Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Crying Survivor: Last Centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire - Yunus Pagonis, International Scholastic Press, AD 2008

- Chapter 5 -
THE MALEINOS EMPERORS​

The Eastern Roman Emperors of the Maleinos family have a bleak distinction: They are remembered by history as the emperors who doomed the Empire.

Constantine IX Maleinos, elevated to the purple in 1021 by a conspiracy among the dynatoi, quickly proved himself to be a man despised among the clergy but loved among the rich elites and the populace alike. Not only did he immediately eliminate laws put in by Basil II to restrict the ability of the dynatoi to buy communal village land, he promptly dipped into the royal treasury to host a vast celebration of his accession. Constantinople was filled with colourful banners, parades, trumpets, games, chariot races and other frivolities, with every household given gifts to celebrate the new Emperor's arrival. A previously dubious populace quickly swung around into Constantine's camp, dampening the ambitions of those elites who might have plotted against him.

The military response of Constantine Diogenes was met by a larger army under Basil Argyros, intercepting him somewhere in western Cappadocia. Apparently a portion of Diogenes' army deserted during the battle, probably having been bought off with gold and promises; the remainder of Diogenes' forces were defeated, and Diogenes himself taken prisoner.

Maleinos seems to have been magnanimous with Diogenes, agreeing to let him live out his days in luxury under the watchful eye of guards, but not to hold power further. He exiled Diogenes to a charming countryside estate and essentially kept him under house arrest there, safely out of the way. For the first couple of years after the transition, however, loyalist commanders crisscrossed the frontiers, tamping down small revolts, including one in southern Italy.

Constantine IX secured his rule by virtue of his enormous generosity towards the powerful. With access to the imperial treasury and with an eye towards giving favours to the dynatoi, he was liberal with his gifts, securing the loyalty of a number of powerful skeptics by giving away estates and treasures. His reign saw the most powerful families in Byzantium grow all the more powerful, with family estates growing larger at the expense of the commoners. This is not to say Constantine was unpopular with the commons: While many of the burghers of Constantinople resented him initially for setting aside Theodora, the rightful heir to the Macedonian dynasty, Constantine won their accedence if not their loyalty through his gifts-and-games programme, at the expense of course of the treasury.

In the long term, these trends towards magnanimous giving and a ruling class mired in corruption and luxury would prove disastrous to the empire. In the short term, they brought the Empire a period of much-needed calm after the Crisis of the 11th Century. With room to breathe and a solid block of support among the dynatoi, Constantine was able to act.

Perhaps the best thing that came out of Constantine IX's reign was the turn in the war in Bulgaria.[1] Leaving his eastern frontier to a mix of other generals, Constantine dispatched Argyros westward and launched a stiff campaign against the Bulgars, by now under the dubious overlordship of Gavril Radomor. Through 1025, Argyros spearheaded a successful campaign that brought most of present-day Epirus under the Roman shadow again; into the later 1020s, he pivoted and pushed inwards from there, dealing the Bulgars a defeat at Dioclea and continuing to cleave their way up the Adriatic coast, biting off Bulgar vassal-states en route to integrating much of that region. The conquests of the Serbian lands would ultimately prove ephemeral, but for the time it bought Constantine another much-needed triumph, solidifying his position in the Empire.

Reeling from seven years of aggressive pushback, a faction within the Bulgar nobility responded by removing Gavril Radomor by force, replacing him with his nephew, Presian II.[2] In some circles Presian was thought to have had foreknowledge of the plot to install Constantine, but nothing really substantiates that, and the accusation may simply be an attack against him given the events of the next few years.

A Roman attempt to push northwest for Sofia was blunted in the infamous Pyrrhic victory at Ihtiman, in which the Bulgars narrowly won the day while leaving half their army dead on the field. With both sides licking their wounds, Presian sent envoys to Constantinople to sue for a truce. While many among the Roman old guard urged Constantine to press on, the Emperor instead agreed to give Presian what he wanted. Hostilities ground to an uneasy halt, and Bulgaria was made to pay tribute, most of which poured into Constantine's coffers - his priority wasn't war but enrichment, and Presian's offer gave him what he wanted easily enough.

Shortly after hostilities slowed, Constantine seems to have removed a number of prominent administrators and military leaders within the inner reaches of the Empire, replacing them with wealthy men loyal to him. This would appear to have been a move to cut off a backlash against his policy towards the Bulgars. In either case, there were some flare-ups, judiciously tamped down, but the Empire went into the 1030s with control of most of the Adriatic, and a pacified but grumbling Bulgaria perched on the border, quiescent for now but not truly defeated.

Foreign policy in this vein seemed to be something of a theme with Constantine. More concerned with domestic affairs and personal enrichment than with squandering lives and money in wars for marginal territory, he comparatively neglected military matters after setting the Bulgar affair in order, preferring to leave much of the day-to-day running of that side of things to Basil Argyros and other generals.

