@Basileus444 the circumstances that led to decolonization are completely different than the ones that the Romans are facing. The Romans are at their heart a mulitethic Empire with universal citizenship granted to those who abide by its laws. It unites various disparate peoples among the notion that there's one law, one faith, and one emperor. Though other versions of Chistianity are tolerated like the Copts, the Armenians, etc.
Southern Italy was basically organized into Katepanate since it was distant from the Empire proper which had a more eastern focus due to the hostile powers near Constantinople. Still the Catepanate was directly answerable to the Emperor with the central government still keeping a watchful eye over the Catepan and coordinating efforts with him.
Agreed. Decolonization is far from my thoughts at the moment, since any TTL analogue to the OTL version is so far in the future. After all, most of the regions of the world that de-colonized IOTL haven’t even been colonized yet ITTL.
That describes the Katepanoi in Rhomania-in-the-East. They function as Viceroys because Constantinople’s too far away to manage things, but they’re still Roman officials that can be reviewed and recalled.
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1635 continued (Southern Germany): Otto Henry and Eberhard march hard east, wishing to minimize their absence from the Rhine theater. Meanwhile Manuel has made less progress than he would like. After sacking Augsburg, he’s been marching in the direction of Stuttgart leaving a trail of destruction behind him. Fleeing in front of the Romans, German refugees and isolated detachments of troops are concentrating in the Free City of Ulm.
Ulm is not a significant Free City, but it lies on the west bank of the Danube and controls an important crossing. During the Brothers’ War it saw some substantial fighting and so its medieval fortifications have been improved by substantial if crude earthen works. Manuel forces a crossing of the Danube south of the city but doesn’t want to leave Ulm as it is behind him. While the Romans are living off the land and thus don’t have conventional supply lines, he is concerned about leaving such a large, if unwieldy and disjointed, force between him and the Roman-Hungarian army besieging Munich. Also a great many supplies on the land have been brought into Ulm, so if the Romans want to eat, taking Ulm is the best way to ensure a meal.
Ulm is placed under siege on August 20th. The defenders outnumber the attackers by a decent margin, but only a thousand of the defenders have any real military experience; most are farmers handed a musket if they’re lucky and a farm implement if they’re not. Their artillery pieces are few and old, one of them bursting on the 21st and killing some of the actual soldiers. However the defenders of Ulm get word, just before Manuel can close the net, that the Reichsarmee is on its way so they reject a demand for surrender on the 22nd.
Manuel is also aware that reinforcements are on their way, although he doesn’t realize their true extent. Given the largely penny-packet opposition he’s faced ever since crossing the Austro-Hungarian border, he does not expect them to be that large. However he has no desire to be trapped between Ulm, the Danube, and even a small relief army. So Ulm needs to fall now.
An hour before dawn on the 24th the attack is launched, the Romans advancing behind a hail of cannonballs and then waves of grenades. Until dawn the assault is checked, but then the commander of the Ulm garrison, Colonel Andreas Erhard von Gaudi, is badly wounded. In tremendous pain, despite the pleas of subordinates, he asks that he be taken from the battlements into the city. At the sight, many of the civilian defenders panic and abandon their posts, the Romans flooding in behind them and overwhelming those still manning their own stations. Resistance collapses.
By the rules of war, any city or fortress that rejects demand for surrender and has to be stormed forfeits any rights to mercy. But before launching the attack, Manuel Philanthropenos said Ulm would be under “1204 Rules”, and so Ulm is handed over to destruction. Fires started, reportedly to take out houses where more stalwart defenders were holding out, soon get out of control. Adding to the hell-scape are the Roman soldiers, who demand valuables and torture or kill those who do not cough up quickly or in the expected quantities. It is sometimes claimed that these were merely tit-for-tat for the atrocities meted out by the participants of the Fourth Crusade, but murderous bloodlust is far more likely.
Exactly how many are killed at Ulm is never established, but the city’s population had been swelled by refugees from the countryside. At least 500 alone were slain when they crowded into Ulm Cathedral for safety and the Romans then blew the church down on their heads. The most common figure cited is about 10,000.
