Chapter Nine: Orbiting a Broken Star (The Roman Cultural Sphere to 630)
The fallout from the Second Council of Nicaea in 626 resounded throughout the Roman world. While previously the Latin and Greek rites of Christianity had been both nominally Chalcedonian, the assertion at the council that the Patriarch of Rome was the head of the church, elevated above even the remaining Patriarchs, drove a wedge between the two rites. The Chalcedonian rite, favored by Greeks and championed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, denied the validity of the Second Council of Nicaea, partially due to their support of the Monothelite movement, but in a larger part from the “Constantinopolitan Theory,” which tied the Emperorship of the Roman Empire the the head of the Christian Church. Wherever the Emperor and the Imperial Court resided, therefore, would be where the head of the church did, too.
While it is important to take the stereotypes of the time with a grain of salt, they are helpful in understanding the mindset of the citizens of the Roman Empire in the 630s. Chalcedonians were typically Greeks, and by their proximity to Constantinople, commonly serving in the Imperial Administration in some capacity. They grew closer to Monophysites than before, with the incorporation of Monothelite thought into Chalcedonian philosophy, and were commonly considered more mercantile, and thus looked down upon by followers of the Latin rite for their perceived favoring of trade to agriculture [1]. Latins, by contrast, were in a period of moral and temporal ascendancy, championed by both the Council of Nicaea and, if tentatively, the Heraclian Emperors. It was during this period that the Whites regained their position as a powerful chariot racing team and political faction, with far-reaching commercial and political contacts within the Empire. Even still, to the Chalcedonians, they were uneducated soldiers from a ravaged and half-barbaric region of the Empire. The third important branch of Christianity within the Empire were the Monophysites, still clustered in Egypt, who were growing increasingly close to the Chalcedonians. The two groups, along with the mess of Nestorians, Armenians, Manichaeans, and Rasulians in Syria, sparked a new burst in creativity and clerical writings along the Levantine coast in this period, inspired by the need to discover theological proofs to disprove the findings of the Second Council of Nicaea.
This burst of intellectual work in theology soon spilled over into other pursuits. From the vast libraries across the Roman world, scholars were soon copying the old Greek and Roman classics, adding their own commentaries to Aristotle and Cicero, giving rise to the Roman Critical Period in literature, where Roman authors seem to have adopted a more cynical view of the Classical Roman authors in particular, something that was likely related to the newfound Greek “superiority” over the Latins and Italians. Perhaps the most well-known author of the Critical Period was Georgius Tisyrías, whose work “The Lives of the Emperors” pokes fun at the classical Roman Emperors, while writing the lives of Justinian and Heraclius as those of model rulers and Christian Emperors [2]. Beyond literature, the most significant advancement made was the introduction of the stationary harbor crane. Originally built by two Greek merchants in the port city of Jeddah, which was rapidly becoming the boom town of the Ghassanid Kingdom. Founded barely a century earlier as a fishing village, Jeddah became the center of the burgeoning Ghassanid-Indian trade, through which the spices and other commodities of the subcontinent flowed. The harbor crane there allowed enterprising merchants to unload their valuable cargoes in a fraction of the time, which partially assisted in the growth of the emporium that Jeddah became. Soon afterwords, similar cranes were constructed in Alexandria, and by the 650s, such cranes had spread to Constantinople, Sidon, Thesselonica, and even Massila.
