented in Indian history. Empires rose and fell across the subcontinent, but rarely had one ascended so quickly. While many of his contemporaries were quick to attribute Rajyavardhana's victories purely to his own greatness, the truth is rather more complex. Rajyavardhana was a talented and capable commander and an adept ruler, whose personal charisma did wonders for his power. But he also was able to hijack and restore the failing Gupta state, and many of his nearby rivals were relatively small, and did not band together against him until it was too late. Any notion that Rajyavardhana could not be defeated is little more than an illusion. After his meteoric rise he had trouble sustaining his momentum. His state further would live in the shadow of the more prosperous Gupta, and he spent little time attempting to revitalize the economy, preferring to remain constantly on some grand conquest or other.
The Chalukya would be his true rival, and despite early successes, here Rajyavardhana would meet his match. Maharaja Pulakesi ruled a large empire straddling the Deccan, and after Rajyavardhana's conquest of Gujarat in 622, he was spurred into action. The remarkable chain of conquests ended. In 625, the "Universal Ruler" limped back to Pataliputra and would never again mount another campaign into the Deccan. Four years later, he would march on Takasila, one of the great cities of the Johiyava. An aging Visvajita met him in battle, and despite what our Eftal sources describe as an uninspired strategy, Visvajita was able to wear down Rajyavardhana with mercenary Turkic and Eftal horse-archers and finally charge home with his own fierce cavalry. The intercession of Rajyavardhana's elephants saved his army from a rout, driving off the Johiyava cavalry. In yeas following this battle, Sindh and Punjab fell into his grasp, but Takasila remained in the hands of the Johiyava.
The Chakravartin was wounded in battle however, and the last ten years of his reign (until 639) would prove tedious to a man whose life had been warfare. He was said to have travelled his Empire extensively, and given up some of his more martial inclinations, but he would ultimately die relatively young, leaving a vast and unwieldy Empire for his young nephew (having never had children of his own.) On account of the influence of his sister, he was a great patron of esoteric gurus which he encountered on his travels, and patronized both Buddhists and Vedanta scholars heavily.
Replacing the Gupta as he did, Rajyavardhana is often seen as the transition point between periods in Indian history, a conqueror emblematic of the Imperial era to come. And yet for all his rapid campaigns, and his reunification of the Indo-Gangetic plain, little changed culturally or socially as a result of his reunification. Since the Saka there had been no great flow of foreign culture or ideas into India. The Eftal had only a passing impact on the vast subcontinent. Those changes happening to India amounted to a bloody restoration of the Gupta-era status quo, except on the coasts - coasts which remained on the periphery of his river-valley focused Empire. If one was to look at the world as Rajyavardhana saw it from his death bed, one would barely see the new India that was to come.
(And that's the way alternate history version of Harsha happens. A restoration of the Gupta Empire in a sense, but ultimately less interesting, if only because the "Sveta Huna" never penetrated the subcontinent. Instead you have a Hindu dynasty projecting power out of Afghanistan and India remains rather more insular and rather less feudal that IOTL. But society is seriously changing along the coasts, and we've successfully butterflied the rise of feudalism and also the Islamic invasions, which should only do good things for the prosperity of India.
Y'all may have started noticing that part of this timeline is a reaction to how many "no Islam, Christianity spreads everywhere" timelines exist. Ideally I'm going to try to avoid wanking any single religion in this timeline, and especially not some of the weird syncretic cults I've made up. In the next post we'll look in depth at Nestorian Mesopotamia and Egypt under her Eftal-Arab conquerors, where Christianity still remains strong. But for the foreseeable future, it doesn't look like Christianity is going to make it to the steppe in force.)
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It's interesting what you are doing with India, with no White Huns, (who are generally considered the forebearers of the Rajput caste) it does leave a sense of a power vacuum, which you've chosen to replace with a Gupta restoration of sorts, very interesting .
With no Islam complicating the identity of India and now several almost successive large scale dynasties in the Subcontinent (Maurya, Gupta's and now their successor dynasty) could India be seen eternally as one whole territory, akin to China, Persian, Japan etc, due to much less cultural divisions.
As in whoever holds the throne of Paliputra or wherever the next dynasty chooses to hold its capital, is emperor of all India?
.With no Islam complicating the identity of India and now several almost successive large scale dynasties in the Subcontinent (Maurya, Gupta's and now their successor dynasty) could India be seen eternally as one whole territory, akin to China, Persian, Japan etc, due to much less cultural divisions.