Still at the smoldering corpse-strewn ruin of Ulm, the Romans get word from their scouts about the approaching Reichsarmee, including the first approximate estimates of its true strength. Manuel has a couple of options. He can hunker down in Ulm. The escalade had not badly damaged the fortifications and Otto Henry and Eberhard can’t stick around for too long for risk of exposing the Rhine. But there is still the risk of getting pinned in place by an army that outnumbers them two-to-one and with all the bodies around Ulm is hardly the heathiest place to encamp for an extended stay.
Another option is to retire back across the Danube, placing the river between the Roman and German armies. But that also means moving back into an area previously picked clean by the Romans while simultaneously putting them back from Manuel’s real target. The petty principalities here are one thing; he wants Württemberg. It also means allowing the Germans to re-fortify and re-garrison Ulm. The original Roman assault, while successful, cost the Romans nearly a thousand casualties, a significant percentage considering their small force. A better quality garrison could make Ulm effectively impervious to Philanthropenos’ force, while remaining a big enough danger to block his advance, hence the reason for the original attack.
The third option is to advance, and that is what Philanthropenos chooses.
Otto Henry and Eberhard are both confused and concerned when their own scouts report that the Romans are coming out of Ulm and heading west; they’d expected Philanthropenos to take either options one or two. Things become clearer when vanguard forces collide near the village of Heroldstatt about 26 kilometers west of Ulm. After what has been described as a “brisk scrap”, the Romans give way and the German horse report that the Romans are in retreat. This reassures the Prince-Elector and the Duke who now believe that Philanthropenos has only now realized the forces arrayed against him. They pursue.
On August 28th the Germans encounter the Akoimetoi fortified in the village of Wennenden, blocking the road southeast. Along said road, which leads toward the Blaubeuren Abbey where Manuel had his headquarters the last two days and whose library held some good maps of the area, is the Roman wagon train. It is partially jammed up on the road thanks to some broken-down vehicles. Clearly the Akoimetoi are the rearguard for a Roman retreat that is not going so smoothly.
The Germans form up in the fields northwest of the village and advance. While, from the Germans’ point-of-view, their right wing is flanked by thick woods, their left flank is held swinging wide open in farm fields. As the result the left wing is reinforced, but given their greater numbers that also allows the German left to swing east of the village to hit the wagon train strung along the Blaubeuren road. Holding the Germans before they hit the wagons is the Chaldean tagma, who deploy parallel to the road, the musket volleys between the two armies scything through the crops of the fields in which they fight.
By 10AM, both armies are roughly in the shape of a backwards r. While the Akoimetoi are holding in Wennenden, the Chaldeans are being pushed back, pressed by greater odds and with no natural defenses or secured flanks.
Three kilometers south of Wennenden is the village of Seissen, the land in between consisting of flat farmland. But just south of Seissen the land drops a hundred meters into a wooded depression before promptly rising again to the fields that surround the next village, Hausen Ob Urspring. Any troops there, between the depression and the trees, are completely hidden by observers. The woods also curve north, to the west of Seissen and then near the outskirts of Wennenden, where they anchor the right flank of the Reichsarmee. However as one goes through the woods north of Seissen, the depression disappears, the elevation of the woods becoming level with the surrounding fields, and they are thick enough that it seems large bodies of troops cannot move through there.
At roughly 10:20 AM, six hundred Roman cavalry, all veterans of woodland fighting in Bulgaria or Lower Macedonia, emerge from those woods. They’d entered the forest south of Seissen at the depression, completely surprising the Germans who’d watched and made sure before the battle that the Romans hadn’t slipped in any ambushers into the woods directly from Wennenden. The going had been rough but the horsemen, all from Macedonia, had been highly motivated and the Germans completely distracted by all the Roman soldiery in plain sight. Those plain-view Romans had matched the German scouts’ report of their strength so the absence of a few hundred Macedonians had gone completely unnoticed.
The only advance warning the Germans get is when the few pickets stationed in the trees come tumbling out. There are some German cavalry posted here as flank guards, but the bulk of the limited German horse are on their left wing where the open fields give them more maneuvering room. They are not nearly enough; the one hundred kataphraktoi that are the spearhead of the Roman cavalry roll right over them.
