Crusader Kings II - Paradox Entertainement (02/12)

[Planet of Hats]

Yeah yeah, I should be playing CK3. Whatever. I don't want to buy new games. Besides, CK2's fun.

I've been playing with When The World Stopped Making Sense lately and decided to do a little alternate migration. That's my jam right there, kids.


Reik Blodag, or Reik the Bloody
Warchief of the Warini (470s? - approx. 494)

The chaos of the Migration Period makes tracing historical personages a challenge, but the figure of Reik Blodag is a large one, for all his vagueness.

Spoiler: Frankwank status: Doubtful.

His name first turns up in a single contemporary document from the 470s concerning a Roman trader who passed through the lands of "Ricius, the chief of the Warini." Most other references to him come from after his apparent death. If not for that fragmentary evidence, he could be dismissed as a legendary figure. Some later tales depict him as a giant with a thundering voice and a stag-horned helmet, and artistic depictions almost always show him wielding a sword in one hand and a throwing-axe in the other, sporting a massive beard and wild hair.

The most descriptive source comes from the fragmentary account of Servius of Amiens, a monk writing in the 530s but who claims to have seen Reik near the end of his life. Servius describes him as "the hulking patriarch of the Werni, hirsute and bursting with wroth, that it erupted from him in great bellows." Historians are divided as to how far Servius can be trusted: The historical record on the Warini migration and the roots of the House de Ricingi are scant, and some elements of it are clearly polemical.

Leaving aside editorial commentary, what is clear is that around the 470s, a mass migration of Warnic Germans flooded into the lands of the Saxons. These warriors, originating largely on the lower Baltic coast, forced the Saxons to the coast en route to settling in war camps along the Weser. Later histories and the De Ricingi genealogy claim Reik as the paramount Warini leader.

The Warini remained on the move in the late 480s, reaching the Rhine by 490 and crossing in an outburst of violence into the realm of the Salian Franks. The brutal war saw some of the largest armies fielded in the period thrown against one another, but eventually established Warini outposts from the Rhine to the headwaters of the Seine. Arrowheads and earthworks found near the ruins of Augusta Viromanduorum have been interpreted as a major Warini war camp.

It is unclear how and when Reik actually died, but it's generally agreed that if he did exist, he was dead by 494.

Asmus Brutus
Rex Vernicae (509 - 22 January 532)
Warchief of the Warini (494 - 509)

The earliest fully agreed-upon ruler of the Warini, Asmus, first appears in the historical record in 494, when fragmentary documents concerning the release of hostages name him as leader of the Warini. In later documents, Asmus claims himself as the son of Reik.

Spoiler: A Brute of a man.

It was under Asmus that the Warnic Germans stormed into the Romano-Gallic Kingdom of Soissons. Beginning in the very early 500s, the Warini flooded into the weakened kingdom of Regina Martina, badly weakened by civil war. After years of bloody battles, the Warini prevailed in 507, driving Martina and the last of her armies out of northern Gaul.

The Warnic Germans largely settled along the north bank of the Loire, displacing a few still-pagan holdouts. With Soissons badly damaged in the fighting, Asmus set up shop at Meledunum. Faced with an imminent rebellion among his Romano-Gallic subjects and struggling to find local help, he took a cue from his wife, a Roman woman named Petronia, and professed adherence to Christianity.

By 509, coins were being minted with the face and name of Asmus, proclaiming him as Rex Vernicae - King of Warnica, or of the Warini. The day-to-day management of this realm is more opaque. What evidence exists suggests the Warini ruling class co-opted Roman institutions that were already crumbling at the time of their arrival. The remaining legions vanish from the historical record, replaced by armies largely composed of Warini war bands and hired Romano-Gallic veterans and peasants attempting to train the Warini in Roman ways. Coins from the period, meanwhile, reflect an eclectic mix of Roman and pagan iconography: Coins and carvings have been found featuring the Virgin Mary depicted with motifs common to the pagan Nerthus. A number of nominally Christian burial sites along the Seine and Loire feature grave goods that are distinctively pagan. It's likely that Asmus would have ruled over a religiously divided and poorly-organized realm, maintaining control through a loyal Warini core and promoting Nicene Christianity more as an instrument of government than as a faith pursued with zeal.

The name of Asmus is otherwise attested in post-Roman records from the south. An Italian bishop visiting in about 520 is the source of the name "Asmus Brutus," coupled with commentary describing him as "hoary" and "tawny-headed." Asmus's origins as a non-Romanized barbarian seem to have been taken for stupidity or irrationality by his mostly Romanized subjects, evidenced further by coins tending to depict him with a sloping forehead and a massive neck - features likely to reflect polemical jabs at the barbarian newcomers.

While Asmus seems to have made strides in integrating the Warini into northern Gaul, he would not live to see it out: Records universally agree he was killed in battle in early 532, leading an invasion of the Burgundian Kingdom. He was cut down by a Burgundian chief at the Battle of the Saoconna during a Warini attempt to cross the river.

Asmus Excelsus, or Asmus II "The Noble"
Rei Vernicae (22 January 532 - 2 August 547)

The son of Asmus Brutus, Asmus II is on record as the marshal of his father's armies. His first act was to bring in the Warini reserves and rally the flagging troops at the Saoconna, securing the battle by capturing the Burgundian Prince Thurisund. In the ensuing negotiations, King Evermud was forced to bargain away the March of Lugdunum in exchange for his son's life.

Spoiler: Not a Brute of a man this time, honest.

For all that he shares a name with his more historically impactful father, Asmus II was a different breed of man. Born on the migration to Gaul, the younger Asmus spent his formative years in Soissons, tutored by Romano-Gallic priests and statesmen. His administration coincides with the emergence of the second generation of Gallic Warini - men and women who grew up surrounded by the trappings of the old Roman administration, becoming Latinized as they reached maturity. The marks of Asmus's administration convey this tightrope walk between the Warini's Germanic barbarian roots and the Latin administration influencing them. His coins depict him with long hair but without a beard, with Nerthus-influenced imagery completely absent. Moreover, some sources refer to him as "Asmus Excelsus," or the Exalted, suggesting a degree of high respect among the elite classes.

Asmus seems to have moved from the outset to involve himself in Christian politics in the Mediterranean. Warini troops fought in Italy to support a Nicene Christian rebellion against an Arian Gothic monarch and independently stamped out a number of Arian revolts in the Septem Provinciae during a time of trouble for Christendom. With Europe beset by years of poor harvests and religious heterodoxy, the continent in general struggled for stability.

What records survive suggest that Asmus attempted to reduce the scheming of his vassals by appointing several broad regional governors, appointing mainly Warnic and Romano-Warnic men as dukes to oversee mainly Gallo-Roman counts.

By 544, Asmus extended his authority down the western Gaulish coast to the mouth of the Garonne, proclaiming a loyal Warini retainer as governor in old Pictavium. These claims came at the expense of the child kings of the Septem Provinciae, large but mostly toothless in the face of years of regencies. However, he appears to have died unexpectedly shortly afterwards. Historians broadly accept an account from a northern Gallic monk, describing Asmus dying from infected injuries sustained when physicians attempted to cut a "great lump" out of his body. Whatever the cause, it's agreed that he was dead sometime before the summer of 547.

Tacitus Lignarius, or Tacet the Carpenter
Rei Vernicae (2 August 547 - 6 October 580)

Tacet, the son of Asmus II, cannot have taken the throne any later than 2 August 547 - the date of a decree under his name recognizing several office-holders. But he appears to have served as his father's regent and secondary ruler for the prior five years. He was likely in his early to mid-twenties when he took power, newly married and with an infant son.

Spoiler: Bob the Builder, circa 6th century AD.

Tacet was part of the born-in-Gaul generation of Warini and would have grown up knowing nothing else but the post-Roman world. This put him at odds with many of his subordinate governors. Finding the Doux of Armorica and Archbishop Adiarius of Lugdunum scheming against him to place his younger brother Count Romanus (Romain) on the throne, Tacet was forced to pay out massive bribes to forestall a civil war. Romanus, installed by Asmus II as Count of Sénte, seems to have loathed his older brother and continued to hold himself out as "Rei Vernicae" in his correspondences with other nobles.

Noble plots were not the only unrest Tacet faced. Early in his reign, a rebellion among the still-pagan Warini broke out along the north bank of the Loire, terrorizing towns before it could be suppressed. Warini troops would move from there to seize the then-independent comté of Naves, then a stronghold of Arianism.

In 550, Tacet lead troops into the Alamannic Kingdom to defend against their cross-Alps invasion of the Kingdom of Annonaria. After capturing a series of Alamannic forts along the Rhine, the Warini armies were joined by a band of Transjuranian hired swords and made their way through the Valley of Augustus (the modern Val d'Aosta), winning a battle there against nearly 6,000 Alamanni. Tacet moved along with his army, proclaiming that the punishment for captured Alamanni war leaders would be death. In practice, common Alamanni warriors were merely imprisoned, but chiefs were generally beheaded. Warini soldiers would ultimately isolate and behead the Alamanni king, Leuthar the Brave, during a battle outside Milan, and several more chiefs and high chiefs were executed en route to defeating the invasion before Christmas of 522.

The battles in Alamannia seem to have had some greater strategic significance for Tacet: Aside from securing a Christian kingdom at a time when Nicene Christianity remained under threat from pagans and resurgent Arianism, the campaign weakened the Alamanni. The death of Leuthar left the Alamanni to the kingship of a newborn baby, under the regency of his singularly inept uncle, Rando of Verodunum, ruling over still more chiefdoms run by the regents of children. The import of those Rhine forts became apparent when Tacet marched his troops east in the spring of 553, claiming the "Belgic Lands" as part of Gaul proper and storming the already-decimated Alamanni forts nearly to the Upper Rhine. The war was predictably quick and brutal, expanding the Warini domain east.

Tacet's rule coincided with a long period of religious turbulence in Europe. The controversy surrounding the Henotikon and the subsequent Acacian Schism left Christianity struggling for central identity, and Tacet spent much of his rule stamping out religious rebellions throughout his realm and neighbouring Nicene kingdoms. The years following the Henotikon's issuance were characterized by a massive European-wide resurgence in Arianism, often with rampant violence. Arian pocket kingdoms were established in the north of Italy, while the already Arian kingdoms of the Burgundians and the Vandals enjoyed a period of momentary flourishing.

When not suppressing an infinite and unknowable number of Arian revolts, Tacet's most notable pro-Christian move was the over-the-Rhine invasion of the now-destabilized Alamanni. Around 560, Warini troops crossed the river and systematically tore down Alamanni hillforts, driving them into the Alps. A Thuringian Christian, Vaefar the Confessor, was set up as King of Vindelica. In practice Vaefar's state was probably little more than a Warini client, but it seemingly secured the eastern border and planted another Christian cross into the soil of western Europe.

Bit by bit, Christendom struggled through the 560s, though its pullback from collapse likely had more to do with the Eastern Roman Empire coming back under the rule of a Nicene Emperor than with the more remote efforts of the Warini Kingdom.

In the late 560s, a civil war broke out in the Warini Kingdom, driven by Duke Jordanes of Chartres attempting to style himself King of the Warini. Jordanes was eventually toppled, and the region was handed to Bendix de Autricimingi, named Doux of Alercie. A revolt in the Lyonnaise followed, with several local lords being deposed and replaced by a duke of the Geiringi family. Yet it's not religious war nor political skullduggery that Tacet is most notable for.

Over the course of his reign, Tacet broke ground on at least a dozen known major churches. He's often credited for the design of the first Basilica of the Mons Martyrus, but no foundation-stone has been found to link its commissioning to him. Tacet's church-building spree reinforced the Church as a key organizing element of the Warini realm, providing education and facilitating communication between otherwise fractious regions. It was largely through Church efforts, driven by Latinate priests, that post-Roman culture filtered outside of the north shore of the Seine and began to take root throughout northern Gaul. This strong network of priests and new or restored churches would prove vital in spreading Galleis dialects and culture.

Tacet's final distinction is that he was the first of the de Recingi monarchs to die peacefully. His death in 580 comes with little fanfare, apparently passing in his sleep.

 

[TheShah]

Yeah yeah, I should be playing CK3. Whatever. I don't want to buy new games. Besides, CK2's fun.

I've been playing with When The World Stopped Making Sense lately and decided to do a little alternate migration. That's my jam right there, kids.

Reik Blodag, or Reik the Bloody
Warchief of the Warini (470s? - approx. 494)

The chaos of the Migration Period makes tracing historical personages a challenge, but the figure of Reik Blodag is a large one, for all his vagueness.

Spoiler: Frankwank status: Doubtful.

His name first turns up in a single contemporary document from the 470s concerning a Roman trader who passed through the lands of "Ricius, the chief of the Warini." Most other references to him come from after his apparent death. If not for that fragmentary evidence, he could be dismissed as a legendary figure. Some later tales depict him as a giant with a thundering voice and a stag-horned helmet, and artistic depictions almost always show him wielding a sword in one hand and a throwing-axe in the other, sporting a massive beard and wild hair.

The most descriptive source comes from the fragmentary account of Servius of Amiens, a monk writing in the 530s but who claims to have seen Reik near the end of his life. Servius describes him as "the hulking patriarch of the Werni, hirsute and bursting with wroth, that it erupted from him in great bellows." Historians are divided as to how far Servius can be trusted: The historical record on the Warini migration and the roots of the House de Ricingi are scant, and some elements of it are clearly polemical.

Leaving aside editorial commentary, what is clear is that around the 470s, a mass migration of Warnic Germans flooded into the lands of the Saxons. These warriors, originating largely on the lower Baltic coast, forced the Saxons to the coast en route to settling in war camps along the Weser. Later histories and the De Ricingi genealogy claim Reik as the paramount Warini leader.

The Warini remained on the move in the late 480s, reaching the Rhine by 490 and crossing in an outburst of violence into the realm of the Salian Franks. The brutal war saw some of the largest armies fielded in the period thrown against one another, but eventually established Warini outposts from the Rhine to the headwaters of the Seine. Arrowheads and earthworks found near the ruins of Augusta Viromanduorum have been interpreted as a major Warini war camp.

It is unclear how and when Reik actually died, but it's generally agreed that if he did exist, he was dead by 494.

Asmus Brutus
Rex Vernicae (509 - 22 January 532)
Warchief of the Warini (494 - 509)

The earliest fully agreed-upon ruler of the Warini, Asmus, first appears in the historical record in 494, when fragmentary documents concerning the release of hostages name him as leader of the Warini. In later documents, Asmus claims himself as the son of Reik.

Spoiler: A Brute of a man.

It was under Asmus that the Warnic Germans stormed into the Romano-Gallic Kingdom of Soissons. Beginning in the very early 500s, the Warini flooded into the weakened kingdom of Regina Martina, badly weakened by civil war. After years of bloody battles, the Warini prevailed in 507, driving Martina and the last of her armies out of northern Gaul.

The Warnic Germans largely settled along the north bank of the Loire, displacing a few still-pagan holdouts. With Soissons badly damaged in the fighting, Asmus set up shop at Meledunum. Faced with an imminent rebellion among his Romano-Gallic subjects and struggling to find local help, he took a cue from his wife, a Roman woman named Petronia, and professed adherence to Christianity.

By 509, coins were being minted with the face and name of Asmus, proclaiming him as Rex Vernicae - King of Warnica, or of the Warini. The day-to-day management of this realm is more opaque. What evidence exists suggests the Warini ruling class co-opted Roman institutions that were already crumbling at the time of their arrival. The remaining legions vanish from the historical record, replaced by armies largely composed of Warini war bands and hired Romano-Gallic veterans and peasants attempting to train the Warini in Roman ways. Coins from the period, meanwhile, reflect an eclectic mix of Roman and pagan iconography: Coins and carvings have been found featuring the Virgin Mary depicted with motifs common to the pagan Nerthus. A number of nominally Christian burial sites along the Seine and Loire feature grave goods that are distinctively pagan. It's likely that Asmus would have ruled over a religiously divided and poorly-organized realm, maintaining control through a loyal Warini core and promoting Nicene Christianity more as an instrument of government than as a faith pursued with zeal.

