A history of the Roman Empire from 565 to 1960 -- done!

[Ares Land]

This is a continuation of that thread http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=478, in which I mixed, not very sensibly, history and language. (I thought it would just be a fun diversion with a vague language sketch and short alt history, but as it happens, I got much more interested in it than I thought!)

In this thread I'll try to offer a brief history of the Roman Empire after the death of Justinian.

565 to 600

In 565, the aged emperor Justinian dies. Either paranoid or indecisive, he fails to name an heir. It seems Justinian had favored Justin, his nephew and curopalates, yet for the Army the natural sucessor is Germanus, Justinian's cousin and Belisarius successor in the Gothic wars. After a short bout of court intrigue during which Justin II ends up assassinated, Germanus becomes emperor, and appoints his elder son Justin, then magister militium as co-emperor.
Germanus revives the practice of elevating one consul in the East and one in the West (such as it is), namely his second son Justinian at Constantinople, and the teenaged Germanus at Ravenna, granting him the title of Caesar as well. (An honor the Ostrogoths had tried to bestow upon him as well).

The Roman Empire in the 560's isn't exactly a dazzling prize. The treasury is empty -- and the empire bought off the Avars and Persians with substantial sums, the empire was ravaged by the first outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe, the Church was divided by a bitter and incomprehensible schism between Chalcedonians and Monophysites and the emperor himself isn't too popular with the Senate and the traditional aristocracy.

Almost immediately, Germanus faced a crisis on the Danube frontier. The Avars and the Lombards as usual, were making unpleasant noises; the aristocracy at home urged the cessation of payment. Eventually, Germanus allowed them to settle in the Balkans and even got them to defend the Danube frontier against the Gepids. All of this emptied the treasury tremendously, however.

Germanus died in 568, perhaps of old age, perhaps poisoned, and was suceeded by Justin II

569 was overall, a bad year for the Empire as the Wisigoths retook part of Roman Spain, and the Berbers, under king Garmul revolted in North Africa.
Fortunately, relative peace in the East as Hormizd IV suceeded Khosrau I, allowed the Romans to retake Africa -- though they lost most of their possessions in Spain to the Wisigoth king Liuvigild

In the West.

Germanus II the Amal, Justin's coemperor proves to be a popular and competent ruler in the west. He has the added legitimacy of being the son of Ostrogoth princess Matasunta, and the grandson of Theoderic the Great.
He arranges for the energetic prefect of Rome turned Rome Gregory to become bishop of Rome.

In the 580's, the Lombards, worried about general Avar agitation in the Balkans invade Italy. Germanus II secures the help of Frankish king Guntram and pushes back the invaders. In exchange, the Romans offer symbolic help to Guntram in his struggle with his unpleasant brother Childeric (unfavorably compared to Nero) and not-so-symbolic help in Septimania. Guntram takes Septimania from king Leovigild. It was the first time in a century that Romans intervened in Gaul.

Conflict with Arian king Leovigild continues; his son Hermenevigild converts to Catholicism and declares himself king of Spain. Germanus and Hermenevigild embark on a long Spanish campaign which ends with the defeat of Liuvigild.

When Justin II passed away in 590, the Roman empire was in firm control of Italy, North Africa and had friendly relations with its western neighbours, Frankish king Guntram and Wisigothic king Hermenevigild.

Eastern trouble

These immediate successes should not lead us to forget that the empire was dramatically overextended. Justin III (Justinian II's brother and Germanus II's brother) inherited an empty treasury, just as Sassanid king Hormizd IV, felt to be too much of an appeaser, was replaced by the more agressive Khosrau II. Justin III was killed in a military rebellion (the Eastern military was poorly paid) just as the Sassanids invaded Mesopotamia.
Germanus had his share of domestic trouble; he was neither familiar nor inclined to patience towards the unending Monophysite dispute. This led to a purge at the capital, and a revolt in Egypt. As most troops were diverted to the Persian front, the Lombards took advantage of the situation and attacked northern Italy in 600.

[Ares Land]

A metafictional note.

My point of divergence is in 550, when a cousin of Justinian (my emperor Germanus I) didn't die. I wanted the POD to be as late as possible but last straw, I believe, was the accession of Justin II (our Justin II, I should add) who was more interested in campaigning against the Sassanids than in the west. After that, having the Romans hold on to Italy somehow would be unreasonable. So it means that Justin II must be less influential than in our timeline, and Germanus feeling better is a reasonable solution.
However, this means that anything that happened after 550 most likely went on differently than in OTL. That is a problem, because Muhammad was born in 570.

Now, my educated guess is that the Arabs would have united no matter what, and that the pagan Arabs would have converted to something anyway. But to what? I don't think it's really feasible to come up with a reasonable alternative (or anyway, it would be beyond the scope of this alternate history and my abilities). Besides, I have anything trouble telling the Justins and the Clotaires for one another.

So I decided that Muhammad existed too in this timeline, and did most of what he did in our timeline (with, perhaps, a few changes in chronology). It's certifiably believable anyway, since all of this actually happened!

[dhok]

I would recommend reading Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome. He makes a pretty convincing case that Rome was a one-off empire whose disintegration was essentially irreversible but sowed the seeds for the modern world.

Of course, you're entitled to handwave that, but it's worth reading him just to see what might and might not be plausible in a given scenario. He notes, for example, that the Arab expansion was at least as much a consequence of Byzantine and Persian weakness as Arab unity; if Muhammad had been born a generation earlier (in, say, 541 instead of 571) and the Arab conquest proceeded on that timeline, the Byzantines and Persians would likely have successfully kept the caliphate to the Arabian peninsula.

[Ares Land]

Thanks for the recommendation; I'll read it. If that is his point, I only half agree The Eastern empire did last until 1453, which is pretty impressive. But I expect the modern world would be very different and would probably be a lot less advanced without division in the West...

I'l expand on it, but in this fictional timeline, the Muslim conquests proceeds pretty much as it did in ours; the Byzantine and Persians still have a major war, religious division still leaves Egypt and the Levan disgruntled, and so on.

[dewrad]

Tom Holland’s “In the Shadow of the Sword” might well be instructive here as a source of ideas.

(I have been following the thread on Voigare with great interest, as a Romance obsessive!)

[zompist]

A metafictional note.

My point of divergence is in 550, when a cousin of Justinian (my emperor Germanus I) didn't die. I wanted the POD to be as late as possible but last straw, I believe, was the accession of Justin II (our Justin II, I should add) who was more interested in campaigning against the Sassanids than in the west. After that, having the Romans hold on to Italy somehow would be unreasonable. So it means that Justin II must be less influential than in our timeline, and Germanus feeling better is a reasonable solution.
However, this means that anything that happened after 550 most likely went on differently than in OTL. That is a problem, because Muhammad was born in 570.

As there is no actual science behind alternate histories, you can do what you want. But what makes sense to me is that the divergence proceeds like an infection: from its center outward slowly. One Greek dude getting over an illness in 550 should not have any effect on the Xianbei emperors in North China or the post-Gupta rulers in India.

I think it's reasonable that nothing in Europe affected the career of Muhammad, even though his death was 82 years after your divergence point.

[Ares Land]

Thanks everyone for the advice and recommendation. (I've started reading Escape from Rome, which proves very interesting in that it asks the very same question I'm asking here )

600-700

The Sassanids had long been restless in the East; persecutions of Christans in Armenia and Iberia (Caucasian Georgia, that is) led to Roman military intervention, which proved disastrous.
Meanwhile Slavs and Avars were raiding the Balkans, reaching as far as Athens and the Lombards attacked Italy.
Germanus had only limited success on the Balkan front, and was forced to sue for peace with the Sassanids in 606 under extremely expensive terms, permanently losing Mesopotamia.
Things were going sour in the West; the Lombards were raiding Italy, and in Spain the Arian usurper Liuva rebelled under Catholic king Athanagild II, a Roman ally. Only the prefecture of Africa held.

The deep causes of the problem was a profound economic crisis, in turn due to ravages from the plague and an insufficient fiscal policy. Justinian I, Germanus I, Justin II, Justin III and Germanus had all tried various options, including taxing the rich landowners (as always very creative when it came to tax evasion), lowering or delaying soldiers' pay (which worked better than you'd expect but ultimately led to mutiny in the Balkans) and ceasing payment of tribute to Barbarians (which never worked: the Barbarians then invaded, and had to be bought of at a much higher prize).

Germanus himself had trouble establishing his legitimacy in the West. Part of the trouble came from, surprisingly, the Blues and the Greens teams of supporters in the popular sport of chariot racing, always raucous and eager for the chance to make trouble. Germanus was himself an ardent Green, which of course led to deep trouble with the Blues.

And finally, the East was in the throes of a deep religious devide between Chalcedonian and Monophysites. To put it shortly, the Chalcedonian were the direct predecessors of Catholicism as we know it, and believed that Christ had a dual nature, divine and human, while the Monophysites held that He was solely human. Monophysites dominated Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and attempts at reconciliation had utterly failed.
In any case, Germanus II was a devout Chalcedonian and altogether baffled by the conflict.

The West was mostly, a poor backwater of the Empire. Yet, Africa was fairly rich (the prefectoral capital, Carthage was the only true city in the West), Hispania showed promise. Help came, surprisingly, from Italy, poor and utterly ravaged. The energetic pope Gregory I had somehow managed to rebuild something resembling a functioning administration there, and sent missions as far as Britain. He secured the help of Frankish king Clothar II against the Lombards and the rebel Wisigoths. Clothar was eager to help against his main rivals in Italy; and to extend his power in Northern Italy. In thanks, he was granted the title of Caesar -- the first time, but not the last, such a title would be conferred on a Barbarian ally.
The good thing about the West, though, was that major victories could be won with comparatively small forces. The Franks and the Romans managed to put down the Wisigothic rebellion and the Lombard raids with forces of a few thousand men. Germanus, however, unable to pay in any other way, had to grant land in Italy to the Franks and sued for peace with the Lombards by promising land in the Balkans.
Germanus, too busy in the East, and not trusting any agent in Constantinople, promptly named John, a prominent Carthaginian general Western emperor.
The Persian wars proceeded in fits, starts and a series of stalemates and finally in an uneasy peace. Germanus died in 725.

He was remembered as one of the great emperors, almost the equal of Justinian. In the Arabic peninsula, Muhammad had united the Arabs and founded a new religion; Germanus was even mentioned in Islamic sources as a pious man who supposedly had converted to Islam. (As far as we know, Germanus was only vaguely aware of Muslims and thought they were a Jewish sect).

He was succeeded by Sergius I in the East and John I in the West, two prominent generals and married to Germanus' daughters. Sergius I was immediately deposed by the usurper Priscus in yet another revolt of the army. John I had to sail to Constantinople just like Germanus II had done; the Persians reacted to the news of civil war by invading Egypt, Syria and Palestine. The Sassanids took the True Cross to Ctesiphon. Constantinople was besieged by joined Persian and Avars forces, and John I reportedly considered abandoning the city and moving the capital to Carthage.

Yet John, a devout Christian, also John the Saint would not let insults to the Holy Land unpunished. He embarked on a holy war, leading Roman forces to Ctesiphon, retaking the True Cross and reinstating them in Jerusalem.
The Sassanids were starting a counter attack, just as the Arabs invaded. The Muslim forces finished the Sassanids off; Anatolia itself held but just barely; yet by 640 the Romans had definitely lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotomia.
The local populations had welcomed the Arabs as liberators; and indeed it was a lot better to be a Monophysite Christian under Arab rule then under Roman rule. The monophysites finally enjoyed freedom of religion without persecution from Constantinople.

At the death of John the Saint, he was succeeded by his eighteen-year old son John II, who immediately had to deal with revolts in Constantinople. The loss of Egypt had been disastrous to the capital which immediately suffered from famine and a resurgence of the plague.
As a consolation, perhaps, the Caliphate itself suffered from plague and civil war.
The usurper Bonosus came to power in 642 as the young John II fled to Carthage.

