In the Company of Saints: the Rise and Fall of the Tiberians

Imperial Inkstand-filler

In the Company of Saints: the Rise and Fall of the Tiberians

Chapter One: In the Shadow of Giants (569-576)​

The days following the death of the Emperor Justinian I were difficult ones for the Emperors in Constantinople. Italia and North Africa had been reclaimed for the Empire, but at an immense cost in both men and money. Outposts as far-flung as Hispania had Roman garrisons while, in Hellas, barbarians from the north pressed the Empire’s borders, threatening both Constantinople and Rome with the humiliation and devastation of sacking. The Empire itself was terribly weakened, as well, by the plague of Justinian, which had robbed the Empire of nearly a third of its population in the 540s. The only saving grace of this plague was that it had spread to Sassanian Persia, briefly granting the Empire respite from the specter of invasion from the east. Nevertheless, with enemies on all sides and a weakened interior, the Roman Empire appeared to be on the brink of catastrophe, just waiting for a spectacular 6th century collapse to mirror Rome’s sack a century before.

The Emperor at the time, Justin II, did little to inspire confidence in the Imperial citizens. A staunch Roman, Justin considered himself to be above diplomacy and treating with the myriad of enemies at Rome’s gates. For his dazzling predecessor, with a professional army and brilliant generals, such a method was acceptable, but Justin lacked the former; the army had been underpaid for years, and following the two-decade struggle in Italia and the plague, was spread far too thinly to form such powerful forces as had been commanded by Belisarius and Narses in days past. The Emperor, however, did have an effective general in the person of Tiberius Constantine, a Thracian-born man who, through his connection with the Patriarch of Constantinople Eutychius, had met and befriended the Emperor. Tiberius, while not a commander on par with Belisarius from the previous generation, was nevertheless an astute general and capable diplomat.

Tiberius’s abilities were needed in 569, a mere four years after the death of Justinian, when the Emperor decided to cease paying tribute the Avars and Lombards, two groups which lived on the northern border of Roman Hellas and Italia. This refusal sparked retaliatory invasions by both groups, the Avars in Hellas and the Lombards in Italia. With Constantinople potentially threatened, Justin granted Tiberius the title of Magister utriusque Militiae, the Master of Soldiers, on top of his position as Comes Excubitorum, or the commander of the Imperial Guards. Setting out to deal with the Avars, Tiberius managed to stop them from burning their way to Constantinople with the promise of land on the southern side of the Danube and Imperial protection, with only the demand of hostages of the Avar chiefs to be kept in Constantinople as hostages. The Avars accepted this deal, and for a time, carved out a semi-Roman state on either side of the Danube [1].

Refusing to learn from his mistakes, or possibly attempting to stem the endemic flow of gold and silver out of the Imperial treasury, Justin again refused to pay tribute in 572, this time to the Sassanian Persians. Their reaction was more severe, crossing the border with an army under their Shahanshah Khosrau I. An Imperial force under Marcian, a cousin of Justin’s, managed to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Sagathon, but his efforts to rapidly eliminate the Persian threat were undone when he was accused of attempting to usurp the throne from his cousin. Utterly convinced of the charges, Justin summoned Marcian to Constantinople. The loss of their leader disrupted the Imperial army and caused them to abandon the siege of Nisibis. The way now clear, Khosrau surged forward and, after a four-month siege, captured the Roman fort city of Dara.

It is hard not to blame the fiasco in the East on Justin. Not only had his refusal to pay of the Persians ended a peace treaty that had, theoretically, guaranteed forty more years of peace between the two powers, but he had also attempted to assassinate the King of the Ghassanids al-Mundhir III the very same year, robbing the Empire of a valuable ally on the Sassanian border, and he had eliminated any momentum Marcian’s army had gained. The fall of Dara reportedly caused Justin to slip into madness. In his moments of lucidity, Justin authorized the raising of Tiberius, his trusted general, to the rank of Caesar, and adopted him as a son. Tiberius, thus empowered, took it upon himself to correct the situation in the East.

Tiberius’s expedition East was at the head of an army composed of men from Hellas, including a unit of Excubitores from Constantinople, as well as a contingent of Avar Symmachi [2]. With both Tiberius and Marcian, the same cousin of Justin’s who had been accused of scheming to usurp the throne, in command of the expedition, much of 573 was spent preparing for battle. In 574, the city of Nisibis, where Marcian had been two years before, was invested by the Imperial troops. Meanwhile, Tiberius had sent riders down to the Ghassanids with a letter of apology, marked by the Emperor’s seal, and a hefty sum of gold. More importantly, the letters offered a resumption of the alliance against the Persians. What exactly Tiberius promised is unknown; most believe it is assistance in battling the Lakhmids, the Sassanian’s client state in Arabia, although some have theorized that Tiberius promised the death of Justin himself.

Whatever the case, the Ghassanids renewed their offensive against the Lakhmids, sacking their capital of Hira a year later. Meanwhile, a five-month siege of Nisibis concluded in the Empire taking the city before marching out to meet a Persian force moving to intercept the expedition. The two armies shadowed one another for much of the later summer of 574, finally coming to blows in late August in a skirmish along the coast of the Tigris. Two weeks later, the Imperial Army received reinforcements from the Armenian Kingdom, inspiring Tiberius to force a battle with the Sassanians. Tiberius’s infantry engaged that of the Sassanian general, a man named Tamkhosrau, who managed to force back Tiberius’s forces. However, the Imperial cavalry, mixed with Alan horsemen, managed to rout the Sassanian cavalry, who had been weakened by the departure of Shahanshah Khosrau three days earlier with a third of the cavalry, not having expected a battle this late in the year. With the Persian cavalry routed, the Alans led a ferocious charge into the Persian right flank, rolling up their line and stopping the Persian advance. Meanwhile, Tiberius managed to rally his forces and force the Sassanian army to retreat.

Victory at Bezabde won Tiberius the necessary space to make demands of the Sassanians. A five-year truce was agreed to, with Imperial payments to the Sassanians ended and the fortress of Nisibis returned to Persian hands. It was a continuation of the pre-war status quo, and it bought the Empire some breathing room to deal with the mounting issues it was facing. The mobilization of Tiberius’s army, while ultimately effective, had been a drain on the treasury that cut deeply into the Imperial books, even with the cessation of payments to both the Avars and Persians.

When Tiberius returned to Constantinople in 575, it was to the joy of much of the city. He had managed to end the humiliating tribute payed to Rome’s enemies and beaten back a threatening Persian army. The Emperor, however, was less happy with Tiberius’s return. The same jealousy that had led to his recall of Marcian had awoken in him, and the close work Tiberius and Marcian had dome together only furthered his fears [3]. The paranoia of Justin, once awakened, showed him threats everywhere: senators, noblemen, even his own guards were in Tiberius’s pocket. Regardless of whether or not his life legitimately was in danger, Justin felt threatened and, in 576, he made a decision that shocked the Roman world. In one of his final moments of lucidity, he decided to retire from the position of Emperor and pass it to his adoptive son, Tiberius. Justin dutifully retired to a monastery and Tiberius was crowned Emperor Tiberius II Constantine.

[1] - This is the POD. In OTL, Justin II rejected this deal, causing a war between the Romans and Avars that further drained resources and weakened the Empire.

[2] - Or, as they would be known to western cousins, foederati.

[3] - Marcian, an experienced commander in the East, was of great use to Tiberius during the campaign.
 

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Chapter Two: Collapse and Rebirth (576-582)​

Despite the shockingly smooth transition of power from Justin to Tiberius, the new Emperor was hardly in a strong position. The Avars had been placated, but they remained a state that paid no taxes and had only nominal support for Constantinople poised dangerously over the capital. Four years remained in his treaty with Sassanian Persia, and war on that front would certainly not allow the Empire the time and resources it needed to stabilize itself. The treasury was close to empty, and Tiberius had a new threat to contend with: his former comrade Marcian.

Immediately, however, Tiberius had to deal with the Lombards. While he had managed to deal with the Avar invasion, the Lombards had been left to ravage Italia unchecked. By 572, when the King of the Lombards, Alboin, died, Imperial power in the peninsula that Justinian had spent two decades reconquering was reduced to Sicily, Rome, Apulia and Calabria, and a string of outposts from Rome to Ravenna. War with Persia had occupied the Empire, but now, Tiberius needed a way to prevent further collapse on the Italian front.

The Lombards, however, quickly fell victim to intrigues and their own policies. Alboin and his successor Cleph had made a point of trying to destroy the legal institutions left by both the Romans and Ostrogoths by wiping out the Latin aristocracy, but had gotten both Kings assassinated. Following Cleph’s death in 574, the various Dukes of the Lombards ruled as independent men in their various duchies, not electing a new King. Tiberius, leaving the Avar contingent of his army with estates in the East, instead raced back to Italia with his Eastern veterans to deal with the Lombards. Landing in Ravenna, Tiberius made his was through Tuscia, putting down individual noblemen and restoring Roman rule to much of Central Italia. The following year, fearing the Roman advance, the Lombards convened to select a new King, but disagreements led to the elevation of two Kings: the northern King, Euin, and the southern King, Zotto.