The name of Asmus is otherwise attested in post-Roman records from the south. An Italian bishop visiting in about 520 is the source of the name "Asmus Brutus," coupled with commentary describing him as "hoary" and "tawny-headed." Asmus's origins as a non-Romanized barbarian seem to have been taken for stupidity or irrationality by his mostly Romanized subjects, evidenced further by coins tending to depict him with a sloping forehead and a massive neck - features likely to reflect polemical jabs at the barbarian newcomers.

While Asmus seems to have made strides in integrating the Warini into northern Gaul, he would not live to see it out: Records universally agree he was killed in battle in early 532, leading an invasion of the Burgundian Kingdom. He was cut down by a Burgundian chief at the Battle of the Saoconna during a Warini attempt to cross the river.

Asmus Excelsus, or Asmus II "The Noble"
Rei Vernicae (22 January 532 - 2 August 547)

The son of Asmus Brutus, Asmus II is on record as the marshal of his father's armies. His first act was to bring in the Warini reserves and rally the flagging troops at the Saoconna, securing the battle by capturing the Burgundian Prince Thurisund. In the ensuing negotiations, King Evermud was forced to bargain away the March of Lugdunum in exchange for his son's life.

Spoiler: Not a Brute of a man this time, honest.

For all that he shares a name with his more historically impactful father, Asmus II was a different breed of man. Born on the migration to Gaul, the younger Asmus spent his formative years in Soissons, tutored by Romano-Gallic priests and statesmen. His administration coincides with the emergence of the second generation of Gallic Warini - men and women who grew up surrounded by the trappings of the old Roman administration, becoming Latinized as they reached maturity. The marks of Asmus's administration convey this tightrope walk between the Warini's Germanic barbarian roots and the Latin administration influencing them. His coins depict him with long hair but without a beard, with Nerthus-influenced imagery completely absent. Moreover, some sources refer to him as "Asmus Excelsus," or the Exalted, suggesting a degree of high respect among the elite classes.

Asmus seems to have moved from the outset to involve himself in Christian politics in the Mediterranean. Warini troops fought in Italy to support a Nicene Christian rebellion against an Arian Gothic monarch and independently stamped out a number of Arian revolts in the Septem Provinciae during a time of trouble for Christendom. With Europe beset by years of poor harvests and religious heterodoxy, the continent in general struggled for stability.

What records survive suggest that Asmus attempted to reduce the scheming of his vassals by appointing several broad regional governors, appointing mainly Warnic and Romano-Warnic men as dukes to oversee mainly Gallo-Roman counts.

By 544, Asmus extended his authority down the western Gaulish coast to the mouth of the Garonne, proclaiming a loyal Warini retainer as governor in old Pictavium. These claims came at the expense of the child kings of the Septem Provinciae, large but mostly toothless in the face of years of regencies. However, he appears to have died unexpectedly shortly afterwards. Historians broadly accept an account from a northern Gallic monk, describing Asmus dying from infected injuries sustained when physicians attempted to cut a "great lump" out of his body. Whatever the cause, it's agreed that he was dead sometime before the summer of 547.

Tacitus Lignarius, or Tacet the Carpenter
Rei Vernicae (2 August 547 - 6 October 580)

Tacet, the son of Asmus II, cannot have taken the throne any later than 2 August 547 - the date of a decree under his name recognizing several office-holders. But he appears to have served as his father's regent and secondary ruler for the prior five years. He was likely in his early to mid-twenties when he took power, newly married and with an infant son.

Spoiler: Bob the Builder, circa 6th century AD.

Tacet was part of the born-in-Gaul generation of Warini and would have grown up knowing nothing else but the post-Roman world. This put him at odds with many of his subordinate governors. Finding the Doux of Armorica and Archbishop Adiarius of Lugdunum scheming against him to place his younger brother Count Romanus (Romain) on the throne, Tacet was forced to pay out massive bribes to forestall a civil war. Romanus, installed by Asmus II as Count of Sénte, seems to have loathed his older brother and continued to hold himself out as "Rei Vernicae" in his correspondences with other nobles.

Noble plots were not the only unrest Tacet faced. Early in his reign, a rebellion among the still-pagan Warini broke out along the north bank of the Loire, terrorizing towns before it could be suppressed. Warini troops would move from there to seize the then-independent comté of Naves, then a stronghold of Arianism.

In 550, Tacet lead troops into the Alamannic Kingdom to defend against their cross-Alps invasion of the Kingdom of Annonaria. After capturing a series of Alamannic forts along the Rhine, the Warini armies were joined by a band of Transjuranian hired swords and made their way through the Valley of Augustus (the modern Val d'Aosta), winning a battle there against nearly 6,000 Alamanni. Tacet moved along with his army, proclaiming that the punishment for captured Alamanni war leaders would be death. In practice, common Alamanni warriors were merely imprisoned, but chiefs were generally beheaded. Warini soldiers would ultimately isolate and behead the Alamanni king, Leuthar the Brave, during a battle outside Milan, and several more chiefs and high chiefs were executed en route to defeating the invasion before Christmas of 522.

The battles in Alamannia seem to have had some greater strategic significance for Tacet: Aside from securing a Christian kingdom at a time when Nicene Christianity remained under threat from pagans and resurgent Arianism, the campaign weakened the Alamanni. The death of Leuthar left the Alamanni to the kingship of a newborn baby, under the regency of his singularly inept uncle, Rando of Verodunum, ruling over still more chiefdoms run by the regents of children. The import of those Rhine forts became apparent when Tacet marched his troops east in the spring of 553, claiming the "Belgic Lands" as part of Gaul proper and storming the already-decimated Alamanni forts nearly to the Upper Rhine. The war was predictably quick and brutal, expanding the Warini domain east.

Tacet's rule coincided with a long period of religious turbulence in Europe. The controversy surrounding the Henotikon and the subsequent Acacian Schism left Christianity struggling for central identity, and Tacet spent much of his rule stamping out religious rebellions throughout his realm and neighbouring Nicene kingdoms. The years following the Henotikon's issuance were characterized by a massive European-wide resurgence in Arianism, often with rampant violence. Arian pocket kingdoms were established in the north of Italy, while the already Arian kingdoms of the Burgundians and the Vandals enjoyed a period of momentary flourishing.

When not suppressing an infinite and unknowable number of Arian revolts, Tacet's most notable pro-Christian move was the over-the-Rhine invasion of the now-destabilized Alamanni. Around 560, Warini troops crossed the river and systematically tore down Alamanni hillforts, driving them into the Alps. A Thuringian Christian, Vaefar the Confessor, was set up as King of Vindelica. In practice Vaefar's state was probably little more than a Warini client, but it seemingly secured the eastern border and planted another Christian cross into the soil of western Europe.

Bit by bit, Christendom struggled through the 560s, though its pullback from collapse likely had more to do with the Eastern Roman Empire coming back under the rule of a Nicene Emperor than with the more remote efforts of the Warini Kingdom.

In the late 560s, a civil war broke out in the Warini Kingdom, driven by Duke Jordanes of Chartres attempting to style himself King of the Warini. Jordanes was eventually toppled, and the region was handed to Bendix de Autricimingi, named Doux of Alercie. A revolt in the Lyonnaise followed, with several local lords being deposed and replaced by a duke of the Geiringi family. Yet it's not religious war nor political skullduggery that Tacet is most notable for.

Over the course of his reign, Tacet broke ground on at least a dozen known major churches. He's often credited for the design of the first Basilica of the Mons Martyrus, but no foundation-stone has been found to link its commissioning to him. Tacet's church-building spree reinforced the Church as a key organizing element of the Warini realm, providing education and facilitating communication between otherwise fractious regions. It was largely through Church efforts, driven by Latinate priests, that post-Roman culture filtered outside of the north shore of the Seine and began to take root throughout northern Gaul. This strong network of priests and new or restored churches would prove vital in spreading Galleis dialects and culture.

Tacet's final distinction is that he was the first of the de Recingi monarchs to die peacefully. His death in 580 comes with little fanfare, apparently passing in his sleep.

need to give Ck2 WTWSMS another shot

 

[Planet of Hats]

need to give Ck2 WTWSMS another shot

I've had fun with it thus far despite it being a few patches out of date - the map granularity isn't quite up to end-stage vanilla CK2. It makes up for it with weird post-Roman melting pot options and the potential for wacky alternate histories based on the Migration Period.
Case in point, more of these:


Traianus Formosus, or Traien the Fair
Rei Vernicae (6 October 580 - 28 May 607)
Overlord of the Septem Provinciae (18 October 605 - 28 May 607)

In his mid-30s at the time he peacefully took the throne, Traien was the son of Tacet and Queen Faustina, a princess from the south of Gaul. Contemporary accounts describe him as evidently fully Latinized, with even his physical appearance more Latinate than German. Moreover, his descent gave him a vital claim to the Septem Provinciae - but no grounds to pursue it.

Spoiler: Traien: "noooo you can't stay alive and stable and keep me from pressing claim!" Albus: "haha health go brrrrr"

Traien spent the first years of his reign staving off Frankish incursions from the north and continuing the steady process of missionary work throughout his kingdom. A stone discovered at the Basilica of the Mons Martyrus credits him with commissioning grand decorations for the interior, and several buildings in Melun and Soissons feature marks bearing his name. Christian belief appears to have become steadily more widespread through the back quarter of the sixth century as missionaries converted the settled Warini along the Loire, even driving out a stubborn community of "the followers of old Jupiter" in the Conté de Cemân (Maine in some dialects).

Hand in hand with this campaign, Traien moved to sweep the remaining Frankish strongholds from the south bank of the Rhine. Crafting a series of legal fictions claiming those lands as "Roman land by right," he pushed the rump Franks to the north end of the river and the swampy lowland islands at the Rhine-mouth, at that point a boggy hell that Traien left alone. Another quick campaign subjugated the well-developed hillfort at Cologne, built atop the ruins of the former Roman city of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium.

These conquests coincided with the steady emergence of the Thuringian Kingdom to the east, moving into the lands of the Saxons and increasingly shouldering the Franks into the marshy lowlands of old Frisia. Anticipating that Thuringian King Berthachar the Shrewd could amass an army large enough to threaten the Warini Kingdom, Traien married one of his daughters to the barbarian ruler's youngest son to secure a peace treaty. The Warini would nevertheless station a unit of cavalry in Cologne to ward off barbarous raiders. This unit, while described in official sources as a "legion," seems to have been a unit of well-equipped horsemen intended to pursue and break up large numbers of mostly-on-foot Frankish or Thuringian raiders.

As Italia and northern Gaul largely stabilized, the rest of the continent remained a hotbed of migration, war and cultural melting pots. Aside from the cultural phenomena happening in Gaul, the British Isles were awash in Pictish invasions from across Hadrian's Wall, many of whom had begun to assimilate with Romano-Britons in the southwestern highlands. In Burgundy, the documents of King Athalaric begin to be written in a Latin script prototypical of the early Romansh dialect. Perhaps the most bizarre of these migrations was the arrival of the Uturgurs in northern Italy, settling in the foothills around Milan and Cremona. These equestrians are believed to be refugees from the eastern Xiongnu who somehow made it across eastern Europe and put down roots, possibly as foederati to the then-declining Annonarian kingdom.

For the time, Traien's kingdom was remarkable not only for its degree of stability, but its substantial Jewish population. Jews were among Traien's closest advisors, with two in particular - Hila of Nenzing and Kafnai of Shrinagar - acting as intermediaries between Traien and his more restive vassals.

By 600, the Warini had kicked the Franks out of the marshy Zeeland, confining them to a narrow slice of land north of the Rhine - sandwiched between the Warini realm and the growing Thuringians. From there, Traien dedicated himself entirely to a single and petty task: Annoying the devil out of Albus the Brave, ruler of the Septem Provinciae.

Though Traien held claim to the south of Gaul through his mother's line and ruled a far more powerful kingdom than Albus, his commitment to Christendom - and Albus's endurance and slightly younger age - thwarted Traien's hope to press his claim. By the turn of the seventh century, he turned to skullduggery. Mere months after Albus marrying a young queen in the hopes of finally birthing a male heir, his bride dropped dead at a banquet, and though all contemporary sources describe this in vague terms, modern historians suggest conspiracy linked to Traien. Warini agents Kafnai of Shrinagar, Yllian of Cain, Germanus of Augusta Taurinorum and Visigothic Prince Drusus (Traien's son-in-law) crisscrossed the Seven Provinces, delivering correspondence and building arguments that the south of Gaul should by right be ruled from the north. Traien's correspondences in this period begin to describe him as "Overlord of All Gaul," and in one testy letter to Albus, he opens with "Ausculta fili" - "listen, son." Another of Albus's queens - Kasrin, a Coptic woman - died under similar circumstances two years later, with greater evidence left behind to suggest Warini skullduggery afoot. Word of an assassin at court circulated in the south, with Albus on campaign against the Visigoths.

Rumours of an assassin were entirely too true - indeed, later writers lay the actions at the feet of Traien and Albus's own spymaster, Doux Varius of the Narbonensis. After years of trying, Traien won the cooperation of Varius in 604 as paranoia gripped the court. Varius would ultimately take funds from Traien to hire highwaymen to waylay the monarch on the campaign trail. Albus was struck down under a hail of arrows, perhaps suspecting Traien as his ultimate killer but unlikely to have known for sure, leaving his oldest daughter Galeria to be rushed to power.

Traien would wait until the onset of winter before sending word to Tolosa that he would "take you, my lady, into the greatest care." His troops promptly headed for the south.

On paper the mismatch was colossal. Newly-crowned and not trusted by her court, Galeria could muster no more than four thousand men. The Warini army took Tolosa by May of 605, only to find that Galeria had abandoned the city and moved her seat to Mirapiscae in the Hers Valley. Pursuing her into the Pyrenean foothills, Traien's army isolated Galeria's in the valley and ground them down, leaving about two thousand men dead on the field. The city was quickly captured, and by the end of 605, Traien had proclaimed himself king over all of Gaul. Bizarrely, even as Traien wound down the campaign, word arrived of the conversion of the mountainous Alamanni Kingdom to Christianity... through the efforts of missionary work funded by Albus and Galeria.

As Traien returned home, leaving Count Paschen and Chancellor Drusus to organize holdings in the south, word came that the conversion of Alamannia had been followed immediately by a massive Thuringian invasion. With the death of Berthachar, the non-aggression pact between the Thuringians and the Warini had crumbled. Seeing his own armies eager for a hot meal and some rest, Traien opened the Warini treasury to groups of Burgundian and Saxon mercenaries and sent them to the Alps.

The rigors of campaigning in the mountains proved brutal for an aging king on campaign. Traien would die not of battle, but of a mere cold, passing sick in his tent in the spring of 607 as his hired swords campaigned in high montane Alamannia.

Tacitus Rufus, or Tacet II
Caesar of Gaul (25 December 609 - 4 March 628)
Rei Vernicae (28 May 607 - 4 March 628)
Overlord of the Septem Provinciae (28 May 607 - 4 March 628)

Tacet II came to power in a flurry of action, on campaign with his father and not expecting to take the throne just yet. He barely had time to arrange transport home for his father's body before finding eight thousand Thuringians bearing down on his army of hired swords.

Spoiler: Just Thuringian Problems (except for, y'know)

Tellings of the battles in the Alps suggest that Tacet nearly fell within the month as his armies narrowly beat back charges by the Thuringians. He emerged from the experience shaken and haunted. After a couple of bloody victories that left half his mercenaries dead in the Alpine valleys, he returned home and opted to lead from the rear, rejoining his flying cavalry near the Thuringian border. As his commanders continued to lead the mercenary army through running battles, Tacet moved quickly to change the calculus of the fighting: He drove the cavalry across Vindelica, stormed the lightly-defended Thuringian capital and captured King Berthachar II's infant heir.

The Thuringians likely had an absolute numerical advantage and were almost certainly capable of exhausting Tacet's budget and means to do war, given enough time. But with his heir captured and his immediate gains rolled back, Berthachar begrudgingly called a truce in the spring of 609 and went home. A weary Tacet released the boy, sent his hired swords home and limped back to Melun. Worn down by the brutal mountain war, he did the only thing that made sense.

He proclaimed himself Caesar of Gaul.