As in whoever holds the throne of Paliputra or wherever the next dynasty chooses to hold its capital, is emperor of all India?
XanXar -
I don't want to spoil too too much with the legacy of Rajyavardhana. (I don't have a good dynastic name yet. I was thinking Maukhari maybe?) But yes, Pataliputra has retained symbolic importance and with that comes a much more unbroken imperial tradition. But the south is divided into many small regional states, with the exception of a powerful Chalukya empire in the Deccan. It very much remains to be seen if the (Maukhari) will unite the whole subcontinent for any length of time, but logistically such a feat would be truly remarkable. Another series of whirlwind victories as Rajyavardhana pulled off are highly unlikely.
It's also worth noting that in this timeline, its possible Persia won't be seen as one eternal, whole territory. And China is still divided into a north and south.
I don't want to spoil too too much with the legacy of Rajyavardhana. (I don't have a good dynastic name yet. I was thinking Maukhari maybe?) But yes, Pataliputra has retained symbolic importance and with that comes a much more unbroken imperial tradition. But the south is divided into many small regional states, with the exception of a powerful Chalukya empire in the Deccan. It very much remains to be seen if the (Maukhari) will unite the whole subcontinent for any length of time, but logistically such a feat would be truly remarkable. Another series of whirlwind victories as Rajyavardhana pulled off are highly unlikely.
It's also worth noting that in this timeline, its possible Persia won't be seen as one eternal, whole territory. And China is still divided into a north and south.
That's interesting to note, I look forward to seeing more updates.
fi11222
Banned
This is a wonderful thread. Congratulations Lobster!
One thing that might be interesting to develop more in depth would be to depict the kind of religious debates that might occur in the world that you have set in motion. As you say, you are keeping a rough balance between the major religious movements so that none becomes completely dominant anywhere (except Christianity in the Roman Empire like IOTL). In that era IOTL, the only place where really diverse religious currents met was Bactria and eastern Iran where there was a mix of Budhism, Hinduism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrism, Tengrism and Nestorian Christianity. In this TL, this situation is extended pretty much from Central Asia all the way to Egypt and Yemen. As a result, I imagine that this huge area must be crawling with missionaries, holy men, monks and scholars of all kinds and affiliations. These men no doubt debate among themselves, either in front of crowds or of rulers, in order to prove the value, and for some the superiority, of their creeds. One might imagine Milinda Panha-like Buddhist apologetics versus Manichaean universalism or Augustine-like Christian polemics against everybody else and so many other combinations. IOTL, such debates generally had little impact as they were confined to relatively insignificant regions. In this TL, it would probably be different.
I have been working recently on a TL in the same area and time-frame (see below) and am planning myself to devote quite a lot of effort to religious matters.
Keep up the good work. There are not many TLs like yours and it is really nice to see these generally overlooked peoples and areas being explored.
One thing that might be interesting to develop more in depth would be to depict the kind of religious debates that might occur in the world that you have set in motion. As you say, you are keeping a rough balance between the major religious movements so that none becomes completely dominant anywhere (except Christianity in the Roman Empire like IOTL). In that era IOTL, the only place where really diverse religious currents met was Bactria and eastern Iran where there was a mix of Budhism, Hinduism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrism, Tengrism and Nestorian Christianity. In this TL, this situation is extended pretty much from Central Asia all the way to Egypt and Yemen. As a result, I imagine that this huge area must be crawling with missionaries, holy men, monks and scholars of all kinds and affiliations. These men no doubt debate among themselves, either in front of crowds or of rulers, in order to prove the value, and for some the superiority, of their creeds. One might imagine Milinda Panha-like Buddhist apologetics versus Manichaean universalism or Augustine-like Christian polemics against everybody else and so many other combinations. IOTL, such debates generally had little impact as they were confined to relatively insignificant regions. In this TL, it would probably be different.
I have been working recently on a TL in the same area and time-frame (see below) and am planning myself to devote quite a lot of effort to religious matters.
Keep up the good work. There are not many TLs like yours and it is really nice to see these generally overlooked peoples and areas being explored.
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Thanks fi11222!
I think a post on that could be fascinating, you're right. I will also check out your TL shortly, from a quick look it seems very interesting.
I think a post on that could be fascinating, you're right. I will also check out your TL shortly, from a quick look it seems very interesting.