In the east, Constantine comparatively neglected affairs in Armenia, with the result that Turkmen raiders continued to wreak havoc in the neighbouring Kingdom of Vaspurakan.[3] Constantine viewed Armenia in general as a useful buffer against such instabilities on his eastern frontier, with the result that Armenia was left to bear the Turkmen incursions with only token support from Constantinople, while the Romans' defenses along the eastern frontier were allowed to grow relatively scant. This would have ramifications later.

It was hardly Constantine's foreign policy which damns his legacy; in fact his treatment of the Bulgars is viewed by historians as one of the few positives, and his retaking of the Adriatic region set that region's future into motion. More to his discredit is his personal conduct.

Depicted as a fit and spry young man in early art, Constantine was later given the epithet Choironopos - "Pig-like" - by some contemporary historians. Histories describe him as a man who adored a life of excess and glamour, spending the royal treasury on lavish feasts, sporting events, glamorous parties and luxurious treasures. Surviving letters indicate that Constantine was chastened at one point by the Patriarch of Constantinople about the dangers of laxity and gluttony, and that Constantine was viewed dimly among the ecclesiasts of the Empire.

More to the point, Constantine's profligate spending drained the treasury, and his focus on bribing the dynatoi into compliance resulted in wealthy men buying up communal village spaces. Corruption ran rampant in the halls of power during the Maleinos age. Byzantine politics were always murky, but Maleinos gave little attention to relationships, simply rewarding his most loyal followers. While his early years were not abnormal and the Bulgar war represents the height of his achievement, these achievements were slowly undermined by his tendency to reward loyalty and devotion over talent, with the result that Constantine's inner circle was gradually replaced by yes men with no particular talent in their field.[4]


[1] The Bulgars were probably not going to get off easy, not so long as they had eyes for Constantinople and styled themselves emperors.
[2] Butterflies had reached this part of the world by 996, so this Presian II is not the same man as the OTL Presian II, albeit not by much; he's got a bit more starch to him, in any case.
[3] Never given to Basil because no Basil and a less stable Byzantium which cares less about what's happening out there. Constantine, meanwhile, takes the "I don't want to deal with this crap" approach.
[4] This lengthy diversion into Byzantium was intended mainly to catch the East up to where I've written al-Andalus to. What say we get back to al-Muntasir and the family?

SUMMARY:
1025: The Eastern Roman Empire successfully secures Epirus from the Bulgars.
1028: A successful Roman campaign along the Adriatic brings the lands of the Serbs back under Constantinople's penumbra.
1029: The Battle of Ihtiman results in a Pyrrhic victory for the Bulgars. Unwilling to sacrifice another army, Constantine IX Maleinos accepts a peace proposal and tribute from the Bulgarian Tsar, Presian II. Bulgaria slumps into a period of internal squabbling as an uneasy border peace reigns, and Constantine goes on to fritter away the imperial treasury on luxuries, bribes and rank excess.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Yea, one should love an Arab girl
Even if she's not beautiful or pure.
But stay far away from a Spanish girl
Even if she's radiant as the sun!

- A poem by Todros ben Judah Halevi Abulafia​

~​

Excerpt: The Triumphal Myth: De-Mythologizing al-Muntasir and Medieval al-Andalus - 'Asma Zakari, Falconbird Press, AD 2006


Scholarly opinion agrees that in many ways, the myth of al-Muntasir was built up in large part by nostalgia among those who came after him.[1] In his own time, he was a man of contradictions, and it is in some ways ironic that he gained the reputation that he did as a mighty warrior, for aside from his exploits in the Aquitanian-Andalusian War, he seems to have presided over a time of prosperity and comparative peace - not exactly a Pax Andalusiyya, but at least stability.

As a man, al-Muntasir's personal valor is not in question, and his abundance of fine personal traits were well admired by the court at Córdoba. However, it's also evident that al-Muntasir himself had little to do with running the day-to-day administration of the Córdoban Caliphate at the time. Much of the administrative duty of the empire following the war with Aquitaine fell into the lap of al-Muntasir's Hajib, his brother al-Azraq.

Yet even al-Azraq is not the start of this trend: Before him, Hisham II was effectively controlled by his uncle, al-Mughira, who served as his Hajib until his own death. In Hisham we see the first example of the trend which would define al-Andalus into the future: The growing power of the Hajib relative to the Caliph, with the Hajib taking increasing responsibility for the secular sphere of influence within the polity. With al-Muntasir and al-Azraq the arrangement worked well. While by all accounts al-Azraq was brilliant and gifted, and appears to have furnished his brother with a full treasury and a robust organization, it nevertheless codified the notion that the Caliph could and did devolve certain powers to the Hajib in a traditional fashion.