In a startling proclamation on Christmas Eve of 609, Tacet received a golden laurel from Archbishop Adiarius of Transjurania, the realm's highest-ranking churchman, and was acclaimed with the title of "nobilissimus caesar." The title was seemingly a nod to the existence of the Eastern Roman Empire - Tacet was not so bold as to name himself Augustus - but in taking on the imperial symbols, he left little doubt of his intentions. His narrative positioned him as a defender of the faith and heir to the Roman legacy in Gaul and Europe, protector of Christendom from heathen barbarians - barbarians not dissimilar to the old Warini. His first test, however, would not be barbarians or heretics.

The Plague of Himerios swept out of India and spread through Asia Minor in 611, rapidly proliferating through Europe. By the turn of 613 it was at the gates of Melun. Contemporary sources describe Tacet as brooding and cynical in this period. He was far from the only one: Across Christendom, the Plague was viewed as a curse from God and a punishment for the sins of man. More prosaically, the spread of the Yersinia pestis bacterium killed millions, hollowing out entire towns throughout Europe and Asia.

Documenting the Plague is difficult, sources being mainly ecclesiastical at the time, and even then fragmentary. But it's clear enough that by 617, the worst of the Plague had passed Gaul by, leaving a third or more of the kingdom dead in its wake. The experience left Gaul recoiling religiously. In 618 Tacet responded by issuing the Decree of Veromandêre, where he had broken ground on a great summer castle near Rethel. The Decree declared Christianity the "one true faith" and introduced new laws designed to discourage the last vestiges of paganism. Suspected pagans could be dispossessed, barred from holding landed title or even put to death for crimes such as preaching or "sorcery." In practice the new laws responded both to reactionary religious sentiments among the surviving peasantry and the severe weakening of the post-Roman bureaucracy and tax system in the wake of the Plague. The Church stepped into the gulf as an institution with pseudopods extending throughout Gaul, evolving into a vital stabilizing force - at the expense of pagans, Jews and schismatic Christians.

The new policies were promptly turned towards stamping out the Carmanianists, groups of heretics emerging in communities along the Loire during the Plague. These schismatic communities rejected the Nicene Creed and shared doctrinal similarities to the older Pneumatomachi of late fourth-century Greece, though these followers seemed to mainly be of old Warini stock. The Plague's utter desolation of the Gaulish countryside and population made suppressing their rebellions a challenge, but priests soon descended on the area, preaching to the masses and arresting or executing suspected Carmanianist leaders.

In the wake of these persecutions, Tacet marched his armies into the south of Gaul, where they seized the eastern Narbonensis from the King of Maxima Sequanorum. That war would be wrapped up by 620, and while Tacet would have been able to justify further capture of Sequania, he seemingly had little interest in drawn-out campaigns in the Alps after his Alemannic experience. In truth Tacet was more of an administrator than a military titan - but with Gaul still reeling from the devastating plague, an able organizer was more needed than a warrior.

A stroke of fate would ensure, however, that Tacet's reign would end much as his father's - on campaign against the Thuringians as they invaded Vindelica. Leading his armies in support of his client kingdom over the Rhine, Tacet would perish in his tent in the late winter of 628.

 

[TheShah]

SPQR Hispania!

That or Vandals

 

[Planet of Hats]

SPQR Hispania!

That or Vandals

The Vandals are astonishingly still clinging to life by the 660s in this playthrough, probably because the Byzantine Empire has been a bordergore-soaked gong show.

 

[TheShah]

The Vandals are astonishingly still clinging to life by the 660s in this playthrough, probably because the Byzantine Empire has been a bordergore-soaked gong show.

Is there Islam (or some analogue) end-game crisis?

 

[Planet of Hats]

Is there Islam (or some analogue) end-game crisis?

They have an option for an emergence of Islam, but they never polished it and it's disabled by default. I triggered it manually for funsies at one point and it just pops up Abu Bakr with a hellstack and hands him a claim on Persia and Arabia.

 

[TheShah]

They have an option for an emergence of Islam, but they never polished it and it's disabled by default. I triggered it manually for funsies at one point and it just pops up Abu Bakr with a hellstack and hands him a claim on Persia and Arabia.

works

 

[Planet of Hats]

And one more of these:

Saint Preis the Apostle
Caesar of Gaul (4 March 628 - 23 October 660)

One could be forgiven for reading the circumstances of Preis's emergence as ruler as similar to his father's. In his case, there would be no humiliation or near-death experience: Preis was in Melun at the time, supervising improvements to the city in his role as steward and regent. Upon hearing word of his father's death, he sent word to his men to remain at the front and ensure the Thuringians were driven back. The war would end in victory that summer, yet at the cost of half of Gaul's army and significant funds invested.

Spoiler: The Thuringian Wars.

In the early years of his rule, Preis set out to secure Gaul's frontiers by forcing neighbouring realms into tributary relationships. The Franks of Frisia and the Kingdom of Maxima Sequanorum both paid tribute to Melun in this period. Though Gaul was no naval power, they nevertheless moved in 638 to seize the Balearic Islands from the Vandals, marking the kingdom's first noted maritime foray. The islands were organized under Galleis rulers and treated as a hub of trade.

In 639, Preis stepped into an Italian war against the Thuringians. With Rex Traianus seeking to carve several counties in Pannonia from the Thuringian menace, Preis waged his own war in the mountains, storming Thuringian hillforts east of the Rhine before pushing south into the Alps to besiege several counties taken from the crumbling Alamanni Kingdom. This second front smoothed Traianus's war in the south: The Thuringians were dealt a double blow, with Italy gaining control of redoubts on the Danube and Gaul freeing the Alpine cities. These mountain redoubts were passed to the control of the Vindelic king, whose kingdom was by now known as Weissland.

As the western kingdoms dealt with the menace of the Thuringians, the chaos in Illyria was beginning to come under the control of the nascent Kingdom of the Poles. The early Polish people were among many Slavic tribes to migrate into lands once controlled by the Gepids. In the 640s, Konrad the Mutilator begin to rapidly subjugate and subordinate neighbouring chiefs, consolidating a nascent pagan kingdom out of his clan's initial holdings around old Aquincum. By 650, meanwhile, the rump Rouran Khaganate was in full-on collapse ahead of the rizing Toquz-Oghuz Khaganate. (The game tends towards moving the same pieces around the board forever, leading to stuff like the Khazars surviving from 769 to the 1440s; in this case, I stacked the deck for the AI by giving a couple of randomly-chosen AI rulers modest hellstacks and letting them go to town.)

In the late 640s, Preis saw to his own northern frontiers by invading the Frankish Kingdom, by now reduced to a couple of rump chiefdoms in the Frisian low countries. Seeing no serious opposition left in the Frankish realm, he left the cleanup work there to his flying cavalry. The equestrians demolished Frankish hillforts and temples over the next two years, citing documents produced by Preis asserting a historic Roman claim to these lowlands. Ultimately Preis set up a Frankish converso, Chief Bero Laidrati, as his man in the Low Countries, intent on eventually spinning him off as a client. These conquests essentially ended all but the very last hangers-on of the Merovingians, consigning the dynasty to obscurity and extinction.

Seeing the Thuringians again at war with Italia, Preis made another move to aid them indirectly in 651, pressing the claim of his court physician and chaplain, Frithuwald, to the Thuringian realm. Days after Gallic troops crossed the Rhine, however, King Beowinus announced that he and his court had taken the cross in a great ceremony led by an unlikely source: King Athalaric II of Maxima Sequanorum. An irritated Preis found himself suddenly at war for an old man's claim against a Thuringian realm he would have little issue with anymore. The Gaulish march abruptly halted, reduced to little more than border skirmishes, but the entire affair dematerialized as soon as it started after Frithuwald inexplicably fell out a window and landed on six knives and a vial of poison before hitting the ground. The monk Septimus of Remos memorably describes "all of the court whistling with feigned innocence" when asked about Frithuwald's demise, but with no casus belli, the Gaulish troops returned to their farms in time for the fall harvest.

Half of the army turned around again in the spring as King Agenarich of Weissland came pleading for aid in his bid to claim an Alpine stronghold from pagan rebels attempting to resist the Thuringian conversion. Joining the fray put Preis in the position of indirectly aiding the former enemy he had attacked just last year in the hopes of indirectly aiding Italia. With Beowinus understandably unhappy about either outcome - standing to lose even a rebellious county - the Gaulish and Thuringian armies avoided each other carefully over the campaign season of 652. Gaulish troops provided siege engines, weapons and supplies to Weisslanders as they wrested the seat of Holzheim from the pagans. Peace was called just as the Gaulish commander, Duc Cecily of Alercie, turned his men northward to crush a rebellion of peasant pagans. The Thuringian army finally crossed the Gauls' path there, but with the matter of Holzheim settled, the two armies merely glared at each other tensely while slaughtering the rebellious peasants to a man.

Beyond these military concerns, sources describe Preis as deeply devoted to his faith. His involvement with the Church went so deep as to entail regular visits to monasteries and periods of withdrawal into prayer and study. Major improvements to the Mons Martyrum Basilica were undertaken during his reign, adding features that would not have been out of place in a high Roman cathedral of its day. Stories of Preis's deeds were widespread and fantastic, the most astonishing being a claim that he at one point drove a dragon from a Galleis village with little more than a Bible and a sword. More prosaically, Preis is described as deeply charitable and humble, as much a scholar of the Bible as a ruler of realms. His building programs were aimed as much at cities and forts across Gaul as within his personal demesne.

Matters in Thuringia only escalated in the 650s. The turmoil of the Thuringian conversion showed a weakness, and surrounding powers leapt for King Beowinus's throat. At his wits' end for means to intervene, Preis ultimately arranged a betrothal of his second son Tacet to one of Beowinus's daughters, forging an alliance. He moved quickly to enter the most serious of the Wars of the Thuringian Conversion: A massive Geatish landing along the northern Baltic coast, in lands once part of the Warini urheimat.

The Battle of Ologost was one of the most serious battles of the post-Roman age. The Gaulish army of roughly 12,000 arrived to find 15,000 Geats ravaging the coast. After liberating several hillforts, the two armies collided at the hillfort of Ologost, where the Geats rapidly stormed the the Gaulish army and appeared poised to rout them. Only the late arrival of the flying cavalry, a day late after being bogged down on marshy ground, turned the tide. The equestrians stormed the Geatish flank and allowed the Gauls to push them back and drive them off the field, pursuing them back down the coast.

Battered, the Gaulish regulars slouched home, leaving the Geatish cleanup to the Thuringians. An era of peace settled uneasily over western Europe, and the remainder of Preis's reign was spent funding rebuilding projects at home until his passing in his sleep in the autumn of 660.

Comain I "the Wise"
Caesar of Gaul (23 October 660 - 27 April 690)

There would be no rushed wartime coronation for Caesar Comain. He came to the throne at a time of general peace, seeing to his coronation and acknowledging in 661 when word came down of his father's beatification. By 664, his father would be officially beatified, and his grave in the Comté de Parisêre would become a pilgrimage site.

Spoiler: Son of a Saint.

Comain marshalled his flying cavalry in 662 to make pace for Weissland, where word had come down of migrating tribes of "Huns" set to attack down the Danube. Only when the men arrived did it become apparent that the message had come from the other side of the world, from a wanderer somewhere in China, nowhere near Weissland. Comain, encamped with the boy-king Agenarich III at Aedelfesti, exchanged confused looks with the lad before settling in for awhile, the cavalry no longer needed along frontiers that had largely been secured.

After years of mild nuisance, Comain swept the last Frankish pagan hillfort from the Rhine-bank in the summer of 664, driving the Dodonids into the wilderness. The comté of Kleve was awarded to a distant kinsman and organized under the Duchy of Cologne.

The death of Thuringian King Beowinus in 664 saw the newly-converted kingdom divided. His eldest son, 17-year-old Frithuwald, inherited a powerful realm straddling the lower Elbe, while the rump of the kingdom was left to the infant Berthachar of Oshenloand, somehow expected to govern holdings on the upper Rhine from a remote camp on the Vistula. With the real power in the eastern kingdom resting with the still-pagan warlord Thachulf, who loathed the Christian infant wearing the crown, rebellion was inevitable.

In 665, the migrating host of Suixi the Brave finally arrived in Weissland... with all of 900 horsemen. The Gaulish equestrians dispersed most of them with a single charge and left the rest to Aedelfesti's army to mop up before marching home. To the east, meanwhile, the Polish kingdom collapsed following the death of Konrad the Mutilator, scattering Polish lords across the Danube and leaving the region in chaos. In the wake of it all, the bulk of them simply up and migrated, marching through lands loosely controlled by the fracturing Heruli confederation to settle at the mouth of the Vistula.

Through all the migratory chaos, Comain spent his first decade in relative peace. Funds were directed towards building mundane projects in Gaulish towns and cities: Aqueducts, cisterns, public theatres and baths. Comain invested heavily in rebuilding long-unused Roman roads and extending new ones throughout the core of Gaul. With cash directed away from the usual skullduggery of crafting claims and bribing assassins, Gaul's chancellor and spymaster could crisscross the realm freely, building goodwill with Comain's dukes and easing the fears and tensions of the peasantry.

That peace would end with the explosion of Thuringia in a massive vassal revolt. The kingdom abruptly ceased to exist as chiefs throughout old Germania went into business for themselves.

With a severe wave of consumption ravaging northern Gaul in 675 and the Germanic frontier exploding into clan wars, Comain could only watch from behind the walls of his castle. In the Danube basin, the power vacuum left by the breakup of Poland was filled by the Bohemian Slavs, carving out their own kingdom in Pannonia and ultimately converting to Christianity en masse in 679 before exploding again the next year. Along the Baltic rim, the Poles and Lithuanians wrested their own realms from the shuddering carcass of the Heruli, by now backed up deep into the tundra and steppe. The Lithuanian realm would melt in a few short years when its war-chief died a mangled mess, leaving no heir strong enough to hold the realm together. Comain, seeing his realm through illness and trying to insulate the population from the chaos beyond Gaul, broke ground on a great Roman-style lighthouse at the mouth of the Seine River. The Flame of the Seine is the oldest surviving lighthouse in Gaul today.

Across the Channel, meanwhile, old Roman Britain had completely fallen to pagan Picts, establishing the Kingdom of Lloegyr in the south. Comain dispatched his brother and chaplain Tacet to try and make contact, only for King Unuist to immediately sacrifice him to the Celtic gods. A furious Comain, with no legal claims in the British Isles and not much of a navy to speak of, turned to skullduggery. With quiet funding from a righteously angry Comain, a handful of dissidents in Unuist's court planted a manure bomb beneath the floorboards of his hillfort and lit a fuse. He died in a fiery, putrid blaze in March of 677.

His kingdom died with him, immediately collapsing into a mess of feuding chiefdoms.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the ensuing years was the relative stability of Gaul, Italia and southern Iberia in comparison to everywhere else. Buoyed by rich tax revenues being brought in through the reorganized and Church-based system, Comain continued to quietly invest in infrastructure.

In 689, Comain was faced with a difficult decision. His son and steward Comain the Younger, desirous of landed title, was caught outside his chambers with a dagger, intent on slaying him in his sleep. Reluctant to execute his own son and horrified at the lengths the young man would go to in order to secure a holding, Comain the Elder sent the young man to the gaol and left him to rot there awhile. The younger Comain would be released that summer, but the issue had far from come to a head.

In April of 690, courtiers found Comain the Elder lying dead in the baths at Melun. It was clear the Caesar had drowned, and suspicion immediately turned to murder. Comain the Younger was again suspected, but found to have been at the summer palace in Rethel at the time, with no evidence to link him to the plot. The murder left Gaul in turmoil as rumours flew at court of grave misdeeds afoot.

Comanos Magnus, or Comain II "the Great"
Caesar of Gaul (27 April 690 - 9 May 735)

Brilliant and gifted by all accounts and a descendant of the Emperor Constantine through his mother's line, Comain II was far from the humility and charity of Saint Preis the Apostle or his own father, Comain I. The younger Comain is described by contemporary sources as bold, ambitious, deceitful and filled with pride and envy. Not a particularly diplomatic man, Comain II was known as an exceptional administrator - and an alleged master of spycraft, and even murder.