Crossroads of Civilization
A Less Universal Ruler
Rajyavardhana Maukhani's early death left an empire likely to collapse, except for one fortuitous factor - he had a nephew, fifteen years old, residing in one of the royal centers of authority, Kankyakubja. Named Visnuvadhana, the boy was quickly elevated by the court bureaucrats to authority. Having been groomed for authority for a young age, there were few obstacles to overcome in the matter of succession. However, rebellions on the periphery would consume his early reign.
Two important leaders, Janasriya and Govindahagda, ministers placed in overall authority over Kamarupa (Assam) and Vanga (Bengal) respectively sought to rebel. Haritiputa, a general in Rajyavardhana's army, was placed in command of the force sent to put down the rebellion. Initially, Haritiputa had great success through covert means, stalling the rebellion until he could secure a betrayal which saw Govindahagda deposed and murdered. However, Haritiputa's attack up the massive Brahmaputra river would be met with less success.
Despite some seventy thousand men, thousands of war elephants, and perhaps two thousand riverboats, his forces bogged down in the immense floodplain and in an indecisive two year siege of Guyahati. The siege would be commemorated in a great epic poem, "Guyahati" which became part of the Kamarupan history and held the foreign-born Janasriya as a national hero of sorts. Without a decisive battle and with Janasriya not falling to intrigue, victory was impossible. Finally, with news of the Maharaja of Valabhi declaring himself independent, the army was recalled and peace signed. Kamarupa would remain beyond the fold of the new Empire.
Haritiputa's fate is unclear. Some sources record he did not survive the immense siege, while others say he was executed shortly thereafter in a palace intrigue. Whatever the case, a new commander named Damodara rose to command shortly thereafter, and lead a significantly reduced force south through Malava, "obtaining the submission of many cities there" and finally leading a campaign through Gujarat that lead to Valabhi being brought back under the at least nominal control of the Maukhani Empire. However, cities like Valabhi were rich from trade with Persia, Africa, and Arabia, and as such could use their wealth to buy influence with local governors. This ensured that the Satraps of Gujarat were frequently able to rule as Rajas in their own right. In such coastal cities the rules governing caste and proper behavior were considerably looser than inland - and the cosmopolitan foreign traders who resided in them saw a very different world than those who travelled to say, Pataliputra.
It is also notable that Visnuvadhana claimed a lesser title than Emperor. He ruled as a Maharajadhiraja, but never aspired to the same divinely-mandated rulership his father did. Perhaps as a consequence of his weaker reign, dominated in his youth by ministers and scholars, he often saw himself as a student rather than a patron, far into adulthood. Whatever his early inclinations, he seems to have never found enlightenment, for in 631 launched a campaign into the Punjab with great success at restoring borders eroded by Samantayava, the latest Johiyava Maharaja. At the culmination of this campaign, he wed Samantayava's sister, Karmavati in a grand ceremony at Takasila. This decision granted the Johiyava a protector and secured Punjab against raids from the north.
The Crossroads of Civilization
For centuries, the Middle East was the birthplace of numerous religions. Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism and Christianity all had their foundations within the broad region which, by the year 620 was entirely under the broad banner of "Eftal". From Baktria, where Sveta Huna clansmen languished under the Johiyava, to Egypt, where the Arabs and Eftal were busy establishing a new empire, the arrival of the Eftal had permanently upended the dynamic of religious belief in the region. Through their conquests, they brought the religious traditions of their steppe home to the East in force, and more than that, they brought a certain tolerance that allowed a melting pot of faiths to grow.
Out of this melting pot came many scholars. It was, at first, primarily the province of Christians and Buddhists, two faiths far more inclined to missionary work than Eftal paganism or Zoroastrianism. The Hindu mystics would come later as well, their ideas complicating an already rich religious framework. A Buddhist missionary, Sonuttara of Vattaniya, is often hailed as the forerunner of the western Buddhist tradition, a tradition which grew out of the direct competition between the emerging Buddhist monastic communities and the traditional Zoroastrian classes. Arriving in 540, he spent some twenty years proselytizing, and his writings, notably "The Characteristics of Wisdom" and "The Noble Dialogues" would inform Buddhist missionary work for years to come. The latter was vital as it was one of the first writings to contemplate how to blend the Persian and Buddhist religious mindset - something that would be invaluable to latter scholars.