In the years after the war, al-Azraq focused heavily on economic affairs. A number of prominent academies across the nation date to this time. A new mosque was commissioned in Coimbra, the famous Algarve Mosque, with its spectacular 11th-century architecture and minaret. But he also paid enormous attention to matters of trade and economic development. Recognizing the growing influence of the Saqaliba, he and al-Muntasir began to seed them in settler colonies in east-central Andalusia, and the community at Denia continued to grow in influence, setting on course to one day become one of the most prominent cultural centres in the state.[2]

The other key preoccupation of al-Azraq was the expansion of the nation's maritime trade. Among his acts - in the name of al-Muntasir, of course - was the further enhancement of Denia, already a major port, with a major repair and upgrade to its port infrastructure. The Caliph and his Hajib encouraged Andalusian traders to go far and wide, and they plied not only the Mediterranean, but also up the Atlantic coast. Al-Muntasir's era saw trade networks thrive, enriching the kingdom - particularly in the form of the slave trade. The trade delivered even more new Saqaliba to al-Andalus, including many newcomers imported from battle zones in the Balkan region - some displaced by the constant state of flux there as the Eastern Roman Empire's borders butted up against grumbling Bulgars and Serbs and marauding Pechenegs, others simply captured and shipped west. Still more are likely to have come from the Baltic region.

Through this, al-Muntasir continued to wage the yearly raids against the kingdoms of the north, making a point to lead them himself, always on horseback and in full regalia, though how much he actually fought as he got older is dubious. Beyond the regularly scheduled harassment of Leon and Pamplona, he turned his attention in 1035 to a substantial revolt among the Banu Qasim of Alpuente, evidently at the urging of a stubborn leader resistant to the Caliphate's growing reliance on imported slave-soldiers from the Slavic world. Al-Muntasir's generals spent the next couple of years driving the Banu Qasim out of a friendly city and rounding them up, leading to even more friendly troops being stationed in the east.

However, while al-Muntasir maintained an excellent relationship with his vassals, shored up by al-Azraq's carefully-timed dishing-out of prudent cash gifts to help local landowners fund new schools and mosques, al-Andalus remained fundamentally an ethnically-tiered polity where local lords largely tended to their own affairs. The legacy of Hisham, now being shored up by al-Muntasir, was the establishment of a few new Saqaliba polities in the core, especially Denia. These slave-soldiers - Muslim conversos all, many of them not actually eunuchs at this point - tended to favour staffing their own councils and alcazars with other Saqaliba, but more importantly with people of muwallad background.

In general, Muslim conversos enjoyed a cultural flowering in the 11th century as Islam finally came to enjoy a clear dominance among the commons.[3] Gradually, many people of muwallad background - with Islam in their family line for generations - forgot their Christian ancestry. It became common among them to create Arab genealogies for themselves, and to view themselves as no different than the Arabo-Andalusians who enjoyed utmost privilege within the ummah.

Much ill-informed fluff tends to be written of the preeminent status of medieval al-Andalus as a wonderland of ethnic mixing and unity.[4] In point of fact, even as muwallad people gained in prominence and the population of the region grew more and more mixed, and even as they came to enjoy greater access to government offices in those cities managed by the Saqaliba and within Córdoba, they remained third-class citizens. Despite their preeminent role as the drivers of the economy, the muwalladun were generally viewed with contempt by Arabo-Andalusian and Berber aristocrats, standing at the absolute bottom of the social totem pole.

The growing power of the muwalladun in areas such as Denia led to a gradual refinement of the Andalusian Shu'ubiyya movement - a backlash against the predominance of Arabo-Andalusians. The movement had always existed; landowners within al-Andalus were obliged to put down regular revolts among the commons, and al-Muntasir himself ruled during the suppression of many, including a particularly merciless play against the muwalladun of Seville in 1039, apparently provoked into revolt by the actions of a tax collector. However, in the Saqaliba-heavy corners of al-Andalus, more and more muwallad people with Shu'ubi leanings found themselves in position where they could exercise real power.

At its core, Umayyad al-Andalus - while a standout in culture, civilization and learning, and certainly a jewel of the world - remained bound to its nature as a state forged by the conquest of a vast local population by a tiny invading one. Yet more and more, the blood of the Arabo-Andalusians was beginning to dilute. The Umayyad Caliphs of the time were largely blonde, blue-eyed men with Iberian and Slavic traits from generations of interbreeding with slave women. Gradually, the bloodlines thinned - but no Caliph seems to have been inclined to entrust the oft-reviled muwalladun with forming a native-strength army, or of doing more than providing taxes to the nation.

It's debatable the extent to which al-Muntasir and al-Azraq realized the extent to which muwalladun were growing in political power at the local level - or its implications for the future.