Spoiler: -10 (Known Murderer)

Contemporary historians agree that Comain cleared the way to the throne by arranging for the murder of his own father, placing himself far enough away from the scene of the crime that he could not be easily fingered for the act of patricide. Remarkably, his coronation was met with no real opposition and a minimum of internal politicking. Comain removed one potential rebel quickly, fabricating legal pretense to revoke the titular Duchy of Aquitania Secunda from Leta Victatrix. The civil war was short and predictable, ending when Leta was captured at the head of her small retinue and forced to the humilating surrender of her title and the Comté of Poitiers. Comain promptly declared the Duchy title in abeyance, granting the comté to Chavar de Recingi as a de jure part of the Duchy of Angoulême - a title held by his steward, Duke Galerius ad Ardenn. The move both removed a potential enemy and strengthened Comain's relationship with a key ally at court.

Perhaps seeking to win favour with a suspicious public, Comain made a show in 691 of granting a substantial sum of coin to the Church, claiming it to be a gift in honour of Saint Preis. With the other hand he was mobilizing his hosts to seize the town of Najac, which had come to owe allegiance to a rebellious lord in the Kingdom of Mauretania and Hispania. Not desiring for a direct clash of armies, with the rebel Izem the Quarreler able to raise a host equal to Comain's personal levies, the new emperor quickly took Najac before sailing his armies to Mauretania to burn towns and cities without let. The army stormed forts at high cost, burned towns and plundered Izem's seat at Lalla Marnia over the course of a year before the rebel agreed to cede Najac, signing his name to paper on Christmas Day of 692.

In the spring of 694, Comain went to war with the King of Italia for the Comté of Provence after the count there suddenly inherited the Italian crown. Though wracked by rebellion, Italia could nevertheless raise a host significant enough to contend with Gaul's. Comain raised the armies of his dukes along with his own and formed two large hosts, one breaking down the Provencal redoubts, the other moving to encamp in the Alps to await King Veteric's move. But no host was forthcoming through the year, and Comain's scouts would soon report that Veteric was in Florence, laying siege to a rebel stronghold. With rumours of a second column of Italian troops moving along the Maghrebi coast in an effort to "Hannibal" Gaul from across the Pyrenees, Comain sent ships to scour the shoreline and watch for fleet crossings, but seeing none, he marched his armies through Liguria to find Veteric right where his scouts predicted. The battle was bloody but decisive, and Provence was returned to Gaul.

In 697, Comain killed Duke Eike of Morne, a perennial plotter and schemer closely involved in a dangerous faction hoping to place Comain's sister Euphrosine on the throne. Eike being the most intractable of the five dukes, he perished in 697 after drinking poisoned wine, and Comain turned his focus to buying off the four survivors with gifts and honours. The faction only continuing to grow, Comain killed the mad Duke Luctemanus of Aquitaine the next year, apparently pulling him aside for a private conversation in the Palace at Rethel and slitting his throat in cold blood.

By 702, the scheming at court having largely abated amidst pools of noble blood, Comain marched his forces southwest, seeking to press "ancient" claims in the Cantabrian mountains. To campaign there would be no easy task: Gaul's army would easily outnumber the still-pagan Basques, but centuries of abandonment of the already-lax Roman administration there had left the region largely controlled by tribes, with few organized farms to feed an army on the move. An advance force crossed by way of Roncevalles Pass to build a string of supply depots, only to be forced to scatter into the hills as an army of nearly ten thousand pagan Cantabrians descended from the west. The army under Triath Rumann sacked the depots and rushed through the pass themselves, finding the armies of Gaul only partially assembled.

The Battle of Roncevalles Pass was bloody but decisive. The Gaulish force under Tacet d'Aurich was initially outnumbered, but as the armies continued to assemble, the Cantabrians were beaten steadily back until a unit broke through their lines and captured Rumann. As the Gauls pursued the Cantabrians through the pass, Rumann was brought to Comain, where he was forced to concede the three counties of Vasconia. Cantabrian warriors were permitted to return home unmolested as Comain stripped lingering pagan mayors and priests of their holdings, driving them out of crumbling churches and pagan villages by the sword. For his service, Tacet was given the comté of Viscaya and created Duke of Vasconia.

Beyond Gaul, a wave of turbulence and change continued to define the east of Europe. The Kings of Weissland moved into the vacuum created by the implosion of Thuringia, seizing control of lands east of the Rhine and along the south bank of the Danube as far as old Vindobonum. The Slavs of Pannonia continued to wane and wax, while across the Cantabrians, an arrival of a second, eastern wave of Ulich Slavs had finally broken the Heruli, carving out a vast but poorly-organized kingdom in the pagan plains. In Britannia, the pagan Ri of Eabhraig endeavoured to restore the English dominion, but was continually hobbled by rebellion and unrest. The Eastern Roman Empire, finally stable after centuries of internecine warfare and paying of tribute to Javanroudid Persia, made strides to reclaim control of Egypt. In old Africa, the declining Vandals had finally collapsed, giving way to a mess of Berber clan-states and African Romance coastal holdouts.

Most troubling, however, was the rise of Arian schismatics to the dual throne of Italia and Dalmatia. In search of a means to restore Rome to the rightful faith, Comain declared war for Theodemir of Forcauquier's claim on Italia in the fall of 703. Over the next two years, Gaulish armies scattered across north-central Italy. With the peninsula in rebellion, the Gauls were obliged to take it slow, fighting rebel armies along the way. But by the winter of 704, the Arian King Evermud had been incapacitated by a blow to the head in battle. He died comatose, Theodemir took the crown through Italia and Dalmatia's bizarre seniority-based succession, and the war was all for naught, save the Italian booty plundered by Gaulish troops.

The Italian mud on his soldiers' boots not yet dry, Comain turned them around in the spring of 705 to march for Maxima Sequanorum, intent on making a tributary of that mountain kingdom. King Athalarik III, knowing he faced a war he would not win, sent swift rider to Melun and agreed to bend the knee to Comain without a fight, bringing the realm into the Gaulish tributary network. From there he sent his elite cavalry southward to subordinate counties breaking away from the crumbling Annonarian Kingdom. Through 705 the equestrians subjugated the Uturgur-inhabited foothills, continuing into the end of the decade as peasant rebels broke up the last Annonarian holdouts in Liguria and Ferrara. The Ferraran rebels were left to King Theodemir, but by 708 Comain had won Liguria into his empire. Comain proceeded to murder the successful rebel leaders one by one in a dishonourable and unsubtle campaign of bloodshed, replacing them with picked men, including his cousin Andrea Orsini, whom he named Duke of Liguria. Among the notables was Count Bernabo of Cremona, a Latinized descendant of Odoacer.

With factions continuing to form at court, Comain sent assassins to kill Duke Barnard of Frisia, whose domains in the north had swelled over the years as he'd moved into the vacuum left by the Thuringians. Barnard's son Teoderic, a more content man, was paid off with a sizable purse of gold.

Comain would irritate more of his nobles in 713, when he declared the regnal title of the Seven Provinces in abeyance, proclaiming that the south would be directly ruled as Imperial territory rather than as a separate diocese. Though he dampened the worst of the outrage with treasury-draining bribes, he nevertheless spent much of the next year ruling from the Balearic Islands, effectively in hiding and hopefully out of reach of assassins. His son, 16-year-old Tacet, governed with the aid of the aging Chancellor Andreu de Recingi in this period.

Gaul again roused to war in Cantabria in 718, seeking to make good more "historic claims" in the rugged mountains. The war was wrapped up by the next summer, and four comtés were distributed, with kinsman Florien being created Conte of Burgos. These wars would break the authority of the Cantabrian chiefs, the region breaking down into feuding local polities. Comain sent his cavalry into the vacuum to subjugate Celtic lands where he could, paying handsomely to fund unjust wars against chiefs squatting in Roman ruins on the border. He dealt with these rulers as he did in the north of Italy: Forcing them to humiliating submission, then assassinating them and installing picked Christian men in their place. By the spring of 724, Gaulish rule extended into old Gallaecia, but for a single holdout count in the northwest, stubbornly evading Comain's assassins and sheltering behind treaty's writ. That writ finally expired in 729, and Comain's equestrians drove the aging Triath Rumann into the Gallaecian hills, securing the port of Coruna and proclaiming Robert of Santiago Prince-Archbishop over the northwest of Iberia.

In 724, Comain quietly saw to the death of Mayor Theuderic of Nyon, desirous of preventing him from taking the throne of Dalmatia and bringing that rich city under a foreign lordship. He settled in from there for a few years of quiet, aside from the ever-present taming of the Cantabrian territories.

Comain took ship in 732, traveling to the Eastern Roman Empire on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Reports of the time suggest he came back with a renewed zeal, abandoning cynicism and experiencing an awakening of faith at the age of 68. Upon his return, he would undertake a broad survey of Gaul and arrange for a sweeping census of his empire, before going on to organize a great fair at Melun.

Gaulish troops crossed the Channel in 733 to seize the pagan chiefdom of Kent, at the southeasternmost tip of Britannia. The island being entirely dominated by pagan Picts, Comain - seeking a toehold by which to return Christianity to the land - evicted the inhabitants of the cape and granted it to Drostan, a Latinized Celtic exile from a community steadily being wiped out by Pictish encroachment. The conquest would be his last, and he spent the next two years quietly seeing to his demesne and organizing a largely stable realm.

Comain II, known as the Great, ruled Gaul for 45 years. In that time, he added the northwest of Italy to his empire, brought Christianity to the north of Iberia, and safeguarded the expansion of his tributaries of Maxima Sequanorum and Weissland. He warred with Cantabrians, Picts, Romans and Uturgurs, defeating all. Those he could not conquer through law or main force, he slew without let, killing pagans, heretics and dukes in great numbers - even slaying his own father to secure his rise to power. He left behind the most powerful realm in all of Christendom, eclipsing even the Eastern Roman Empire. Whether he is remembered as a titanic pillar of the faith or as an ambitious monster whose path to glory is drenched in the blood of his victims, none can argue that he leaves a large footprint in the firmament of history.

 

[Domz]

 

[Planet of Hats]

One more of these.


Tacet the Saint, or Tacet II
Caesar/Empereor of Gaul (9 May 735 - 27 July 762)

His father's regent and marshal at the time of his coronation, Tacet is universally regarded as less of a man than his father. Comain the Great is hailed as a genius, while Tacet's achievements lie deep in his shadow. As a note on numbering, Tacet is considered the Second because of the distinction between the Gallic Empire and the Warini Kingdom; the earlier Tacet II became Tacet I of the Empire when he founded it decades back.

Spoiler: All brakes, no gas

For all that Comain had kept his vassals in line, Tacet's rise to the throne was met with some relief among the lords of Gaul, who stayed their scheming out of acknowledgment of their new ruler's virtues. Much unlike his father, Tacet was known for his patience, charity and lifelong devotion to God, though one source describes him as capable of weaving lies adeptly.

Tacet's early years are linked to the Five Martyrs of England. As the Picts once again moved to unify the south of the main island into a pagan kingdom of Lloegyr, Tacet funded missionaries to visit both King Rubert and the last local lordlets holding out against him, hoping to convert some of them to Christianity. Five of these missionaries were executed. Slipping Christianity into England without a tiresome process of crafting claims would be impossible, and with Drostan of Kent scheming against Tacet already, the new emperor opted in 737 to withdraw his retinue from the cape, leaving Drostan to his own devices. He would attempt instead to reach into Britannia through correspondence, sending numerous missives to Rubert in the hopes of winning his trust and opening his mind to the Christian faith.

The deeds accredited to Tacet reflect a desire to turn inward. Tacet broke ground on new villages and towns throughout northern Gaul and expanded the empire's road network. He's also associated with the construction of a series of forts and signal posts along the northern coast, between the Rhine and the cape of Mortain. These forts were constructed at a time when Geatish freebooters were becoming more common. Each would be fortified with a small garrison and a beacon, allowing the signal to be lit if the need for reinforcements arose. The Flame of the Seine was integrated into this network as the largest and most prominent of the beacons.

In 745, catching the Duchess of Aquitaine scheming against him, Tacet revoked her titles and granted them to Été de Melgueil, breaking up a powerful duchy with scattered holdings around Gaul. He took ship from there and made pilgrimage to Antioch. Poor weather drove the ship ashore in Cyprus, and Tacet was hurled overboard, injuring his leg in the process. He would survive and board a new ship for Antioch, limping his way through the pilgrimage.

Years of peace were broken in 750, when a massive uprising occurred in the old Septem Provinciae. Peasants and veteran soldiers across the south rallied under the banner of independence, vowing to restore the independence of the south from the "Gallish yoke." It took until the next year for Tacet to rally his troops and stamp out the rebellion. The leaders were largely imprisoned, but Tacet opted to spare the life of the rebel leader, Tacitus of Zurich. The rebel was ordered to retire to a monastery and spend his life in prayer and reflection.

Tacet's efforts to curry favour with Rubert of Lloegyr came to naught when the Pictish king again ordered Gaulish missionaries put to death in 751. A frustrated Tacet halted his efforts to sway the pagan, giving Britannia up for lost. He would soon have other issues to worry about.

In 753, a mass movement of the last of the Heruli into the Kingdom of Weissland roused Gaul to war in defense of their tributary kingdom. The war was swift, brutal and ugly, ending with Gauls and Weisslanders storming across the Rhine to sack the Heruli hillforts. Warchief Ermanaric was ultimately captured on the field and put in the stocks to be pelted with detritus, then thrown into the Rhine and left to float downstream in a sack.

Historians are divided as to Tacet II's legacy. His reign was a time of general peace and prosperity, with few external wars and no territorial expansion - indeed, Gaul's influence contracted somewhat under him, no moreso than when the Kingdom of Weissland was split upon the death of King Wisimar the Missionary, leaving a Noric successor kingdom alone to fall to the Napocan Slavs. Yet within Gaul itself, life was broadly peaceful, prosperous and happy. Church hospices were built and expanded, new cities were established, roads were improved and aqueducts were constructed, and tax revenue flowed from Melun into countless public works projects. A Gaulish peasant in Tacet's day could work or even travel without fear of banditry, marauding barbarians or invading armies. Yet for all that Tacet ruled over a peaceful realm, he was inadequate for the task of spreading that prosperity, be it to preserve it in the eastern Alps or to make any headway into pagan Britannia. His foreign efforts inevitably stumbled or failed to launch.

Tacet died a peaceful death in the summer of 762. Found in his bed by his son, Comain III, his death was mourned by noble and peasant alike. For all his failings and shortcomings, he was nevertheless known as the Saint later in life, an acknowledgment of his gentle and kindly demeanor.

Comain the Bold, or Comain III
Caesar/Empereor of Gaul (27 July 762 - 27 December 787)

For all the saintliness of Tacet II, Comain III was a very different sort of man. He had served as both his father's regent and, for a time, his chaplain, watching as a succession of bishops had crossed the English Channel to become martyrs in a futile effort to preach in Lloegyr. Comain emerged from the experience highly learned, but deeply cynical about the Church. For all his wisdom and administrative skill, he had gained a reputation for stubbornness that rankled some at court.

Spoiler: All gas, no brakes

In the first few years of his reign, Comain appeared content to commit himself to the same peaceful reign as his father, building cisterns and city walls and improving strongholds throughout Gaul. In 770, however, that changed abruptly.

That autumn, Comain III invated Italia, pressing the claim of his brother-in-law Prince Avagis, to whom he'd granted a barony in Liguria. For the first time in generations, the Empereor led the host himself, immediately storming into the north of the peninsula at the head of 7,500 cavalry and dispatching a large band of mercenaries down the coast. With a large war chest built up in peacetime, Comain spent heavily to fund these hired swords while taking his time to assemble his own levies, counting on a lightning-strike assault to throw King Julius-Caesar the Great back on his heels.

As the mercenaries broke down strongholds along the Ligurian coast, Comain and the cavalry doubled back to catch a Roman army attempting to hustle along the Gaulish coastline by boat. The landing was intercepted and killed to a man, and the cavalry regrouped to Italia once more, followed closely by the levies of Gaul. With Caesar distracted staving off a claimant on the African coast, the Gaulish armies encountered no armies in the field - merely well-defended fortresses and rich cities. Comain set his mercenaries to storming cities and temples and besieging forts, but ordered his men to spare the city of Rome, desiring it intact for the arrival of Avagis and his bride, Comain's sister Agathe.