This, among other things, allowed Zoroastrianism to decline or be subsumed. The veneration of traditional Iranic dieties continued, of course. Little effort was made to stop Eftal from worshipping Mitra, or to put out the sacred fires. As such, despite the growth of these religious movements, the decline of Zoroastrianism frequently cited by many scholars could well be called an illusion. The faith of the elites transformed, but at a local level Zoroastrianism endured in many different folk traditions that were sufficiently well-respected by the elites as to avoid persecution. And where Zoroastrianism could not endure, it changed.
With this growing tolerance and the decline of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism enjoyed an upsurge in popularity again, and without persecution it made inroads into Mesopotamia, its traditional heartland, and into Syria as well. The gnostic religion had a distinct appeal to both certain marginalized local groups but also many of the Alan and Turkic tribes who had been settled in the region. The great Manichaeist preacher Sabrishu (544-591) was notable for spreading the religion, but would ultimately be murdered during the Sack of Tesifon, while fleeing the advancing armies of Shah Isaiah. After this period, the "Religion of Light" would slowly begin to lose popularity in Eftal lands, ultimately being relegated to the steppe. Its ideas would endure however. Sabrishu's disciples would travel far and wide, many reaching courts in Africa and beyond, where they would go on to introduce eastern ideas further into the west than any of their rival creeds.
Mahadeva began as an Indian god, a name of Shiva. By 550, his rapid popularity among the Eftal elite was readily apparent. Like Mitra, Mahadeva appealed to a certain warlike eastern sensibility, but unlike Mitra, Mahadeva-worship also had certain universal elements, imported wholesale from the traditions of the Upanishads. The Persian philosopher and mathematician Arash was one of the first indigenous converts, and much like Buddhism, Mahadeva worship was willing to tolerate polytheism, allowing it to subtly inform the religious traditions of the Eftal and become accepted by the even the most traditionalist Eftal. It was, of course, Shah Akhshunwar Malka who brought this religion into mass acceptance, but its endurance can be attributed to an underlying cultural foundation which could easily accommodate Mahadeva as a supreme being and a path to moksha.
However, the proliferation of Indian philosophies, of reincarnation and nirvana/moksha was a consequence less of philosophers and rulers than it was of mass preachers laying the groundwork. Asceticism was an alien concept to the peoples of Persia, but very familiar to the Eftal, who had long provided safe haven to traveling mystics in Central Asia. This patronage was on the level of local tribal/clan groups, not royal support, but allowed these missions to continue on a grand scale, reaching even Arabia, where Persian and Indian ideas enjoyed a vogue under Hadhramut patronage. Mahadeva in particular found root in Awalastan and Arabia, and even after its practitioners were driven out or persecuted, Indian philosophy would leave a profound effect on the region, influencing the heterodox monotheistic cults which would grow in subsequent decades, and the sanskritized Savahila states, where Buddhism would predominate.
Ascetics were also more familiar in Mesopotamia, a populous and strongly Nestorian region, and Armenia, a Iranic but nevertheless Christian country. While Armenia was able to benefit from Eftal distraction and tolerance, and thus remain rather peripheral to the horse-lords to their south, Mesopotamia early on inherited the off-and-on persecution of the Sassanian regime. This persecution was however uncharacteristic of the Eftal, who had Christians among their ranks in any case, and therefore slowly came to an end as the Eftal divorced themselves from the Sassanid rulers whose position they had usurped. Many Eftal would come to embrace Christianity.
If any one region is to be considered a melting pot however, it should be Mesopotamia. The Nestorian Christians had long been persecuted, creating long lists of martyrs and hardening their congregations against adversity. In the aftermath of the great Egyptian Plague of 542, and even before the region was settled by many eastern peoples. Rouran, Turks, and Baktrians were relocated to the region throughout the Eftal era, part of a series of great exoduses and resettlements. Tengri, Mithra, and Buddha became as venerated as Christ for many elements of the population, and yet the long-suffering Christians of the region saw this not as a threat but as an opportunity. They began to proselytize openly, and for the next century would do so with the support of the Eftal. Christianity spread into the heartland of Iran much as Buddhism did, albeit without the same state support. Notably, some of the local saints who would become popular on the Iranian plateau had curious similarities to local religious practices - a process which it should be noted was by no means exclusive to Christianity.