[1] No, you don't get to be privy to those discussions just yet. Stay tuned.
[2] OTL, Denia was one of the more prominent taifa kingdoms, and run by rulers of Saqlabi ancestry.
[3] And now you see the truth: The biggest effect of this POD was to buy al-Andalus 60 or 70 more years of stability and a couple of generations of further breeding in order for Islam to continue to take root in a nominally unified polity.
[4] Much as OTL.

SUMMARY:
1035: Caliph al-Muntasir stomps down a revolt among the Banu Qasim, laying siege to Alpuente.
1039: A major Muladi revolt is put down in Seville.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Palm of the Distant West Nurtured in the Soils of al-Andalus - Joseph ibn Abram al-Qadisi, AH 442 (AD 1059)


Now even as the years passed did the Caliph al-Muntasir continue to ride out yearly with his forces, and waged the iihad against the foe, as was the want of the Caliph. And each summer the men did go into the north to punish the Christian kingdoms there, the Castilian and those Leon, and those of Gallaecia, for indeed that kingdom was once more whole; for in the year 420[1] did the king called Ordono perish, and in his lifetime he had completed the retaking of Gallaecia for the kings of Leon. And Ordono had two sons, the eldest being named Alfonso, and the younger of the two, Ramiro. And upon the occasion of his death did he place the crown of Leon upon the brow of Alfonso, and he was the sixth to bear the name, and upon the brow of Ramiro did he grant the crown of Gallaecia, and he was the fourth to rule over it.[2]

Now just as some of the land-lords of the Andalus did chafe at times beneath the rule of the Banu Umayya, and pursue their own designs, so too did the rulers of the Christian lands, and many of the Gallaecians did resent the men of Leon for their seizure of their kingdom, and the ending of its brief independence. And in the Gallaecian lands did live a noble of Portugalia by the name of Munio the son of Gonzalo,[3] and he looked with greatest disfavour upon the rule of Ramiro over Gallaecia, for his line had endured even the surrender of the kingdom to Leon, and he felt his claim to the kingship the stronger. And he sought the support of the Caliph, though for many years al-Muntasir put him off, and acknowledged him as the Count.

As the years went by did the forces of the Portugalians clash with those of the Gallaecian, and as was often the case in those days, the Count turned to the Caliph to seek his involvement in the affairs of the Christians. And al-Muntasir did welcome Munio to Córdoba with some ceremony, and brought the Christian before him at the Madinat az-Zahra, and did agree to a peace with him, in exchange for some tribute from the Portugalian, and the passage of men of the Muslim lands northward each year, to cross over the river Lima,[4] and into Gallaecia, there to conduct the summer raid.

So incensed was Ramiro, that he did send an emissary even unto Córdoba, and did curse the name of al-Muntasir, and brought word that the place of the Caliph was not to choose a side in the affairs of the Christians.

Thus it was that al-Muntasir did pen a missive to the King, and advised him that he had sent no army, nor waged no war on behalf of the Portucalian, nor sought to send him blades nor soldiers, but merely sought peace. And he advised Ramiro as well to pay unto him the tribute his forebears had paid. And it is said that Ramiro was so wroth upon reading the missive of the Caliph that he did smash his goblet in fury, and swore an oath even unto the false Messiah of the Christian,[5] and did denounce the Caliph's actions as vile treachery.

And yet al-Muntasir paid little mind to the rantings of the weak King, and merely collected his tribute from the Count of Portugalia, and allowed the soldiers of the King and his wayward Count to war now and then, though the days proceeded and Portugalia plotted its own path.

And thus it was that the kingdoms of the North divided themselves, for though Leon and Gallaecia were bound to each other by blood, each grappled with its own troublesome men within, for the constant stubbornness of the Counts of Castile did long trouble the Kings of Leon, and those of Portugalia the Kings of Gallaecia, and the affairs of Pamplona - called Navarre by some, for the eyes of Queen Sancha were most often upon affairs in Aquitaine.

Now it was some seven years hence that al-Muntasir did call his men to the field again, for upon a summer's day did a host of the al-Madjus[6] come unto the al-Gharb, and they did sail even to Lishbuna and smite it, and the men there did take up arms and war with the men of the ships. And the vessels of the Caliph did sail in to battle them upon the waters, and many of both sides were slain, and yet it was the Muslims who emerged the victors.

From that battle did the soldiers of the Andalus capture some number of the al-Madjus. Now they were taken to Córdoba, and paraded through the streets in chains, and taken before al-Muntasir, and some were placed into the prison. And it is said that some were kept within the Caliphate, and their swords and strength purchased for the ranks of the faithful, and they came into the service of the Caliph.