In consolidating Italia, Caesar had made a crucial error: He'd made his power base in old Carthage. Unable to muster enough men to the boot to resist, the Roman ruler was forced to a humilating surrender in 772, exiling him to the Carthaginian environs but for a holdout in Amalfi. Comain hustled Avagis and Agathe to Rome, crowning them King and Queen of Italia - a kingdom within the new Gaulish Empire. Not content with these conquests, Comain sent his men into Dalmatia later that year, pressing claims on four counties in northern Italia. Those wars were brought to a short and brutal conclusion by the summer of 774, affecting the seizure of Ravenna and three more counties.

The swiftness and shocking decisiveness of the Italian Conquest left Christendon stunned. Overnight, Comain began to be spoken of as akin to a new Augustus, a restorer of the Western Roman Empire. In much of the still-Romanized south, there was a longing for it: The Eastern Roman Empire had plunged into another period of weakness under a series of usurper-emperors, even paying tribute to the Persians at times, lending vigor to the hope of a Roman restoration. As Comain traveled to Italy to oversee his new conquests and tend to the large and powerful kingdom he'd just swallowed whole, he was summoned to Rome by the city's Patriarch, meeting with him on Christmas Eve on 774. What passed between Patriarch Leontius and Comain that night is unclear. But on Christmas Morning in 774, Comain emerged from the Lateran Palace to find a crowd gathered, many of them his soldiers.

The event is recorded in detail by Marcian of Assisi, a patriarchal legate and historian in attendance at the Lateran. The crowd, upon seeing Comain, let up an immense cheer, bowing and hailing him with cries of "Hail Caesar, Emperor of Rome." Comain let them cheer a moment before raising a hand and shaking his head.

"From Gallia I came, and in Gallia I will lay my bones," he is said to have declared. "But until that day, God has chosen me Empereor, and I shall carry out His will upon this Earth."

There would be no restoration of the Western Roman Empire, though Comain spent heavily on a great triumph through the Roman streets to legitimize his reign. Despite pressure to move his capital to Rome, Comain would return to Melun in 775 and entrust the rule of Rome to Avagis. Those men he selected to rule his conquests in the north of Italy were not of noble Roman stock, but largely common-born men who had served with distinction in the levies, mostly those drafted from the estates of the Duke of Liguria. The two most reliable sources on this time period, Marcian of Assisi and Preis of Määnz, both describe these choices as deliberate and borne of Comain's scholarly pursuits together with his cynicism. While well-educated about the Roman Empire and even fond of it, Comain believe its institutions were flawed and decayed, and that it would be better to build a new empire upon the bones of the past than to - in the words attributed to him by Preis - "weave puppet strings to the rotten corpse of Rome, that the worm-eaten thing can stagger along once more, pretending that it lives."

Comain's imperial reforms were sweeping and dramatic. Perhaps recognizing the unique power of Italy within his empire, he introduced a system of viceroys, assigning key dukes as his point men in frontier regions. The first of these, Guitoy of Caen, was named Viceroy of Gallaecia in February 775, with Napoleone Orsini created Viceroy of Annonaria in October 777. These titles would carry the power and responsibilities of kings, but would be appointed like a military governor, not hereditary. Gaul proper received no viceroys; the title of King of Warnica was Comain's by long family tradition, while the old Septem Provinciae was already a hotbed of powerful dukes, whom Comain wished to keep divided against one another - and under his thumb.

In concert, Comain issued a document known today as the Capitulary on Learning. This writ of law called for the establishment of cathedral schools in churches and monasteries throughout Gaul, "that every boy in the land may be taught the word of God, the use of proper language, the grammar and arithmetic, the knowledge of music." These cathedral schools would form an important mechanism for the Recingian Renaissance of the eighth century, a flowering of culture and language in the post-Roman world. The reforms were aimed at commoners as well as nobles, though in practice the typical peasant boy would learn only rudiments. The more cynical aspect was aimed at the nobility: Comain broke ground on a large monastery and school complex in the old post-Roman capitol at Soissons, intended as an academy for the education of young nobles. The Cathedral-School of Soissons would be aimed not only at teaching the children of dukes and counts how to manage a realm, but in ensuring their education would be in Galleis language and customs.

The swelling of Gaul's empire enabled Comain to open relations with China. A Gallic mission was dispatched overland to the Jin Empire, bearing gifts of the finest textiles and a set of well-crafted Galleis mail. The diplomats returned with gifts from the Shangzong Emperor in the form of fine silks and a book of Chinese medical literature, the latter of which became well-studied at the hospital of Melun.

The conquest of Italy would have deep consequences for the power balance in Gaul. Now with a large kingdom in hand, Avagis would be emboldened to pursue claims against his relatives in Dalmatia, an outcome intolerable to Comain. The first half of the 780s was wracked by petty war, but in early 784 a sheaf of documents was produced by a Roman bishop, claiming it as evidence of Avagis's desire to kill Comain and seize the empire for himself. Avagis at the time being on campaign in Dalmatia to press his claim to that crown, Comain rode to Rome in his absence and proclaimed Avagis deposed and the crown of Italia declared void.

Branded a traitor, Avagis raised his levies in rebellion. Some of Italia's nobles joined him, but many, already considering him a usurper king, stood by and left him to his fate. Comain marched his troops into Comain's holdings in Latium and stormed them, ultimately capturing him and putting him in chains before stripping him of his titles and leaving him to rot in the oubliette.

Not desiring to restore the complex Roman bureaucracy that had prevailed in the peninsula, Comain divided Italy. The west-central peninsula was given to Ciro Sormella, ruling from Rome as Viceroy of the Romagna, granted authority over Latium, Umbria and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, with plans to add Spoleto to his domain in later years. In the south, the bulk of the peninsula was made part of the Viceroyalty of Naples. (Mechanically this was done because of a bug whereby usurping any form of Italia overrides your government to Bureaucratic, with no way to change it back.) The island of Sicily proper was left independent, deemed strategically important and useful to have directly under Comain's thumb.

The years following the division saw Comain retreat to Rethel, plagued by a cancerous tumour and intense stress. His health worsened over the onset of winter in 787, when a bout of food poisoning left him confined to his bed. He passed two days after Christmas, leaving the realm to his only son.

Leon the Noble
Empereor of Gaul (27 December 787 - 26 November 825)

Leon, born late in his father's life, arrived on the throne at age 22 and unwed. Seeking a potent co-ruler as quickly as possible, he was soon wed to Rodelinda of Meissen, the Thuringian daughter of a count.

Spoiler: Out with the Rome, in with the feud

Despite a relatively young age, Leon arrived with some experience in rule: He had served in the armies that deposed Avagis, rising to become his father's marshal and deputy. His martial background crafted a more strategic and military-minded man than the late Comain the Bold. But he also inherited a wave of consumption sweeping the Channel coast, possibly contributing to his father's death. The illness would quickly claim Queen Rodelinda, and Leon would remarry to Constantia, the daughter of a Polish high chieftain. She would convert to Christianity shortly after arriving.

Comain having died only a short time after dividing Italy, Leon was left to face the consequences of his father's actions, the first of these being major peasant revolts throughout the peninsula. While the nobility largely submitted to Gallic lordship, thousands of peasants and veterans rose up in late 790, demanding the restoration of Italia and Roman government. Leon was obliged to reinforce his retinue and keep them stationed in Rome to suppress these rebels, counting on the equestrians' superior equipment, training and mounts to overwhelm rebel forces largely made up of poorly-equipped peasants.

In 793, Leon went to war with the Kingdom of Dalmatia for a large swath of land at the head of the Adriatic Sea. His war efforts were made all the easier by having Prince Avagis still rotting in his gaol: Dalmatia, following seniority-based succession, acknowledged the deposed usurper-prince as the kingdom's heir. The war ended in a quick victory, with Avagis being ransomed to the Dalmatians in exchange for four counties. Internally, however, the insistence of the old Roman aristocracy on maintaining their bureaucratic, seniority-based structures created friction. Upon the death of his viceroy in Annonaria, Leon declared the title in abeyance and sorted the Duke of Ferrara and Ravenna into the Viceroyalty of Romagna. Liguria and the Duchy of Saluzzo were sorted into a new viceroyalty, that of the Piedmont, while the immense duchy of Histria was allowed to stand on its own, accounting as it did for as much as half of the de jure territory of Annonaria. The port of Venice being in the hands of lords from the Viceroyalty of Naples prevented the Histrian lords from just naming themselves kings in their own right.

A quick war in 796 against a Dalmatian rebel brought the County of Chreina into Gaul's overlordship. Leon went on the next year to organize his vassals along the Rhine into the Viceroyalty of Francia, governed from Breda. A series of wars through 797 and 798 would bring the now-Slavic city of Wien into the empire, a settlement built on the ruins of old Vindobona.

With Vasconia passing outside the realm in 802, Leon declared war to re-subjugate it. He turned from there to Dalmatia once more, taking advantage of a succession crisis to press claims on three counties, then completing the subordination of a handful of pagan counties along the Danube by the end of 804. These were granted to men of mixed Slavic and Germanic stock, the descendants of Slavs and a population likely of Gepid extraction, placed under the dominion of Duke Filipu the Good. This nobleman was created Duke of both Upper and Lower Pannonia as well as the old lands of the Rosian Slavs as Leon turned his eye towards creating a Slavic Christian kingdom on the frontiers of his empire. The consequence of these wars would be a series of revolts in Dalmatia and Pannona, splitting off duchies and counties, which Leon dedicated himself to absorbing as they fractured. Gaul would capture the last county of Dalmatia in 808, exiling the last king - once again Avagis the Usurper - to the wilderness. His decision to travel to Gaul to pursue his claim on Italy had proven to be his undoing.

With a final series of wars in the western Carpathians, Leon secured the region of Nitra, which he gave to Filipu the Good en route to releasing him from his vassalage at the end of 810. Filipu promptly proclaimed himself King of Pannonia and set about establishing a bureaucracy. Duke Albus of Andautonia would also be given freedom later that year, relinquishing Dalmatia to new lords unlikely to trouble Gaul with the frustration of seniority-based succession.

In 811, word came to Leon that he had succeeded where Tacet II had failed: He'd made a breakthrough in Britannia. A mission led by Patriarch Yvery of Pontigny successfully persuaded the King of Lloegyr, Aenbecan the Valiant, to convert to Christianity.

Leon moved in 813 to imprison Duke Avitus of Lucania, a known murderer and knave. Avitus defied Leon and raised his men to arms, and Leon dispatched his equestrians to the south of Italy, scattering the Lucanian armies to the winds and storming Acenzera to wrench the duke from his hideout at a friend's home. The disgraced duke was stripped of his duchy and his holdings in Reggio before being left to rot, and Leon held the county to give to his third son Amadeu, awaiting his majority the next year.

Before the year was out, a personal tragedy struck Leon as Empress Constantia was found pregnant by another man. Furious, Comain threw both his queen and her lover in the gaol. He would soon choose a new consort, Theodrada of Brandenburg. Constantia's lover - Budziwuj, an exile from one of the failed Polish kingdoms of Pannonia - was beheaded the next year, while the ex-empress herself would be sent into exile with her bastard.

Throughout this period of petty wars and personal drama, the most impactful changes were being made largely in the background. The transition away from the post-Roman tax system had been going on for decades - perhaps centuries - but the emergence of feudal Gaul was solidly entrenched by 815. Tax collection in this period was largely devolved to local lords. Many of these were men who had served loyally in the Gaulish cavalry corps, receiving baronies and the protection of the Recingi emperors in exchange for their service. Roman offices all but disappeared as Gaul underwent a decentralizing transformation away from a post-Roman bureaucracy and towards a more loosely-defined system of obligations, illustrated starkly by lords on the frontiers of the Gaulish Empire going into business for themselves in various petty wars. Leon largely tolerated these little adventures as necessary to maintain the loyalty of his vassals.

Seeing King Aenbecan beset in 820 by a massive pagan revolt and likely to lose, Leon formalized an alliance with the Loegrian king and sent 20,000 men across the Channel to secure Christian Britannia's existence. The rebellion of Aniel the Wise was concentrated largely in the south of the island, and though the Gaulish armies substantially outnumbered the rebels, they proved both stubborn and tenacious, refusing surrender despite overwhelming losses. Leon responded by simply laying waste to the south of Lloegyr, burning and sacking everything his troops encountered. By 823, Aniel - his armies broken and his cities devastated - sent word of surrender to Aenbecan, and Leon shipped his armies home. Leon would secure the alliance by betrothing his daughter to Aenbecan's heir, Tarla II.

Leon passed uneventfully in the late autumn of 825. More campaigner than bureaucrat, he saw Gaul through an era of sea change, of expansion and contraction, and of radical reform that would sweep out the legacy of the Roman bureaucracy and usher in a new way of ruling an Empire. His campaigns would end the Athalokid dynasty of Pannonia and Dalmatia, establish a strong Slavic kingdom on the Danube and bring Christianity to the British Isles once more.

Comain IV
Empereor of Gaul (26 November 825 - 22 September 834)

In comparison to his military-minded father, Comain IV stands as a somewhat more conventional administrative-minded emperor. His organizational mind and scholasticism were his hallmarks. He had spent little time on campaign, instead serving as his father's seneschal and the co-drafter of many of his later laws.

Spoiler: Brevity

The early years of Comain's rule started relatively peacefully, broken only by a sprint across the Pyrenees to claim the County of Urgell from a rebelling Iberian count. In 830, he would revoke the Duchy of the Lionaise and the County of Forez from Duchess Rubelia, who stood accused of treasonous dealings with heretics. These counties were distributed to an unlikely source: Boleslaw de Parisêre, the bastard child of Comain's mother, Queen Constantia.

Matters in Gaul moved at a pace of slow reform in those days, though elsewhere in the world, change remained afoot. The emerging Uyghur Khaganate finally finished the task of ending the last tattered remnants of both the Rourans and the Oghuz Khaganate, beginning to push further down the great steppes into Transoxiana. Their rise hit a stunning crest in the early 830s, when they launched a massive invasion of the Persian Empire. The Javanroudids, forced to appeal for aid from allies across an immense empire, could not muster their forces into a host capable of withstanding the Uyghur onslaught, and Khagan Ituk burned and sacked his way across Khorasan and down into Persia proper. By 834, Emperor Bakhtiar III sent writ of surrender, and the Uyghurs swept through the rest of Persia with little resistance en route to subjugating the entire ancient empire.

Poor health would cut Comain's reign short at less than nine years. He died at the age of 43, dropping dead at court just months after his son reached the age of majority, wrapping up an unremarkable reign.

 

[Planet of Hats]

And still more old game madness:


Yllian the Missionary, or Yllian I
Empereor of Gaul (22 September 834 - 3 March 883)

Yllian's accession to the Gallic throne was seen by many as a sign of crisis. Barely sixteen years old at the time of his father's sudden death and yet unwed, the redheaded young teenager took power at a time when news was sweeping the world of the fall of the mighty Persian Empire, long considered an implacable enemy of the Roman and now the Christian world. Worse, the Byzantine Empire was once more in a disgraceful state, reduced to paying tribute to the Nubian chiefs of Blemmyia after a series of catastrophic civil wars and usurpations. After nine years of inactivity from Comain IV and with much of the world awash in paganism and instability, a sentiment pervaded Gaul that Christendom was in peril at worst and in traction at best.

Spoiler: Reconquista status: WTF

Shortly after taking power, Yllian arranged a betrothal to Gestée Laidrati, a relative of the powerful Duke of Frisia, in the hopes of securing the compliance of at least one vassal. The usual gifts of gold were enough to forestall large-scale factionalization as Yllian began to learn on the job. He spent the first years of his rule under the guidance of a strong council, supported robustly by the Church. The young emperor relied heavily on the guidance of Polin the Wise, the aged Prince-Bishop of Transjurania, alongside that of his chancellor, Tacet de Tournoël, and his steward, Mayor Eustache of Gournay. Command of the army was entrusted to Siste of Melun, a commoner who had fought his way into high court honours as a cavalryman under Leon the Noble.

On the advice of Polin and Siste, Yllian dismissed Achai of Aveiro from his council within a few months. Achai, a Jewish expatriate, had served Comain IV respectfully enough but viewed Yllian with contempt, and his skills as a plotter and schemer made him a dangerous enemy. A wandering Galichian Slav, Tverdislav, was tasked with maintaining the security of Yllian's person and protecting the court from plots and schemes.