It was not until the reign of Khauwashta son of Sheskh that the first royal-sponsored religious debates took place. At the Shah's winter palace near the Gulf city of Ram-Ardashir, the debate was held between the Nestorian Bishop Elisha of Bavel, the Syriac Buddhist monk Bhedhisho, and a group of various Zoroastrian and Indian mystics, most notably the rail-thin ascetic Khalinga of Argan, one of the earliest Iranian Advaita devotees and a traveler and historian who spent much of his time in Balkh. While such debates had happened before in satrapal courts and in the latter days of the Reign of Sons, they began again under the renewed tolerance ushered in by Khauwashta.
This debate, and those which occurred before and subsequently, rarely caused direct upheavals in the religious framework of the Eftal world. But, by encouraging these traveling holy men to travel, they reinforced the patchwork intermingling of various faiths on a very local level, and helped offset to some degree the growing regionalization of the Eftal world. The Caspain sea coast would remain a great center of Buddhism, Mesun the beating heart of Mahadeva worship, and Arbayestan the center of Nestorian Christianity, but hard lines never managed to establish themselves - even if among various Eftal or Turkic groups (in and of itself a blurring distinction) religious beliefs often fell along tribal lines. The most important element of this blurring however, was the spread of "eastern" culture westwards, carried by the earliest Eftal whose worlds were shaped by Baktrian and Soghdian dress, food, and societal organization. The version of Indian culture that spread west was one rooted in the interpretations of these earlier Iranian peoples, and this is an important distinction to make, and necessary to understand how Zoroastrianism was in many cases pushed aside or subsumed, while Christianity fared better.
(Continued - the Western Crossroads)
In the Syrian state carved out by Heshana however, the religious situation was rather different. Here the Indian thought that had so influenced the eastern Eftal was all but absent, and unlike among the Sahu, eastern missionaries were met with little success. Like Armenia, Syria and Egypt had their own long-established Christian tradition, and here, at the periphery of the Eftal conquests, the natives were less inclined to abandon their own creeds. Plague and war had provided inroads for conquerors to establish themselves. Steppe paganism flourished in Osrhoene, where many warlike clans had settled in some of the very first waves of Eftal invasion. The Eftal Sun-God [perhaps called Huareh] had a particularly strong worship in this region, and provided the basis for the religion of Heshana and many of his close tribal affiliates. Along with a number of other pagan deities, these beliefs remained strong but in the absence of an organized belief system had little effect on a deeply Christian region.
Instead, Heshana's whirlwind conquest and his son's taking of Egypt had little impact on the average Roman citizen. The Christians were treated little differently than before, save that those belonging to heterodox sects were not persecuted, and Jews especially found their situation improved. The Eftal deeply respected the Hellenistic learning they encountered, preserving it where possible, and copying many of the more notable texts for private libraries. Their Arab allies had a similar fascination - many of them were Christians as well, or Jewish. What differentiated the Eftal conquerors was the way that, despite having become Persian in many regards, they did not abandon their culture wholly, using their identity to remain separate from those of the conquered peoples. Rather, they assimilated more Arab ideas, developing a love for poetry and the garden palaces favored by the tribal elite.
However, the true benefactor of the Eftal conquest was in some ways Egypt. Freed from the Roman yoke, Coptic Christianity was free to evolve without the threat of persecution. Decentralized local governance by tolerant administrators more concerned with regular tax than religious orthodoxy allowed Egypt to become a hotbed of Christian theological debate.
As long as these debates did not progress to rioting or communal violence, they were encouraged by the Eftal, who in 625 would found a new fortress city, Hvarapat, on the eastern bank of the Nile. Populated by Arabs and a mixed group of Persian colonists and merchants, the new city would not immediately take off - rather it would remain most importantly a secure base of operations for campaigns to suppress dissent, such as the violent uprising by a former Coptic officer named Paulos, who briefly claimed to be "Basileus." By 627 however, he had been chased south and would ultimately flee to unhappy exile in Axum.
Certain cities, like Emesa and Hvarabad became Eftal strongholds in a region largely apathetic to their new conquerors, and the temples to Mithra and the Sun built there, were built in a distinctive Helleno-Iranian style remain a testament to the unique culture of the western Eftal. And yet the Shahs in Emesa never fell into the growing Indian cultural sphere, even as they remained part of the cosmopolitan Eftal world.
(here we go. India begins to stabilize, Hvarapat is an alt-Fustat of sorts, only without Islam it is as much Christian city as a vaguely pagan one. I think we should expect to see Khalinga again, and I'm very eager to get us back to Berber Africa as you guys might have noticed. Up next we'll also return to the Balkans and the Avars.)