Now in those days the affairs in the Maghreb were unsettled, though it was so that the leaders of the Banu Ifran had been firmly ensconced within the seat of power at Fes, and the tribes of the Maghrawa had begun to divide from their old confederation, and many of them joined with the Banu Ifran out of convenience if not love. And into those divisions came other forces, and the most troublesome were the Banu Zejel, one of the tribes of the Ghomara, and they dwelled in the Western Rif. And they agitated against the Caliphal authority, and did work to unify the Ghomara, and swore their fealty to the Caliph of Cairo, and they did seek to increase their dominion.

In those times did al-Muntasir continue to hire the Africans into the army, though always with care, and increasingly less so, and the Saqaliba came to more often see to affairs in the Andalus herself, for they were better suited to the life of urban persons, and not so alienated as were often the Africans. But in Africa al-Muntasir did rely on these tribes that would swear fealty to him, of which the Ifran were the greatest in those days, but also the Dejrawa, who had been one of the tribes of the Zenatah who had held their fealty to the Andalus.

Now the leader of the Banu Zejel was a holy man, and he was called Badis the son of Yusuf, and his ways were most zealous and his heart filled with passion, and he told those who followed him of the strictest adherence to the law, and the moral fibre of the faithful. And his zeal in enforcing the laws of God was vast, and he drove his followers on with great fury, and did gather the tribes of the Ghomara under his banner, and rode out to strike even against the bastions of Fes, and caused the Banu Ifran great consternation. And al-Muntasir did worry greatly of their influence, for their lands lay on the coast, and en route to Fes.

So intent was he on crushing the Ghomara did he bring his royal guard, the Saqaliba, and rode out with them despite his eld. And they landed upon the shore in the Maghrib and marched unto the lands of the Ghomara, and there was joined by some number of the Banu Ifran. But he could not know that the Banu Zejel were prepared, and they did fall upon the host of al-Muntasir by darkness, and did slay many of the followers of the Caliph, and did wound many good men. And the men were in chaos, and fearful at being so greatly shaken.

And in their confusion did al-Muntasir speak unto them, and exhorted them forward in the name of God, and said to them, "Can you truly believe that these men hear the word of God? Do you not ride with the Commander of the Faithful? Fie, where is your faith!, that you should find it and gird yourself in the armour of belief, and draw the sword of faith!"

And the men did let out a great cry, and they did ride forth, and al-Muntasir did move himself to the head of the host. And the battle raged at the dawn at the site of Oued Laou, and the host of the Saqaliba and the Banu Ifran did slay many of the Ghomara, and the enemy host broke and fled to the east. And al-Muntasir was wounded in the arm in the battle, but did not fall from his horse.

Now it is said that this was the final battle of al-Muntasir, and he rode out no more after that.


[1] November 1029.
[2] Technically Ramiro III was also king over Gallaecia!
[3] Count Munio is the brother of Rodrigo and son of OTL Gonzalo Menendez, who succeeded Menendo Gonzales as Count of Portugalia.
[4] Andalusian lords currently hold Portugalia up to roughly Viseu, with effective control almost to the Duero. The Count still holds Porto, running north through Guimaraes and Braga to the Lima.
[5] Lest you forget that the author is a Sephardic Jew.
[6] The Vikings.

SUMMARY:
1029: King Ordono V of Leon dies. He divides his realm between his sons, Alfonso VI of Leon and Ramiro IV of Gallaecia.
1036: Caliph al-Muntasir accepts tribute from Munio Gonzales, the separatist Count of Portugalia, effectively taking Portugalia's side in its bid to become independent from Gallaecia.
1043: A Viking raid results in a bloody battle at Lishbuna. The Vikings are forced back into the sea, but some are taken prisoner. A few are settled.
1047: The Battle of Oued Laou. Troubled by a rising among the Ghomara Berbers, led by a zealous preacher, al-Muntasir takes the field in the Maghreb. Despite being defeated in a night ambush, he leads his battered troops to victory the next day.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Triumphal Myth: De-Mythologizing al-Muntasir and Medieval al-Andalus - 'Asma Zakari, Falconbird Press, AD 2006


History tells us that in the winter of 1053, Caliph al-Muntasir fell asleep one night and never woke up. He was 61 years old.

It was a quiet, unassuming death for a Caliph whose reign set the stage for what al-Andalus would be in the years after his death. For a man hailed by his contemporaries and those after him as a great warrior, al-Muntasir's record on the field was hardly uniform. His attempt to salvage his brother Abd ar-Rahman IV's invasion of Sardinia went nowhere, resulting mostly in a rump presence of Arabo-Berbers lingering in Sicily in a couple of strongholds and the environs of Cagliari. His battles with Aquitaine-Pamplona, meanwhile, ended mainly because of the influence of France. His personal valour was never in doubt, but in these affairs, his strategic legacy may fall short.