By this time, Tiberius was beginning to determine that prolonged war in Italia was a poor idea, and decided to end the war in a double knockout blow. Contacting the Burgundian King Childebert II, Tiberius invited him to invade and plunder the lands of King Euin, while Tiberius himself would focus on the lands of Zotto. As an added bonus, Tiberius would hand Rosamund, the wife of Alboin who had assassinated him, over to Childebert as a hostage. The plan worked and Childebert moved on northern Italia, utterly shattering the forces under King Euin, but Tiberius had unknowingly allowed a new power to move into Italia.

Nevertheless, 577 was spent mopping up Lombard resistance in southern Italia. Tiberius had, against all odds, managed to restore nearly all of the borders Justinian had established, forcing back enemies on all fronts of the Roman Empire. Some in Constantinople wondered in a triumph, like that of Belisarius a generation before when he reconquered North Africa from the Vandals, would be held in celebration of Tiberius’s magnificent victories. The people of Constantinople, however, would be sorely disappointed. For while Tiberius had some measure of the intellect and ability that defined Justinian, he lacked the panache and magnanimity of his predecessor. Instead, Tiberius harkened back to his predecessor Justin I, the stingy Emperor who had left the treasury full for Justinian to burn through [1]. There was not lavish Triumph for Tiberius’s victory, no celebratory races in the Hippodrome. One monument, a Triumphal arch build along the Mese, was raised to commemorate the victory over the Lombards, and nothing else. Tiberius would leave his mark, not in stone, but in gold.

While Tiberius ruled, he had to deal with the ever-present problem of ambitious generals. Two, Marcian and Justinian, conspired with Sophia, the wife of the former Emperor Justin, to replace Tiberius with Marcian while Tiberius was campaigning in Italy in 577. Upon learning of the plot, however, the Comes Excubitorum, a man by the name of Maurice, had the conspirators arrested, keeping them in the Imperial palace until Tiberius’s return. Sophia was given a modest allowance and sent away, while Marcian and Justinian were both forgiven by the Emperor, although both were stripped of their rank. The incident did, however, spark the partnership and eventual friendship between Maurice and Tiberius, which would result in the former’s marriage to the latter’s daughter Constantina.

Meanwhile, the Empire’s growth slowed due to the lack of Imperial patronage, although it certainly continued to grow. The lone exception was the silk industry, which Tiberius patronized. The islands of Samothrace and Thasos both became home to Imperial silk plantations and shipyards, allowing the Emperor to maintain control over the valuable silk industry. Accordingly, fine silks manufactured by Roman craftsmen begin to show up around this time in the hands of Avar chieftans, who were courted heavily by Tiberius during this time. Although the Avars had been useful as allies, Tiberius’s ultimate goal was to have them as citizens of the Empire, where they could be Romanized and become taxpaying citizens. Such a process was already undertaken on a small scale; Hellas had been severely underpopulated for years, and Avars would often find lands and Greek wives if they migrated further south, allowing the population to slowly regroup. The integration of those Avars on the Danube, however, would be a long-term process that wouldn’t be complete for nearly two generations.

Tiberius’s reign was marked by two other events. The first was the Slavic invasion in 579, when the Slavic hordes besieged Sirmium. Tiberius, having built up a reasonable surplus, bribed the Slavs with some 300,000 nomismata to abandon the siege, effectively destroying the surplus he had accumulated through two years of careful saving, but nevertheless preventing further bloodshed on the northern border. That winter, a fire swept through Constantinople, destroying a number of buildings. Tiberius’s attempts to alleviate the suffering of those citizens displaced eliminated the remainder of his treasury, but come 580, Tiberius was riding high on popularity in the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately, Tiberius was sixty by this time, and was showing the signs of age and a hard life as a commander. In 580, he granted the position of Caesar to his son-in-law Maurice, passing over his other son-in-law Germanus, and in 582, Tiberius expired, leading to the elevation of Maurice to Augustus. Historians typically place the beginning of the Tiberian Dynasty, then, to the ascension of Tiberius, despite the fact that he was adopted by his own predecessor Justin, because of the lack of a blood relation. Maurice, then, would develop as the second Emperor of the Tiberian Dynasty, and still energetic in his early forties, he seemed to many to be a combination of the best traits of Tiberius and Justinian; the military man of Tiberius and the energetic leader of Justinian fused into a single man. Only time would tell if Maurice could live up to this expectation.

[1] - A change in Tiberius’s character from OTL, stemming from a different experience with Justin II - Justin’s rule being less drastic, Tiberius is less reactionary and dependent on spending for a base of support.
 

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Chapter Three: A Fire in the East (582-586)​

Maurice was not blessed with as powerful an Empire as some of his predecessors had been, but compared to his father-in-law, the Empire was on solid footing. North Africa, Egypt, and Anatolia continued to produce for the Empire with little disruption from wars and raids, and with the Avars providing a buffer, Hellas was slowly but surely recovering. Italia remained the largest thorn in the Imperial side, with the majority of what little infrastructure had survived Justinian’s Italian Wars wrecked by the Lombard invasion, but the tentative Frankish hegemony over the Po valley had secured the northern border there as well. Even the Levant, which had so recently been threatened with invasion, seemed secure. The Empire’s treasury was meager, but the subsidies paid to the Slavs and the Franks were far less than what had been paid to the Persians, Avars, and Lombards a decade earlier.

Maurice’s one threat, however, came from the East. A five-year truce signed in 575 had temporarily kept the Sassanian Persians at bay while Tiberius had cleaned up the situation in Italia, but the end of that truce had led to successive Persian incursions into Imperial territory under their new Shahanshah Hormizd IV, the one in 582 succeeding in capturing Dara and turning it into a forward base against Imperial armies. The next year, he captured Marde, Thannuris, and Arzamon, all border fortresses, before investing Constantina. When Constantina fell in August of 583, Hormizd withdrew, planning to overwhelm the Roman frontier the next year and sweep into the Levant.

This attack on the Imperial frontier was met with a ferocious response by Maurice. Writing to the King of the Ghassanids, al-Mundhir III, Maurice planned to have his Arabian allies pillage their way across their Lakhmid rival’s territory before striking at the exposed underbelly of Sassanian Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, Maurice raised an army of nearly 40,000, including Avar allies and even a contingent of Moors brought from the North African border to march on the Persians. Word was similarly dispatched to the Armenians living under Persian rule, who were urged to rise up against their heathen overlords. Although this effort was largely unsuccessful, it did give Maurice the much-needed time to march his army to the eastern front to engage the Sassanians.

Nevertheless, Hormizd IV conducted his invasion of the Roman East in 584. His army was much reduced from what he had planned on gathering the previous year due to the need to stem the Ghassanid incursions and Armenian rebellions, but nevertheless nearly 55,000 men poured across the Roman border. Hormizd divided his force into three contingents: his own, the largest, composed of 35,000 men, would continue to push towards Antioch, the predominant Roman city in the East. The second, composed of another 15,000 men, was given to his general Tamkhorsau, the same one who had cut his teeth with Tiberius a decade before, was instructed to head north along the Euphrates to clear any resistance there and delay potential Roman counterattacks before linking back up with Hormizd’s force. The final, and smallest, contingent of the army was given to Khorsau, Hormizd’s son, and sent to attack Leontopolis, which would grant his force a clear road to the wealthy costal cities of Roman Lebanon, where he could plunder unmolested while Hormizd and Tamkhorsau would deal with Roman counterattacks.

Hormizd’s initial offensive met with success in the early months of the 585 campaigning season. Tamkhorsau successfully sacked the city of Amida, while Hormizd threatened Edessa. In May, however, Maurice and his force arrived in Antioch, only to learn that Hormizd’s force had been temporarily halted by the discovery that the majority of their rations had gone bad. While the Shahanshah moved to restore his supplies, Maurice dispatched his general John Mystacon with a small force to reinforce and coordinate the defenses of the Levant against Khorsau’s offensive, while Maurice himself marched to meet the main Persian force. Moving with speed that few could predict, Maurice managed to catch Hormizd unaware outside of a town infamous in Roman history: Carrhae. On the battlefields near where a Parthian army had crushed a Roman one five centuries earlier, two Emperors clashed on the frontier between their empires.

The Second Battle of Carrhae has disagreeing accounts about how it occurred. John of Epiphania, the contemporary historian of the Roman-Persian wars under Justin II, Tiberius, and the early days of Maurice, claims that Hormizd had reacted to Maurice’s appearance with a charge, confident in his superior numbers, which was broken on the disciplined Imperial ranks, before a contingent of Imperial light cavalry, led by the Moorish auxiliaries of the Imperial army, turned what had been an orderly retreat by the Persian forces into an utter rout.

This account is directly contradicted by Theophylact Simocatta, a historian who rose to prominence later but claims to have fought in the battle. According to Theophylact’s account, Maurice sprang an attack first, striking from the west with the heart of his army while a similar cavalry contingent as John’s account striking at the Persians from the south. According to the account by Theophylact, he was a part of the cavalry force that managed to rout the Persian cavalry before rolling up the left flank of the Persian lines [1].