Rajyavardhana Maukhani's early death left an empire likely to collapse, except for one fortuitous factor - he had a nephew, fifteen years old, residing in one of the royal centers of authority, Kankyakubja. Named Visnuvadhana, the boy was quickly elevated by the court bureaucrats to authority. Having been groomed for authority for a young age, there were few obstacles to overcome in the matter of succession. However, rebellions on the periphery would consume his early reign.
Two important leaders, Janasriya and Govindahagda, ministers placed in overall authority over Kamarupa (Assam) and Vanga (Bengal) respectively sought to rebel. Haritiputa, a general in Rajyavardhana's army, was placed in command of the force sent to put down the rebellion. Initially, Haritiputa had great success through covert means, stalling the rebellion until he could secure a betrayal which saw Govindahagda deposed and murdered. However, Haritiputa's attack up the massive Brahmaputra river would be met with less success.
Despite some seventy thousand men, thousands of war elephants, and perhaps two thousand riverboats, his forces bogged down in the immense floodplain and in an indecisive two year siege of Guyahati. The siege would be commemorated in a great epic poem, "Guyahati" which became part of the Kamarupan history and held the foreign-born Janasriya as a national hero of sorts. Without a decisive battle and with Janasriya not falling to intrigue, victory was impossible. Finally, with news of the Maharaja of Valabhi declaring himself independent, the army was recalled and peace signed. Kamarupa would remain beyond the fold of the new Empire.
Haritiputa's fate is unclear. Some sources record he did not survive the immense siege, while others say he was executed shortly thereafter in a palace intrigue. Whatever the case, a new commander named Damodara rose to command shortly thereafter, and lead a significantly reduced force south through Malava, "obtaining the submission of many cities there" and finally leading a campaign through Gujarat that lead to Valabhi being brought back under the at least nominal control of the Maukhani Empire. However, cities like Valabhi were rich from trade with Persia, Africa, and Arabia, and as such could use their wealth to buy influence with local governors. This ensured that the Satraps of Gujarat were frequently able to rule as Rajas in their own right. In such coastal cities the rules governing caste and proper behavior were considerably looser than inland - and the cosmopolitan foreign traders who resided in them saw a very different world than those who travelled to say, Pataliputra.
It is also notable that Visnuvadhana claimed a lesser title than Emperor. He ruled as a Maharajadhiraja, but never aspired to the same divinely-mandated rulership his father did. Perhaps as a consequence of his weaker reign, dominated in his youth by ministers and scholars, he often saw himself as a student rather than a patron, far into adulthood. Whatever his early inclinations, he seems to have never found enlightenment, for in 631 launched a campaign into the Punjab with great success at restoring borders eroded by Samantayava, the latest Johiyava Maharaja. At the culmination of this campaign, he wed Samantayava's sister, Karmavati in a grand ceremony at Takasila. This decision granted the Johiyava a protector and secured Punjab against raids from the north.
The Crossroads of Civilization
For centuries, the Middle East was the birthplace of numerous religions. Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism and Christianity all had their foundations within the broad region which, by the year 620 was entirely under the broad banner of "Eftal". From Baktria, where Sveta Huna clansmen languished under the Johiyava, to Egypt, where the Arabs and Eftal were busy establishing a new empire, the arrival of the Eftal had permanently upended the dynamic of religious belief in the region. Through their conquests, they brought the religious traditions of their steppe home to the East in force, and more than that, they brought a certain tolerance that allowed a melting pot of faiths to grow.
Out of this melting pot came many scholars. It was, at first, primarily the province of Christians and Buddhists, two faiths far more inclined to missionary work than Eftal paganism or Zoroastrianism. The Hindu mystics would come later as well, their ideas complicating an already rich religious framework. A Buddhist missionary, Sonuttara of Vattaniya, is often hailed as the forerunner of the western Buddhist tradition, a tradition which grew out of the direct competition between the emerging Buddhist monastic communities and the traditional Zoroastrian classes. Arriving in 540, he spent some twenty years proselytizing, and his writings, notably "The Characteristics of Wisdom" and "The Noble Dialogues" would inform Buddhist missionary work for years to come. The latter was vital as it was one of the first writings to contemplate how to blend the Persian and Buddhist religious mindset - something that would be invaluable to latter scholars.