He had perhaps more success in picking winners among the feuding kingdoms of Northern Iberia. Cannily acknowledging that a unified Leon presented a danger, as did a Leon and Gallaecia with two aligned brothers upon the thrones, he tied up one of those kingdoms by giving favour to the rebel Count of Portugalia, encouraging separatism and nativism within the Kingdom and keeping the eyes of the North off Córdoba during a time of transition. As well, he seems to have taken a similar tack towards the breakaway county of Castile, cultivating that long-time grudge with the county's Leonese overlords.

Beyond that is what he failed to do: Take advantage of the waning of the Frankish crown in the Spanish March. With much of the south of Francia having little faith in the later Robertians such as Adalbert, opportunities lay there for al-Muntasir to expand his borders beyond simply the capture of Viguera. Instead he left the Spanish March to its own devices, so busy was he with managing the fracious relationship with the Berbers and the troubles in the north of Iberia.

This failure proved fortuitous; it kept the eye of France from turning towards the south at a time when Islam was still finding itself in Iberia. Three centuries after its founding, al-Andalus was still coming into its own, as any native Iberian Muslim at the time could likely attest. Native conversos were still treated with skepticism, and armies still came from the ranks of bought or imported soldiers, in al-Muntasir's case the Saqaliba.

It is the Saqaliba who are al-Muntasir's most consequential legacy. For a long time, the Andalusian Caliphs had sought a counterbalance to the dominance of African Berbers in the military. Beginning with Abd ar-Rahman III, slave-soldiers of a Slavic background began to arrive in earnest, but still only in limited roles. Saqaliba eunuchs had always been popular; they began to catch on as un-castrated slave-soldiers, too.

Under Hisham II, the role of the Saqaliba increased. History suggests that it was Saqaliba conspirators who sought to place al-Mughira on the throne, and then struck the compromise to place him as Hisham's hajib. They seem as well to have been involved in the conspiracy against Abd ar-Rahman IV. Under al-Mughira's regency, the Saqaliba expanded their military role; under al-Muntasir, that role exploded into a powerful knightly caste, and a distinctly Siqlabi mindset emerged, that of the Islamicized slave-soldier and heavy cavalryman. African Berbers continued to play key roles in the military, but al-Muntasir built a powerful, dedicated core of slave-soldier cavalrymen who spent their lives honing their craft to perfection.

The growing role of the Saqaliba left many eyebrows raised at court, but the personal charisma and valour of al-Muntasir quieted many of them. As a man, he was well-loved by most of the people and seen as strong, virtuous, pious and generous, and he effectively kept the competing forces of Andalusian politics under his control, save in the Maghreb, where he was forced to jettison the Maghrawa confederacy and build new alliances with the Banu Ifran.

More to the point, he left behind an al-Andalus in solid financial position, though it's likely that most of this had to do with his brother al-Azraq holding control over the Caliphal pursestrings. In many ways, al-Muntasir's success can be attributed to him. A modest program of building projects put citizens to work, while the economy flourished, particularly in terms of maritime trade. The outposts at Sardinia seem to have provided Andalusian merchant ships a new place to land en route to the east. Ports like Denia became prosperous outlets for the slave trade. Al-Muntasir seems to have left his successor with a robust treasury, if not the riches of the ages.

In the days following al-Muntasir's death, succession fell as expected to his third son, Muhammad. Aged about 30, he ascended the throne as Muhammad II, the name by which history knows him, though he took on the laqab of ar-Rashid. The transition to power seems to have been relatively smooth, perhaps owing to the influence of al-Azraq, Muhammad II's uncle and al-Muntasir's brother, who remained hajib.

The real measure of a ruler's reign is what happens when he passes power on to his successor. Al-Muntasir handed his son a polity in reasonably good shape, and solid relative to its neighbours - yet that strength obscured a grumbling over affairs which had been glossed over by al-Muntasir's personal charms and valour. Old Arabo-Andalusians chafed at the growing influence of the Saqaliba; old Berbers chafed at their increasingly shrinking role, and at the favouring of the Ifranids; and muwalladun chafed over their level of inclusion still being lower than almost any other class of society. In succeeding his father, Muhammad II faced the same old social problems that had hounded Caliphs and Emirs for generations, symptoms of the oldest and most systemic problem: Al-Andalus was a polity built upon the domination of a conquered people by a small group of outsiders, who never trusted the people they conquered to fight for themselves, no matter how many of them accepted Islam or embraced the ways of the Arabs, and no matter how many embraced Arab writing and genealogies for themselves.

Al-Muntasir is one of the most celebrated and fondly-remembered Caliphs. But it was under Muhammad II that the old systemic challenges would come to a head.

~​

It felt like he had been reading for weeks. It was almost a relief when he reached the end of the chapter.

Groaning softly, Iqal drew his bookmark into place and closed the tome, setting it off to one side, He slouched down into his battered old armchair and propped his feet up on the stool at the foot of it. Off to one side, a news program was playing on the imager[1] but he didn't pay much mind to it, instead pushing his hands through his hair and tilting back out of his slouch after a moment. He pushed his hands through his hair.