The young emperor soon gained a reputation from cruelty. He cut off grain shipments from Carthage to Constantinople, and was acclaimed as a liberator the following year when he came back to the capital with shipments of grain. He had Bonosus dismembered and his head exposed.
He felt the need to outdo his father John the Saint; this meant, mostly, ill-fated military adventures and renewed persecutions of Monophysites.
The Muslim forces meanwhile, were raiding Anatolia and Africa; only civil war stopped them from raiding Constantinope. The Patriarch of Constantinople, suspected of not being Chalcedonian enough was tortured and put to death in 560.
Increasingly unpopular, John II was deposed by the general Valentinian, ending the Justinian dynasty.

Valentinian might have been an usurper, but he was a pretty good emperor, considering. He managed to negotiate peace with the Arabs -- at an exhorbitant price, however, and completed a reorganization of the army which allowed him to restore some semblance of order in the Balkans.
With the loss of Egypt and the Levant, the West was gaining in importance again. Carthage could provide adequate amounts of grain for the capital; Italy could be plundered. Besides, Valentinian, who turned against the religious persecutions of his predecessor, desired to keep the papacy under control so that a compromise could be reached.

Valentinian finally established a system of duchies in the East; Anatolia was divided in provinces led by a general -- titled dux or strategos with overreaching civil and military power, and supporting the army from local means. This reform, initiated by John the Saint perhaps in imitation of Germanic and Sassanid models finally solved the issue of the military budget; each major unit was assigned to a duchy and expected to support itself from there.
Valentinian, however, attempted to impose the same system in Italy and Africa and met the opposition of the local authorities -- used to some autonomy and increasingly unsatisfied with the empire, which proved ineffective in defense and imposed a heavy tax burden, more than the West could reasonably pay.

In 665 a second Muslim invasion ravaged North Africa up to Tangier. Constantinople, otherwise occupied in the Balkans refused help. Subsequently, Gregorius, prefect of Africa declared himself independant, was proclaimed emperor by the Pope.

Gregorius' African adventure was most probably going to be short-lived, but he managed to obtain Berber support by successfully stopping the Muslim forces with the help of Frankish, Goth and Lombard mercenaries.

A period of anarchy began in the East at the death of Valentinian, as several emperors acceded to the throne, never managing to hold on to it -- the newly found independant of Anatolian dukes made usurpation fairly easy. Valentinian was succeded by Justinian II, who was subsequently deposed and defaced by Constantine III. The struggle between Justinian and Constantinian went on until the latter (defaced in turn, with his nose cut off) sought Bulgar help. Constantine III regained the throne in 670 and, thankful, granted the title of Caesar to the Bulgar Khan.

He immediately attempted to retake the west; but Gregorius enlisted the help of, of all people, the Umayyad Caliph who saw an opportunity in Roman division. Soon after, the Umayyads turned their attention to Constantinople -- only Roman naval superiority and the formidable city walls managed to save the capital. In particular, the new innovation of liquid fire proved crucial.

Meanwhile, in the West, the new Roman emperor Gregory found himself in a difficult situation. He had initially rebelled against heavy taxations, but had to raise taxes himself to keep the Muslims at bay. The Western Roman Empire couldn't count on his traditional German allies to help; the Frankish kingdom had divided in three and was busily conquerring itself; a revolt in Wisigothic Spain likewise kept the Hispano-Romans and Gothic troops occupied. Few of the succeeding popes had the charisma of Gregory and the Bonifaces, and they were, besides, much disappointed in the emperor. Eventually the Ummayyads took Carthage and Gregory was killed.

In 685, Constantine III retook Carthage and invaded Italy. He imposed a Syrian pope, Sergius and otherwise reorganized the West under the duchy system. In Spain, the Wisigoth kings were in conflict with the Romans; the main issue was that, absent a functioning succession rules, the kings owed their elections to councils of nobles and bishops; the bishops being in turn loyal to the pope, himself influenced by the emperor. The new pope Sergius and the emperor made large territorial concessions in exchange for military help from Hermenegild II; the emperor himself was content with a few coastal cities in Spain.
Constantine III was succeeded by his son, Justinian II (yes, yet another!). Grudgingly, his claim to legitimacy was accepted and thus began the Thracian dynasty. Justinian II liberated Africa and Carthage with Wisigothic and Berber help (fortunately, the Berbers were disgruntled with Roman rule but not as alienated as the Egyptians had been)

In 700 the Roman empire was somehow united, though much reduced: it covered Anatolia, Greece, parts of Dalmatia, Italy, parts of the North African Coast and a few ports in Southern Hispania.

Yet in some ways its situation was much better than it had been under Justinian. The Muslim threat was checked for now, religious controversies had slowly died down (Justinian II had forbid all discussion of the nature of Christ under penalty of death, and besides most Monophysites were subjects of the Caliphate now); the Bulgars and Slavs had been placated. More importantly, perhaps, the Roman holdings, though few and impoverished were at critical points along the Mediterranean, thus ensuring complete control of the Western mediterranean (except for Septimania and Provence, but the Franks could be trusted -- for now) and a fairly solid position in the East.

The empire's holdings were reorganized as a cheaper semi-feudal system; the Wisigoths and Frankish kingdoms acted as friendly buffer states, on the whole easy to placate.

[Ares Land]

700 to 800: rule, Romania, Romania rule the waves...

The Roman empire had dismissed the west as an irrelevant backwater during the preceding century, but that was no longer quite the case.
Italy had enjoyed a century and a half of relative peace (some Germanic incursions aside); Hispania was too far from Constantinople to be truly interesting, but it paid for its own defense. Africa was a highly productive province, and after the loss of Egypt, Constantinople increasingly came to depend from African grain.

Carthage was, in fact, in the words of Isaac da Petrovici, 'the delicate jugular vein of the empire". It was, however, regularly threatened by the Caliphate, who feared an attack on Egypt. In 702 launched yet another land attack on Africa; two years of long struggle followed as the Ummayyad commander asked for, and received reinforcements. Yet the loss of Africa led to riots and unrest in Constantinople; Justinian II could not afford to lose the province.

Yet, the West saw little of the Empire except for its tax collectors, and there was a growing feeling of 'What have the Romans ever done for us?'
The Arabs held Africa with difficulty, as the Moors, Berbers and Franks were in continuous revolts; but the African had little love for the Romans either.
All was almost lost when the duke of Syracusa, Stephen the Longobard mutinied and proclaimed himself emperor for good measure. He even managed to secure an alliance with Demetrius, the count of the Obsequium (that is, the commander of troops around Constantinople and the internal retinue).

Only the intervention of pope John VIII who condemned Stephen the Longobard and obtained the help of the Frankish dukes of Northern Italy saved Justinian. He took Carthage from the Caliphate, but had to return in haste: at Constantinople, Demetrius proclaimed himself emperor.

The Capital was ravaged by the plague, as emperors and usurpers fought each other. The Caliphate, sensing weakness, prepared for a naval invasion of Constantinople. The legitimate emperor, Justinian II, died of the plague and finally, the Obsequium troops, panicked, proclaimed the unwilling Leo III the Thracian, a cousin of Constantine III and Justinian II.

Leo III, by all accounts uninspiring and dull, had little hopes to last; the people of Constantinople prepared themselved for the loss of the Capital. To the surpise of all, Leo III and the capital endured two years of siege.

Leo III the Drunkard had none of the qualities that came to be expected of an emperor. He was a typical aristocratic drone, indulged in debauchery, had no interest in religion or the military. He proved a capable administrator anyway. He reduced the county of the Obsequium to a ceremonial position, established the duchies of Thrace and the Optimates on opposing side of the Bosphorus, and established three rival elite units of cavalry, the Palatines, the Scholae and the Excubitores.
In Sicily, Apsamir of Mediolanum stopped a last Ummayad attempt at taking Sicily and was named, as a reward, duke of the Sicilian navy.

In later years, the Roman navy was even able to raid Arab cities from the sea. Growing numbers of Christian refugees came to the Empire, and Leo III resettled them in Anatolia, and also in the Balkans, to provide a counterbalance to slavic influence. The duke Apsamir was even able to retake Alexandria. The grass is always greener on the other side: after acclaiming the Muslims as liberators, the Christian Alexandrians had found that Muslims raised taxes, too.

With the siege of Constantinople came a renewal of religious fervor even though the Romans were fanatics already. Debauched in private, Leo III put on a tolerable show of going through the motions. He had to contend, still, with two rival powers: the Patriach of Constantinople and the Pope at Rome. He decided that the Pope was the most annoying, or the least useful of the two. In effect, the Pope was the chief secular authority in Italy, much more powerful than the Roman Prefect at Ravenna. In religious matters, his influence extended far beyond the Empire, to the Frankish realms and up to Britain. Yet from Constantinople, Rome was very far away. Leo III summoned a religious synod at Constantinople, including the newly reinstated patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. (The Caliph, among other concessions, had allowed the Romans to name Orthodox patriarchs in the two latter cities). Outnumbered, the papal legates could only leave in protest as the council decreed heretical many long standing practices of the Western Church: fasting during Lent and on Fridays, requiring men to abandon married life upon ordination, and the word Filioque in the Nicean creed. Besides that, the council affirmed the preeminence of Constantinople over Rome.

Eastern and Western religious practices had long drifted away. There were besides, differences in general attitude. The West viewed the East as irredeemable nitpickers (filioque came to be a mild swearword in Voigare) and heretics, a judgement that was harsh, but not untrue. The West wasn't without fault, either. As a later commentator put it, the papacy disapproved of devil worship because it might lead to Monophysitism.
The council of 732 came as a shock. It was the first time an emperor had publicly disavowed Rome; and even Leo III and Nicephorus felt they had gone too far. At the death of pope Gregorius II, they tried to replace him with a Syrian bishop and met with riots in Rome. Leo III was disinclined to push the matter further; he quietly let the matter go and Gregorius III, a Frank from Latium was elected pope. This set a dangerous precedent of independant papal elections, but the emperor had more pressing concerns. He didn't have an heir. He married successively three noblewomen, all of whom he disliked and none of whom produced a male heir.

In retrospect, Leo III wasn't doing so badly. Successive reforms were starting to bear fruit; the Caliphates even offered tributes, the treasury had never been so full. The army could be maintained at a much lower cost -- with the inconvenience of independant and sometimes rebellious generals. The Balkans were even under some kind of control again.
But literacy was at an all time low, the entire empire had gone from a very urbanized lifestyle to a chiefly rural society. Official currency circulated with difficulted and Romans often had to resort to barter. Cities had been much diminished in population: Constantinople had gone from a population around 250,000 to 100,000 -- and was still the largest city in the empire by far. The last outbreak of plague was a generation earlier, but its memory was still vivid. Quite naturally, the Romans, and especially the Contantinopolitans were wondering what had gone wrong.

The answer was, of course, insufficient piety. Bardanism, a new heresy had come to the capital with Syrian refugees. Named after the apocalyptic preacher Bardanes, and much inspired by Islam and Judaism, it counseled fasting, renouncing to icons, and prayer. The Patriarch was initially sympathetic -- he approved, in principle, of increased piety -- but Leo III had his reservations. When Bardanians started to imply that the emperor's debauchery would lead the city to disaster, he convened a new council and condemned Bardanianism. This met with opposition in Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem: the patriarchs there were quite taken with the idea that worship of icons was idolatry. Leo III revoked the patriarchs. Nicephorus condemned that decision.

In bad terms with the patriarchate, Leo III started courting the new pope Gregorius IV. He had several practitcal reason to do so; he had lost control on the Italian dukes (which had always been tenuous at best) and his last wife had failed to produce a male heir. He'd divorced her and married his long-suffering mistress, the dancer Zoe. He was on his fourth marriage, and besides Zoe's morals were doubtful so naturally the patriarch Nicephorus condemned the alliance. Gregorius IV would later be canonized. He might have been a saint, but he was a politician first and foremost.