The Ghassanid Kingdom itself was also moving forward. Under the rulership of Jabalah VI ibn al-Aiham, the Kingdom had moved to consolidate its vastly increased territory. Between the earliest days of the Kingdom in the third century to the conclusion of the sixth, the Ghassanids had occupied roughly the same territory as always, lodged between the Romans, Sassanians, Lakhmids, and Arabians. Since the last Roman-Sassanian war, however, the Ghassanids had swarmed Lakhmid territory, extending their reach to the Persian Gulf, and later, they had moved south to occupy the territories of the Hejaz, establishing them as the predominant power in the Arabian peninsula. While Gabitha, the capital of the Ghassanid Kingdom, and Jeddah were lavished with new buildings, including the great Basilica of Mohammad Rasul in Jeddah, where the man it was named after would serve for a short time as the “Patriarch of the South Sea,” merchants from the Ghassanid Kingdom used their own considerable fortunes to tie the Kingdom together through their construction of caravansaries, roads, and wells. While the differences between the Ghassanids, who had been in the Roman cultural orbit for centuries, the Lakhmids, who had been in the Persian cultural orbit for as long, and the Hejazi Arabians, who were not as influenced by either, remained pronounced, the Rasulian Church played a substantial role in the preservation of the Kingdom. Despite some Roman influence, the Rasulian Church was remarkably Arabian, and served as a source of pan-Arabian sentiment that held the Kingdom together as the disparate cultures slowly blended together.
That blend was assisted by the changes occurring in the Qasar Empire [3]. While the Sassanians, like their Parthian predecessors, had been more focused on the reclamation of Egypt and the Levant and the restoration of the old Achaemenid borders, the Qasars were particularly more interested in the riches of India, particularly as the Ghassanids began to cut into their profits from the overland routes of the Silk Road. The first two generations of the Qasar Empire, generally considered to be between 625, when Shahanshah Bahram died, and 663, when Yukuk Qaghan, the son of the first Qasar Shahanshah Bhumin Qaghan, expired, were still adjusting to their new role as the heirs to the ancient mantle of Persian Emperors, but by the time of Chulo Qaghan, who took power in 663, the Qasar Golden Age had begun.
Italia was also undergoing a transformation. The Heraclian de-urbanization had allowed the old Roman infrastructure of the peninsula to survive the destruction of the Gothic War and Lombard invasion, but it had also reduced the economic viability of the region. With the introduction of the Dagobert Plough to the Po Valley and the subsequent population explosion, Melian became the primary economic center of the peninsula, eclipsing Rome as the city suffered from the hurt feelings the Second Council brought to Greek and Egyptian merchants. As a result, many in the peninsula began to see the long-held view that had hurt Roman interests in Italia for so long: why pay tax collectors in Constantinople when it was Italians who had forged the Roman Empire to begin with? While there don’t seem to have been any open revolts, writings from the period begin to display a distinct other-ness to the remainder of the Roman Empire. One immediately notable feature of this was the development of the Italian language. Based on Vulgar Latin, it had vague Gallo-Roman influences and even a few from the Frankish language. While the Papal administration still spoke fluent Classical Latin and the merchants from the east spoke Greek, the commoners in Italia, particularly near the frontier with the Frankish Kingdom of the Po, began to be drawn more into the cultural orbit of Massila than Constantinople [4].
The Frankish Kingdom, meanwhile, was entering a period of remarkable stability and growth. For most scholars, the first true sign of Frankish scholarship entering the wider Greco-Roman cultural world came in 629, when the “Parisian Theory” was introduced as a counter to the Constantinopolitan Theory. Authored by the Bishop of Paris, Saint Marcellinus the Bold, the Parisian Theory rejects the chaining of Pontifical authority to Imperial authority entirely. The Parisian Theory sheds an illuminating light on the Frankish psyche and historical memory in the early 600s. Citing such examples as the Arian Kings of the Visigoths and Vandals, who continued in their ways despite the condemnation by Ecumenical Councils, the Parisian Theory articulates on Saint Augustine’s work that “two cities have been built by two loves: the Earthly by the love of self, the Heavenly by the love of God,” and thus, “the authority of the Earthly city deals nothing with the authority of the Heavenly city.” While many educated theologians in Constantinople and Alexandria, and even Rome, turned up their noses at the assertions of the Parisian Theory, it would later play an important role in the development of culture on the western edge of the Greco-Roman cultural sphere, and Saint Marcellinus is considered the father of Frankish intellectual culture and the uncle of the strong Frankish monastic culture.