This, among other things, allowed Zoroastrianism to decline or be subsumed. The veneration of traditional Iranic dieties continued, of course. Little effort was made to stop Eftal from worshipping Mitra, or to put out the sacred fires. As such, despite the growth of these religious movements, the decline of Zoroastrianism frequently cited by many scholars could well be called an illusion. The faith of the elites transformed, but at a local level Zoroastrianism endured in many different folk traditions that were sufficiently well-respected by the elites as to avoid persecution. And where Zoroastrianism could not endure, it changed.
With this growing tolerance and the decline of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism enjoyed an upsurge in popularity again, and without persecution it made inroads into Mesopotamia, its traditional heartland, and into Syria as well. The gnostic religion had a distinct appeal to both certain marginalized local groups but also many of the Alan and Turkic tribes who had been settled in the region. The great Manichaeist preacher Sabrishu (544-591) was notable for spreading the religion, but would ultimately be murdered during the Sack of Tesifon, while fleeing the advancing armies of Shah Isaiah. After this period, the "Religion of Light" would slowly begin to lose popularity in Eftal lands, ultimately being relegated to the steppe. Its ideas would endure however. Sabrishu's disciples would travel far and wide, many reaching courts in Africa and beyond, where they would go on to introduce eastern ideas further into the west than any of their rival creeds.
Mahadeva began as an Indian god, a name of Shiva. By 550, his rapid popularity among the Eftal elite was readily apparent. Like Mitra, Mahadeva appealed to a certain warlike eastern sensibility, but unlike Mitra, Mahadeva-worship also had certain universal elements, imported wholesale from the traditions of the Upanishads. The Persian philosopher and mathematician Arash was one of the first indigenous converts, and much like Buddhism, Mahadeva worship was willing to tolerate polytheism, allowing it to subtly inform the religious traditions of the Eftal and become accepted by the even the most traditionalist Eftal. It was, of course, Shah Akhshunwar Malka who brought this religion into mass acceptance, but its endurance can be attributed to an underlying cultural foundation which could easily accommodate Mahadeva as a supreme being and a path to moksha.
However, the proliferation of Indian philosophies, of reincarnation and nirvana/moksha was a consequence less of philosophers and rulers than it was of mass preachers laying the groundwork. Asceticism was an alien concept to the peoples of Persia, but very familiar to the Eftal, who had long provided safe haven to traveling mystics in Central Asia. This patronage was on the level of local tribal/clan groups, not royal support, but allowed these missions to continue on a grand scale, reaching even Arabia, where Persian and Indian ideas enjoyed a vogue under Hadhramut patronage. Mahadeva in particular found root in Awalastan and Arabia, and even after its practitioners were driven out or persecuted, Indian philosophy would leave a profound effect on the region, influencing the heterodox monotheistic cults which would grow in subsequent decades, and the sanskritized Savahila states, where Buddhism would predominate.
Ascetics were also more familiar in Mesopotamia, a populous and strongly Nestorian region, and Armenia, a Iranic but nevertheless Christian country. While Armenia was able to benefit from Eftal distraction and tolerance, and thus remain rather peripheral to the horse-lords to their south, Mesopotamia early on inherited the off-and-on persecution of the Sassanian regime. This persecution was however uncharacteristic of the Eftal, who had Christians among their ranks in any case, and therefore slowly came to an end as the Eftal divorced themselves from the Sassanid rulers whose position they had usurped. Many Eftal would come to embrace Christianity.
If any one region is to be considered a melting pot however, it should be Mesopotamia. The Nestorian Christians had long been persecuted, creating long lists of martyrs and hardening their congregations against adversity. In the aftermath of the great Egyptian Plague of 542, and even before the region was settled by many eastern peoples. Rouran, Turks, and Baktrians were relocated to the region throughout the Eftal era, part of a series of great exoduses and resettlements. Tengri, Mithra, and Buddha became as venerated as Christ for many elements of the population, and yet the long-suffering Christians of the region saw this not as a threat but as an opportunity. They began to proselytize openly, and for the next century would do so with the support of the Eftal. Christianity spread into the heartland of Iran much as Buddhism did, albeit without the same state support. Notably, some of the local saints who would become popular on the Iranian plateau had curious similarities to local religious practices - a process which it should be noted was by no means exclusive to Christianity.