An agreement was found: a new synod was convened, which mostly reverted the decisions of the previous ones (though celibacy of Western priest, hardly enforced in any case was quietly abandoned), denounced Bardianism once more, and established that the preseance of the bishop of Rome was purely ceremonial. The patriarch of Constantinople was demoted to second place, though it was agree that all major theological decisions had to be made through a synod.

Faced with a detachment of Scholae knights, the patriarch Nicephorus suddenly found that his true vocation was monastic life; he was replaced by Sergius IV.

Leo III died in 743 after a tragic nighttime encounter with a renegade Bardanian knight of the Excubitores, in his bedroom, with a chandelier.

He left behind him his mistress Zoe and at long last, a male heir, aged 4.

To be continued...

[Ares Land]

Meanwhile in the West...

Before we find out what happened to Zoe and her son, we'll take a quick look at what is going on in the West.

In Spain

In 700, Roman Spania consisted of the domains of the counts of Malaca, Gades, Carthago Nova to which we could add the count of Septa, on the African side of the Pillars of Hercules. The cities had kept a curia, a traditional Roman city councils and being headed by decurions, a remarkable fact for cities of that size. Other than that, they were convenient naval base and profitable commerical outposts, but nothing more.
There was little to distinguish the Roman counts from their counterparts on the Visigothic counterparts, and most everyone in the Empire had agreed to quietly forget about the province.

During the reign of Leo III, however, Peter, the prefect of Africa named a duke of Hispania and sent additional military reinforcements, probably to keep order in the province as Wisigothic rule was slowly disintegrated. In 734, amidst yet another civil war in Spain the duke Paul negotiated and, to the considerable surprise of all, obtained extra troops from Apsamir, duke of Sicily to assist king Roderic in his struggle against his rival Agilla II.
The Wisigothic armies, disorganized and as a whole unpopular found difficult to resist Roman advance; Roderic was left with a rump kingdom in Toledo while duke Paul kept the southern half of the peninsula to distribute as military land.

In Gaul
The Merovingian kingdom was arguably the Western superpower in the 6th century and the first half of the 7th. It's certainly true that it looked impressive on the map, but the Frankish kings weren't interested in empire-building. A long standing custom had been for kings to divide the realm amongst their sons; Guntram, than Clothar II had managed to rule most of Gaul; as did Clothar's son, Theoderic Caesar. Yet Theoderic, plagued by three heirs, had to divide the kingdom between his sons. Besides, his sons, themselves, had to make large concessions (amounting to Magnae Cartae) to the Frankish aristocracy, to the point that they were mainly powerless.
There was a good deal of mutual respect between the Franks and the Roman empire; Clothar and Theoderic had both been granted titles of consul and Caesar.
Around 740, though, came a conflict between the kingdoms of Burgundy, Austrasia and Francia proper. The pope was asked to mediate the dispute; he approved of the very doubtful dynastic claims of Frankish king Grimoaldus I. Belatedly, Leo III approved the resolution and granted Grimoald the title of Caesar in Gaul. Burgundian king Guntram III and Aquitanian king Theoderic had to make significant territorial concessions.
Guntram III, in particular, vented his anger on Provence (the loyalty of the count of Provence was doubtful), who in turn asked for Roman help. Guntram was defeated at Avennio in 742, and most his territory taken by Grimaldus I Caesar -- except for the county of Provence, which became, nominally, a Roman vassal state.

Around the same time, Theoderic of Aquitania and the young and eager king Roderic II of the Visigoths (son of that Roderic the Romans helped a decade before) managed to pick a fight with each other over Narbonnensis. Likewise, the news reached the Pope and Narbo was placed under Roman protection.

At the death of Leo III, the Roman empire held Italy, North Africa from Carthage to the Atlantic, a solid half of Spain, and the Mediterranean coast of Gaul.
Although it should be kept in mind that Constantinople was mostly interested in Africa, Venetia, and the Dalmatian coast. The rest was mostly held by independant rulers, nominally loyal to the Empire, yet united by a common sense of being Roman and Orthodox Christianity. It was a start.

[Ares Land]

I've posted terribly long walls of text; but it's been a rough couple of centuries for the Romans, and I need to get into some detail there or the rest of the history won't make much sense.

Now for a change, I'll post a map instead. I drew it up hastily, and it's a poor map really; more of a sketch. But I think even an ugly map would help at this stage.

So here's the Mediterranean in 750:

Romania_750.png (114.95 KiB) Viewed 9640 times

• There's now a Western Roman Empire, with the capital at Syracuse. I'll explain how later.
• It looks fairly good on the map, but it's still weaker than the East. Most of Western Europe is ruled by Frankish (or Visigothic, in Spain) aristocrats who don't see much of a difference between being nominally ruled by a Frankish king or a Roman emperor.
• The civil war between the Umayyads and the Abbassids allowed the Romans to retake Antioch and Alexandria.

A few metafictional notes:

• It seems I can't decide between English or Latin names... I have some objections to using English names (I have no idea yet what king of names the alt-English will use in this timeline) but it's easier to handle with familiar names...
• On the other hand, I won't use the word 'Byzantine', which no contemporary used and which will never be coined in this timeline.
• Another linguistic note: the Thracian emperors are the first Greek dynasty so far and the administration still uses Latin to a large extent. So a province is called an exercitus, not a theme and may be ruled by a strategus, a comes or a dux instead of a strategos. A minister is a rationalis, not a logothete
• Oh, and their Lombardy is our western Austria / eastern Switzerland. What we call Lombardy, they call Annonaria. Not the first time that geographical terms will get confusing, I'm afraid.

That's all for now. The next installment will be an overlong wall of text, featuring saints, scheming eunuchs and mad emperors (and yes, dear God, yes, popes and patriarchs)

[Kuchigakatai]

rationles? Is that a typo?

[Ares Land]

rationles? Is that a typo?

Yes, and a double typo, no less. I fixed it, thanks! It's ratiōnālis (pl. ratiōnālēs)

[Ares Land]

The polygamists

The Roman empire was a Christian theocracy. Among other consequences, this meant that almost all controversies were eventually framed as religious debates.
The controversy surrounding the succession of Leo III was no exception.

It started with the late emperor's four marriages. The first division was between the papacy and the patriarchate of Constantinople. Divorce was merely tolerated in the West, in theory it was even forbidden. But the pope had to deal with the much-married Frankish monarchs, or illegitimate heirs and had seen no problem with condoning Leo III's fourth marriage.
The patriarchate saw no problem with divorce, but allowed, in theory, a maximum of two marriages.
The Bardanian heretics, still influent in the capital, allowed neither divorce nor remarriages.

This meant that either Leo IV, the child emperor was illegitimate and without a right to rule, or that his father's previous wives had committed adultery, a grave insult to their family, prominent aristocrats and generals.

The underlying issue was that Leo III had done his best to curb the power of the Anatolian aristocracy (to which his earlier fathers-in-law belonged), heavily taxing them, forbidding the sale of military land, forbidding the rich to buy land from the poor. That aristocracy was, in turn, over-represented in the military, while the civil administration had favored Leo III.
As a consequence, the aristocracy and the military were trigamist, rejecting Leo as illegitimate and favoring the claim of a prominent general, Nicephorus the Obsequian, who was also the father of Leo III's third wife. The bureaucracy supported Leo IV, as did the common people, such as the Bardianists were monogamists, favouring Tiberius Julian, the brother of Leo III's first wife. As a whole, the West supported Leo IV.

In any case, Zoe's position was too precarious. She retired to a monastery near Nicomedia with her young son and Nicephorus became emperor. His short reign is called in later sources the Usurpation of Nicephorus. Yes, I know, spoilers.
Nicephorus didn't in fact do so badly. He managed to retake Antioch and part of Syria, and the imperial fleet managed to hold on to Alexandria.
The Bardianist were still making trouble at the capital. As businessmen said, they executed a successful pivot. The prohibition on icons, which had worked for them in the frontier, was unpopular at the capital; so they switched to austerity and eremitism, which allowed them to attract monastic and ecclesiastical sympathy; their opposition to rich landowners made them popular in Anatolia. The polygamist partisans of Leo IV were still so influent that Nicephorus couldn't have him safely executed.

This was a time to regroup and to establish his hold on the capital; but everyone could plainly see that the Caliphate was weakened by the plague and civil war, and Nicephorus couldn't resist. He planned two expeditions; one from Constantinople would retake Palestine and march on Egypt, while the Western fleet would sail from Syracuse and retake Tripolitania and then, using Alexandria as a bridehead and join the Eastern army at the Nile.
That was overambitious, to put it kindly.

In any case, Sicily was hit by the plague; the much diminished Sicilian navy was destroyed at Sozusa in Libya. The new Abbassid Caliph, Suleiman had brought the civil war to an end and was able to defeat the Romans in Syria although they still kept Antioch. The expedition was undoubtedly a failure, but it wasn't an entire disaster: the Romans had lost no territory in the process. But the plague finally reached in 746.

The Plague of 746 was a brief outbreak but incredibly destructive. Revolts in Africa had led to famine in Constantinople: the capital's population, weakened, was greaty diminished. It looked, contemporaries said, as though the hand of God had come down to smite the city. There was little doubt now that God disapproved of Nicephorus.

Nicephorus himself grew increasingly unstable and erratic. Prone to fits of despairs and delusions of grandeur, he alternatively ordered an attack of Jerusalem, a punitive expedition against sicily, and finally purged much of the aristocracy (or what remained of it), ordered mass executions of Bardanists (those who had survived the plague) and ordered the execution of Zoe and Leo.

Nicephorus earned the epithet of Nicephorus the Mad and Nicephorus the Usurper. Perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on him. It does seem he started out a competent ruler -- in many ways more competent than Leo III; it should be remembered that he lost just about everything to the Plague (his family died while he was in Syria).

After that, the duke of Sicily declared itself independant, along with most of the West. The eunuch Nicolaus Thracianus, than rationalis cursus (one of the highest government positions), targetted by one of Nicepohorus' purges departed for Italy, taking with him Leo and his mother Zoe, perhaps as insurance.

This left Tiberius Julianus (the son of Leo III's first wife's brother) as the sole vaguely credible contender for the imperial throne. To paraphrase Alan Moore, he was the strongest man on the cinder.

Here historiography becomes vaguely confusing as Tiberius ruled under the regnal name of Constantine IV (sharing a name with both Tiberius and Julian II was too much for a Christian emperor at the time) but the rename never quite took hold and he was known to posterity as Tiberius II Julian.
In spite of his name, he proved a very competent ruler. He repopulated Constantinople until it reached a respectable population of about 100,000, kept the Bulgars somehow at bay, resettled Greeks and Latin-speakers in the Western Balkans. He carefully avoided any attempt at retaking Palestine, but managed to hold on to Antioch, and even to Alexandria until 761 when it lapsed again under Caliphate rule, at which point he made no attempt to retake. Basically, he concentrated on securing the core regions of the empires, retaking the Taurus and the Antitaurus regions, Armenia, and parts of the Black Sea coast. The plague was not to strike Constantinople again in the coming centuries.
He died in bed in 766, and was succeeded peacefully by his son, who ruled the East as Constantine V. The one thing he could not do was retake the West.

In 748, Leo IV was proclaimed Western emperor (He was later known as Leo of Syracuse), with Zoe as regent and the indispensible Nicolaus Thracianus as curopalates (a rank right under Caesar in the palace hierarchy) and rationales cursus.

In the West, Zoe soon gained a reputation for religious fervor -- perhaps influenced by his long stay in a monastery -- which was shared by his son, and she and Nicolaus proved competent administrators, reforming the Western bureaucracy, in dire need of a complete overhaul, on Eastern models.
They also introduced monetary reforms, switching the currency to more accessible silver and issued a new silver solidus, used not only in the Empire but in Frankish realms. (Which would cause some confusion later on, as Tiberius II did the same in the East, but with a gold solidus, or nomisma).

The initial plan was to use the West as a base and retake the East. The imperial capital was Syracuse, conveniently placed between Italy and Africa, but also Greek-speaking and not out of reach of Constantinople. But as Leo IV came of age, he seemed perfectly content to remain Western emperor. He left the administration in the care of Nicolaus at Syracuse, and became something of an itinerant emperor, going as far as to visit Hispania (something no Roman emperor had done for centuries).