They'd warned him coming in that Dr. Mirza's classes always involved heavy reading, and always from many different sources. It was a lot to digest. The Sirat al-Muntasir was one thing; the supplemental sources were another. And yet, he didn't feel any closer to the answer he sought.

The complete story of his ancestors. What brought them over the sea and why. The basics he understood, but no more.

Not that he expected to find an ancestor in the history books. He smiled bitterly, sighing again and shaking his head. As if he'd turn a page one day and find a footnote: 'Iqal Alnamany, this man is your many-times-great-grandfather.' Foolishness.

In the background, snippets of the newscast on the imager reached his ears.

"New progress in managing temperature escalation,"[2] the newswoman said in a low, buttery voice. "Representatives of Sin[3] agreeing today to new measures to control particle venting. Officials say sea levels have levelled off in recent years but rolling back the damage could take centuries."

Iqal sighed quietly and tuned out the imager. That was politics.

Politics was beyond him.

He closed his eyes, just missing a map flickering across the screen.

~​

END OF ACT II "SIRAT AL MUNTASIR"

STAY TUNED FOR
ACT THE THIRD

"WEST AND EAST"​

[1] A very high-definition variant on a television set.
[2] Climate change.
[3] The State of Zhongguo.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Danish Conquest: A Foundational History of Angland - Daniel Eardwald, Grimsby University Press, 1983

* 3 *
Cnut the Rich: 1014 - 1058​

Contrary to how language has evolved over the past seven years, the epithet "Cnut the Rich" - or "Canute the Rich" in some tellings - didn't refer to this monarch's personal wealth, though he did have it. Instead it may be more accurate to call him "Cnut the Great" or "Cnut the Powerful." Nevertheless, the epithet stuck in Cnut's own time, from 1014 to 1058, and has lasted through history because of the important role this formational monarch played in consolidating the Danish Conquest. Sweyn Forkbeard delivered Angland into the hands of the Scandinavians, but in many ways it was Cnut the Rich who made it stick.

Fortuitously, Cnut was a man of twenty at the time he was named King of the Anglish by the Danish fleet in the area, and already showing signs of being a dynamic, energetic man known as a people person - albeit with a tendency to strong-arm his enemies. His personal dynamism seems to have cut short a bid by the Anglo-Saxon lords of the land to assemble the witenagemot and place Earl Leofwine of the Hwicce on the throne, for lack of a candidate from the ruling House of Wessex. In fact the only surviving son of King Aethelred, Edgar, had been driven into exile and would later turn up in Bulgaria as a mercenary chief.

Perhaps this lack of an obvious candidate - and the legwork of Sweyn Forkbeard in thinning out the ranks of the Anglo-Saxon nobility - is what resulted in most of the witenagemot simply not turning up save for a minority of Leofwine's supporters. Before long, a body of Cnut's men broke up the council, and Leofwine was summarily executed and replaced with a Dane as jarl over the Hwicce.

The name "the Rich" tends to stick in people's minds because of Cnut's next move: Buying the loyalty of a number of more surly Anglo-Saxon lords and barons with gifts of gold and treasure. In fact he wouldn't gain the epithet for many more years, but the move does seem to have at least quieted some of the surlier grumbling from within the kingdom, saying nothing of the presence of a large body of armed Danes able to move quickly to virtually any town in the land and muscle down local opposition. Between the presence of Cnut's fleet and the seven years of foundation-laying Sweyn Forkbeard managed before his death, Cnut succeeded to the throne with a surprising minimum of bloodshed.

With Danish power still weak in the lands of old Wessex - concentrated as it was within the Danelaw and around London - Cnut moved quickly to remedy the problem, creating an earldom over Wessex and placing not a Dane, but an Anglo-Saxon over it. Drawing from the ranks of local men loyal to him, he granted the earldom to the thegn, Morcar son of Earngrim.[1]

Pestered by his advisors to take a wife, Cnut put it off for a couple of years, instead turning to see to his new kingdom. He seems to have travelled to Denmark within the first two years of his rule to meet with his brother Harald, who inherited the Danish throne after Forkbeard's passing. While relations between the two brothers remained good, Harald seems to have spurned Cnut's suggestion that the two sit as co-monarchs, and the Anglish king returned home frustrated, enough so that he seems not to have come to his brother's aid when Olaf Haraldsson overthrew the Danish earl who had thenceforth ruled Norway, gaining the throne in 1017.

All told, however, Cnut is mostly remembered as a wise king who focused on building a legacy within Angland. His close relationship with his brother saw Angland become part of the Nordic sphere, and a bustling stream of longships began to flow between the Humber-mouth and the Danish lands as a busy North Sea trade sprung to life. Trade activity gradually began to shift from London north towards Grimsby, the preferred landing point for traders from the north and east; while London never ceased to be a major city, the centre of power gradually moved towards Cnut's capital at Gaignesborg, and especially towards Grimsby, which was simply a more accessible port.