Regardless of the truth of the matter, the Second Battle of Carrhae put a decisive end to Hormizd’s drive towards Antioch. John Mystacon, meanwhile, had managed to slip into Leontopolis with a small force and supplies that allowed him to repel a number of Khorsau’s attacks. When news of Carrhae reached the walls of Leontopolis, Khorsau packed up and began to beat a retreat to Constantina, which remained in Persian hands. Hormizd, whose army remained intact, began to beat a retreat to reunite with his son. Maurice pursued them, meeting them outside of Constantina and winning a second battle and retaking the city. As the Shahanshah and his son beat a hasty retreat to the Persian frontier, it seemed as if Dara could be retaken and avenged with further Persian blood. Maurice’s momentum, however, was shattered when, in late July, word reached him that Antioch was besieged.

Tamkhorsau, having heard of the defeat at Carrhae, had rightfully guessed that the war had swung against Sassanian Persia and that his Shahanshah would be falling back against the Emperor’s attack. Lifting his siege of Samosata, Tamkhorsau moved with incredible speed to, at a stroke, destroy Maurice’s progress. Bypassing a number of strongholds and cities, Tamkhorsau made his way to Antioch in the hope that he could take the pressure off of his Shahanshah.

The remarkable thing about Tamkhorsau’s counteroffensive is that it was, at heart, a suicide mission. The logistics alone of attempting to capture Antioch in the center of Roman territory was simply a nightmare, even without the looming threat of a Roman counterattack. The goal of the attack, it seems, was simply to draw Maurice’s attention away from Hormizd, and was not a legitimate attempt to take Antioch. This remarkable example of sacrifice seems counterintuitive to the Persian war effort, and unfortunately, no contemporary writings shed any light on Tamkhorsau’s motives beyond the Roman opinion that his moves were simply Persian folly.

Maurice, similarly, was placed in a difficult position. Without his intervention, Antioch was threatened, and the fall of the third city of the Empire would destroy his campaign. On the other hand, he had Hormizd on the retreat, and could push back across the Persian border for the first time since the days of Justinian. In the end, he divided his force, giving command of a smaller portion to a general by the name of Heraclius to end the siege of Antioch, while he took a larger portion of the army and moved on Dara. Heraclius met with success, securing a surrender from Tamkhorsau after a skirmish outside of the walls of Antioch, while Maurice pressed forward. In mid-August, Dara was finally returned to Roman hands, with Hormizd retreating following a third battle at Arzamon.

The year of 586 opened with a grand Roman offensive. A large army under the joint command of Heraclius and John Mystacon, meant to prevent either from using the army to attempt to usurp Maurice, attacked Nisibis and took it before shadowing the force of Hormizd into Adiabene. Maurice, meanwhile, took a smaller force south, moving along the Euphrates as he moved towards Ctestiphon. To the south, a Ghassanid force had fully subdued their Lakhmid rivals and marched opposite to Maurice, the two forces aiming to meet and take Ctestiphon [2]. Victory at Nur-Ardashir by the Imperial forces under Heraclius prevented Hormizd’s attempt to stop Maurice’s advance, but he managed to stop the impending doom for his capital with an offer of peace.

The Peace of 586 ended the Roman-Persian war that had carried on, with a five-year gap, since 572. Hormizd agreed to pay Maurice the equivalent of 5,000 nomismata yearly for the next twenty years, ceded the Persian Armenian territories to the Romans, guaranteed Roman ownership of Nisibis, and acknowledged the Ghassanid conquest of the former Lakhmid territory. Maurice’s return to Constantinople was a glorious one, laden with the spoils of his war, and having destroyed the Persian threat that had loomed over the eastern frontier for much of the Roman memory. As the 580s entered their latter half, the Empire seemed to be on the verge of prosperity unseen since the days before the Plague of Justinian. The truth, of course, is far more complicated.

[1] - The debate over the John-Theophylact issue has tinges of personal attacks on both parties. It has been alleged that John of Epiphania made Maurice seem purposefully timid (giving credit for the victory to Persian failings and the Moorish initiative) as a part of a later anti-Maurice conspiracy, while others claim that Theophylact’s account purposefully gives more heroism to the cavalry that Theophylact had been a part of.

[2] - With less Persian assistance to the Lakhmids and a faster reconstruction of Roman-Ghassanid relations under Justin II, the Ghassanids have been able to establish a shaky hegemony over former Lakhmid territory.
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

Chapter Four: The Center Cannot Hold (586-607)​

Maurice’s victory in the Persian war won him immense popularity in the Empire, and unlike his predecessor Tiberius, there were celebrations in the capital following his return. A full week of chariot races, culminating in a mock-up battle replicating his victory at Carrhae, managed to burn through his spoils from the campaign. Through 586 and 587, the Empire’s enemies seemed to be cowed on every corner, with the Empire finally at peace from Italia to Egypt. For the first time since Justinian, the Empire was triumphant on every front, and the credit for the victory flowed back to the Imperial Palace.

If Maurice had planned on ruling with a finger in the wind, however, he was sorely mistaken. A series of poor harvests over the 586-87 period caused starvation among the Avars settled along the Danube, leading to a revolt against Imperial authorities in 588. Following a victory against an Imperial force, a charismatic man by the name of Bayan took the helm of the rebellion as the Khagan of the Avars. Such a threat directly threatened Constantinople, not to mention the slowly recovering economy of Hellas. Maurice dutifully marched out at the head of an army, leaving his capital under the temporary command of his general Heraclius. He met problems, however, when an early winter on the Danube demoralized his soldiers, which, combined with near-constant Avar raids on the Imperial troops, ground the campaign to a halt. Unable to force Bayan to fight in a pitched battle, Maurice was ultimately forced to withdraw to Thesselonika, where he planned to renew his campaign the following spring.

The 589 campaign fared even worse for the Roman troops. While pursuing the Avars west along the Danube, the Slavs took the opportunity to cross the Danube and burn their way towards Constantinople. Maurice, trusting in Heraclius’s ability to defend the city, pursued the Avar forces without success, until in late 589, Bayan was assassinated by one of his soldiers [1]. Without his leadership, the constant attacks on Roman forces stopped, and Maurice was able to come to terms with the Avars. A large number would be relocated further south in Hellas, particularly in southern Macedonia, Thessaly, and the Peloponnese, areas whose populations could absorb the immigrants, while the remainder could be resettled along the Danube frontier as Imperial citizens, with the promise that Imperial funds would help to establish a more productive zone for them [2]. Maurice proceeded to winter in Hellas, facilitating the dispersal of the Avars before returning to Constantinople in 590.

His two-year absence from the capital had seriously undermined Maurice’s authority. There were a number of people in his court who sought power for themselves; Sophia, the old widower of Justin II, still held aspirations to control the man on the throne, and she retained the position of Augusta and a section of the Imperial Palace [3]. John Mystacon, one of Maurice’s generals, similarly felt slighted by Maurice’s increasing reliance on Heraclius as an advisor. Other members of this conspiracy included historian John of Epiphania and a figure which had been surprisingly quiet in the past three decades, the Pope.

The Pope that entered the conspiracy through a series of letters was Pelagius II, who first contacted Sophia and John of Epiphania in 589. The Patriarch of Constantinople, John IV, had adopted the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch,” much to the chagrin of the Pontiff. His influence, although rather small in Constantinople and the East, extended throughout much of Italia, where Pelagius was the most powerful man in Imperial territory.

Key to the plot of the conspirators was the public opinion of Maurice. Ironically, after he had been so wildly successful only a few years earlier, Maurice now received an icy welcome from the people of Constantinople. The Avar revolt had caused starvation among the poorer classes of Constantinople, and the resolution of the crisis by bringing back the hated tribute that his predecessor had fought to abolish earned him the ire of much of the population [4]. A small riot in early 591 over continually high bread prices was put down, but when the captain of the Excubitores who put it down was struck in the head with a brick, the men turned on the citizens and carried out a slaughter of those immediately around them.

The debacle only further emboldened the anti-Maurice faction. Their plan seems to have been to, after removing Maurice, establishing John Mystacon as Emperor, deposing Patriarch John IV, and potentially granting John of Epipharia some kind of political power in Egypt or North Africa [5]. When John of Epipharia died in late 591, the conspirators prepared to move forward with their plot. Maurice’s Excubitores were paid off by Mystacon, while a group of assassins led by Mystacon himself would enter through Sophia’s quarters in the Imperial Palace to eliminate Maurice. The conspirators made their way to the Emperor’s quarters in February of 593, only to discover that a few of the Excubitores had warned the Emperor and were in the process of spiriting him away when Mystacon and his accomplices found them. A skirmish ensued, ending with Mystacon being bludgeoned by the butt of a spear, before being killed.

Maurice’s survival and the reveal of the plot ruined the conspirators. John of Epipharia’s notes on the plot revealed those involved, and Sophia was seized in the early hours of the morning, then exiled to the island of Theros. Pope Pelagius, distant in Rome, was left alone - he would die later that year anyway - but Maurice was convinced of the need to establish a counterbalancing weight in Italia. As a result, in early 594, Heraclius, accompanied by his sons Heraclius and Theodore, made his way to Ravenna as the Exarch of Italia.