He launched expeditions in Dalmatia, from the new Italian capital at Venezia, and against the Slavs and Lombards, thereby securing the eastern border, and even resettling the Western part of the Balkan (which had been desolated for centuries), and came close to meeting Tiberius' troops in the Pelopponese. That must have vexed the Eastern emperor terribly, but Leo IV took pains to keep friendly relations. He recognized Tiberius as August and co-emperor, made plainly clear that he would not challenge his claim in the East, and finally married Tiberius' daughter. He even, sometimes, paid some back taxes to Constantinople.

Later recognized as a saint along with his mother (who had retired to a Roman monastery, this time of her own free will), was perhaps Christian enough to forgive. (But not enough, as we'll see, to forget)

Upon the death of Tiberius II, he divorced Tiberius' daughter and married a Frankish princess, Theodrada. This led, apparently to difficulties with the pope. Another long-standing issue was persecution of the Jews. The Visigothic kings had long persecuted the Jews, while the Roman governors of Hispania were not quite so eager to do so. Leo IV abandoned all persecution altogether. That was not done out of kindness, but Leo IV had apparently realized that indifference towards the Jewish communities had benefitted the empire (these communities were a key part of Mediterranean trade). The pope protested, but he died in 767, and Leo IV found that occasional stays in Rome were greatly helpful, as the new pope Adrian II found himself in complete agreement with the emperor and rescinded the condemnation of his second marriage.

In the 770s the two Frankish kings, cousins Pippin and Grimoald II found themselves in disagreement between themselves and Eudes, the duke of Aquitaines and the Vascones.

The Frankish allies were essential to the long-term survival of the Westen empire, as they helped secured the eastern borders with the Slavs, Avars, and Lombards. Pippin was deposed by his cousin and sent to a monastery; Pippin decided to take shelter at the court of the Lombard king. That was a new and unwelcome development.

The usual imperial policy had long been to let the Frank work out their family feuds themselves and to openly support whoever came on top. Leo IV took a break with tradition. In a move that must have seen awfully reckless to contemporaries, he sided with Pippin and the Lombards instead. The Roman had long sent help to the Frank; but this time Leo IV had big ideas. He negociated troops from the East in exchange for grain and silver shipments, recruited Italian and African soldiers with promises of land (the desperate Pippin would agree to anything) and launched a massive campaign against Grimoald II.

Nobody had quite noticed that the empire was recovering, and in fact the combined Frankish-Roman-Lombard forces could match Grimoald's army. Roman siege tactics, developped in endless wars against the Sassanids and the Caliphate made short work of Frankish cities. Soon the Romans put Pippin on the throne.
The new Frankish king was granted the title of Caesar, which elicitated protestation in the East, for no clear reason (the title had been awarded to Frankish kings for generations now). The Romans then turned against the mutinous dukes of Aquitaine.

Leo IV was rewarded or, more accurately, with the duchy of Vascones, part of Aquitaine, part of the Lower Rhine valley.
The Lombard king was not entirely trustworthy; when he launched a sneak attack on Northern Italy (the bulk of the Roman troops were still around Tolosa) he was quickly subdued and the allies set up Lombardy under a puppet duke, vassal to Francia (Leo IV also took some land to reward his troops while he was at it).

Leo IV still had an eager army on his hands, and Frankish troops mutinied easily. A solution was quickly found: they raided the king of Gothia in Spain, which Leo IV promptly annexed and divided between his vassals.

The Western empire now held the entire Iberian peninsula, Italy, part of Aquitaine, the mediterranean coast of Gaul and its hinterland, Italy, and most of Dalmatia and Illyria. Besides, the weak North-Eastern frontier was defended by the powerful Frankish kingdom, which was now a client state under a Caesar who had backed his claim with Roman troops.

The Western economy was slowly improving, now that the Western emperor had unilaterally reduced the amount of taxes owed to Constantinople, and it enjoyed the fruits of centuries of relative peace. Leo IV presided over a cultural renaissance there : he encouraged learning, and set up monasteries as centers of learning and relays of imperial powers. It could be said, indeed, that the West was superior to the East in terms of education.

Leo IV held a triumph at Rome, not as good as a triumph as Constantinople perhaps, but sill a very strong symbol.

In the East, Constantine V was gradually coming to terms with the fact the Western emperor was undoubtedly the senior emperor (a fact unprecedented in Roman history). Leo IV strongly hinted, through the papal nuncio, that his son would not be recognized as co-emperor, or even Caesar, should he decide to grant him such a title. Reportedly, in a fit of rage, Tiberius III had the nuncio blinded, to which the pope reacted by excommunicating him.
This led to two councils, one at Nicomedia where the Patriach of Antioch, the Patriarch of Alexandria and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the pope, while at Rome the Pope and the Patriarch of Alexandria (not an error: Alexandria had two patriarchs, one residing there, the other in exile at Carthage) excommunicated most Eastern Patriarchs.

Leo IV further outraged Constantine V by negotiating directly with Caliph Ibrahim of Bagdad on behalf of all Christian pilgrims at Jerusalem, which put everyone in a delicate position.

Neither party could intervene militarly against the other. The two empires were in a delicate stalemate that could have led to a permanent schism. Finally, Leo IV went to Constantinople with a papal delegation suggesting reconciliation.

A council at Constantinople took care of the religious dispute; both sides agreed to disagree on matters of rite; most of the council was spent condemning the Bardanists. In itself, that was a small jab at Constantine V who, like his father, would neither confirm nor deny that he was a Bardanist.

The question of succession was solved as Constantine VI, Constantine V's son was made emperor and Caesar, along with Leo IV's eldest son, Leo V.
Constantine V's half-brother, Gregorius, was made Caesar and would become Western emperor.
(Leo IV had other sons, who were granted various imperial dignities and whose descendants would play a part later on).

Constantine V died in 795, and was duly succeded by two co-emperors. Having multiple emperors was not without precedent; it was expected that one of the two would be reduced to a ceremonial role, and Constantine IV had feared that his son would be reduced to just that.

But Leo IV had a dream; and that was to retake Jerusalem. In retrospect, this explains most of his earlier strategy: retaking the Holy Land would need a committment from both East and West, the largest possible task base and of course reconciliation of the two empires. The aging emperor felt too old in ill; but his son Leo V could lead the campaign.

Leo IV retired (yet again, something no emperor had done since Diocletian) to a Sicilian monastery. Gregorius became Western emperor, and Leo V departed for the Levant, leaving Constantine V in charge of the East.

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800 to 955

The Roman campaign in Palestine is best described as a Peanuts comic strip. Leo V being Charlie Brown, Jerusalem the football, and Lucy an Abbassid force of 100,000 men, numbers the Romans weren't quite able to match yet.
But the Romans would soon find that old Diocletian was on to something with his multiple emperor setup; the East could fight wars on multiple wars, and when the Bulgarians, once again, attacked the Balkans, they were met by sizable Roman forces led by Constantine V. Attacked on several fronts by the Franks and the Eastern Romans, and by the Western Romans under Gregorius later on, the Bulgars were pushed back north of the Danube.

Leo V died in 805 during the Roman siege of Beroea, leaving Constantine V sole Eastern emperor.

This left the empire under the control of two dynasties: the Julians in the East, and the Gothics in the east -- for unclear reasons, the Western emperors had earned the epithet Gothicus, perhaps over their victories in Spain, perhaps to reinforce the connection with Theodoric.
The Gothic and Julian states led a more or less independant existence; while Gregorius and Constantine were openly allied against the Bulgars, it was an open secret that Gregorius plotted to put his brother, later his nephew on the Eastern throne.
The Romans took the eminently pragmatic view that God was on the side of the victorious army; Gregorius could grumble about the Julians being usurpers, victories in the Balkans made it clear that God approved of the Julians too. The empire would still remain divided for some time.

The Frankish king Pippin died in the 810s; Gregorius took a proprietary interest in the succession. According to Frankish custom, the Nibelungian kingdom (named after Nibelung, Pippin's grandfather; no particular connection with magic rings or dwarfs) was divided between his two sons, Ludwig and Lothar. In the ensuing succession dispute, Gregorius sided with Ludwig, and extended Roman territory to the Loire and Rhône rivers. In compensation, Ludwig got the title of Caesar, and secure Eastern marches from Saxony to Lombardy. Ludwig was also granted the elevated status of co-emperors. Of course, the East didn't like it, to which Gregorius answered; watcha gonna do?

The first half of the century was a very peaceful era, with the Roman empires divided into three closely allied states: the Gothics, the Nibelungians and the Julians.

Paul I succeeded to Constantine V. He is to be credited for finally pacifying the Balkans and the Danube region, by signing a treaty with the Bulgarian khan Svinizas, who converted to Christianity and married Paul's daughter Theodora. Soon the Bulgar state was set up as a client kingdom, with Paul Svinizas (he adopted the name of the emperor, his godfather at his baptism) as the Bulgar Caesar.
Paul Julian could have presided over a long era of peace; his daughter Martina married Leo, a nephew of Gregorius Gothicus and a long lasting peace could have been achieved between the two empires.

Yet, after a promising beginning, Paul Julian proved increasingly unstable. He was in turns obsessed with piety, frequently sleeping crouched on the floor in front of his icons, and predicting the future. A prominent Egyptian quack, Romanus of Alexandria was happy to oblige. Reports of animal sacrifices led the pope and the patriarch to condemn him; in answer, an increasingly paranoid emperor had Leo sent back to Syracuse.

In 840, he launched a new expedition to retake Syria and Palestine. With the army supplemented with Bulgarian and Frankish troops, the Romans were this time able to match the Abbassid forces.
Paul Julian managed to secure a defeat against all odds, by sending the army to Mesopotamia. (Romanus of Alexandria had, apparently, predicted he would restore the Roman empire to its height).
He also sent assassins to Syracuse. He was apparently under the impression that the army and the church were plotting to replace him with Leo. He was absolutely correct, and he did succeed in killing Leo and Gregorius. Another relative of Gregorius, confusingly named Paul survived.

And so Paul Julian had made two classic blunders: going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line and starting a land war in Asia. He was assassinated in turn in 848.

The Eastern court wouldn't accept Paul Julian; they favored Tiberius, Julian relative and prominent general.
Paul Gothicus had trouble at home anyway. Peter, another Gothicus relative and a bishop was elected Pope, according to his uncle's wishes. But the Roman clergy protested, held a counter-council and proclaimed Sergius III the Great pope instead.
That Sergius is called "the Great" should be enough to tell you who won. In fact the Church, sensing imperial weakness had taken the opportunity to reassert itself. Paul Gothicus, who was probably smart enough not to antagonize the Church and not very convinced by his cousin, eventually agreed that the emperors had long agreed not to interfere in papal elections, and recalled his cousin to Syracuse.

Obviously, of course, Peter Gothicus decide that the next best thing was to become emperor.

Meanwhile in the East, Tiberius managed to secure an humiliating peace with the Abbasids and to keep Antioch, which was about as well as he could do. That was not enough for some; he was deposed soon after; Romanus the Alexandrian was publicly executed (an uncommon punishment in an empire that felt that blinding criminals by gouging their eyes out was more humane). For a solid decade, Constantinople was ruled by a military junta while the East engaged in civil war.

King Ludwig on the Franks had died after hitting a door lintel (a surprisingly common cause of death in pre-modern times, actually!) and divided his kingdom between his sons. This time, the Romans stayed out of the ensuing wars, and eventually Ludwig's two sons worked out a division along the Rhine and Scheldt rivers.

Lothar, the younger son, ruled the western part; but newcomers had appeared on the scene: the Vikings.

Both Paul Gothicus died in 552; his cousin Peter was met by opposition from Church and army; several generals attempted to proclaim themselves emperor. In fact the only thing resembling legitimate power was in the hands of pope Sergius the Great. Leo VI (another Gothicus) became emperor, but he was very much a puppet of the papacy. He's mostly remembered for sending help to the Franks against the Vikings.
Again at the impulsion of the pope, Roman troops were even sent to Britain to protect monasteries against Viking raids.