Seeking to win the respect of his vassals, Yllian was handed his opportunity by Chancellor Tacet: A legal claim on the Duchy of Barcinensis. Yllian, the son of a Maghrebi-Hispanic princess, would have been in line to inherit those kingdoms had not his mother's succession been derailed by internal revolt. The young emperor, believing Hispania to be a birthright denied to him, struck out in early 838 to seize the duchy.

As thousands of Gaulish men-at-arms laid siege in the Marca Hispania, Yllian received a mission from the petty king Buðli of Jutland, beseeching him to bring Christianity to his small realm. Yllian acceded willingly, traveling to the temple of Byrum along with Polin to baptize Buðli and his jarls into the faith. A legate was left behind to aid the converso, and Yllian set sail for Hispania to check on the progress of his troops. King Aemelius, Yllian's maternal cousin, would attempt to circumvent the large Gaulish army laying siege in the March by sending a body of 3,200 men by boat to Rouen, but they were quickly intercepted by the Gaulish cavalry and dismantled. By the end of 839, after a year and a half of war, a defeated Aemilius surrendered the March to Gaul.

Far to the east, Khagan Ituk of the Uyghurs settled in Persia and faced down an immediate general revolt. Meanwhile, Yllian was gathering more causes for war. Chancellor Tacet roamed the northwest of Iberia, crafting legal claims to counties across old Hispania Tarraconensis. Out of a desire to keep the merchant republic in Mallorca independent of any kingdom in that region, Yllian proclaimed Doge Luc de Mao of the islands to hold independent charter over the Balearic isles and trade in the western Mediterranean Sea, elevating his standing to a tier equivalent to that of a viceroy but leaving elections to the Republic of Mallorca in the hands of that island's trading aristocracy.

In 847, it became clear that all was not well in Britannia: Factional revolts had deposed the young King Domelch, installing Broichan the Bastard, a cruel and arbitrary pagan, as king in Lloegyr. Seeking about for a claimant to depose the usurper, Yllian recruited Taran map Uist, the Christian grandson of King Tarla the Fanged, and declared war to place him on the Loegrian throne. Twenty two thousand Gallic soldiers crossed the Channel to besiege counties along the Thames River, but Broichan quickly responded by landing ten thousand men at Rouen. They were intercepted by 7,000 horse from Yllian's elite retinue. Despite being sorely outnumbered, the equestrians lost fewer than 700 men, slaying 3,000 Loegrians and pursuing them to Rouen to rout the host. Taran would be set up at Westminster by year's end, though he would be almost immediately flung into a series of civil wars. Taran being married and with no children, Yllian had no legal avenue to assist him. With all the other claimants being Christians, this didn't bother the young Empereor greatly.

Chancellor Tacet's efforts gave Yllian what he needed by the time the truce with his Maghrebi cousin Aemilius ended in 849. Massing his ships in the Brittanic Channel, Yllian declared war that July and loaded his men aboard, setting sail for Viscaya to march down the Ebro Valley into the southern Tarraconese. An advance party of 7,500 knights surged into the Maghrebi kingdom to lay siege to Tarragona. By autumn, 32,000 men arrived in Viscaya to march into the contested lands, breaking off into four smaller armies to set sieges in the counties Taced had laid claim to. The forts of Hispania being well-developed and with new expansions of historic Roman walls and bulwarks, beseiging castles and towns took time. Yllian would join his troops in Teruel, establishing camp in the quickly occupied city before the Gaulish troops set in for protracted sieges.

By spring, King Aemilius being occupied in Mauretania with his wars against the Berbers, Yllian saw his sieges begin to bear fruit. Albarracin fell in March of 850, with other cities following. In April Yllian led the storming of Utrillas, capturing that city with losses before letting that column of the army regroup. By May, Tarragona finally fell to the Gaulish knights after nearly nine months of siege. As strongholds continued to give way before his armies, Yllian sent writ to Aemilius with terms of surrender, not expecting them to be answered.

Much to his surprise, Aemilius sent back his accedence, and Gaul's armies moved to occupy the remaining cities of the Tarraconese and the county of Valencia without a true fight. With an immense swath of new land now before him, Yllian spent the summer in Tarraco, appointing counts and dukes. He found strong support from the region's minority Visigothic community: Long overthrown and reduced to the northeast by the local Hispano-Roman community, key Visigothic leaders sided with Gaul readily, seeing in Yllian and his dynasty a group known for tolerance. Many of the Iberian Goths maintained friendly trade ties with kinsmen in the south of the Seven Provinces, further deepening their trust of Gaul. Ildefonsus Goisi, a well-respected man in Tarragona's Gothic community, was made Count of Tarragona and duke of the broader region.

Long maintaining a tributary relationship with the kingdom of Maxima Sequanorum, Yllian cut it short in the summer of 851 and sent writ of war to Queen Reta, declaring his intent to seize the duchy of Savoy - a de jure part of Gaul in his eyes. The war was swift and decisive, bringing the core of the mountain kingdom into the empire as a Romansh-speaking duchy. Immediately afterward, Gaul would be dragged into a civil war in Weissland as a faction of nobles rose up to demand a reduction in the prerogatives of the crown. Assessing the size of the rebel host, Yllian sent his knights to battle and quickly broke the back of the splinter faction. The war was wound down by late 852.

Change continued to gradually creep up on the edges of Christendom, no more prominently than the 852 invasion of eastern Dacia by the Batoyid Bolghars. Khagan Sarkhan would butcher his way through the Byzantine holdings there, claiming the area by summer of 855 and sweeping out all but one last Slavic lord. In the Maghreb, meanwhile, the southern fringes of the Hispano-Roman kingdom were being persistently nibbled by both Berbers and Mande-speaking peoples, the latter being pushed north along the gold routes by climatic and political changes in the Sahel.

Yllian appointed another regional point-man in 856, creating Ildefonsus of Tarragona as Viceroy of Gathalania - or Catalonia in modern linguistics. By that point, Iberia had become so war-torn that disease had begun to spread. Smallpox and measles ravaged most of the peninsula alongside revolts and claimant wars even as Yllian's chancellor roamed the lands along the Duero River, collecting legal claim to counties en masse. When the Viceroy of Naples declared war in 855 for Yllian's mother's claim to the Maghreb, Yllian declined to join the fighting, but quietly sat by and wished them well, knowing he stood as his mother's heir in any sane system. The attempt would ultimately fail.

By 861, Tacet long having passed, Yllian was relying on Duke Chavar of Aquitaine to craft claims in Iberia. Despite being a known lunatic, he proved astonishingly capable of generating reams of legal fictions to justify war. The mad duke is reputed to have drawn up documents through sheer absurdity: The claim he penned to Toledo, for instance, asserted very seriously that the county belonged to Gaul because it had once been granted to Julius Caesar's cat, who was the ultimate great-ancestor of Yllian's own three cats, and therefore Yllian was the rightful Roman Emperor and thus owned the county. With a sheaf of claims in hand, Yllian declared war on King Anicius the Monster in the spring of 861, mustering an immense host for a spring campaign against his Iberian cousin.

This time Yllian could not count on his opponent being distracted. Breaking his army up into smaller hosts, he spread them out across the range of the Duero, laying slow siege to northern keeps and fortresses as the seasons turn. Soon enough, Anicius took the bait, charging into battle against Yllian's army at Toledo. Yliane let them commit to the charge before dispatching relief hosts from nearby sieges, while the Gallic knights maneuvered around by way of Valencia to cut off the Maghrebi supply lines northward. The Battle of Toledo was a wholesale slaughter: Of 12,000 Maghrebi-Iberians sent into the fray, 8,500 were slain, at the cost of 3,500 Gaulish lives. With Anicius's own effort to land raiding parties in Gaul unsuccessful, it was left to Mayor Marius to sue for peace, which Yllian accepted in the spring of 862. Here, too, he would entrust the lands to the Visigothic minority, creating Dukes of Toledo and Merida. The knights quickly rode from Iberia to the Alps to finish the capture of de jure Sequania by the end of the year, though the war to secure the Duchy of Rhaetia was essentially an unfair fight and a fait accompli. That realm would be organized not as a viceroyalty, but as a kingdom with special status - the Kingdom of Burgundy, hereditary out of respect for the long-serving Romansh monarchs of the western Alps.

On the great steppes, the dominance of the Tiradin Bulgars was broken in 863 by an unlikely source: An alliance of Slavic tribes camped along the tributaries of the Volga. While Ludevit the Victorious would have precisely zero chance of holding the vast Scythian plains beyond his lifetime, if nothing else he smashed a long-standing irritant and marked his name in history. Closer to home, the eastward expansion of Weissland was blunted in the 860s with the split of the kingdom along the Elbe. The kingdom was split between the two daughters of King Butilin the Just: Queen Sigrade was made Queen of Weissland, and her sister Hamingda made Queen of Ostenland (Ostäänänd in the Alamannian dialect).

Through the 860s, Yllian sought to make sense of the scattering of Gaul's noble domains over the years. Seeing dukes holding fealty over counties far from their de jure holdings, he declared several of these vassalage agreements in abeyance and brokered new agreements between the loose counts and their de jure lords. Among these decisions, he revoked the Duchy of Guascone and the County of Bordeaux from a kinswoman for seeking to fabricate claims, distributing them to a loyal man, Jehane de Saintois, in the summer of 868. These decisions were within Yllian's prerogatives as an emperor, but irked the dukes affected, obliging Yllian to pay out bribes to forestall scheming and plotting.

His most impactful decision was the breakup of the immense Duchy of Histria upon the revocation of that title in 869. The duchy was by far the largest in Gaul, covering eleven counties on its own. Yllian (with the aid of the Title Manager mod) declared the title in abeyance and split it up into four new titles, proclaiming a Prince-Bishopric of Trent and the Duchies of Verona and Aquileia on the mainland while granting the lords of Venice the charter of Republic. The mainland duchies would be organized under a single Viceroyalty of Aquileia. Yllian's overall goal would be to break up kingdom-sized duchies - those with more than six or seven de jure counties - en route to organizing the empire along lines divergent from the old system of Roman provinces and dioceses.

Yllian's efforts in Iberia received a sudden start when, in 869, the vassals of the Maghrebi-Iberian kingdom rose up to demand he be placed on the throne of the Visigothic Kingdom. The emperor, now 35 years into his reign and seeing his fiftieth year pass by, sent word to the rebels that he would aid them, and he ordered his knights to roam southern Iberia, scattering assembling Maghrebi hosts where they could be found. The war would technically wind down by the summer of 870, only for King Anicius to smugly declare Yllian king to an empty kingdom, proclaiming the Visigothic title to be no more than a titular formality.

Furious, Yllian sent his knights back into the fray, this time pressing his mother's claim to the northern half of Anicius's realm. The Maghrebi field army was destroyed quickly, forcing Anicius to flee by ship to North Africa, where he would gather reinforcements among the Numidians. These reinforcements arrived in the winter of 871 but were intercepted by Gaulish knights. On the eve of January 10, 872, the knights captured Anicius at the Battle of Granada. The Maghrebi king was brought to Yllian's camp at Tarragona and forced to the humiliating surrender of most of Iberia but for a strip of land adjoining Cadiz.

Yllian approached these lands with an eye towards breaking up the old Hispano-Roman structures that had prevailed there for centuries, carving out entirely new duchies and sorting counties into new groupings. The duchies of the southeast in particular were reorganized to create three new titles - the Duchies of Cartagena and Granada and the Prince-Bishopric of Calatrava - and organized as the Viceroyalty of Bética. West-central Iberia remained largely in the hands of its own Hispano-Roman nobles but was placed under the Viceroyalty of Lusitania.

Yllian sailed north to Pictland in 878, helping to lead the Kingdom of Strathclyde's nobility in a mass conversion, then settled in to wait a few years, until the break of 882, when he launched his knights at Cadiz in a campaign to complete the exiling of the Maghrebi Kingdom from Iberia. Resolved to end the war quickly, Yllian mustered his armies for a large-scale invasion of the Maghrebi coast. The war would last the year, the exhausted King Anicius surrendering the Cadizian region and withdrawing entirely to Mauretania.

Missives arrived that year with odd news: His cousin Nicolas had been elected to the throne of the Roman Empire, breaking the string of emperors of the House Calathes. The Gallo-Byzantine Basileus had almost immediately found himself plunged into a revolt against his more ambitious vassals. Never on the best of terms with his cousin, Yliane made no move to aid Nicolas, instead setting his scribes to work studying classical history and his own genealogy. He would not, however, live to see through his ambitious plan to connect his bloodline to Alexander the Great.

Yllian the Missionary died in his bed in the spring of 883. He left behind an immensely enlarged empire stretching from the tip of Frisia to the southern extremities of Iberia and Italia. Wherever his empire touched, the old structures of the moribund Western Roman Empire gave way, replaced with new administration for a new time. He reined in the power of the Duchy of Histria, drove the old Hispano-Roman ruling class from Iberia, secured continued Christian rule in Britannia, brought the cross to Jutland and Caledonia, absorbed Burgundy into the Empire of Gaul and built Weissland into a kingdom powerful enough to stand on its own in a turbulent world. His machinations saw a Recingi Basileus onto the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire and led to the founding of powerful trading houses that would go on to dominate the flow of goods through much of the Mediterranean Sea. His near fifty-year reign radically altered the destiny of western Europe, bringing much of the continent under the rule of a single Christian empire. For these reasons and more, he is sometimes considered one of the greatest emperors of Gaul to ever live, and a Roman Emperor in all but name.

Comain the Fat, or Comain V
Empereor of Gaul (3 March 883 - 1 July 894)

Comain V, born early in his father's life, was already well into his forties and a seasoned administrator when he took the throne. While well-known as an able logothete and scholar, he was far less a martial man than his father, acknowledged more for his knowledge of mysticism and esoterica - and for his penchant for gluttony.

Spoiler: Grumpy vassals and a side of war

Growing up at his father's side through his years of campaigning, Comain declared to his dukes at a feast not long after his coronation that he would seek "a time of peace." He placed much focus on the tutoring of his heir - his second son Yllian. This unusual circumstance came about with his eldest, also named Comain, having chosen a career in the Church. The choice - encouraged by Yllian the Missionary - cleared the way for the younger Yllian, who even at a young age showed an uncommon brilliance.

Comain's plans for peace did not survive the rebellion of Albina, Duchess of Latium. The expected heir to her father as Viceroy of Romagna, she stood to inherit a large swath of land in Iberia - a situation Comain found intolerable. She found him much the same, raising her levies in May of 885 in a rebellion possibly incited by Comain's agents. To the Emperor's surprise, she brought a large swath of the Romagna with her. In a two-year war, Comain would be forced to draw levies from further inland to put down Albina's revolt, imprisoning and stripping the honours of three dukes en route to leaving them to rot in the oubliette. In truth he would have been on safe legal ground to merely strip their ducal titles, but he unlanded all three of them and appointed new dukes in Romagna, going beyond the prerogative of the crown to punish the rebels. These harsh measures would strain Comain's relations with his vassals, obliging him to pay out a new wave of bribes and honours to stay the hands of plotters scheming to force the introduction of gavelkind in Gaul.

Gaul struck across the Mediterranean in 887 in an unjust war to seize the Comté of Ruspae from the pagan King of Arzugis, completing the seizure of that land in 888 to add it to a cluster of counties in the headland of Tunis taken by the Viceroy of Naples. Comain's aim was to forestall future expansion by the Byzantine Empire, which he feared was building a case to lay claim to all lands of the former Roman Empire - including Gaul's. Another war in 890 would bring much of the Libyan coast under Comain's control, stretching from Tunis to the ruins of Leptis Magna.

Taking ship on pilgrimage in 893, Comain returned to Melun hobbled by both stress and pneumonia. He survived the illness, attributing it to the blessings he received while visiting the Holy City. These blessings would not see him through the stroke he suffered in 894, which took his life on July 1.

 

[Planet of Hats]

And we continue.