Barely slowed down, the Roman horse crash squarely into the right flank of the Reichsarmee, staggering the formations there, jostling and disordering them, snarling reserves that were coming forward against the Roman cavalry. But while the Romans have hurt the Reichsarmee, they have by no means killed it, and now they are at risk of getting swamped by an enemy that outnumbers them locally over twenty to one. The cavalry pull back to reform.
But now the Akoimetoi come swarming out of Wennenden. While they’ve been firing all morning, they all have a second-issued D3 musket that has not been used that day, until now. With clean weaponry that hasn’t built up any powder residue over the course of the battle, the Guard start pumping volleys into the tangled mass of German soldiery at a rate of 4-5 rounds per minute per man. They cannot keep up that rate for very long, but the carnage they inflict on the packed ranks of humanity is tremendous, with multiple reports of a single Roman musket ball going through three German soldiers.
And then the Roman cavalry slam into them again, this time into their rear. The Reichsarmee’s right wing shatters at the impact but the fleeing Germans are trapped between the muskets of the Akoimetoi and the sabers of the cavalry. It is sheer butchery.
Finally the Germans here manage to break clear of the cavalry, fleeing to the northwest. While the cavalry pursue, their mounts are blown and so are unable to do more, but they’ve more than earned their pay today. Meanwhile the Akoimetoi wheel right, crashing into the exposed flank of what used to be the Reichsarmee’s center. Their rate of fire has dropped since the devastating salvoes from just out of Wennenden, but that is more than made up by their light cannons that are now unlimbering on the field and adding their weight of metal to the Akoimetoi’s attack.
Hammered from the side while the Romans in front of them, invigorated from the news, begin counterattacking, the German center crumbles, albeit not as suddenly or catastrophically as the right wing. The left wing also begins retreating in good order, although the movement is difficult with the Romans hanging on to them.
Manuel then commits everything he has, including the 4th and 8th Macedonian Guard tourmai, neither of which have seen action so far today. The Duke of Teck, commander of the left wing, is killed at this point, and the retreat turns into a rout.
It is now 11:10, fifty minutes since 600 Roman horse emerged from the woods northwest of Wennenden.
The Romans are on the Reichsarmee like a pack of starving wolves on a wounded caribou, the fire in their blood overwhelming their exhaustion. German infantry that form squares to defend them against the Roman cavalry are blasted to bits by light field pieces frantically hauled forward, while if the Germans disperse to avoid the cannon fire the cavalry ride them down. In one case, kataphraktoi with long lances that are longer than the musket-ambrolar weaponry of their opponents, attacking a square formation in the corners, the weakest point, are able to break the square by themselves. This alarms and dismays their compatriots who watch helplessly as the kataphraktoi then flay the formation from the inside out.
Somewhere at this point, although no one can say exactly when and where, the Bishop of Augsburg, the Margrave of Baden, and the Prince of Hohenzollern (a cousin of Archbishop Bone-Breaker) are all killed. Somewhat later in the day death comes for both Prince-Elector Otto Henry II and Duke Eberhard III. The former is slain by a random cannonball that cuts him in half, the latter by a musket ball while leading the rearguard in a desperate stand a few kilometers north of Wennenden. Only nightfall ends the Roman pursuit.
The Reichsarmee effectively ceases to exist. Many German soldiers manage to flee the field, but with their weaponry abandoned and leaders slain, they do not return to their colors, disappearing into the countryside. The senior-most remaining officer of the Reichsarmee, the Count of Fürstenberg, eventually rallies 10000 men at Stuttgart, not quite a third of its pre-Wennenden strength, but that third of the army is a broken reed.
The remainder have been killed, dispersed, or are Roman prisoners. In fact, the number of German POWs after the battle is about half the size of the Roman army. Normally this would be a very serious danger to the Roman army in itself. D’Este last year, in a similar position after the battle of Bad Tölz, had massacred his non-peasant prisoners in the place now infamously known as the Field of Knives. However the Germans here are completely broken, with reports that a single Roman soldier armed with a musket plus a broken ambrolar and no powder and shot is seen hustling on thirty German captives. Thanks to their docility and Manuel’s distaste at the idea of massacring this body of captives, so much larger than that taken at Bad Tölz, most will end up as penal labor in Rhomania, leaving their bones there by some construction project.
Official Roman casualties are listed as 89 killed and 376 wounded.