Let's turn back East again. Did you remember that there was a Senate at Constantinople? Well, neither did the Romans. Prominent bureaucrats, clergymen and generals bore the traditional title of "senator", but the Senate as a body hadn't met for generations.
Yet there was unrest in the East and, perhaps more importantly in the Norths, as the christian Bulgar Caesaar had to deal with a pagan and Slav uprising. The junta's rule had to be legitimized somehow, so in 556 they reinstated the Senate for the sole purpose of nominating Michael Krinites, an 85 years old veteran who had served under Leo III and Leo IV. In other words, they expected an elderly and conservative puppet emperor. They were wrong.

Michael Krinites restored imperial power, banished most the junta to remote monasteries. His granddaughter married Thomas the Greek, who became Caesar and co-emperor, and led successful military campaigns, securing Dalmatia and the rest of the Balkans. During a five year reign, he had launched vast tax reforms, mostly aimed at breaking the back of the large Anatolian landowners, and ordered the compilation of a new code of law.

In 567, both the Eastern and Western emperors died.

Thomas the Greek, Michael Krinites' popular right-hand man succeeded him without much fuss. A few prominent generals and aristocrats disappeared, but these things happened, and besides he enjoyed a considerable popularity. Thomas was most likely not Greek; his family were Latin-speakers from the Balkans (what we would call Vlachs) or possibly barbarians (Slavs or Bulgars). In any case he was equally proficient in Greek and Latin.
He had been duke of Hellas (military governor of Southern Greece) which earned him the epithete of Helladikos in Greek, which his Western subjects translated as Graecus.

Wait, did I say Western subjects?

In fact, at first he continued the long-standing policy of paying no attention to the West; instead he lauched raids against the Caliphate. He had no hope for significant conquests; his problem was that the empire owed huge tributes to the Abbassids. Presumably if he hurt them enough, they would hurt the matter. He did succeed in negotiating a better peace treaty, without compromising the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Thereafter, he launched a massive fleet towards Sicily. Leo VI had been replaced by an usurper, John, against the wishes of the pope. Grudgingly, Sergius III recognized the claim of Thomas Graecus who finally reunited the empire in 770.

Meanwhile the Vikings were still raiding Western Francia and England and started raiding Roman Aquitaine and Hispania. Thomas Graecus was largely unaware of the political situation in the West; he didn't quite see the point of a Frankish buffer state that wasn't buffering anything. When local king Karl asked for Roman help, Thomas simply took over his kingdom.

All lands west of the Rhine were now under Roman rule. The Frankish kingdom was pretty much dead; the East Francian king, Arnulf became the first Caesar Germanorum.

Thomas was notable for leaving Constantinople (something few Eastern emperors had done before) and extensively touring the West. His interest may seem surprising, but the West as a whole had enjoyed almost two centuries of relative peace under Roman - Frankish leadership, and while not quite the equal of the East, it was rich, prosperous and secure.

Government charges had become more or less hereditary; Thomas reorganized the whole system, establishing two levels of hierarchy: ecclesiastical, with bishops under the responsability of the local patriarch (either of Antioch, Constantinople, Carthage, or the pope) military, with dukes and counts under four prefects (of Africa, Italy and Gaul, Syria and the East) and added a third, civilian hierarchy with vicarii imperial inspectors with both civil and religious responsabilities.

Thomas Graecus was much disliked by his contemporaries, especially in the East, who bemoaned that he had failed, through lack of piety, to retake the Holy Land.

In fact, his son, Michael the Saint, who became emperor in 782 embarked on no Eastern adventures either. Seeing himself as a Christian emperor ruling over Christians, he had no desire to rule over unruly Muslim populations, especially since no attemps at conversion had met with any success.

Instead, he continued reforming imperial institution, attempted to unite Eastern and Western monetary policy (in fact he mostly decreed the Eastern nomismata equivalent to the Western libra and left it at that; the West continued to use silver and the East gold). He largely replaced the Constantinopolitan court aristocracy, based on large land holdings in Anatolia, with landed military elites and undermined both with a system of civilian vicarii and praetores. He sponsored institutions of learning in the patriarchals sees, establishing the Studia of Rome, Carthage and Constantinople.

The one, relatively minor sore point, was the Vikings. The Romans had expected to be better than the Franks at fending them off; but the Vikings turned out relatively persistent.

By then, the Romans were very much used to dealing with pagan Barbarians. In Gaul, they obtained the conversion of Rufus, the head of an expedition against Paris, in exchange for large grants of lands - he became duke of Danisca likewise in Britain where they converted Henricus, later duke of Eboracum.
The Danish power was counterbalanced with Celtic rulers in Brittany and Wales, with Solomon becoming duke of Brittany and Concenus, duke of Wales. Michael II partly overturned some of his father's reform, happy to leave hereditary rules in the periphery in exchange for heightened control over the central provinces.

Michael II died in 942, succeeded by his grandson Basilius, who himself was succeeded by his son Thomas II. Both successions were completely uneventful.

When we think of the grandeur that was Rome, we tend to look back fondly to the Antonines. But to the Romans, the most exemplary dynasty are the Graeci. They had made it for almost a century with a large united empire (not quite Trajan's empire, but impressive nonetheless), no dynastic squabbles and presided over a Roman renaissance.

In a strange twist, while the Eastern Romans continued to call themselves Romans, the Western Romans distinguished between Graecia (imperial land) and Theodiscia (their German neighbours to the East).

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Another ugly map!

This time with the Roman empire and its exerciti (provinces) in 942, at the death of Michael II.

Untitled drawing.png (173.58 KiB) Viewed 9351 times

Yes, it's awful, but I hope it helps.

The provinces of Sicily (with the Western capital at Syracuse) Rome and the Optimates (with Constantinople), get special prefects, rotated often and on an especially tight leash. In the rest of the empire, the density of exerciti is a complex function of importance, population density and trust in the local authorities.

[Ares Land]

955 to 970: Heresiarchs and witches.

It's been a while since we mentioned the African provinces. Rich, powerful and prosperous, they had served as a power base for many an imperial pretender. Government was mostly left to local elites: Romanized Berbers and Franks occupied the coastal city, bordering nomadic pastoralists, mostly left alone, with local leaders granted the title of princeps.
These provinces had long been christianized, and after the Donatist heresy in the 5th century had been strictly orthodox. A patriarchal see had been established in Carthage in order to break up the power of the papacy somewhat, but the Carthaginian patriarchs were consistently aligned with Rome.
In religious controversies, African Christian often insisted on the most rigorous position.

In the early 10th century, a new heresy called Cutumanism began to take root in Numidia. Named after an African bishop named Philip Cutumanorum it wasn't terribly original, as heresies go: it was pretty much a rehash of Marcionism and Gnosticism. The central tenet was a rejection of the Old Testament, with the implication that the God of the Old Testament was not the true God. The preacher Philip had some success among pastoralist Berbers and part of the rural elite; after being condemned by the Carthaginian patriarch, he sought refuge with the Cutumani (in the mountains of Eastern Numidia).
Soon there were rumors that Philip Cutumanorum could perform miracles -- or had made a pact with the devil.

According to the available evidence, Philip was just a local quack, and that sort of thing could and should have been suppressed by local authorities. Except that a local nobleman, the duke Marcus Gothicus, supposedly a descendant of Leo IV officialy condoned Cutumanism, and denounced both the prefect of Africa and the Carthaginian patriarch.

Soon the rumor spread that the Berbers had converted to Islam -- Cutumanism bears no resemblance to Islam, but Christians at the time were, to put it kindly, not very sophisticated about Islam, especially in the West and treated it as a kind of paganism. Marcus Gothicus supposedly restored some pagan practices and led riots in the cities of Saldae, Hippo and finally Carthage.

Thomas II, upon his accession, reacted with surprising brutality, debarking in Carthage in 955 with newly recruited Norse troops and led personally a five-year long campaign, treating in fact the heresy as what it was: a transparent attempt to use Africa as a base for imperial usurpation.
The war did not go well; the duke had strong support in the cities and cleverly exploited divisions in the local population: exploiting long divisions of Berber versus Roman, Jews versus Christians, country versus city. There were reports of rains of locusts, water turning to blood, a return of the plague. All seemed hopeless when suddenly in 961 the heretic Berbers suddenly reject Philip Cutumanism, and chased him out of his moutain hideout and turned against Marcus Gothicus.

Thomas II issued a general pardon and returned to Constantinople with the rebel duke and the heresiarch in fetters. Both were burned at the stake for heresy.

The empire was pacified. Civil war erupted in the Caliphate, between a newly formed Egyptian and Baghdad Caliphate. Thomas II took advantage of the weakened enemy to retake Cyrenaica and Tripolitana, where he established colonies of Norse settlers. He was certain that the African revolt had been caused by Muslim interference and wanted to establish a buffer province.

Thomas II's wife died in 964; she had bore him three daughters, but no son. The widowed emperor was reportedly smitten with Calliope Samosatus, the daughter of a palace officer named Theophilus Samosatus.
Thomas II's remarriage met with some opposition. The new bride was apparently low born. Theophilus Samosatus, a Greek by birth, is mentioned as a praetor in Reda, not far from Narbo. He was indeed sent in a fairly low capacity (some obscure matter considering military tax owed by the local count); Calliope is also mentioned as the daughter of a fishmonger from Narbo, but since she's also mentioned as the daughter of an incubus, we take such claims with a grain of salt.

In any case, Thomas II suffered some political opposition as a result of his marriage, and in fact he was assassinated, leaving his young wife pregnant. According to Eustratius, the cubicularius - chamberlain - he had not been entirely unprepared for an assassination, and had decreed that the unborn child, if male, would be a son, and that Calliope would be regent.

Well, as they said back then, coniuratio obvia est obvia.

In any case, Leo VI was born in 968 and Calliope was crowned empress as Zoe Augusta. The auspicious names were presumably supposed to recall good memories St Zoe and St Leo. Besides, they were a subtle jab at the Helladikoi/Graeci family. Constantinople had in fact to deal with a surfeit of imperial relatives: the Graeci/Helladikoi clan, relatives of the emperor, but also Gothici and Juliani, relatives of the previous dynasties.

During Thomas II's long absence, the imperial court had turned into a nest of vipers. There's an alternate interpretation to Calliope/Zoe's regency: perhaps Thomas II did plan for an assassination, and perhaps he couldn't trust his large screwed up family with his heir, and so decided to make his wife regent, knowing that she would, in turn, rely on the eunuchs.

A few words on the eunuchs: theoretically the Romans frowned on castration, which meant that accidental castration was oddly common in imperial circles. In fact, eunuchs ran a good deal of the upper levels of administration; they were supposed to lack ulterior motives. Eustratius was, in fact, a remote Gothicus cpusin, in spite of which he remained mostly loyal to the Graeci.
Zoe did put her trust in eunuchs -- about the only smart move for a reigning empress. Eustratius became rationalis cursus and curopalates, another eunuch was made count of the Obsequium, another duke of the Optimates, other were made prefects.

How about the regent herself? Well, let's say that opinions are divided. She was known to later historians as Saint Zoe Augusta or as Zoe la Striga -- Zoe the Witch.

The charges of witchcraft include of course her sudden marriage to Thomas II and her consorting with fortune-tellers. But what led to the accusations was mostly the fate of her political opponents. The aristocratic office-holders she or Eusebius had replaced all met with sudden accidental deaths or illness in 968 and 969. Carthage suffered from rains of blood until the prefect of Africa (a Gothicus relative) was replaced; terrible fires ravaged the Numidian countryside.
Michael Helladikos, a cousin of Thomas II was accused of his assassination; he was driven mad by visions of hell, clawed his eyes out and fled to mount Athos.
Of course such accusations are seldom taken seriously. The fact remains that many potential rivals met cruel and unusual fates while she held on to the throne against all odds.