The position of Exarch was a new one for the Roman Empire. Combining military and civil authority, the Exarchate of Ravenna was meant to both check the power of the Pope and also protect the border of Imperial Italia. The proximity of Ravenna to the frontier demonstrated both the desire to keep the temporal power of the Exarch separate from the spiritual authority of Rome, and also to keep the frontier stable. The Frankish-Lombard Kingdom of the Po Valley, which at the time was still developing as a state, had the luxury of Heraclius being absorbed in the reconstruction of Italia from the destruction of the past century.

As such, much of Italia was developed by Heraclius during the late 6th and early 7th centuries. In particular, Heraclius carried out a systematic de-urbanization of Italia in order to restore the agricultural productivity of the peninsula. Major cities, in particular Neapolis, Rome, Taranto, Benevento, and Spoleto, saw an even greater drop in population as empty estates were divided and parceled out to the citizens of Italia in exchange for promises of military service. This combination of the repopulation of the countryside being linked with the creation of an Imperial army in Italia did have the negative effect of reducing the outward prosperity of Italia even more - no Italian port could compare with those of the Roman Levant, Egypt, or the Aegean coast of Anatolia. By 600, the only cities of any major importance in Italia were Ravenna and Syracuse, the latter of which was not governed by the Exarchate.

While Heraclius established the Exarchate in Italia, Maurice attempted to unify the Empire. A first move was made in 594, when the Armenian Church was subordinated to the Patriarch of Constantinople. At the same time, Maurice attempted to repair relations between the Chalcedonian and Monophysite churches, despite protests from Pope Gregory I, Pelagius’s successor. These religious overtones were complimented by a building program unseen since the days of Justinian. In particular, the Persian and Danubian frontiers were patronized heavily, with bridges, irrigation, and fortifications springing up along the borders. This program, while it did strengthen the borders and those provinces, also had the effect of emptying the Imperial treasury of the surplus carefully built up by Tiberius.

Maurice’s reign would continue largely uninterrupted for the remainder of the 6th century. In 595, he appointed his 12-year old son, Theodosius, as co-Emperor, and began to hand over greater power to his son starting in 603, when Theodosius turned 20. Maurice increasingly remained within the Imperial Palace, while Theodosius became the working face of the Imperial Government. On April 6th, 607, Emperor Maurice I breathed his last, passing power on to his son Theodosius III, who was crowned in the Hagia Sophia by Patriarch Thomas I.

[1] - What caused Bayan’s assassination is up for debate. Contemporary historians claimed a soldier converted to Christianity carried it out, although most modern scholars believe that Bayan was killed by a chieftan of the Avars for seducing the man’s wife.

[2] - The Avar presence gives the region its present name, Avaria (OTL Bulgaria).

[3] - Sophia had, allegedly, planned on marrying Maurice back in 580 in order to try and form an anti-Tiberius alliance, but Maurice’s marriage to Constantina and his close relationship with Tiberius had turned the Augusta against him.

[4] - Although Maurice wasn’t directly paying tribute, he was using Imperial funds to improve the lands of Avaria, which was seen by many as a sign of weakness.

[5] - We know as much as we do about the conspiracy largely due to John of Epipharia’s writings.
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

Chapter Five: The Armenian Complication (607-615)​

The ascension of Theodosius III to the Imperial throne marked the end of the soldier-emperor dynamic that had existed under his father and grandfather. Theodosius was not a military man in any capacity - he had been born in Constantinople in 583, the first year of his father’s reign. He had thus spent much of his early life separated from his father. While Maurice had been on campaign in Mesopotamia, Italia, and Avaria, Theodosius had instead grown close to the Magister Officiorum, later Exarch of Ravenna Heraclius, and his younger son, Theodore. By the time the Heraclians relocated to Ravenna in 594, however, the 11-year-old Theodosius was close to being named co-Emperor by his father.

Due to Theodosius’s lack of military training, he tended to rely on his generals heavily. In particular, his old friend Theodore, who made his way to Constantinople in 607 to celebrate Theodosius’s ascension, was soon named Comes Excubitorum - a position that was rapidly becoming a testing grounds for those with Imperial ambitions - by Theodosius. In 609, Theodore had an opportunity to cut his teeth on an enemy when displaced members of the Alans began to raid Roman Armenia. Marching at the head of an army, Theodore, accompanied by the seasoned commander Priscus, marched along the northern coast of Anatolia, wintering in Trebizond before making their way to engage the Alans.

Theodore’s expeditions seems to have run into problems when it first entered Armenia in 610. Armenian collusion with the Alans was widespread due to their dissatisfaction with Constantinople over the subordination of the Armenian Church to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and although the looming threat of the Persians had largely convinced the Armenians to stay in line rather than attempt to break free, the Alans provided an opportunity to screen against Roman attacks. Thus, when Theodore reached the border fortress of Theodosiopolis, he discovered that its countryside had been ransacked by the raiders, much further from the Armenian frontier than he had expected. Chasing down the bands of Alans proved to be difficult for Theodore and Priscus, who seem to have divided their army up into no fewer than five divisions to try and root out the Alans. When Priscus’s detachment was mauled and the general killed, Theodore seemed to be unable to salvage the situation.

The utter failure of Imperial troops, combined with the mounting dissatisfaction of the Armenians with the Empire, led to a full scale revolt in 611. A prominent Armenian nobleman adopted the title of King of Armenia and was crowned Arsaces III in Valarshapat, which rapidly became the center of the revolt. Theodore wasn’t entirely unable to battle the rebellion - in May, he crushed a rebel force at a pitched battle along the Araxes River, and two months later he defeated a force led Arsaces himself. The countryside, however, was turning increasingly against the Roman forces, with villages selling produce at drastically inflated prices being the best outcome of the Imperial Army marching to an Armenian town.

Part of the Armenian success is due to the support of Sassanian Persia. The Sassanians had been largely silent throughout the later years of Maurice’s reign, largely due to a struggling state. Following the Peace of 586, the prominent Sassanian general Tamkhorsau began to raise a revolt against the severely weakened Hormizd IV, allying himself with another prominent general, Barham. The two managed to secure much of Mesopotamia under their own banners before moving on to Persia proper. Ctestiphon fell to the rebels in 589, with Hormizd and his son Khorsau fleeing to Susa to try and gather an army. In desperation, they appealed the the Onoq Khaganate to their north-east, hoping that their ferocious horsemen could destroy the rebels [1].

The Onoq, under their chieftans, charged into Bactria at the Shahanshah’s request, looting and pillaging the Sassanian province as they made their way to Susa. They arrived to find Bahram already in the city, having executed both Hormizd and Khorsau outside the city walls. The presence of the Central Asian horsemen unnerved the Persian general. The Onoq had already expanded down through Bactria, and with the horsemen bearing down on him while Tamkhorsau and the majority of the Persian army was mopping up resistance along the border with Roman Armenia. Without much of a choice, Bahram agreed to abandon the Persian claims to Khwarmezm, Sogdiana, Dihistan, and Margiana, and hand them over to the leader of the Onoq, Tulan Qaghan.

Although Bahram would likely have been killed by the Onoq had he attempted to resist, his decision nonetheless infuriated Tamkhorsau when he heard of it. Declaring Bahram a traitor, Tamkhorsau refused to acknowledge the agreement and made his way to Susa, intent on stripping Bahram of command and possibly executing him [2]. Bahram wasn’t about to be stripped of his ranks and titles, let alone give himself up to the possibility of execution, and thus raised himself in rebellion to Tamkhorsau.

At first, Tamkhorsau appeared to be in a much stronger position. Not only did he posses a larger army than his opponent, but he was also renowned as Persia’s greatest commander. In 591, he began his march towards Susa, where Bahram had based himself, at the head of a host he was convinced would be able to smash aside any resistance Bahram could put up. Bahram, however, had two distinct advantages. The first was his immense popularity in Persia proper for turning away the Onoq horsemen, a sentiment that created a steady stream of volunteers for his army. Secondly, he had in his forces a promising young man by the name of Sharbaraz. A Parthian by descent, Sharbaraz managed to unite many of the pastoral volunteers to Bahram’s army into a cohesive fighting force.

In June of 592, Bahram and Sharbaraz met Tamkhorsau on a battlefield in eastern Asuristan, midway between Susa and Ctestiphon. There, in a titanic battle, Tamkhorsau’s forces were crushed by the superior mobility and tactics of Sharbaraz, who allegedly personally executed Tamkhorsau after the battle. The remainder of 592 and the majority of 593 saw Sharbaraz and Bahram subdue Mesopotamia for the second time in four years. When a Roman ambassador arrived in Ctestiphon requesting the tribute that had been neglected during the course of the Civil War, the weakness of the Persian army convinced Bahram to continue to pay the Romans, including back payments for those years that were missed.

This shift of power in the Persian Empire had kept them largely out of Imperial affairs during the reign of Maurice, but by the time of the Armenian revolt in 611, the Persian coffers had refilled enough that Persian gold found its way into Armenian hands. By 613, it was clear that Imperial arms would be unable to bring the Armenians back into the Imperial fold, and by 615, it was clear to all the parties involved that Arsaces III had secured for himself an independent Kingdom of Armenia. For the Persians, it was the first blow they had struck against the Romans in three decades. For the Theodore, it was a setback, but surprisingly, public opinion in the Empire wasn’t focused on the general that had commanded the armies.