Yllian the Wise, or Yllian II
Empereor of Gaul (1 July 894 - 27 July 925)

Yllian II's path to the throne had been cleared by his grandfather and older brother years earlier. The second son of Comain the Fat, Yllian was expected to inherit at best a barony or county, but his elder brother Comain's desire to take the cloth had seen Yllian I set him up as a bishop. The decision proved propitious: Even from a young age, Yllian was deeply precocious, with a brilliant mind for organization and numbers. He reached adulthood as perhaps the most able administrator in Christendom - an ability matched by his shyness and tendency to avoid engaging in person wherever possible. Some contemporaries describe him as the Unseen Emperor for his tendency to avoid ostentatious public displays.

Spoiler: The African Theatre

Upon completing a grand hunt alongside his vassals and distributing bribes to those most aggrieved with his father's rule, Yllian sent his chancellor and patriarch to the Lybian coast, setting to work crafting claims and preaching Christianity among communities long overtaken by Gurzil Berbers. His retinue remained in Italy, tamping down outbreaks of unrest among the peasantry. Comain the Fat had been hardest on the nobles and peasants of old Rome, and resentment remained even among the commons.

At war in 899 for several counties beyond the coast of the Carthaginian headland, Yllian married his promised bride, Lucinetta. He found her tempestuous and deceitful, yet brilliant and fundamentally kind - enough to cause him grief in his personal life while still proving an intellectual match for him. By 900 he had captured enough land to proclaim himself King of Africa, holding onto the title with intention to break up the enormous holdings of the Berbers into proper duchies once the kingdom had reached its planned extent.

Yllian travelled to the isle of Gotland in the year 900, helping High Chief Sigurðr the Just to lead his chiefs in converting to Christianity. The act brought the last large realm in Scandinavia into the arms of the Cross, averting the potential for large-scale Norse and Geatish migrations. Three years later he would conduct a conversion for Chief Sambor of Danzig, a Polish chieftain squatting within the de jure domains of Ostäänänd, hoping to ease that tribe into Christendom.

Seeking to secure the eastern frontiers of the Christian world, Yllian forged an alliance with King Uthoil of Ostäänänd in 900 and sent his men to the urheimat of the Warini to help the Ostenlanders hold off a Lithuanian attack. This embroiled Gaul in no less than four successive Ostenlandic civil wars over the next six years, all of which Gaulish troops suppressed violently. All the while, Yllian was positioning knights in Libya, gathering causes for war against the Garamantes.

His plots were abruptly interrupted in the summer of 906, when he caught Decius the Wise, Duke of Alercie, scheming to overthrow Yllian in favour of his cousin, Duke Preis of Bourges. Yllian sent men to apprehend both on charges of treachery. Preis was quickly seized, but Decius evaded capture and raised an army, declaring Yllian a pretender and claiming himself as the true King of Warnica. Marshaling his host, Yllian marched them into the duchy neighbouring his own demesne, pursuing Decius's army into Armorica. Decius would be captured on the field following a pitched battle outside Rennes. Both dukes were put in chains and brought before Yllian, who stripped them of their ducal titles and left them in the gaol as an object lesson. A loyal commander, Valeran d'Aubusson, was named the new Duke in Alercie, while the Duchy of Bourges was passed to the Count of Blois, a distant kinsman.

With the death of the King of the Arzugi Berbers, Yllian was again given a free hand in Libya, and he took it by invading several inland strongholds still held by that weakened kingdom. The inland Garamantians rushed into the war, turning it into a two and a half-year game of cat-and-mouse between Gaulish knights and Garamantian horsemen as the regular army slowly besieged strongholds in the more sparsely-provendered inland regions. By the end of 908, the last of these fortresses had fallen, and Yllian organized the bulk of them into the Duchy of Ausuriana. The city of Syrte he retained for himself, opting to use it as a staging base to eventually put the Arzugids to an end.

In 909, Yllian was faced with grim news from Catalonia: Viceroy Joan had proclaimed himself King and declared intent to pass the title down to his son. Worse, he had gained a reputation as a man possessed by Satan. Upon receiving word of Joan's dishonourable conduct, Yllian sent men to apprehend him, but Joan had them beheaded on the spot and raised the army of the March of Hispania in an effort to overthrow Yllian. The war would be quickly turned when Yllian's armies captured Joan's son on the field, going on to storm Tarragona. Joan was stripped of county and kingdom, and Ramon-Borrell de Puigcerda was named Viceroy in his place.

That year, Yllian sent fast ships and scouts to report on a massive invasion of the lower Danube by a confederation of the Batoyid Bolghars. Powered by the fragmented survivors of other Bolghar houses on the great steppes, Khagan Organ Irongrip waged a four-year campaign and eventually drove the Byzantine Empire back south of the river, carving out a vast but Christianized Bolghar Khaganate on the great empire's very doorstep. At the same time - in a truly bizarre moment of happenstance - a son of the Chinese Emperor, Zhongsun Wo, managed to gain rulership of the Persian Empire through entirely legitimate means, marrying into the family of the Itukid Uyghurs and taking over the throne from his suspiciously prematurely-deceased son.

Through the first half of the 910s, Yllian waged mostly smaller-scale wars, capturing a handful of individual counties in Africa and aiding the Kingdom of Ostäänänd in suppressing rebellions. By the end of 918, these wars culminated with the seizure of Syrte and the completion of Yllian's ambition of a Kingdom of Africa. Yustenu, Duke of Tunis, was granted the title of King and allowed to take his kingdom along a path of his own choosing. In 919, however, Yllian's campaigns would take a dramatic turn.

That may, Yllian declared war on the Eastern Roman Empire to press the claim of a distant in-law to old Moesia Superior. He took the rare step of mobilizing the entire military of Gaul, mustering tens of thousands of men to storm the eastern Adriatic coast in a series of grinding sieges. Yet as Yllian sailed with his main force into the Mediterranean, his fleet encountered a large Byzantine fleet sailing west. The two fleets clashed just shy of Gibraltar before the Romans ran the Gaulish line and sprinted for the Alercian coast, with Yllian hot on their heels. When the Romans made landfall, the Gallic armies were just behind. The two forces clashed at Evreux, with the more numerous Gauls emerging victorious in a spring 2020 slog. The victory crushed a large part of the Byzantine army, and with still more Gauls already laying siege in Moesia, Basileus Germanos Caiaphas ultimately capitulated. Leon Baduilid was set up as King of Moesia Superior, and Yllian began pulling his armies back to home.

Even as he waged war in the Adriatic, Yllian began to turn his focus to his three infant sons - Cadoual, Jehane and Comain, all yet to reach their majority, yet all with promise. As Gaul's empire swelled, Yllian found himself at odds on how to secure each of them a fair and just inheritance. He spent much of the 920s appointing new lords in the old lands of the Saxons, once Frisia, creating two new dukes and granting charter of republic to the merchants of Bremen. Yllian's succession plans became more clear when the Viceroy of Catalonia died childless: He moved in July 925 to name Jehane Duke of Tarragona and King of Catalonia, with a promise that he would rule all of Iberia upon Yllian's death. In turn, Cadoual would be promised all of Gaul proper, and Comain Italia proper.

Yllian's plans would come to fruition upon his death in 925. The Empereor, by now compared by many to Alexander the Great, suffered a massive heart attack at the age of 51 and died in great pain. His will made clear the division of his realm, splitting it between his three sons.

Cadoual the Just, or Cadoual the Schismatic, or Cadoual I
Empereor of Gaul (27 July 925 - 27 July 936)
King of Catalonia, Gallaecia and Lusitania (19 May 933 - 27 July 936)
Holy Roman Emperor (27 July 936 - 25 December 972)

Cadoual, 19 years old at the time of his rise to power, arrived in time to see his father's immense empire split, his brothers receiving Italy and Iberia as their inheritance. On paper, Cadoual was the only one to retain imperial title, but in practice he held no authority over his siblings. He would go on to triumph over all of them and carve his name and legacy deep into the bedrock of Europe.

Spoiler: A Crisis of Faith and Politics

For all his youth, Cadoual had the advantage of the strongest of the three realms carved out of Gaul: The core of the empire. But the complex vassal relationships between the parts of greater Gaul created the potential for inheritance to splinter the three realms. Cadoual dealt with these problems as best he could, revoking the County of Artois in 927 and granting it to a courtier to forestall its inheritance, then seeing to the death of the duke consort of Verdun to prevent the realm's inheritance by a lord in the Piedmont.

Events early in Cadoual's reign showed him to be less a tactical man than his father. He leapt to the aid of his brother Joan against rebels seeking to secede and seize the crown of Lusitania as they went, but Gaul's army suffered a humiliating defeat against a smaller rebel force at Valladolid, only being brought to right when Joan's army and the much-reduced Gaulish knights swept a month later to harry the rebel survivors. The rebellion was put down with great cost of life, the Gaulish force limping home wounded and battered.

The division of the realms was partially mended by surprise: Joan died in 933 after a battlefield wound festered into a fatal infection, and Iberia was again split, with Cadoual receiving the north and his brother Comain the southern reach of Bética. The kingdoms fell into Cadoual's hands with a claimant trying to make a play for Catalonia. In the hopes of curtailing the power of his vassals, Cadoual declared the viceregal titles of Gallaecia and Lusitania to be in abeyance, opting to rule the dukes of northern and western Iberia directly.

Cadoual would take decisive action to heal the remaining rift. In 935, he mustered the entire host of Gaul and sent writ to Comain, declaring that Italy and Betica would be his, by fire and sword. The war would be brutal and grinding, but in the end, swift. Expecting to encounter his younger brother in the field, Cadoual instead found Comain had sent his entire army to Sardinia to press a claim, choosing to keep them there even as Gaulish soldiers besieged Piedmontese and Baetic strongholds in small blocs. Fort after fort fell as the winter wound on, until Cadoual sent a messenger to Sardinia, proposing a deal of surrender: Comain would be permitted his core realm of the Kingdom of Naples and allowed to maintain the Kingdom of Aquileia, but the rest would be Comain's. Baetica would be calved off as a tributary kingdom.

The agreement was signed in Rome in July of 936. There, Cadoual met with Pope Alexander at the Lateran Palace, remaining there for several hours. When he emerged on the morning of July 27, John and Cadoual threw the course of history askew.

As recorded by Bishop Emmanuele of Forli in his Histories, Cadoual knelt before Alexander, who crowned him with a golden circlet and proclaimed him Augustus and ruler of the Roman Empire, in the holy name of God. Cadoual then led the assembled crowd through a great triumph, ending in a week of prayer and thanksgiving. In accepting the title of Roman Emperor, Cadoual took the step that his great-great-great grandfather, Leon the Noble, declined to take - he wrapped himself in the mantle of Rome and positioned himself as its restorer, equal to the Byzantine Emperor.

The reasons behind Alexander and Cadoual's decision are opaque. Some have speculated the move to be a gauntlet cast into the teeth of the Byzantine Emperor, a recognition of some weakness on the part of the old empire - yet the Byzantines controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean at that point, and had done so for a solid century. While Germanus Maximianus was hardly the most spectacular Basileus ever to reign, presiding over a relatively weak empire that could be bullied by tribal Berbers and Bedouins alike, he was generally viewed as legitimate and well-respected. A more personal motive may lie in Cadoual's personal ambition and his views on Germanus's predecessors. Prior to Germanus taking the purple, a series of men from a distant branch of the Recingi family had ruled in the east as Roman Emperors. The last of them - Dorotheos Kopronymos, or Drotey the Dung-Named - had died in disgrace in 934, widely derided as the son of Satan and a cruel coward. Emmanuele of Forli and other contemporary writers all describe Cadoual as ambitious and well-versed in Roman history and nostalgia. Historians speculate that he viewed Dorotheos's reign as a disgrace to the Recingian name: He had risen to the highest rank imaginable, that of Augustus, and had shamed himself and his line while there. By claiming the title of Roman Emperor for himself, Cadoual sought to erase the stain of his kinsman's imperial bout.

Whatever the reason, Cadoual's coronation is recognized as the end of the Gaulish Empire and the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire - and the beginning of the Great Schism, kicked off by the coronation and the intense backlash to it. That reaction was rooted in Church politics that had festered within Christendom for generations. Roman primacy had existed since at least the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-96), but had seen greater use since at least the time of Empereor Leon to justify church decisions made in the interest of the increasingly populous western half of Europe. The concept was based on the primacy of Peter - the idea that the late Apostle, as the first Bishop of Rome, had brought to the office his indelible status of first among equals, able to supercede any of the four other classical patriarchs. In crowning Cadoual, Alexander's eventual explanation was entirely rooted in this trend of Petrine supremacy: He could do it because Rome stood above the other patriarchs.

Intense spiritual debates tore through the Galleis and Greek worlds over the next couple of years. The hastily-assembled Fourth Council of Constantinople saw Alexander skip the event, sending a legate in his stead. The legate delivered a simple and concise message: "Only the Bishop of the See of Rome is the primate of the universal Church and apostolic. It is to the churches throughout the world as the head to all the members. The See of blessed Peter the Apostle has the right to unbind what has been bound by the decree of any pontiffs; it has the right to judge the whole Church. Neither is it lawful for anyone to unbind its judgment."

Churchmen from the west - most of them based in kingdoms that were part of Gaul, established by Gaul or within Gaul's sphere of influence - sided with Alexander, while those in the east joined the four other patriarchs in declaring Roman primacy to be anathema. By 938, the council had ended with the four eastern patriarchs excommunicating Alexander, who promptly excommunicated both them and Emperor Germanus of the Eastern Roman Empire. The eastern patriarchs excommunicated Cadoual in turn. Nobles and churchmen across Europe followed along similar regional lines. The Gaul-influenced world rallied behind the Pope of Rome. Across the straits, the Picts of the Empire of Alba threw in their lot with the Pontiff, while the lords of the Bolghar Khanate joined the Eastern Romans in upholding the old orthodoxy. In practical terms the transition was not instantaneous - fence-sitters, neutral parties and contrarians would persist for decades - but at the highest levels, the Church had been split into western and eastern spheres.

It's this schism that gives Cadoual his dual legacy. Pro-Catholic histories describe him as "the Just," while pro-Byzantine accounts inevitably describe him as at best a schismatic power-monger and at worst the Antichrist. A third class of historian takes neither side - some viewed the entire affair as little more than bloviating between overstuffed churchmen, with no real consequence. The tendency of historians on both sides to consider the Schism insignificant in its own time is remarkable and surprisingly widespread.

The emergence of Roman primacy coincided with Cadoual dealing closely with Alexander over the fate of the Romagna. By the end of 938, Cadoual agreed to recognize the Pope as the sovereign ruler of Rome, concluding a deal that would terminate Cadoual's influence at the loose boundary between the Piedmont and Umbria. This decision was rooted in the Cession of Leon, an apocryphal document in which the late Empereor Leon allegedly entrusted the Papacy with the welfare of Christians from Rome to Ravenna. The Cession was used to legitimize granting Alexander much of central Italy, carving out a compact but wealthy Papal State anchored between Rome, Florence and Ravenna. In practice this realm would function as a loose and ambiguously-defined appendage of the Holy Roman Empire - even today, there is considerable debate as to whether Cadoual and his successors actually incorporated the Papacy into the empire, or if it operated as a de facto independent realm with close ties to the Galleis realm. Caveats or not, the land donation granted the Holy See a parallel temporal power not enjoyed by any of the eastern patriarchs and instilled in the pontiff an immense legitimizing power over western Christendom. The Pope essentially acted as the sole voice of God in Western Europe - a power that could potentially legitimize any monarch able to win Rome's favour.

The ensuing few years prompted a flurry of religious crisis. Cadoual spent much of 939 and 940 on campaign in Jutland and the Kattegat, occupying regions held by a mix of pagan chiefs and loose earls who had recognized the eastern patriarchs. He unseated these rulers and installed Catholic Danish rulers in their stead, establishing a Kingdom of Denmark. More serious was the move by the King of Baetica, released as a nominal tributary of Cadoual's, to name a patriarch of his own - the first known antipope. While Cadoual himself remained in Denmark, Baron Antonin de Meldiu led the regular army into the south of Iberia to forcibly depose Antipope Hormisdas. The conflict ended the relationship between Baetica and the Holy Roman Empire almost as soon as it began, leaving the Visigothic rulers of that kingdom to their fate.