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Heresies resurfaced once more. The client state of Bulgaria (confusingly located north of the Danube, in other words, what we call Romania...) was troubled by new neighbours: the Pechenegs, the Magyars and a newly formed Slavic-Norse condominium called the Rus'.

That and the excessive lifestyle of the Roman-supported Bulgar caesars led to a popular revolt which, as it often happened, took the form of a new heresy. Well, not so new. It had been long standing practice to move some troublesome populations to Scythia. Under the influence of African Cutumanites and Armenian Paulicians, the Bulgar heresy (or Massalianism) was simply Gnosticism.

Zoe reacted with unconventional brutality. The long wars that ensued effectively terminated Bulgaria with extreme prejudice. Rains of fire, chroniclers, said, destroyed the Bulgarian cities (which is usually interpreted as yet another instance of witchcraft, but was probably due to the use of liquid fire: petroleum mixed with soap and resin, in essence, a crude early form of napalm. The Romans made great use of it; there are reports of Roman soldiers using 'Antioch jars' -- ceramic hand grenades -- in Britain).

The war strengthened her rule; she won some gruding respect from both church and military. Most of Bulgaria became imperial land. New client kingdoms were set up, confusingly called Western Turkia (a Magyar kingdom) and Eastern Turkia (mostly Petcheneg).
Relationships with the Rus', which until then had been Roman enemies, also improved. They were already halfway through converting to Christianity. Zoe granted Vladimir, the prince of Kiev, the title of Caesar, and married him to Helena, Thomas II's eldest daughter.

Speaking of marriage, Thomas' second daughter married Conrad, king of the German, and the third one married a minor landlord from Macedonia, Peter Palaiologos.

Contemporaries pointed out, to Zoe's face, that the matches were way below the princesses' station, and behind her back complained that she was prostituting them. It was, in fact, a clever political move: none of the matches could be imperial candidates, and Leo VI's half-sisters could not be used against him.

Zoe turned out a very capable empress (even though the mysterious deaths could be disturbing); her son proved a disappointment. In 988 he tried to have Constantinople burned; the following year he tried to have his mother murdered, and then Eusebius (successfully, this time) and the year after that he publicly renounced orthodox christianity and formally established the Bulgarian heresy as a state religion.

Leo VI is usually classified among the mad emperors, along with Nero, Commodus and Caligula. As far as we can judge from the few accounts, he was a slightly disturbed young man, and quite sincere in his Gnosticism. The plot against Constantinople is possibly a later fabrication; as for the rest, his conversion to Gnosticism had led him to plot against his mother -- whom he had come to see as a great sinner, a murderess and a witch.

Zoe had no choice but to exile her son to Mount Athos, along with several heterodox priests she felt had exerted a bad influence on her son.

The next year, fleeing the unsanitary Constantinopolitan court, she moved to Rome.

The pope, John XIV (one of the most brilliant intellectual of his time, who among other accomplishments did much to revive Classical learning) was probably nonplussed by the arrival of the witch-empress, and her retinue of eunuchs and court magicians. But he was a good politician, and did his best to hide it. He answered with the equivalent of 'dude, WTF?' to king Conrad, who claimed that as the emperor could not possibly be a woman (Zoe now signed her novelle, her decrees, imperator in Latin and basileus in Greek.) and suggested that he was now the legitimate emperor.
John XIV asserted his power -- and the empress' -- on the German court by denying him the title of Caesar and granting him to his Bavarian rival, Ludwig; The German kingdom erupted into a brief civil war. (The princess Helena was murdered; reportedly Conrad was struck by lightning the day after, leaving an astonished Ludwig with no rival Caesar).

Leo VI supposedly died in 993, although it is widely believed that he escaped his monastic retirement and was never sighted after that.

In the East, a civil war was raging between Shi'a and Sunni factions; finally a new dynasty, the Alids, established themselves in Egypt, conquered Palestine and Syria and refused pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jerusalem attracted an ever-increasing number of pilgrims as the Balkan and Mediterranean routes were becoming safer.
The Roman empire send troops to the help of the Sunni factions; in return Jerusalem was practically turned into a Roman town.

Zoe died in 1040, at almost ninety. She had named successive generals Caesar; finally the title went to a Basil Bardae, who married a granddaughter of the princess Theopana (and emperor Thomas II's great-granddaughter).

In many ways, Zoe's reign was a golden age for the empire. She had secured the Balkans and established a network of client states that would serve the Romans well for generations. New systems of crop rotations, and the introduction of water mills meant that the West was richer and more populous than ever before.
The new invention of paper, invented in China, made its way to the empire during her way, through Persia and the Caliphate), allowing cheaper production of books; a renewed interest in learning meant that there was a healthy market for them.

The empire was in many ways unstable; tax collection was as difficult as ever; Zoe and the preceding Graeci had made many concessions to the landed military of the exerciti. Charges of dukes and counts were often hereditary and these new lords could be independant magnates in their own rights. She had barely managed to contain private wars between her governors. But this new power was mitigated by a greatly improved imperial bureaucracy (she had greatly favoured eunuchs, who in turned had strengthened the administration); large grants of lands were made to monasteries, establishing efficient counter-powers. The egalitarian reforms of previous emperors remained more or less in force, preventing the largest landowners from buying out little properties outright.

Zoe, a charismatic woman, could handle crowds very well; while the aristocracy generally reviled her, the people of Rome were calling her a saint before her deaths. In those day, that was enough for canonizations, and so she was known as Saint Zoe Augusta, in spite of all the persistent rumors of witchcraft.

Rumor has it that she had other children of various lovers (one name that comes up often is Leo Gothicus, a minor Gothicus relative that somehow escaped her purge), that were hidden from Leo VI and sent to Egypt, or to far off regiosn of empire. If such children existed, secrecy was indeed maintained as they were never mentioned in contemporary souces, but many a pretender would later claim descent from them.

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Zoe's greatest success, though, was mostly overlooked at the time. The Roman empire under the early Graeci suffered from an excess of rival aristocracies: the court aristocracy of Constantinople, the rich landowners of Anatolia, the military aristocracy, and the feudal dukes in the West. She did manage to renew the overlarge aristocratic class Basil Bardae, the new emperor was perhaps the best example.

The son of an ordinary Anatolian peasant, Basil was one of that vast class that did not even rate a surname (Bardae simply meant, 'son of Bardas'). When he was a child, Zoe was establishing new imperial regiments, outside the traditional landed military; Basil was noticed by an imperial recruiter. At a very young age, he was noticed for bravery in Jerusalem, and transferred to the Scholae Palatinae, the empire's elite troops.
The Scholae had suffered a slow decline and by Zoe's regency, they were a purely ceremonial corps for young court aristocrats. Most of the Scholae had been purged and the corps had been transformed into the empress' personal guard and occasional commando troops.

Basil Bardae was made count of the Scholae and did much in Spain to end a private wars between the rival dukes of Tarracon and the praetor of Cordoba; finally he was named Domestic of the Schools; which made him de facto commander of the imperial armies.

He concluded his career by marrying into the imperial family and taking the name of Basil Graeci.

Basil I was a fairly dull, decent leader, reigning over a more or less pacified empire, the chief problems being unrest in the Balkans and the rising power of great feudal lords in the West. He died in 1051.

The trouble with autocracy is that much depends on the personality of the autocrats. Zoe and Basil were workaholics, which ensured that the Graeci system worked more or less satisfactorily. Basil's son, Theodore I turned out to be a disappointment.

The first thing he did was picking up a fight with the Roman clergy, who had long had the privilege of electing the pope without obvious interference. Theodore had favoured an Eastern candidate, John of Cilicia over Benedict, the pope-elect. Much to Theodore's suprise, the patriarch of Constantinople favoured Benedict as well. Riots chased the emperor out of Rome; John of Cilicia was killed on the orders of the Roman curia. In a rage, the emperor dismissed the urban prefect, which didn't arrange matters one bit.

Theodore suggested a compromise and offered Nicolaus of Burgundia as an acceptable candidate. Constantinople and Carthage insisted on Benedict, even though the Roman electors had already deposed him and elected Nicolaus.

So the empire ended up with two popes, a religious schism in the making (several dukes declared themselves for Benedict, exiled in the abbey of Cluniacus. Oh, and German king Henry insisted on naming himself the archbishop of Trier. Pope Nicolaus rejected his nomination, which led to tense relations between the empire and Germany.

Why did Theodore feel the need to pick a fight with the pope? Well, all we need is to follow the money.

The Roman empire had reached a respectable extent, but local government, especially in the border province was fairly laissez-faire, and without an adequate census or local cooperation collecting tax was a difficult proposition.

The reasonable thing would have been to oust the local governors, replace them with trusted men, and implement a proper census. But the Graeci lacked the means to do so. Zoe and Basil I had established new military forces, but those needed to be paid. Traditionally the Roman army was paid in land, but that was no longer an option: the borders had been fairly stable for almost two centuries. Eventually feudal holdings reverted to the Crown, but the emperor had no choice but to redistribute them again. Of course, local knights, not serving in wars, were supposed to repay service with a special tax instead; but the military tax was probably the hardest to collect.

So Theodore had hoped to get his hands on the holdings of the numerous monasteries, and on Church land as well, and perhaps to diminish some of the powers of the archbishops (as it happens, archbishops were often strong feudal lords of their own). The idea was sound, but Theodore hadn't anticipated the formidable resistance; he also had hope to use to his profit the rivalry between Constantinople and Rome, which had only heightened since the capital had moved back to Rome. (The patriarchs probably supported the pope because they were aware that the property of the Eastern churches would turn next).

Theodore also had trouble in Africa. Prince John, a local Berber ruler, took Volubilis (Mauretania Tingitania) in 1055. Much depended on the Berbers at the time, as they controlled the very lucrative trade across the Sahara with the empire of Ghana. Besides, Mauretania was a very productive agricultural province; besides John was well-placed to threaten Carthage. Theodore had little choice but to accept the situation, and buy John's loyalty by granting him the title of Caesar.

In Britain, the dukes of York and Anglia, faced with Theodore's indifference, had little choice but to ask for the help of the neighbouring dukes of Francia, Brittania Minor and Danescia against Danish incursions. The Danes were soon expelled, but the rival duchies started turning against each other. Rome had no troops to spare to mediate the dispute: they were needed on the Black Sea borders, where both Rus' and Romans had to deal with the Petchenegs and the Cumans (both Turkic people).

Theodore's leadership proved uninspiring in the crisis. So uninspiring in fact, that the emperor's trustee on the Eastern Front, Antonius the Dacian rebelled in 1058. Antonius was of Magyar and Turkic origins, a brilliant general, with a genius for steppe warfare. He managed to hold the Pechenegs in check, and to secure Chersonesia, when he faced a mutiny from his unpaid troops. Many of these, coincidentally, were Berbers, and eager to go home. Antonius had nothing to pay the troops with, and was unwilling to die in a revolt, so he took the third option of walking on Constantinople and proclaiming himself emperor.

The locals were pretty happy about having a new emperor, especially one at home rather than occupied in the barbaric West, but the patriarch remained prudent (and paid dearly for it, as Antonius had him asssassinated soon after). Theodore managed to muster an army, with help from Frankish and Hispanic dukes, and the Mauretanian Caesar. The civil war went on for ten years and ended in a loyalist victory.

Theodore was deposed, during the war, by the Scholae who elevated instead another Theodore, a remote cousin of the previous Theodore. Theodore II married a Graeci princess, had her formally adopt his son Basil to consolidate his dynastic claim, and finished off the wars in 1068.

Theodore II, also known as Theodore the Great managed to save the empire from disaster. He mostly gave up on the religious issues but insisted on confirming the nomination of the archbishop of Trier, which provoked a brief war with Germany. The German Caesar suffered from the same problems, as his kingdom was quickly disintegrating into independant principalities. The Romans could muster bigger armies and so the German war was brief and victorious.