It was not until the reign of Khauwashta son of Sheskh that the first royal-sponsored religious debates took place. At the Shah's winter palace near the Gulf city of Ram-Ardashir, the debate was held between the Nestorian Bishop Elisha of Bavel, the Syriac Buddhist monk Bhedhisho, and a group of various Zoroastrian and Indian mystics, most notably the rail-thin ascetic Khalinga of Argan, one of the earliest Iranian Advaita devotees and a traveler and historian who spent much of his time in Balkh. While such debates had happened before in satrapal courts and in the latter days of the Reign of Sons, they began again under the renewed tolerance ushered in by Khauwashta.
This debate, and those which occurred before and subsequently, rarely caused direct upheavals in the religious framework of the Eftal world. But, by encouraging these traveling holy men to travel, they reinforced the patchwork intermingling of various faiths on a very local level, and helped offset to some degree the growing regionalization of the Eftal world. The Caspain sea coast would remain a great center of Buddhism, Mesun the beating heart of Mahadeva worship, and Arbayestan the center of Nestorian Christianity, but hard lines never managed to establish themselves - even if among various Eftal or Turkic groups (in and of itself a blurring distinction) religious beliefs often fell along tribal lines. The most important element of this blurring however, was the spread of "eastern" culture westwards, carried by the earliest Eftal whose worlds were shaped by Baktrian and Soghdian dress, food, and societal organization. The version of Indian culture that spread west was one rooted in the interpretations of these earlier Iranian peoples, and this is an important distinction to make, and necessary to understand how Zoroastrianism was in many cases pushed aside or subsumed, while Christianity fared better.
(Continued - the Western Crossroads)
In the Syrian state carved out by Heshana however, the religious situation was rather different. Here the Indian thought that had so influenced the eastern Eftal was all but absent, and unlike among the Sahu, eastern missionaries were met with little success. Like Armenia, Syria and Egypt had their own long-established Christian tradition, and here, at the periphery of the Eftal conquests, the natives were less inclined to abandon their own creeds. Plague and war had provided inroads for conquerors to establish themselves. Steppe paganism flourished in Osrhoene, where many warlike clans had settled in some of the very first waves of Eftal invasion. The Eftal Sun-God [perhaps called Huareh] had a particularly strong worship in this region, and provided the basis for the religion of Heshana and many of his close tribal affiliates. Along with a number of other pagan deities, these beliefs remained strong but in the absence of an organized belief system had little effect on a deeply Christian region.
Instead, Heshana's whirlwind conquest and his son's taking of Egypt had little impact on the average Roman citizen. The Christians were treated little differently than before, save that those belonging to heterodox sects were not persecuted, and Jews especially found their situation improved. The Eftal deeply respected the Hellenistic learning they encountered, preserving it where possible, and copying many of the more notable texts for private libraries. Their Arab allies had a similar fascination - many of them were Christians as well, or Jewish. What differentiated the Eftal conquerors was the way that, despite having become Persian in many regards, they did not abandon their culture wholly, using their identity to remain separate from those of the conquered peoples. Rather, they assimilated more Arab ideas, developing a love for poetry and the garden palaces favored by the tribal elite.
However, the true benefactor of the Eftal conquest was in some ways Egypt. Freed from the Roman yoke, Coptic Christianity was free to evolve without the threat of persecution. Decentralized local governance by tolerant administrators more concerned with regular tax than religious orthodoxy allowed Egypt to become a hotbed of Christian theological debate.
As long as these debates did not progress to rioting or communal violence, they were encouraged by the Eftal, who in 625 would found a new fortress city, Hvarapat, on the eastern bank of the Nile. Populated by Arabs and a mixed group of Persian colonists and merchants, the new city would not immediately take off - rather it would remain most importantly a secure base of operations for campaigns to suppress dissent, such as the violent uprising by a former Coptic officer named Paulos, who briefly claimed to be "Basileus." By 627 however, he had been chased south and would ultimately flee to unhappy exile in Axum.
Certain cities, like Emesa and Hvarabad became Eftal strongholds in a region largely apathetic to their new conquerors, and the temples to Mithra and the Sun built there, were built in a distinctive Helleno-Iranian style remain a testament to the unique culture of the western Eftal. And yet the Shahs in Emesa never fell into the growing Indian cultural sphere, even as they remained part of the cosmopolitan Eftal world.
(here we go. India begins to stabilize, Hvarapat is an alt-Fustat of sorts, only without Islam it is as much Christian city as a vaguely pagan one. I think we should expect to see Khalinga again, and I'm very eager to get us back to Berber Africa as you guys might have noticed. Up next we'll also return to the Balkans and the Avars.)
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