These wars being settled, Cadoual spent the early 940s declaring various viceregal titles to be in abeyance. These steps would reduce the number of powerful vassals in the Empire but would also limit its size and growth potential. Nobles from Warnica to Iberia seethed as the prospect of claiming viceroyalties for themselves slipped away, but Cadoual spent liberally to mollify these angry voices. With the death of the last Viceroy of Francia in 949, Cadoual declared the title in abeyance, terminating all viceroyal positions in the empire. Only one king - Corsin the Just, King of Burgundy - remained under imperial governance.

Beyond his administrative reforms, Cadoual appears to have enjoyed significant goodwill from the commons. His best-known folk story is of how he closed the Gap of Hell. Tradition holds that a peasant farmer, tilling a field somewhere in the north of Gaul, discovered a fissure that belched fire and screams. Cadoual is said to have gathered bishops and knights from across the land, conducting an exorcism over the gap and causing the flames to die down. More embellished tales depict he and the knights duelling Satan and an army of demons, while a late adaptation from Byzantine historian Sergios of Hieropolis describes the gap as the means by which Cadoual communed with the powers of Hell.

Scandinavia, split between Catholic and Orthodox believers, quickly emerged as a battleground between the two faiths. Cadoual struck out in 946 to seize Scania from the Geats, aiming to add it to his Danish clients' holdings, only for a rebellion in Denmark to rope him in. Amidst this clash, his brother Comain fled to his court in Melun, unlanded by a noble rebellion in Naples. A sympathetic Cadoual granted Comain the county of Scania, establishing him as his man on the Scandinavian rim. Within a few years, the remaining Geatish kingdom was invaded from the east, overrun by bands of Slavs striking from across the sea.

The Holy Roman Empire mustered its full host in the autumn of 956 to come to the aid of King Graziano of Naples, facing invasion by the Byzantine Empire in a bid to wrest southern Italy back into its fold. The war ground on for two years as the old Gallic Equestrians joined the Neapolitan army in driving back a Byzantine attempt to cross into Apulia. A Holy Roman landing in Epirus was driven back into the sea by a vicious Byzantine counterattack, but subsequent landings established sieges in the west of Greece. Another army sailed straight into the Bosporus, defeating a Byzantine fleet in a narrow engagement and allowing thousands of men to make landfall around Constantinople and the environs. As the Holy Roman siege engines pounded the Theodosian Walls and reduced some outlying settlements, Emperor Theodosius III managed to pull off a few tactical victories in Epirus, but his army would eventually be broken and scattered. In the spring of 958 he sent writ of surrender to Graziano and paid an enormous indemnity, giving up the invasion for lost.

Cadoual was faced with a difficult question in 962, when a Portuguese duke seized the crown of Betica for himself and brought that kingdom back into the realm. Once more faced with an immense royal vassal within his empire, Cadoual met with Fernao and granted him nominal independence, on the condition that the Kingdoms of Lusitania and Betica continue to pay him tribute.

In the midst of all this, the historian Pompey of Chalons records a strange event in the spring of 964: The Dancing Plague. Pompey's records describe a sudden outbreak of mass dancing in the city of Remos, spreading rapidly through the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. The event seems to have passed quickly without reaching Melun, nor interrupting Cadoual's campaigns of building. Through the late 960s and into the early 970s, Cadoual waged no military campaigns, instead breaking ground on massive fortification structures in the vicinity of key trade hubs in Vecsin. Work continued as well on erecting a grand cathedral in the city of Cologne, by now a major pilgrimace site for Christians in both old Gaul and the growing kingdoms of Weissland and Denmark.

As the winter of 972 set in, Cadoual returned from a tour of the walls of Vecsin and settled in at Melun. He acknowledged Christmas with a small ceremony before retiring to bed. When the dawn broke the next day, Cadoual had passed, leaving a much-transformed world to his first son, Cadoual II.

 

[Sevarics]

For anyone interested, someone brought back the Targaryen Invasion of Europe mod for ck2

 

[Gukpard]

Guys, is there any active ckii YouTuber?

 

[Razorfloss]

Not anymore they've all but switched to ck3

 

[Gukpard]

Not anymore they've all but switched to ck3

F

 

[Zireael]

Not anymore they've all but switched to ck3

Sad. CK2 is a great game

 

[floyd22]

Yeah yeah, I should be playing CK3. Whatever. I don't want to buy new games. Besides, CK2's fun.

I've been playing with When The World Stopped Making Sense lately and decided to do a little alternate migration. That's my jam right there, kids.


Reik Blodag, or Reik the Bloody
Warchief of the Warini (470s? - approx. 494)

The chaos of the Migration Period makes tracing historical personages a challenge, but the figure of Reik Blodag is a large one, for all his vagueness.

Spoiler: Frankwank status: Doubtful.

His name first turns up in a single contemporary document from the 470s concerning a Roman trader who passed through the lands of "Ricius, the chief of the Warini." Most other references to him come from after his apparent death. If not for that fragmentary evidence, he could be dismissed as a legendary figure. Some later tales depict him as a giant with a thundering voice and a stag-horned helmet, and artistic depictions almost always show him wielding a sword in one hand and a throwing-axe in the other, sporting a massive beard and wild hair.

The most descriptive source comes from the fragmentary account of Servius of Amiens, a monk writing in the 530s but who claims to have seen Reik near the end of his life. Servius describes him as "the hulking patriarch of the Werni, hirsute and bursting with wroth, that it erupted from him in great bellows." Historians are divided as to how far Servius can be trusted: The historical record on the Warini migration and the roots of the House de Ricingi are scant, and some elements of it are clearly polemical.

Leaving aside editorial commentary, what is clear is that around the 470s, a mass migration of Warnic Germans flooded into the lands of the Saxons. These warriors, originating largely on the lower Baltic coast, forced the Saxons to the coast en route to settling in war camps along the Weser. Later histories and the De Ricingi genealogy claim Reik as the paramount Warini leader.

The Warini remained on the move in the late 480s, reaching the Rhine by 490 and crossing in an outburst of violence into the realm of the Salian Franks. The brutal war saw some of the largest armies fielded in the period thrown against one another, but eventually established Warini outposts from the Rhine to the headwaters of the Seine. Arrowheads and earthworks found near the ruins of Augusta Viromanduorum have been interpreted as a major Warini war camp.

It is unclear how and when Reik actually died, but it's generally agreed that if he did exist, he was dead by 494.

Asmus Brutus
Rex Vernicae (509 - 22 January 532)
Warchief of the Warini (494 - 509)

The earliest fully agreed-upon ruler of the Warini, Asmus, first appears in the historical record in 494, when fragmentary documents concerning the release of hostages name him as leader of the Warini. In later documents, Asmus claims himself as the son of Reik.

Spoiler: A Brute of a man.

It was under Asmus that the Warnic Germans stormed into the Romano-Gallic Kingdom of Soissons. Beginning in the very early 500s, the Warini flooded into the weakened kingdom of Regina Martina, badly weakened by civil war. After years of bloody battles, the Warini prevailed in 507, driving Martina and the last of her armies out of northern Gaul.

The Warnic Germans largely settled along the north bank of the Loire, displacing a few still-pagan holdouts. With Soissons badly damaged in the fighting, Asmus set up shop at Meledunum. Faced with an imminent rebellion among his Romano-Gallic subjects and struggling to find local help, he took a cue from his wife, a Roman woman named Petronia, and professed adherence to Christianity.

By 509, coins were being minted with the face and name of Asmus, proclaiming him as Rex Vernicae - King of Warnica, or of the Warini. The day-to-day management of this realm is more opaque. What evidence exists suggests the Warini ruling class co-opted Roman institutions that were already crumbling at the time of their arrival. The remaining legions vanish from the historical record, replaced by armies largely composed of Warini war bands and hired Romano-Gallic veterans and peasants attempting to train the Warini in Roman ways. Coins from the period, meanwhile, reflect an eclectic mix of Roman and pagan iconography: Coins and carvings have been found featuring the Virgin Mary depicted with motifs common to the pagan Nerthus. A number of nominally Christian burial sites along the Seine and Loire feature grave goods that are distinctively pagan. It's likely that Asmus would have ruled over a religiously divided and poorly-organized realm, maintaining control through a loyal Warini core and promoting Nicene Christianity more as an instrument of government than as a faith pursued with zeal.

The name of Asmus is otherwise attested in post-Roman records from the south. An Italian bishop visiting in about 520 is the source of the name "Asmus Brutus," coupled with commentary describing him as "hoary" and "tawny-headed." Asmus's origins as a non-Romanized barbarian seem to have been taken for stupidity or irrationality by his mostly Romanized subjects, evidenced further by coins tending to depict him with a sloping forehead and a massive neck - features likely to reflect polemical jabs at the barbarian newcomers.

While Asmus seems to have made strides in integrating the Warini into northern Gaul, he would not live to see it out: Records universally agree he was killed in battle in early 532, leading an invasion of the Burgundian Kingdom. He was cut down by a Burgundian chief at the Battle of the Saoconna during a Warini attempt to cross the river.

Asmus Excelsus, or Asmus II "The Noble"
Rei Vernicae (22 January 532 - 2 August 547)

The son of Asmus Brutus, Asmus II is on record as the marshal of his father's armies. His first act was to bring in the Warini reserves and rally the flagging troops at the Saoconna, securing the battle by capturing the Burgundian Prince Thurisund. In the ensuing negotiations, King Evermud was forced to bargain away the March of Lugdunum in exchange for his son's life.

Spoiler: Not a Brute of a man this time, honest.

For all that he shares a name with his more historically impactful father, Asmus II was a different breed of man. Born on the migration to Gaul, the younger Asmus spent his formative years in Soissons, tutored by Romano-Gallic priests and statesmen. His administration coincides with the emergence of the second generation of Gallic Warini - men and women who grew up surrounded by the trappings of the old Roman administration, becoming Latinized as they reached maturity. The marks of Asmus's administration convey this tightrope walk between the Warini's Germanic barbarian roots and the Latin administration influencing them. His coins depict him with long hair but without a beard, with Nerthus-influenced imagery completely absent. Moreover, some sources refer to him as "Asmus Excelsus," or the Exalted, suggesting a degree of high respect among the elite classes.

Asmus seems to have moved from the outset to involve himself in Christian politics in the Mediterranean. Warini troops fought in Italy to support a Nicene Christian rebellion against an Arian Gothic monarch and independently stamped out a number of Arian revolts in the Septem Provinciae during a time of trouble for Christendom. With Europe beset by years of poor harvests and religious heterodoxy, the continent in general struggled for stability.

What records survive suggest that Asmus attempted to reduce the scheming of his vassals by appointing several broad regional governors, appointing mainly Warnic and Romano-Warnic men as dukes to oversee mainly Gallo-Roman counts.

By 544, Asmus extended his authority down the western Gaulish coast to the mouth of the Garonne, proclaiming a loyal Warini retainer as governor in old Pictavium. These claims came at the expense of the child kings of the Septem Provinciae, large but mostly toothless in the face of years of regencies. However, he appears to have died unexpectedly shortly afterwards. Historians broadly accept an account from a northern Gallic monk, describing Asmus dying from infected injuries sustained when physicians attempted to cut a "great lump" out of his body. Whatever the cause, it's agreed that he was dead sometime before the summer of 547.

Tacitus Lignarius, or Tacet the Carpenter
Rei Vernicae (2 August 547 - 6 October 580)

Tacet, the son of Asmus II, cannot have taken the throne any later than 2 August 547 - the date of a decree under his name recognizing several office-holders. But he appears to have served as his father's regent and secondary ruler for the prior five years. He was likely in his early to mid-twenties when he took power, newly married and with an infant son.

Spoiler: Bob the Builder, circa 6th century AD.

Tacet was part of the born-in-Gaul generation of Warini and would have grown up knowing nothing else but the post-Roman world. This put him at odds with many of his subordinate governors. Finding the Doux of Armorica and Archbishop Adiarius of Lugdunum scheming against him to place his younger brother Count Romanus (Romain) on the throne, Tacet was forced to pay out massive bribes to forestall a civil war. Romanus, installed by Asmus II as Count of Sénte, seems to have loathed his older brother and continued to hold himself out as "Rei Vernicae" in his correspondences with other nobles.

Noble plots were not the only unrest Tacet faced. Early in his reign, a rebellion among the still-pagan Warini broke out along the north bank of the Loire, terrorizing towns before it could be suppressed. Warini troops would move from there to seize the then-independent comté of Naves, then a stronghold of Arianism.

In 550, Tacet lead troops into the Alamannic Kingdom to defend against their cross-Alps invasion of the Kingdom of Annonaria. After capturing a series of Alamannic forts along the Rhine, the Warini armies were joined by a band of Transjuranian hired swords and made their way through the Valley of Augustus (the modern Val d'Aosta), winning a battle there against nearly 6,000 Alamanni. Tacet moved along with his army, proclaiming that the punishment for captured Alamanni war leaders would be death. In practice, common Alamanni warriors were merely imprisoned, but chiefs were generally beheaded. Warini soldiers would ultimately isolate and behead the Alamanni king, Leuthar the Brave, during a battle outside Milan, and several more chiefs and high chiefs were executed en route to defeating the invasion before Christmas of 522.

The battles in Alamannia seem to have had some greater strategic significance for Tacet: Aside from securing a Christian kingdom at a time when Nicene Christianity remained under threat from pagans and resurgent Arianism, the campaign weakened the Alamanni. The death of Leuthar left the Alamanni to the kingship of a newborn baby, under the regency of his singularly inept uncle, Rando of Verodunum, ruling over still more chiefdoms run by the regents of children. The import of those Rhine forts became apparent when Tacet marched his troops east in the spring of 553, claiming the "Belgic Lands" as part of Gaul proper and storming the already-decimated Alamanni forts nearly to the Upper Rhine. The war was predictably quick and brutal, expanding the Warini domain east.

Tacet's rule coincided with a long period of religious turbulence in Europe. The controversy surrounding the Henotikon and the subsequent Acacian Schism left Christianity struggling for central identity, and Tacet spent much of his rule stamping out religious rebellions throughout his realm and neighbouring Nicene kingdoms. The years following the Henotikon's issuance were characterized by a massive European-wide resurgence in Arianism, often with rampant violence. Arian pocket kingdoms were established in the north of Italy, while the already Arian kingdoms of the Burgundians and the Vandals enjoyed a period of momentary flourishing.

When not suppressing an infinite and unknowable number of Arian revolts, Tacet's most notable pro-Christian move was the over-the-Rhine invasion of the now-destabilized Alamanni. Around 560, Warini troops crossed the river and systematically tore down Alamanni hillforts, driving them into the Alps. A Thuringian Christian, Vaefar the Confessor, was set up as King of Vindelica. In practice Vaefar's state was probably little more than a Warini client, but it seemingly secured the eastern border and planted another Christian cross into the soil of western Europe.

Bit by bit, Christendom struggled through the 560s, though its pullback from collapse likely had more to do with the Eastern Roman Empire coming back under the rule of a Nicene Emperor than with the more remote efforts of the Warini Kingdom.

In the late 560s, a civil war broke out in the Warini Kingdom, driven by Duke Jordanes of Chartres attempting to style himself King of the Warini. Jordanes was eventually toppled, and the region was handed to Bendix de Autricimingi, named Doux of Alercie. A revolt in the Lyonnaise followed, with several local lords being deposed and replaced by a duke of the Geiringi family. Yet it's not religious war nor political skullduggery that Tacet is most notable for.

Over the course of his reign, Tacet broke ground on at least a dozen known major churches. He's often credited for the design of the first Basilica of the Mons Martyrus, but no foundation-stone has been found to link its commissioning to him. Tacet's church-building spree reinforced the Church as a key organizing element of the Warini realm, providing education and facilitating communication between otherwise fractious regions. It was largely through Church efforts, driven by Latinate priests, that post-Roman culture filtered outside of the north shore of the Seine and began to take root throughout northern Gaul. This strong network of priests and new or restored churches would prove vital in spreading Galleis dialects and culture.

Tacet's final distinction is that he was the first of the de Recingi monarchs to die peacefully. His death in 580 comes with little fanfare, apparently passing in his sleep.

Where may I find this mod?

 

[H.Flashman(VC)]

Where may I find this mod?

What's the platform you're playing?

On Steam you can find the mod in the workshop.