OK. This post started out as a brief overview of all that's happened since 619. As you'll see, 'brief' died a quick death. What's posted below is basically everything from 619 to approximately 700 AD.
So my question to you guys is: is the timeline easier to digest like this, in a narrative form, or should I continue doing a year-by-year format? If you like the narrative style, I'll continue posting that way, picking up with 700 AD and going on from there.
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Four Hundred Years of Change: An Update
In the year 619 AD, the Eastern Roman Emperor, Heraclius, made the momentous decision to move the seat of Empire from Constantinople to the ancient city of Carthage, in his home province of North Africa. Despite the pleas of the Patriarch of the Church, and the skepticism and outright anger of the nobility, Heraclius would not be dissuaded. No one now can say whether the move was precipitated by fear or an uncommon insight into the developing future, but the Emperor’s apparent wisdom was proven when the Sassanid Persians overran all of Anatolia and took possession of Constantinople late the next year.
Thousands upon thousands of dispossessed Romans, noble and commoner alike, fled the Persian armies, some bound for Greece, some for Crete and Cyprus, but most for Egypt and Carthage. The influx threw many of the staid social institutions of the time into chaos; many felt the end of the world was near. Many of the traditional boundaries between rich and poor were laid low as the once-wealthy refugees were forced to work to survive, and the local merchants and farmers made fortunes as the dispossessed sold their gems and silverware for food and shelter.
During this time, Heraclius survived four known assassination attempts, one led by an army regiment commanded by the young son of a noble house who had lost everything but their lives during the ravaging of Constantinople. And these were only the nearly successful attempts – the Emperor’s popularity was at an all-time low as discontent and rebellion stalked North Africa from Carthage to Alexandria.
The army was the least affected by the upheavals; despite a loss of morale after the abandonment of half the Empire to the Persians, the soldiers were fed and paid and had warm barracks to sleep in – more than could be said for many others. After the scattered Persian forces in Egypt were driven out in 626, Heraclius gambled on a major campaign to throw the Persians out of the Sinai and the Levant, securing his eastern borders. The gamble was successful; in 628 the Treaty of Palmyra was signed, signaling peace between the two war-weary Empires.
Despite their territorial losses, the Romans (or Carthaginians, as Heraclius now preferred his people to be called) were in a better position than their rivals. Persia, overextended and facing serious incursions from the barbaric Avars, was now vulnerable to a new foe: the Arab people, invigorated and flush with the joy of a new religion – Islam. Probing raids by the Arabs up and down the Persian frontier assured the desert warriors that the Sassanids were easy pickings.
Heraclius’ domains were not exempt from Arab-backed revolts either, and it was this that prompted the Emperor to meet with the Arab leader Abu Bakr in the city of Damascus in the summer of the year 633. After a month-long conference from which both parties threatened to walk more than once, it was decided that the Empire would cede all lands east of the Sinai to the Arabs in return for a promise of non-interference with the rest of the Empire.
The Arabs, balked for the present in their designs on Africa, instead turned toward Persia. Weakened and under poor leadership, the Persians nevertheless managed to stave off the Arabs for thirteen years. In 648 the Persians were finally crushed, and Constantinople fell once more – this time it was burned to the ground and only fishing villages existed there for the next four centuries. Persian refugees fled into the Balkans, where they carved out small enclaves in remote valleys and mountain ranges, pollinating the Avars with their ancient culture - and with Zoroastrianism.
The Carthaginians, meanwhile had not been idle. Three things guaranteed their continuing survival and indeed, prosperity. One: the army undertook much-needed reforms; the officer corps was streamlined – steps were taken to at least partially eliminate the buying of commissions by the wealthy, which had seriously weakened the army’s effectiveness. The army’s structure was altered as well; gone were the days of heavy armored cavalry and static troop formations. Something much more mobile and speedy was needed in the deserts of Africa. Learning from the Berber tribes which now constituted a significant portion of the population, highly mobile, lightly-armored horse troops were introduced, capable of striking out of nowhere and fading back into the deserts.
Two: Seeking to end the social upheavals which were wreaking havoc on the economy and spiritual life of the Empire, the leaders of the Church met in Carthage in 636 in a great Synod, to explore ways by which the many and diverse Christian sects of North Africa might once more be folded into the Church.
And three: treaties of friendship and trade were signed with the Visigoths of Hispania, securing the Empire’s western borders and gaining them a powerful new ally. As a show of good faith, the remaining Imperial lands in southern Hispania, taken by Justinian in 554, were ceded back to the Visigoths.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, momentous events were occurring. The Tang of China, seeking to expand their borders to the west, had taken on the might of the Tibetan Empire. For thirty long years the two empires struggled against each other; both courted the steppe tribes to the north, and when one of the most wily and powerful, the Uighurs, came down firmly on the side of the Chinese, it was only a matter of time before Tibet crumbled.
In the northern islands of Britain, King Oswiu of Northumbria decided the future of religion in the isles when he decided in favor of the Roman ritual over its Celtic competitor. To the south, in the lands of the Franks, the sovereign Childeric had died, leaving his lands embroiled in civil war and anarchy.
In the wild lands beyond Greece and Anatolia, in what, long years before had been provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, new barbarian tribes were settling. The Avars held pride of place – they were the strongest militarily, and their trade with the Serbs, Croats, and even the Franks and Lombards of Italy served to keep them wealthy. But now the Bulgars along the Danube began to present a threat, and the two peoples engaged in war after war for supremacy. And to the east, there were other tribes, displaced by the mighty conflict between China and Tibet – in their thousands, they began to move steadily westward. East of the Black Sea, the Khazars held sway, and without the threat of Roman Constantinople, they were converted to Islam scarcely half a century after the Arbas boiled out of the deserts.