Instead, the people of the Roman Empire had almost unanimously turned on Theodosius III. Much of the criticism of the Emperor centered on his lack of battlefield experience, and the fact that he had not been out in the field against the Armenians. Theodore, whose crime had been a failure to subdue the rebellion, could be forgiven because he had lacked proper support from Constantinople [3]. Theodosius, who should have been commanding Roman arms like his father and grandfather, could not.

[1] - The Onoq are the direct predecessors to the Turks - in fact, the Onoq Khaganate is also referred to as the “Western Turkic Khaganate.”

[2] - Tamkhorsau was notable in his belief that the Persian Empire’s strength and distinction shouldn’t be tarnished. The same drive that sent him to attack Antioch likely caused his rage over the peace with the Onoq.

[3] - This almost certainly isn’t true, but rather the rhetoric used by the anti-Theodosius faction.
 

Caesar Biden

Banned
Prior to Heraclius, Emperors didn't really go on campaign. Even IOTL with Tiberius and Maurice they stopped campaigning after ascending to the purple. In fact, it was considered rather stupid to do so, as they could die in battle or be undermined at home. Why the sudden change ITTL? IOTL it took disaster after disaster to get Heraclius to do so, and there is no such impetus ITTL.

Are the Tiberians taxing the Roman populace as much as OTL? If not, how are they paying for these victorious armies?

And why were the Persians so intent on taking Antioch with a Roman army in the field? I can't recall them inhaling this much lead IOTL.

You have an interesting start to an interesting period of history. If imagine Islam isn't going anywhere what with the Ghassanids so powerful. I'm eager to see where you go with this.
 

darthfanta

Agree,emperors were actually discouraged from commanding armies personally after the Adrianople fiasco.Ever since the Theodosius,no emperor in the East has ever commanded an army until Heraclius,and it was more forced by circumstance than intention,since Heraclius was himself already established as a competent commander and it would be a waste not to have him command in person.
 
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Imperial Inkstand-filler

Chapter Six: A Western Alternative (615-621)​

As Theodore returned to Constantinople in 615, he found himself inadvertently drawn into a conspiracy. The plummeting popularity of Theodosius III had led a number of powerful men in the Empire to smell blood in the water. No smaller a man than Pope Adeodatus was drawn into the fray, with the hope that he could re-assert Papal Primacy over the other Patriarchs, particularly after the raising of the Patriarch of Constantinople to the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch,” as well as Theodosius’s policy of appeasing the Monophysite population of Egypt. Following the defeat of the Imperial armies in Armenia, Heraclius the Younger, the son of Maurice’s companion and the elder brother of Theodore, entered into the conspiracy in order to protect his brother.

The resulting political alliance was composed largely of those with power in Italia. Pope Adeodatus and Exarch Heraclius made up the two most powerful conspirators, but they were joined by an up-and-coming general by the name of Phocas, who had been transferred to Italia following the settlement of Avaria, where he had previously been stationed, and one Ansegisel, a Frankish chieftain from Austrasia who had risen to prominence in the Po Valley, making his capital at Mediolanum. Between the four, they could command a powerful army which Theodosius, with his dwindling popularity among the military in Hellas and Asia, would be hard-pressed to stymie.

However, the conspiracy didn’t act as soon as Theodore retuned to Constantinople in 615, or in fact for a number of years. Sources are scarce as to why this is, but it is believed that the group faced internal dissent. Heraclius clearly wanted the Imperial Throne for himself, and some have suggested he intended to move the court back to Ravenna [1]. Phocas, as the least powerful in the Roman Triumvirate, may have wanted to seat himself in Constantinople instead, or perhaps favored Petrus, the third son of Maurice, who had spent much of his life as a student, traveling between Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Pope Adeodatus and Ansegisel both preferred Tiberius, the second son of Maurice, a military man who had been stationed in Avaria during the Armenian campaign. Tiberius, it seems, had more Latin sympathies, as compared to the Monophysite-leaning Petrus, and didn’t concentrate as much power into the hands of one of the conspirators as a Heraclian ascension would. Tiberius’s unexpected death in 620 threw this issue into question, and likely would have found a different outcome had outside events not forced the hand of the conspiracy.

As Italia simmered, the rest of the Empire would see issues begin to appear. Theodosius remained unaware of the Italian Conspiracy, but less covert dissent from the ranks of the army saw Theodosius reduce funding, instead directing gold to Ctestiphon to forestall any invasion the Imperial frontier. A botched assassination attempt saw twenty-three former officers hanged in the Forum of Constantine, further alienating the army. Although Theodore, Theodosius’s childhood friend, remained loyal, but consistently advised Theodosius to put his faith in the steel of the Roman Army, rather than the gold he was paying to the Sassanians.

Meanwhile, the humdrum of normal life continued in Constantinople. Theodosius, a passionate supporter of the Blues from among the factions in the chariot races, but the metropolitan life of Constantinople was shaken by the revival of a third faction, the Whites [2]. The Blues and Greens were both political parties as much as they were Chariot-racing factions; the Blues tended to be Chalcedonian and Aristocratic, while the Greens favored Monophysitism and the mercantile class. The Whites, interestingly, began as the party of soldiers returning from Italia, and grew to be the faction which supported Latin churches (as those subordinate to the Pope came to be known), and the army. The growing dissatisfaction among the army with Theodosius gave this new faction ample support, and by 618 it seems the Whites were as much a staple of Constantinopolitan life as the Blues and Greens.

The rise of the Whites also sheds light on the growing divide between Latin and Chalcedonian rites of Christianity. The split is most apparent within the five Patriarchs of the Church; The Pope in Rome was the head of the Latin rite, the Patriarch of Alexandria tended to err on the side of Monophysitism, and the Patriarch of Constantinople was the champion of the Chalcedonian order, with the Patriarch of Antioch tending to fall with the Chalcedonians and the Patriarch of Jerusalem the Monophysites. Technically, there was no true doctrinal division between the Chalcedonian and Latin rites as there was with the Monophysites, although the forthcoming Second Council of Nicaea would change that.

In 621, however, the Italian Conspiracy was shaken by the death of Ansegisel. The Frankish Chieftain had been killed by the invading force of King Chlothar II, who named himself “King of all the Franks.” Having taken up residence in the city of Paris, Chlothar’s Kingdom stretched from beyond the Rhine River to the Pyrenees mountains, and one of the final bands of Franks which eluded him were those who had taken up residence in the Po Valley. Ansegisel had been an ally of the Roman Empire, and Theodosius dispatched the one general he still trusted, Theodore, to the valley to reduce the Frankish King and finally complete the reconquest of Italia.

Although it is unlikely Theodosius realized it, he had placed Theodore in the lion’s den of the most powerful and influential anti-Theodosius faction in the Empire [3]. Theodore arrived in Ravenna with an army of 3,000 men, joined by his brother Heraclius and an additional 6,000. The brothers marched north to evict Chlothar from Italia entirely, but were stopped by a series of skirmishes just north of Ravenna. After a Papal legate secured an oath from Chlothar that he wouldn’t pursue any further action in Italia, the brothers returned to Ravenna, where, in the Basilica of San Vitale, Heraclius the Younger was crowned Emperor Heraclius I of the Roman Empire under the watchful eyes of mosaics of Justinian and his wife, Theodora.

Heraclius had a crown and an army, but he was nonetheless a long way from Constantinople. Ravenna, with its natural defenses and easy access to the Adriatic, was made his base of operations for the time being. He marshaled the remaining forces of Italia, which, thanks to the system put in place by his father, was comparatively larger and more mobile than most other regions of the Empire. This force was augmented by deserters from Hellas and Asia, officers and soldiers who had weathered pay cuts and indignities from Theodosius. By the end of 621, Heraclius possessed an army nearly 15,000 strong, led by a cadre of the best captains in the Empire: himself, his brother, and Phocas.

As soon as word of Heraclius’s declaration reached the capital, Theodosius sprung into action. Sicily, which didn’t defect along with the rest of Italia, had naval squadrons begin to raid up and down the Italian coast. These probing raids met with moderate success, as the major cities of Italia had already been reduced in size, and inland raids conducted by the Sicilian forces more often than not resulted in the Sicilians being ambushed and slaughtered. Meanwhile, Theodosius called up an army in Constantinople. According to his court historian, one Bonosus Kakítafrastis (literally, Bonosus the Poor Translator), Theodosius expected the army that materialized to number close to 50,000 men, although the final force he got was merely a fraction of that number. The core of Theodosius’s army seems to have been the Avars, a group generally loyal to Constantinople over usurpers, and the Excubitores, the Imperial Guard. At the head of the Imperial Force was the aging Germanus, a Levantine commander who had fought under Maurice.

As 621 came to a close, however, two more strokes awaited the Roman Empire. The first came in September, although news wouldn’t reach Constantinople until Christmas. Cartagena, the last Roman outpost in Hispania, fell to the Visigothic Kingdom. Preoccupied with the rebellion, neither Theodosius nor Heraclius sent troops to retake the province. Worse, however, was yet to come. In late September, a Persian Army crossed through Armenia and into the Empire, bypassing the border fortresses of Dara and Nisibis. Moving quickly along the Euphrates, the Sassanians under Sharbaraz were besieging Samosata by the end of the year, as near to Antioch as they were to the Armenian border. With Germanus gone and many of their troops underpaid, the Romans had little to stem the tide of the Persian invasion.