Slightly more impressive to the citizens of the Roman Empire was the exceptional growth of the southern Frankish Kingdoms. The introduction of the Dagobert Plough vastly improved the agricultural output of the Po and Rhone Valleys within the Kingdom, fueling a population boom and making those areas some of the most economically viable within the Frankish Kingdom. This brought with it an economic boom to the Frankish Kingdoms, which in turn shows up a sharp rise in gold and silver artifacts in the hands of Franks and Gallo-Romans other than Kings and nobles. The most visually impressive symbol of this was the Abbey of Saint Dennis, a grand Benedictine Monastery containing the remains of the Patron Saint of France. With a vast library unrivaled outside of the Roman Empire and the Iona Monastery in Hibernia, the Abbey of Saint Dennis soon became the center of the University of Paris, the first such institution outside of the Roman Empire, and thus the heart of the burgeoning “Latin Quarter” of the city, where scholars from Iona and Alexandria could rub shoulders [5]. The University of Paris, with 21 chairs, 15 of whom spoke and taught in Latin and 6 in Frankish, would later spawn imitators in the richest and most developed regions of western Europe.
Unlike the territorial integrity and strength of the Franks, the Visigoths in Hispania were facing serious issues. Their King Reccared I, or Flavius Constantinian as he styled himself, had earned the ire of the nobility within the Kingdom with his conversion from Arian Christianity to the Latin Rite in the late 580s, and although he managed to remain atop his throne, his son was not so lucky, and he was assassinated by a military strongman known as Witteric in 603. Witteric and his successors thus faced a series of religious wars between the Arian and Latin elements of the nobility, which quickly adopted a more cultural stance, as followers of the Latin rite were considered more Roman and Greek, while Arians were often seen as “true” Visigoths. This intermittent warfare between nobles, coupled with the lack of a strong central authority, plunged the Kingdom of the Visigoths into a period known as the “Dark Decade,” lasting roughly between 603 and 615, during which the Kingdom tore itself apart.
It would be the Amazighen people from the old roman province of Mauretania that would introduce a new wrinkle into the fabric of the Visigothic Kingdom [6]. A functionally independent people who nevertheless had close cultural ties to the Roman Empire, particularly in the city of Abyla, which served as one of the westernmost outposts of Chalcedonian Christianity [7]. In 609, a group of Latin nobles in the Visigothic Kingdom gave three thousand Amazighen warriors passage to Hispania, where they served as mercenaries. A steady flow of Amazighen immigrants soon followed, commonly taking advantage of the persistent instability within the Visigothic Kingdom. Finally, in 614, a remarkable Amazighen woman named Kahina wedded a Visigothic nobleman named Sisebut, a devout follower of the Latin rite, and between the two managed to subdue the whole of the Visigothic Kingdom. Adopting the same surname of his predecessor Reccared, Sisebut styled himself as Maximinus Constantinian, and from his court in Toledo, set out to stabilize his Kingdom. While his reign would be one of widespread rebuilding, he was able to set the Visigothic Kingdom on a path to catch up with their Frankish rivals to the north.
[1] - Such a perception might be the most egregious of these stereotypes, and it is important to note that Chalcedonians were only substantially mercantile in comparison to their Latin cousins, following the Heraclian de-urbanization of Italia in the late 500s.
[2] - Georgius Tisyrías was, naturally, in the pay of the Heraclian court.
[3] - The Empire formed in Persia by members of the Onoq Khaganate, or the Western Turkish Khaganate, after a series of civil wars in the Sassanian Empire. This Empire is centered in Samarqand, and the Qasars have converted to Manichaeism.
[4] - To be more specific, to the Gallo-Roman culture. While this culture is, ultimately, derivative of the Roman Empire in Constantinople, a man from Massila would be more at home in northern Italia than a man from Constantinople, and a man from Paris would feel more at home than one from Alexandria or Dara.
[5] - The concept of a university in TTL is quite different from one OTL, as these are patterned after the University of Constantinople. In particular, they are paid for by the state, rather than the clergy, and the lack of guild influence on universities.
[6] - The Amazighen are better known OTL as the Berbers.
[7] - Abyla, in OTL, would come to be known as Ceuta.
My apologies for the long period of time between updates, a broken laptop will do that to you.