With the help of loyal dukes, Robert Senonensins and William of Danescia also put an end to the low level civil war that intermittently erupted in Northern Gaul and Germany. William ended up with the elevated title of megaduke and vicarius Augusti with full authority on Brittany, part of Northern Gaul and Britain, while Robert ended up with Paris, and the rest of Northern Gaul. Soon both megadukes would be at each other throats (and with the dukes of Brittania Minor), but that would be a problem for a later time.

The Church was mostly placated for now; in many ways both popes and emperors had lost. The emperor had accepted his submission to the Church, adn the independance of Church hierarchy -- not to mention that no emperor managed to get one bit of Church estates; on the other hand, the pope had given large concessions to his fellow patriarchs; the papacy had lost all claim to primacy, except ceremonial, and was divided into five autonomous (or, more precisely, autocephalous) churches: Rome, Carthage, Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem. This left the emperors in a position to mediate future Church disputes. Theodore also established enlarged electoral colleges for the patriarchates, thus breaking the influence of the local nobility in Rome; finally, imperial administration was strenghtened in Italy, Thrace and Anatolia.
Theodore the Great granted imperial charters to the newly formed Studia (universities) which had develoopped in the 10th century in Cordoba, Carthage, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, Athens and Thessalonica (more would follow), granting them independance from both Church and local authoritie and employed many Studiae-trained clerks to set up a reformed administration, in the hopes of solving, among others, the persistent problems of tax collection and establishing a reliable census.

All of these reforms were extremely expensive, and Theodore II had to borrow money from Peter, the new Mauretanian Caesar.

Theodore the Great died in 1083. His successor, Basil II found himself facing two major problems: the first one was of course, general unrest in the empire and failing finances. The second one was Jerusalem. The count of Jerusalem had faced an humiliating defeat, and soon the Arslan Turks had taken control of the city. (The Baghdad caliphate was, by then, mostly under the control of their Arslan mercenaries, which had expanded into Mesopotamia from their Persian power base).

Basil, in a fairly cunning move, decide to solve both problems at the same time. After some serious arm-wrestling with the Church Patriarch, the Synod of 1087 declared that all Roman soldiers that died fighting infidels would be considered martyrs: a recurrent imperial demand that was finally granted.

Mauretania, Africa, Hispania and Gaul suffered from an excess of knights. The population had greatly expanded in the West; and as it happens, all sons of a Roman soldier were granted a place in the army. That was an eminently reasonable suggestion when the Empire was struggling for survival; but with demographic growth, that left the West with an idle military class that the empire could neither pay, nor grant land to. Basil II had finally given them an outlet; he also hoped to improve the treasury's help through pillage; finally, if the death toll was high enough, plenty of feudal land could revert back to the Crown.

In any case, in 1088, Basil's impressive Sacred Host departed. They left bad memories in Anatolia (the huge force needed to be fed, and the local army still fighting intermittent Turkic raids along the Black Sea did not see the point of the adventure) but won glory in the Holy Land.
Syria and Palestine became imperial provinces again. Theodore named a megaduke of Jerusalem, distributed land, and marched on Mesopotomia.

Marching in Mesopotomia has never been a good idea for a Roman emperor. Theodore died there fighting the Arslanids, in 1091. His young son, Michael was seventeen at the time, an easy prey for the military junta that soon turned him into a puppet emperor. The Bulgarian army rebelled, again, under Alexis the Turk. Alexis marched on to Constantinople, but soon had to flee through Anatolia. Pursued by Berber loyalist forces, he ended up in the Taurus mountains, which turned out very fortunate for everyone.
The Arslanids had planned to take over Egypt next; but Roman forces held them in check near Syria. So they turned to Anatolia again, where they met the forces of Alexis.

WIth the Arslanids defeated, the emperor had little choice but to pardon Alexis, and to make him duke of Mesopotomia (the Mesopotomian army, that is, or in other words, the army charged with defending Anatolia from Mesopotamia.)

Alexis turned to be a fairly good ally of the imperial power, suppressing several mutinies. He was soon called to Rome and became Praetorian Prefect.

Gaul, Brittania, Mauretania and Syria-Palestine were all more or less turning into independant powers, while Alexis was emperor in Rome in all but name. In the West, only Africa (the province around Carthage) remained more or less loyal -- it was part of the core regions and never allowed to gain any independance.)

Michael IV died in 1116, leaving a thirteen-year old son, who died soon after. All evidence pointed to Alexis, who was excommunicated by the pope, who urged all Christian to remove him from the throne. The following year, Frankish and Mauretanian armies took Rome.

Rome had fallen again. Well, in any case, the Graecian dynasty.

Alexis' son, Alexis II succeeded him in Constantinople. He managed to obtain recognition from Antioch and Constantinople, but not from the other patriarcates; but he managed to hold on Crimea, Bulgaria, the Balkans and Anatolia.

The Megadukes of Brittania, Francia, Paris and Jerusalem declared themselves Caesar in the following years; a military governor soon did the same at Carthage.
A map of Europe in 1120 would be strangely familiar, with an Eastern Roman empire with familiar borders and the West divided amongst rival kingdoms. In the coming decades, this became the new normal, as Basil III replaced Alexis II at Constantinople, and various Western leaders recognizing each other as kings, or independant princes.

The second fall of Rome had been as brutal as the first one has been protracted.

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Roman historians call the period from 1117 to 1243 the Reign of Tyrants or the Great Tyranny. Tyrant, here, being an illegitimate rule; that is, not a Roman emperor.
Contemporaries tended to agree. The complaint of a Gaulish errant knight began Suy grez senz empereur..., I am Greek (that is, Roman!), without an emperor... and there was a real sense of apocalyptic doom. The Romans had long believed, almost as an article of faith, that the Tribulation would start with the fall of the empire.

But Romania didn't do so badly, considering. Romania had never been so populous, so prosperous. Literacy was rising so much that an artisanal method of woodblock printing was invented in Italy; Trade along the Rivers, the Mediterranean and the North and Baltic Sea prospered.

In the East, for starters, there was still very much an empire. Alexis II the Mesopotamian still held a fairly sizable empire.

In the West, informal confedaracie soon coalesced around the megadukes to form kingdoms. The Danescian title passed to Folcus, count of the Andecavi (Anjou), who held most of Western Gaul. The Andecavian managed to hold on most of England and Western Gaul, only checked by the kingdom of Aquitania.

In Africa, the Caesar of Mauretania almost rivaled the Eastern emperor in power; soon he conquerred the southern half of Spain, Carthage, Libya and Sicily. He didn't conquer the whole Iberian Peninsula; he was stopped there by the petty kings of Cesaragossa, Tarragon, Leon and Braga (in Northern Portugal).

Francia was reduced to a buffer state, of respectable size, though, between imperial lands and the Andecavian domain. The ruler styled himself king of the Franks and the Burgundians, and made fanciful claims of Nibelungian descent. Southern Gaul was held by the all-powerful dukes of Narbo, who had actual power over a well-governed core region of the empire and thus needed no fancy title of king and Caesar.

Other parts of Gaul were technically still part of the imperial domain, though as it wasn't very clear who the emperor was, they were mostly self governing. These included Paris and Luddeno/Lion (Lyon). Italy was likewise a dense network of independant city states; that very urbanised region of the empire had kept, or reborrowed, traditional municipal institutions, and were governed by a local curia or senate.

The Easter empire fought a series of painful wars in Sclaviniae (northern Balkans) in the 1150s; they received the help of the nominally still loyal Italian city of Aquilea. The Mesopotamians had little choice but to grant the Aquileans the right to elect their own duke, and sovereignty over Ravenna, Venetia and the Dalmatian coast.

The kingdom of Jerusalem was in the worst possible position; they were sandwiched between Damascus and Egypt, and pretty much cut off from the Eastern empire, which focused on the Black Sea: the Mesopotamian lost Georgia to the Arslanids in 1161 and Chersonese (Crimea) to the Cumans in 1166.

The ruling nobles in Jerusalem were often Frankish, Spanish or Mauretania; they received some intermittent help from overseas which helped them hang on to their precarious positions, but complicated local rule. Several of these chose exile to Constantinople; one of these was Balduinus of Bublione, a Frankish nobleman who fought in Jerusalem, was considered for king, and distinguished in service against the Arslanids at the end of his life.

This earned his sons places in the Vigila (one of the Scholae's rival corps). Alexis was succeeded by his sons Michael VI and Alexis II. But a humiliating defeat against the Arslanids, who conquered most of the Taurus, the fortress of Anatolia, led many to believe that the Mesopotamian dynasty had lost divine favor. After a few years of anarchy, finally, Balduinus (a grandson of Balduinus of Jerusalem), knight of the Sacred Host and of the Vigila by hereditary right was elevated emperor in an emergency Senate session, convened, as they often were, by a military junta.

Relatives in Jerusalem, eager to escape from African pressure, persuaded the young emperor to campaign against Egypt. The alliance was sealed with a marriage between Balduinus and Aenor, daughter of the king of Jerusalem, who accepted Constantinopolitan overlordship and was granted the lofty and coveted title of Caesar.

The proposal was very tempting. The Constantinopolitan had left Jerusalem fend off for itself, but felt bad about it. Rich Egypt would be a welcome addition to the empire, especially as relationships with the West were sour or non-existent, trade in Aquilean hands, and the economy in decline. The timing was ideal, as the Muslim world was divided between Persia, the Abbassid Caliphate of Baghdad, the Arslanids, another Abbassid Caliphate in Egypt, Shi'a rebels in Egypt and countless other factions.

The expedition met with initial success. Unfortunately, another general, Yusuf Nur-ad-Din had similar designs. He incited uprisings in Egypt, attacked Jerusalem and overall made sure the Romans were caught into endless wars in Syria, Palestine and Jerusalem.

The Ugrian king Stephen decided this was a good time to attack the northern border; the Arslanids did likewise in the East. When Baldwin was killed in the siege of Acre in 1180, and that was that for the Egyptian campaign. His son Christophorus succeeded to the throne; but the very young emperor (he was barely thirteen) had no choice but to negotiate a humiliating peace with the Caliphate.
A unified Abbassid dynasty now controled Mesopotamia, a good chunk of Syria and Egypt; the caliph was mostly a figurehead for Yusuf I.
The good news was, other problems mostly took care of themselves. As it happened, the Arslanids were a nuisance for everyone in the region, and Romania managed to regain part of the Taurus mountains; in the Balkans, the duke of Aquilea, always helpful, and without any ulterior motives, no sir, pushed back the Ugrians.

It's been a long time since we haven't mentioned heresy! In fact the Churches' hold was stronger than ever. Especialy in the West, where the kings were pretty good at fighting but not always very interested in administration.
Bishops often acted as judges in the name of whoever the local king happened to be at the time (most states adopted a mix of local custom and Roman law anyway), the pope or the Patriarch mediated disputes between lords, and the monasteries were richer than ever. The Studia were firmly ecclesiastical establishments. You get the idea: the Church was everywhere, indispensible, and to be honest, annoying.
Let's start with lands north of the Mediterranean. There, the fashionable heresy was Paulicianism. Yet another instance of Gnosticism: the material world is evil, Jesus is love, denounce the temporal power of the Church, fast to death, give to the poor, burn the Jews, be excellent to each other. The uncanny mix of admirable and horrid that were peculiar to Christian heresy. In many ways Paulicianism strongly resembled the Bulgarian heresy, which had in fact never been entirely suppressed, and as with the Bulgarians, the motive were political. Paulicians denounced feudalism, constant war, and the excesses of the rich, which earned them popular sympathy. They also proned independance from rigid Church hierarchy, which won them sympathy from the powerful.

The powerful duke of Narbo went to far, though, in publicly adopting Paulicianism. He named Paulician bishops all through his realm, and went to attack Aquitaine, in the name of the (new) True Faith. The pope excommunicating them, Aquilea looked the other way (Venetia was in fact pretty accepting of heresy), and so the duke fell under the Assault of the king of Tarracon. Tarracon had absorbed most the other Spanish kingdoms, and now held all of Southern Gaul. Meanwhile, the Andevaci king seized Aquitaine and proclaimed himself Caesar.