[1] - A more fanciful rumor was that he intended to move the capital to Rome, and, as popularized in the film “Imperator Rex,” restore the Roman Republic. This idea is almost certainly fictional.

[2] - There had originally been four chariot-racing factions in Constantinople, the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites. By the time of Justinian I, the Whites and Reds had largely been abandoned.

[3] - Scholars have gone back and forth on whether or not Theodore was an active part of the Italian Conspiracy, if he was aware and complicit in their alliance but not a full member, or if he had no idea. The fact that Theodosius did not discover the plot from 615 to 621 would suggest the latter, but the lack of writings by any of the main conspirators makes it difficult to discern whether or not Theodore was acting against the Emperor.
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

Chapter Seven: Emperors, Usurpers, and Prophets (622-623)​

With one notable exception we will touch upon later, most histories of the latter half of Theodosius III’s reign tend to focus on his war with Heraclius in the west [1]. As 622 began, Heraclius, Theodore, and Phocas made the bold decision to cross the Adriatic and move on Dyrrachium. Dyrrachium lay at one end of the Via Egnatia, the Roman Road which went through Thesselonica and terminated in Constantinople. The city’s governor threw open the gates to the rebels, and soon the new Emperor was marching on his way towards Thesselonica. Germanus marched out to meet the rebel army at Lychnidos, an ancient city on the northern shore of Lake Lychnitis [2].

The Battle of Lychnidos seems to have been a decisive victory for the rebels, although Germanus’s army was able to regroup and shadow Heraclius on his way to Thesselonica. What seems likely is that a significant portion of Germanus’s force deserted to Heraclius on the day of the battle, forcing Germanus to retreat with slightly more than half of his original force. The presence of weapons and bodies from that era on the field suggests that battle was, in fact, joined between the two forces. It seems likely that Heraclius’s troops, inspired by their commanders leading from the front, began to push back the Imperial center, prompting captains on the Imperial flanks to defect.

What we do know is that, following the battle, Heraclius dispatched Theodore with a substantial force to bypass Thesselonica, which Heraclius himself would besiege, to make his way to Constantinople and either take the city or blockade it. This suggests a high degree of confidence in Theodore on Heraclius’s part, and has been used by many to support the theory that Theodore had been in on the Italian Conspiracy from the beginning. The trust was well-placed, however, as Theodore bribed a series of guards on the Theodosian Walls, granting him entrance into the capital. In late august of 622, Theodosius III was tonsured and packed off to a monastery in Egypt, while Theodore held the capital for his brother. News of the capital’s fall convinced the governor of Thesselonica to throw open his gates, and only slightly more than a year after he declared his intentions, Heraclius was crowned Emperor Heraclius I by the Patriarch of Constantinople.

His ascension, however, forced Heraclius to deal with the Sassanian invasion in the east. Samosata, Doliche, Nicopolis, and Cyrrhus had all fallen to Sharbaraz, while a second Persian force had invested the border forts of Dara and Nisibis. Sharbaraz now stood at the walls of Antioch, where the Persian general Tamkhorsau had stood nearly forty years earlier. Now, however, the Roman frontier had been rolled back, and should Antioch fall, the final barrier to a Persian invasion of both the wealthy Phoenician coast and Cilicia. Sharbaraz, young and energetic, had at his back horsemen from the fearsome Onoq Khaganate, deadly warriors from the steppes of Asia.

Heraclius was prepared to move on Sharbaraz, but seems to have hesitated. The reason, it seems, was the commander of the Antiochian garrison, Petrus. The third son of Maurice and younger brother of Theodosius, Petrus had been in Jerusalem when the Sassanian invasion began, and, using his weight as a member of the Imperial family, had managed to procure a force from Alexandria and the Ghassanids to his command [3]. Despite his numerical inferiority and lack of military experience, Petrus had managed to block a Sassanian attempt to enter the Lebanese coastal plain, sparing the wealthy coastal towns from Persian forces, and soon afterwords distinguished himself by trouncing a Sassanian raiding party at Apamea, to the south of Antioch. He had attempted to press further north, but at the Battle of the Bend, Sharbaraz proved himself to be the superior commander, forcing Petrus to retreat. In the course of the battle, however, Petrus’s Ghassanid troops had distinguished themselves, successfully dueling with the Onoq horsemen and preventing them from attacking the retreating Romans, allowing Petrus’s force to escape intact.

Notable within the battle was an Arabian known as Assatic, or Al-Siddiq, a successful merchant and commander from the southwestern coast of Arabia [4]. While the majority of people in Makkah, his home, were followers of the old Arabian religion, Assatic had been part of a persecuted minority. He, along with his friend and companion, Mohammad Rasul, and a number of other followers, had fled to the Ghassanid Kingdom in 615 following increased persecution for their sect in Makkah [5].

Mohammad Rasul is known as the founder of the “Arabian Orthodox Church,” more commonly referred to in sources as the “Rasulian” church. Popular largely with the slaves and other poorer classes of Makkah and the surrounding countryside, the Rasulians had come under increasing pressure from the authorities in Makkah until, in 615, a threat on Assitic’s life forced the two to decide they should migrate to the Ghassanid Kingdom. There, they had considerably greater success, owing to the Kingdom’s contact with the Romans and the Orthodox church. While it would take two full generations for the Royal Ghassanids to accept the Rasulian Church, the majority of Petrus’s Arabian troops, it seems, were confessed Christians, if heretics in the eyes of the Patriarchy [6] [7].

At any rate, Heraclius and Theodore were caught in a peculiar position. The Roman Empire needed to stem the Sassanian tide, and quickly, lest the third city of the Empire fall, and leave with it the wealth of Phoenicia open to assault. However, Petrus presented them with two unsavory options: reward the capable commander for his defense of the Roman Empire, making the brother of an overthrown Emperor more powerful and respected, or execute a potential threat to the Heraclian regime, alienating the east and the Ghassanids, who had supported his campaign against the Persians.

In early 623, Heraclius dispatched his brother Theodore at the head of an impressive Imperial army east. The force marched with impressive speed: even in Asia Minor, the professionalism and quality of the Exarchate’s Italian troops proved its worth. They were not fast enough, however, to prevent the fall of Antioch. The garrison commander was killed by a mob of starving citizens in November of 622, and the active defensive policy he had put into place fell apart. The city itself was surprisingly well-treated; Sharbaraz seems to have envisioned it as the capital of a new Sassanian Syria, and even commissioned the construction of a gargantuan fountain displaying himself crushing the Romans beneath the heels of his army [8].

The path now lay open for Sharbaraz to march on Phoenicia, with the exception of Petrus and his army. Outnumber three-to-one, Petrus had little hope of defeating the seasoned Persian commander, but nevertheless stood to hold the town of Laodicea against the Sassanian army. Sharbaraz moved south in earnest, investing Laodicea with part of his force while sending the rest to raid as far south as Tripoli. He was consistently hampered, however, by raids mounted by Petrus and Assitic. The two seem to have made an art of sallying forth from Laodicea, disrupting the Persian supply train or camp, and returning.

As time wore on, however, it became increasingly clear that the city, and Petrus’s cause, were doomed. In April of 623, with Theodore’s army a mere two weeks away, Sharbaraz mounted an attack on Laodicea. With his full force brought to bear, there was little hope for the defenders. However, records from the local Bishop indicate that, the previous night, Petrus had been crowned Emperor of the Romans, “for battling the foes of Rome faithfully.” He was killed the next day.

Theodore’s arrival forced Sharbaraz to end his pillaging of Phoenicia and do battle. At Berrhoea, the Imperial army managed to force back the Sassanian one, although it did so at high cost to Theodore’s army. Theodore, well aware of the need to establish peace on the Empire’s eastern border, settled with Sharbaraz, paying a hefty sum of gold in exchange for a withdrawal and ten years of peace between the Empires. The resulting peace would grant his brother time to firmly establish the Heraclian dynasty in Constantinople. The Tiberian Dynasty had come to a close.

Over the course of nearly half a century, the Tiberians had managed to stabilize the Roman Empire in a manner unseen since the days of Anastasius I in the early sixth century. The Empire was mostly secured; Avaria stretched to the Danube, the friendly Ghassanids and Axumites made up their southern border, and Italia and Africa had been incorporated, although the looming specter of the Franks in the Po Valley remained. The treasury was full, and, all across the Eastern Mediterranean, cities and towns plied their trade as they had for generations. The Hellenistic East, which had first appeared under Alexander nine centuries earlier, was secure.

That Hellenistic East was expanding, too. As the Ghassanids pushed south, they encountered more and more mercantile contacts; in 626, ships from the Ghassanids reportedly landed in India. With the swelling power of the Ghassanids came the same tide of Rasulianism, which brought the Roman church, albeit in an Arabian form. Greek merchants from Sicily and Africa, meanwhile, began to resume trade in Massila, where the rapidly centralizing Frankish Kingdom and their newly Christianized nobility held Roman artistry in high demand. By 630, a Chalcedonian Church was constructed in what became the “Little Constantinople” of Massila, which served as the Frankish Kingdom’s gateway to the East.

With the conclusion of the Tiberian dynasty and the rise of the Heraclians, however, many western historians consider the period of “Late Antiquity,” which generally stretches from the murder of Alexander Severus in 235 AD to the death of Petrus at Laodicea in 623. While few in the Roman world would have noticed the difference between the two epochs, but with the rising stars of the Ghassanids and Franks, on opposite sides of the Roman world, they were rapidly entering a new era.

[1] - Sources for this period are remarkably thin, consisting of Bonosus Kakítafrastis, who remained in Constantinople for the campaign and died the next year, Saul of Rhodes, who only began to write in the later 630s as a historian, and Petrus, younger brother of Theodosius, whose diaries focus on the eastern front. As such, the Heraclian-Tiberian Civil War, while monumentally important to understanding the Imperial disposition, is only known about in broad strokes.

[2] - OTL’s Lake Orhid.

[3] - The Ghassanids conquered the Lakhmids, giving them control of northern Arabia back in the 580s, and have been steadily expanding their power and influence southwards ever since.

[4] - Better known to us as Abu Bakr, the first caliph and successor of Muhammad. Al-Siddiq, meaning “the Truthful,” was a common nickname of his.

[5] - Rasul means “Messenger,” and was one of Muhammad’s OTL epithets. Instead of OTL’s flight to Medina, which occurred in 622, the presence of a powerful and (relatively) tolerant Ghassanid Kingdom encouraged the group to migrate there seven years earlier, when Abu Bakr fled to Abysinnia OTL.

[6] - Rasulianism, here, occupies a position similar to Nestorianism, Monophysitism, or, for a greater stretch, Manichaeism. While, admittedly, this could be a source for debate, for the purposes of this TL, I’ve made the assumptions that a) Muhammad is a legitimate historical figure, and b) that Islam, in the form we know it today, took decades, if not centuries, to solidify, and at its inception was closer to a heterodox Judeo-Christian sect than an independent religion. Therefore, with greater Orthodox Christian pressure and influence in the region, it evolves into an eastern Christian sect rather than an independent religion.

[7] - Some scholarship has suggested that Petrus, himself, was converted to Rasulianism by his Ghassanid troops. While the truth of the matter is, obviously, impossible to discern, it is indisputable based on his writings that he was particularly friendly with the sect.

[8] - Fascinatingly, this fountain survived centuries of Roman rule afterwords, and survives to this day.
 

MorningDew

PLEASE CONTINUE! THIS WAS AWESOME!

It is quite sad for Italia to be de-urbanized. However you make a very good excuse for it. Will the infrastructure still be repaired there? I think that you are setting things up for Italy to re-urbanize massively in 3 centuries or so. If so, Rome must still have its 11 aqueducts! (i assume that they have been repaired by now.)

I'm thinking that your going to not only have the old roman civilization survive, you're turning it into otl china. Plz continue along this path. Rome must reach the Vistula-Dniester! Latin the language is going to be a problem though. Vulgar Latin is already pretty much a separate language by now. I look forward to see how you resolve this.

The otl Greek-Latin split seems to be found out. Will it not grow until the the Greeks and Latins view each other as foreigners?

Interesting that Thracia is reamed avaria. will something similar happen to (former) gallia cisalpina. Otl "France" be in north Italy? badass!

YAY FOR SIRMIUM SURVIVING! IM SO HAPPY!:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

Biden&Ceaser'12, darthfanta

That's interesting on Emperors between Adrianople and Heraclius's reign not leading armies in the field - I'll admit that I'm not a full-fledged expert on the area BG-style.

The Tiberians are taxing the population less than they did OTL, but to say that taxes are low would be overselling it. Tiberius OTL was a big spender, and the Empire was paying tribute to the Avars and Sassanians for most of the period. Tiberius's spending was largely driven by a feeling of inadequate support after the death of Justin II, so he's more frugal ITTL, and the Imperial victories have given them respite from that tribute.

Tamkhorsau's drive to Antioch was, essentially, a gamble to save Horzmid from capture of death at Maurice's hands. His logic would have been that threatening Antioch would force Maurice to call off an invasion of Persia proper, allowing it to remain territorially intact.

Soverihn, Swag of Swag

Thank you both (and everyone else who read this) for the responses - I honestly didn't expect this to get such a response!

Italy has been a difficult place to figure out. At first, I planned on having the Heraclians make it a splinter Western Roman Empire, and later I wanted to make it a part of a pan-Frankish union developed under the Merovingians. A lot of the issues regarding infrastructure were caused by the Lombards, who, unlike the Goths or Romans, were actively trying to destroy the Latin government and infrastructure which remained. Regardless of which direction it goes, I do imagine Italy will one day regain it's urban nature - the region is simply to fertile and too centrally located to not prosper barring some massive catastrophe.

Roman civilization isn't strictly China-like yet, but the idea of a unifying culture across a wide geographic region is certainly coming into play. With the Romans, Franks, and Ghassanids all flexing their muscles, Greek and Latin culture will spread quite far, although I doubt Constantinople's legal reach will ever make it to what would become Novgorod.

The Franks in the Po Valley would have a big future, and likely serve as a model for the Merovingians and their successors as a bridge between the old Roman and new Frankish rule.

Open to all:

Would people who enjoyed this be alright with a continuation of this which is both more divergent (we'll have more than one Emperor who didn't ascend to the throne IOTL) and potentially foreign (the nature of the "Middle Ages" has just been irreversibly shifted without Islam)?
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

So, I wrote up another chapter looking at the Roman world following the end of the Tiberian Dynasty. If people seem to like it, and are alright with my comparative lack of knowledge of Merovingian France and the Ghassanids, I'll give this TL a shot at continuing.
 

Imperial Inkstand-filler

Chapter Eight: In Search of Unity (623-630)​

The ascension of the Heraclian Dynasty in Constantinople had brought with it a number of issues, primarily regarding Italia. For much of the Imperial population, the former heart of the Empire had devolved into a backwater, twice ravaged by barbarians and clinging to archaic, pagan traditions. Greek had become the language of commerce, culture, and intellectual pursuits from Sirimium to Dara, and although the Emperors still spoke Latin, Theodosius III’s first language had been Greek, and the court was beginning to favor it as their spoken language. The Patriarch of Constantinople, and to a lesser extent those of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, were considered the intellectual and theological epitome of the Church, articulating the finer points of the Chalcedonian-Monophysite division, only spurred on by the challenges of Nestorians, Manichaeans, and Rasulians, while the Latin Patriarch of Rome still clung to the old Filioque debate.

All of this made it awkward for the Heraclians. Their power base was in Italia, and they had tipped their hand as fervent supporters of the Whites in chariot racing, the faction of soldiers from Italia and Latin clerics. Feeling threatened by the new regime, the Greens and the Blues began to turn more fiercely on their new competitors, with a series of reported incidents involving lynchings in Constantinople. One such event in late 624 resulted in a fire which ended up sweeping through outer Constantinople, even gutting the Church of the Holy Apostles, one of the three most notable churches in the city. Heraclius dutifully reconstructed the building, purportedly hoping to make it his stamp on the capital as Justinian had done with the Church of Holy Wisdom, although the resulting building never surpassed it’s cousin near the Hippodrome.

Constantinople under the Tiberians and early Heraclians had flourished since the conclusion of the Plague of Justinian. The city, while still yet to approach the population of one million Rome had in it’s heyday, but it had fully recovered from the devastation of the 540s and 550s, approaching a population somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 people. To accommodate such a large population, the city relied heavily on Egyptian grain imported to the city on great barges. Imperial patronage, however, had also made an impression on Avaria, where vast farms were soon established and used to ship even more grain to the all-consuming Constantinople [1].

It was also the home of serious theological concerns. A secure border and the lifting of immediate external threats to the safety of the citizens of Constantinople and the remainder of the Empire had brought the divides running through Christendom back to the surface. Three primary branches of the Church existed: the Chalcedonian, theoretically the “true” church, according to the Emperor, centered in Hellas, Asia Minor, and northern Syria, and generally supported by the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch, Monophysite, strongest in Egypt, generally supported by the Patriarch of Alexandria, and Latin, strongest in Italia, and espoused by the Patriarch of Rome. Debates between these three groups stretched from monks and bishops down to the lowliest of peasants, and it wasn’t long before Heraclius felt the need to call for a Second Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 626.

The Second Council of Nicaea was called, primarily, to deal with three issues. The first was the issue of Monothelitism - the proposition that Christ’s human and divine wills were one and the same, a position the Chalcedonians approved of but was generally disliked by the Latin and Monophysite churches [2]. The second was the condition of Rasulianism, and whether or not the church would recognize Mohammad Rasul’s teachings as legitimate or brand them as heretical. The final issue was one which had been a thorn in the Imperial side for a long time - the formal delineation of the Patriarch of Rome’s position within the Church compared to the other four Patriarchs - was he merely a “first among equals,” or was he the head of the Church?