Now for Northern Africa. As I said, the Mauretanian kingdom was well on its way to become Constantinople's chief rival. Except that a new ruler, Thomas the Anacorethe, who had studied in Antioch and Constantinople and sojourned in Jerusalem with Berber relatives, and had spent some time in contemplation, went back to Africa and preached about his new vision, which was mostly a return to script observance of Scripture and rejection of traditional Church hierarchies. He won enough support to lead Roman Africa into a prolonged civil war.

In 1200, the now very aged Thomas had conquered most of Africa, and proclaimed himself sole legitimate emperor at Carthage. With the Mauretanian distracted, thought, the kings of Tarracon and Gada conquered most of Mauretanian spain.

Thomas's son, Peter, conquered Sicily and Southern Italy. He was chased by Aquilean forces. Duke Sebastianus proclaimed himself emperor, only to be deposed by Aquilean nobility. Peter attacked again, until the Pope asked for Constantinopolitan help.

Emperor Christophorus was happy to oblige; he managed to take back Southern Italy, Sicily, but was killed in the siege of Carthage.

Meanwhile, in the West, the Andecavi continued their irresistible advances. With some treachery, the Andecavi Caesar, Fulk II secured the support of Frankish vassals and finally grabbed the short live kingdom of the Franks; with superior naval force, he seized Northern Spain. He was now Emperor of a domain later called the Oceanic empire.

In 1210, the German king got rid of an annoying archbishop by pushing him out of the window. Excommunicated by the pope, he turned against Italy, and submitted most of Northern Italy and parts of Southern Gaul. His presence there was short lived. He was chased by a combination of local militia and eastern forces.

The Bublione dynasty had now recovered Italy and a good part of Southern Gaul, they were in a position to threaten both the African emperors and the kingdom of Tarracon. Alas, he soon had to deal with a military rebellion in Bulgaria, as always an unruly frontier. The Bublione were replaced by the short lived warlords of the Second Macedonians.

Alexander, the leader of the Bulgarian army elevated his son Philip to Caesar, and sent him to Rome as co-emperor. The Macedonian dynasty was however, short-lived. The pope condemned the new emperor; Alexander turned out to be a mediocre ruler in the East; Philip was just awful.

The Italian armies revolted under their duke, Theodore Corsini. Philip did his best (which was not very impressive) to crush the revolt. Meanwhile, Alexander sent the Duke of the Bucellaria, his chief rival to Africa. The Duke arrived in Carthage in 1223, and was killed soon after. His son managed to find some support among the Berbers, by now pretty disgruntled with the Carthaginian theocracy and supposedly managed to win them back to Catholicism. Paul Bucellariae proclaimed himself emperor, and made the mistake of heading to Constantinople without stopping by in Sicily first.

In the meantime, Corsini had defeated Philip, taken Sicily, regained control of the areas conquered by the Germans, had him replaced by a figurehead, and marched against the Oceanic Empire next. He struck a decisive blow near Tolosa (due to, in part, a superior expertise in explosive and incendiary weapons).

Constantinople was securely orthodox, and had little use for extra religious fundamentalism. Paul Bucellariae was tentatively elected emperor, but received only a tepid welcome. Discreet inquiries were made as to whether Theodore Orsini would be more acceptable: the patriarch of Constantinople, in serious danger of being ousted by the Bucellariae African clergy, reluctantly agreed.

In 1231, Theodore Corsini entered into a tentative alliance with the king of Tarragon. With the West supposedly secure, he turned back East. Most of the Byzantine navy defected, and Orsini managed to defeat the Bucellariae near Anaplia. (In the Pelopponese, near ancient Argos.)

Corsini was proclaimed emperor. Almost immediately, the king of Tarracon broke off the alliance. A long war of consolidation had begun. Corsini was helped by many defections within the Oceanic empire and the kingdom of Tarracon; grudgingly Africa accepted his rule after a brief war in Mauretania.

He reached Constantinople in 1243 to be crowned by the Patriarch (he had already been crowned in Rome) and to begin an inspection tour of Anatolia, he soon learned that the unified empire had new neighbours: the Mongol Empire.

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1243

Well, there had been news of invasion of Rus' by the Mongols - or Tartars, as the Romans called them. Theodore had mostly shrugged it off, with a 'Barbarian invaders gotta invade.'
As Theodore was preparing to settle in Constantinople, though, the Tartars destroyed the Rus', sacked Chersonesia, ravaged Turkia and the Bulgarian provinces, sacked Scythia and Sclaviniae, destroyed Ugria, and in general made short work of Roman and allied forces along the Danube border regions. The emperor left Constantinople post-haste: the Mongols were already besieging Aquilea.

The Tartars' initial victories were due, mostly, to general unpreparedness (most of the invaded provinces or allies hadn't seen a barbarian invasion in centuries, except for an occasional Turkish raids), the use of gunpowder by the Mongols, and the large size of the Mongol forces.

Theodore managed to delay the Mongols had Aquilea, thus protecting Italy, but he had trouble launching a counter-attack. Gaulish lords were reluctant to join in the fight and Theodore had to wait for African troops to arrive. He received help from unexpected quarters, especially the Lombard duke, who had invaded Northern Italy not too long earlier; in fact many Southern German lords joined the Roman side.
The Tartars left Central Europe in 1245, but then pushed into Thrace and Macedonia, then the Caucasus, then Anatolia.

Theodore even had to resort to peasant levies, most of which ended up dead but slowed down the Tartars long enough for the cavalry to finish them off.

The war ended in 1248; the Empire had lost Chersonesia, Iberia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Cilicia. But Ugria was now a Roman posession, by default.

Meanwhile the Empire had tried the usual option of converting Mongols to Christianity and settling them as a client state; emissaries reached to Karakorum and were promptly sent back with a 'thanks, but no thanks, I am the Scourge of God' from the Khan. But an idea had been sowed...

Theodore then mounted another campaign in Gaul, he died there of dysentery in 1250.

The question of succession was far from clear. Theodore had named Emmanuel, count Obsequium co-emperor and Emmanuel had handled Constantinopolitan affairs quite competently while Theodore was off fighting. The trouble was, Emmanuel was supposedly the lover of Theodore's wife, and the late emperor will was a forgery. The pope took sides and excommunicated Emmanuel: a civil war raged across Italy between the Imperial and the Church party. The kindom of Tarracon regained some power; Philip Rotomagi, a Gaulish nobleman proclaimed himself Oceanic emperor, while John of Arceio, the British duke, declared himself, well, Oceanic emperor. Southern Germany was firmly on the imperial side. A pro-emperor Mauretanian kingdom was established under Peter IV of Tingis, and opposed to the pro-Church prefect of Carthage.

Emmanuel didn't care one bit about the civil wars fought in his name. A true Constantinopolitan, he mostly ignored the West, and besides he had very pressing concerns East: the Arslanid Turks, pushed back by the Mongol Ilkhanate, were invading Anatolia.

The Ilkhanate sacks Baghdad in 1258, which earns a lasting antipathy from the Muslim Golden Horde to the North, but sympathy from Emmanuel. A tentative Ilkhanate-Roman alliance is formed, against common enemies: the Caliphate, the Turks, the Golden Horde. Yet Anatolia still suffers from Turkish invasions, the imperial remnant arount Jerusalem revolts.

The Felici, from slaves to emperors.

Let's leave Emmanuel to his troubles and go back in time a bit.

In 1226, a young Sicilian servus (it'unclear whether he was a slave or a serf) named Felix was bought by a military commander loyal to Philip and forcibly enrolled in the Corsini army. Felix fought in Gaul, in Africa fought in the siege of Aquilea, and finally was made centurion after a battle that destroyed most of his regiment in Ugria. He also earned his freedom, and continued a distinguished military career. He retired in 1255, at the death of Theodore. He was rewarded with a small farm in the Pelopponese, near the new naval base of Anaplia.
Felix was minor gentry (he may have retired a centurio -- the equivalent of an army captain -- or a chiliarch -- equivalent to a major) with just enough income to send his younger son to the Studia in Rome (it's likely he participated in trade between Jerusalem and Aquilea as well) His elder son would inherit both the farm and his father's rank, as was customary.

So Alexis Felici was sent to Rome as a novice in the newly-founded Johannic order, with the help of his father's relations. He mentioned being a student-copist: cheap paper had greatly improved the availability of manuscripts, and in turn increased demand for copists, and otherwise lived a life of dissipation and debauchery. His father died in 1275, when Alexis was perhaps sixteen. He asked his brother (now his tutor) for permission to join the army; but his request was denied.

Emperor Emmanuel had died in 1272 without ever reconciling with the West; he was succeded by his son Theodore, who was assassinated two years later. Military anarchy ensued as various warlords took command in Constantinople, never daring to assume the imperial crown. The West had reverted to anarchy, mitigated only by the Church.

In Armenia, the monastic Order of Saint Blasius had the double mission of fighting against the Turks and converting them to Christianity. The had little succes in the latter, but had not lost hope for the former. Now a Johannian preacher in Anaplia, he met a knight there and suddenly found a way to reconcile dreams of being a knight and his priestly duty.

The military orders did better than the imperial forces; the Knights of Solomon, Hospitalis, and of Saint Blaise took Anatolia back from the Turks in 1280. Meanwhile, a relative of Emmanuel became Emperor in Constantinople. He still wasn't recognized in the West or anywhere outside Constantinople and Anatolia, besides. In fact, Sergius, a Sclaviniae general rebelled in 1281, and managed to defeat a new attack from the Golden Horde.

In 1282, an unsteady Ilkhanate-Roman alliance defeated the Caliphate and the Turks at Acre; Syria and Palestine were divided between Baghdad and Rome in the treaty of Damascus. The order of Saint Blasius was instrumental in the victory. Sergius II took Constantinople in 1285 and was proclaimed emperor, with the support of Rome and Carthage.

Alexis Felici was already famous then -- most sources, Muslim or Christian, described him as 'a most evil man'. It's not so clear that he was that evil, but he was certainly ambitious and ruthless. His brother had reached some prominence in the Army (he was a Count in the Ugrian army and had fought the Mongols), perhaps because of that, he was received at the court of the decidedly lackluster Sergius II, more at ease on a horse than in a Constantinopolitan palace. Alexis became Grand Master of the Armenian Order of Saint Blasius. He was the first to call for a holy war against the pagans -- Tartar, Turk, the Ilkhanate: it didn't matter much to him. Claims that dying in battle would ensure martyrdom enraged the pope (such a decision had only been granted once, and would never be granted again), who called him the Antichrist. Sergius II was assassinated in 1295, replaced with Theodore VI (another relative of Emmanuel), then by Emmanuel II. 1305, after yet another failed military coup, Alexis Felici marched into Constantinople with the knights of Saint Blasius, and was proclaimed emperor. He left for the West shortly after, to settle a dispute between Ugrian and German lords and stopped by Rome to pay his respects to the Pope.

As it happened, pope Benedict XII had been chased out of Rome by the powerful Roman Curia (the local governing body). Alexis Felici now Alexis IV the Priest, dissolved the Roman curia, named a Knight prefect of the City, and returned the Palace of Lateran to the Papacy. The pope, in thanks, ordained Alexis IV a Bishop, and forgot about the 'most evil man' and 'antichrist' business.
In any case, Alexis IV never bothered the pope much; in fact, he avoided both capitals, touring the empire instead, and leading personally an Holy War against heresy. Or, more appropriately, a purge. In later years, he stayed mostly at Aquilea and Antioch, close to the fronts.

Alexis died in 1314 of dysentery. His brother succeded him, thus establishing the Felici dynasty.

Alexis was fairly unusual in being the only emperor to be a priest as well; he was also unusual in being one of the least religious popes ever. He mostly joined the Order of Saint Blasius for the fighting; as emperor, he had Muslim and Jewish counsellors (a most unusual move at the time). He did emphasize the sacred nature of the imperial office; after his reign the empire became formally known as the Sacrum Imperium Romanum Graecum Gothicum.