From the outset of the Council, it became clear that Heraclius was partial to the Latin delegation, on the behalf of Pope Adeodatus, who had been a member of Heraclius’s Italian conspiracy years before. Monothelitism was discarded entirely, considered a heretical concept. Rasulianism was more difficult to define, as Heraclius toed the line between the political benefits of considering Rasulians, which were now a considerable minority in the Roman-allied Ghassanid Kingdom, true believers, and the clear heresy of Mohammad Rasul’s claim to being a prophet in the vein of those in Israel. In the end, no clear decision was reached on that issue, with the Patriarch of Alexandria agreeing to send monks and other learned men to the Ghassanids to try and “correct” some of the more flawed portions of Rasul’s teachings. With these decisions, Heraclius had curried favor with the Patriarchs of Alexandria and, to a lesser extent, Jerusalem, seemingly hoping to use that support in the final issue.

Heraclius, however, ran into trouble when it came to the third and final issue of Papal Primacy. Three decades earlier, the Patriarch of Constantinople John IV had adopted the title “Ecumenical Patriarch,” much to the chagrin of the Patriarch of Rome at the time, Pelagius II. Since then, there had been a continued power struggle between the two, with the Patriarch of Alexandria taking a distant third as the mediator with the Monophysites and the Patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem nearly nonentities. Whether the successors of St. Peter would be considered the heads of Christendom, or merely the first among equals was the question posed by the Imperial delegation, but it wasn’t long before the Constantinopolitan delegation, backed by some of the Antiochian delegation, proposed an alternative: that it should be the successors to St. Andrew in Constantinople who should be the heads of Christendom.

The Constantinopolitan Theory, as it came to be known, connected Imperial power to Clerical power with an “unbreakable chain.” When St. Peter had been instructed by Christ to build his church upon the rock in Rome, it had been when the Emperors sat in Rome as well. But just as the Emperors, the Vicars of Christ, had moved to Constantinople, the New Rome, so should the head of the Church.

Such a suggestion threw the Council into a frenzy. Several members of the Roman delegation called for the man who suggested the “Constantinopolitan Theory,” the Bishop of Chalcedon, be branded a heretic, with one even calling for his head. Heraclius attempted to maintain peace within the Council, but by the third day since the Constantinopolitan Theory had been introduced, it became clear that either Constantinople or Rome would leave the Council victorious. The Antiochian delegation was the first to abandon the Council, as their see contained the majority of the Monothelites who had already been insulted by the machinations of the Latin branch of the church [3]. The Constantinopolitan delegation left not long afterwords, at which point the Council lost most of its teeth. Eventually, the remaining delegates voted to decree the Patriarch of Rome head of the church, but by the time that vote was taken, the Roman delegation outnumbered the rest of the attendees two-to-one.

A failure at Nicaea could have proved a fateful blow to the unity of the Roman Empire, leaving it threatened, but luckily for Constantinople, their old enemies in Persia were facing internal problems even worse. The Onoq horsemen who had first come into Persia had now lived in the Empire for a generation, the new, Persianized steppe nomads coming to be known as “Qasars,” for their word for “wanderers” [4]. The Qasars had been granted the regions of Khwarmezm, Sogdiana, Dihistan, and Margiana, occupying the north-eastern portion of the Sassanian Empire. These new kings paid tribute to the Shahanshah in Ctestiphon, but with their capital in Samarqand, which the Onoq had managed to rip from the declining Hephthalite Kingdom which had previously occupied it, the Qasars soon became some of the wealthiest and most powerful nobles in the Sassanian Empire - a dangerous position to be in.

Samarqand, along with being an important stop along the Silk Road, was also a center of Manichaeism within the Sassanian Empire and Central Asia. The dualistic religion had been growing significantly in the Sassanian Empire over Zoroastrianism, which retained a substantial place in the Sassanian bureaucracy but had begun to lose ground among the commoners. When Shahanshah Bahram died in 625, his successful general Sharbaraz rose in revolt against Bahram’s children, only to discover that Bhumin Qaghan, the young, energetic, an ruthless Manichaen Qasar Khagan had rose to claim it for himself.

The ensuing civil war is recorded only through oral traditions from the Qasars which were put to paper two generations later, making it difficult to ascertain what is or isn’t historically true. What is generally believed is that, at the Battle of Farah in the Harey region, Bhumin’s Qasar horsemen clashed with Sharbaraz’s Sassanian army, and the resulting battle saw Sharbaraz killed [5]. The Qasars then began a ruthless campaign through the rest of the old Sassanian Empire over the course of the next decade, stamping out resistance and re-establishing their control. Like the Parthians before them, the Sassanians had been removed from power, and the new Qasar Empire had taken root.

The Qasars administered their Empire, at first, in much the same way their predecessors had. Sub-kings still ruled from Ctestiphon, Ecbatana, and Nishapur, among other places, with the Qasar Khagans ruling from Samarqand instead of Ctestiphon. While Bhumin Qaghan was forced to spend much of his reign subduing rebellions and enforcing his rule, soon, his heirs would come to the throne. Far more Persianized than Bhumin ever was, the new Qasar Khagans would turn their heads east rather than west, focusing on the wealth of India and, in the distance, the foe to their Onoq ancestors, the Chinese.

Meanwhile, on the same Roman border, the Ghassanids were similarly interested in the east. Under pressure from Mohammad Rasul, the Ghassanid King, Jabalah V ibn al-Harith, continued to push his borders further south, encompassing the merchant cities along the coast of the Red Sea [6]. It wasn’t until the Hedjaz had been captured, nearly doubling the territory of the Kingdom, that Jabalah met serious resistance in the form of Himyar, a region under the command of the Axumite Kingdom. Although the Axumites were Christians, like the Ghassanids, the expansionism of the latter made tensions flare, and ultimately, the Ghassanids concluded their push for further military expansion.

Mohammad Rasul, however, had been a merchant himself before he was a preacher, and as he rose in influence, so to did the mercantile classes of the Ghassanid Kingdom. As merchants became more adventurous, they began to sail beyond the Red Sea, making the run to India more common. The Ghassanid capital of Gabitha, located near the Roman border, became an important node for merchants moving goods from India to Constantinople, and as a result grew into an opulent city, with the Ghassanids soon becoming famous for their patronage of Arab, Persian, and Greek poets within their capital.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the Frankish Kingdom had begun to develop more fully. Ironically similar to the Sassanian-Qasar administration in Persia, the Franks had a series of sub-Kings sworn to their High King - those of Aquitaine, Burgundy, Italy, Austrasia, and Swabia, with the current King, Dagobert I, ruled from his court in Paris, which served as a stronghold on the island of the Franks, and also as a strategic crossing point of the river Seine. Much of Dagobert’s life was spent overseeing the construction of the Saint Dennis Basilica, the first great church in Paris. The Franks, who were devout followers of the Latin rite of Christianity, and had developed a strong monastic culture. Within those monasteries, unlike the university in Constantinople, was the learning of the Romans mixed with new discoveries from the Franks.

Specifically, it was around 630 that the “Dagobert Plough” first came into use in the Po Valley. A much heavier plough than what was used by Romans in Egypt which could be collared to horses, the Dagobert Plough allowed cultivation in the Po and, within two decades, Rhone Valleys to explode, allowing the population in both regions to surge. By the 650s, Melian and Massila had become two of the largest cities in the western Mediterranean, matched only by Rome and Syracuse [7]. It would take the Dagobert Plough years to be introduced and widely used in the Roman Empire, largely due to their present efficiency with the harvesting of grain using lighter ploughs and slave labor in Egypt.

This expanding population made the people of Aquitaine and Frankish Italy, who were far more commonly the descendants of the Gallo-Roman culture than the Frankish one, begin to agitate for a new King. When Dagobert began to have the Neustrians, the peoples living in the region north of Aquitaine and Burgundy and west of Austrasia, as the primary force in his capital of Paris, he was forced to relent and appoint his son Sigebert as the King of Burgundy and Italy, making the boy one of the most powerful sub-Kings in the Frankish Kingdom, and in the future, would become one of the most powerful Kings in Christendom.

[1] - Some have suggested that Avar grain made up nearly 40% of Constantinopolitan imports by the 630s, although, before the development of the Dagobert Plough, Egyptian grain farming was nearly ten times as efficient as any European could produce, making this unlikely.

[2] - The Latins disliked Monothelitism as the Patriarchs of Rome saw it as denying the human faculty of the will of Christ, while the Monophysites, who were originally intended to be recipients of Monothelitism as a compromise between the two points, were generally opposed to such compromise with the Chalcedonians.

[3] - Antioch would rapidly come to be known as a see notably tolerant of heretics, as it already housed a notable Nestorian population. Combined with later Monothelites and Rasulians, the Patriarchate of Antioch would shelter heretics, but often saw too little unity to enact serious attempts at exerting clerical strength compared to the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Rome, and Alexandria.

[4] - The same name word would become OTL’s “Khazars.”

[5] - Qasar storytellers would have us believe that Bhumin launched a surprise attack on Sharbaraz, killing ten thousand Sassanian soldiers while losing only fourteen of his own men, before storming the Sassanian Shahanshah’s camp, battling through his bodyguard, and slaying the general himself.

[6] - The general distraction of the Persians, along with the absorption of the former Lakhmid territories, gave the Ghassanids the power to do so.

[7] - Milan and Marseilles, to use their OTL names.
 
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