Cnut is also remarkable because of how widely he is attested in the sources of other histories. In 1016, not long after his stop at home in Denmark, he seems to have taken ship to Rome to appear before Pope Sergius V. Histories of the time record that his father, Sweyn, was suspected of being a crypto-pagan; Cnut, meanwhile, came to the Lateran with lavish gifts of gold and jewels, then proclaimed himself a loyal servant of the Lord. Sergius seems to have confirmed the young king as lord over Angland. Not long afterward, the name of Cnut appears somewhere between 1017 and 1020 in the histories of Aquitaine, sending an emissary to the court of Guilhem V, Duke of Aquitaine and King Consort of Pamplona, seeking trade with him. And Cnut himself turns up in 1022 to attend the coronation of Otto IV as Holy Roman Emperor, the boy having finally reached the age of majority and shrugged off the need for a regent; Cnut seems to have brought him, too, fine gifts, among them a fine Anglish blade made of gold and silver. This sword is said to still reside among the Germans' national treasures as a minor artifact. And he appears once more in Poland sometime before 1030, again bringing gifts and praise to the court there.

Rather than a legacy as a warrior, Cnut's strengths seem to have been as a charismatic salesman for his newly-conquered kingdom, winning over the Anglo-Saxons with economic prosperity - though his efforts seemed to focus greatly on the old Danelaw. He nevertheless attempted to cement his position among the Anglo-Saxons in 1023 by marrying himself to Aethelthryth - the daughter and only child of the late King Aethelstan II, and one of the few surviving members of the House of Wessex.[2]

The marriage seems to have been calculated to add Anglo-Saxon legitimacy to Cnut's claim to be King of Angland. Not long after that, Cnut commissioned the construction of new piers at Grimsby, then sprung for the construction of a large domicile for himself in Gaignesborg. This old castle, today known as Rich Hall, is a fine example of late pre-Romanesque architecture and is meticulously maintained by the state.

While Cnut was primarily a trader and a builder, he did have some military exploits to his name, among them the subjugation of the rebel lords of Cornwall, the last vassals of Wessex still holding out against Danish rule in Angland. Danish raiders utilized Anglish ports as a base for raiding, and longships sailed throughout the North Sea to harass trade posts and coastal ports along the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire and into West Francia on down towards Aquitaine and Iberia. That said, these raids gradually decreased as the Anglish trade economy came to prosper, taking on more of a mercantile flavour.


[1] Sorry, Godwin. Take a hike. In fact there's some speculation that OTL Aethelred had Morcar axed for helping to gin up support for Sweyn during the Danish period; here, Morcar ends up drifting over to the side of the Danes and becoming Canute's favourite Anglo-Saxon.
[2] More butterflies.

SUMMARY:
1017: Olaf II Haraldsson seizes the Norwegian throne.
1023: Cnut the Rich, King of Angland, marries Aethelthryth, the daughter and only child of the late King Aethelstan II.
1026: Cnut the Rich begins a major port construction project at Grimsby, setting the stage for the city to eventually round into a major Anglish port.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Lonely Island: The History of Islam in Sicily - Izemo Morabito, International Scholastic Press, AD 1998


The frontier areas of Islam inevitably faced challenges not experienced in the Muslim heartland, and the island of Sicily was no exception - indeed, it can be viewed as a colossal fifty-autocar pile-up of challenges, almost all of them systemic.

The survival of al-Andalus was largely a function of the region overcoming its core systemic challenge: The fact that at its most basic level, it existed as the rulership of the conquered by an increasingly smaller and more isolated group of conquerors. Events of the 11th century and beyond gradually eroded the primacy of Arab overlords in Iberia in favour of the broader population, though it wasn't until some time after the reign of al-Muntasir as Caliph that these changes would be realized meaningfully.

Sicily presented much the same issue - since the time the Aghlabids of Ifriqiya seized the island from the Eastern Roman Empire and placed a governor there, the island was lorded over by a cadre of outsiders - Arabs and Berbers, mostly. But things only got worse when the Fatimids of Ifriqiya gained hegemony over the island and placed al-Hasan al-Kalbi in charge of affairs there. Then, thirty years later, the Fatimids moved their entire operation to Egypt, breaking ground on a new capital there.

Not only did the Fatimids' move rob the Emirate of Sicily of its naval support, it left the Kalbids in the dire position of being Shia vassals of a Shia power too distant to support them, ruling over a noble class that remained basically Sunni, all ruling over a native population with little representation. While large numbers of native Sicilians converted to Islam, many communities of Christians remained, mostly native in the west, Greek-speaking in the east. From the moment the Fatimids withdrew their fleet to Egypt, the clock was ticking for the Kalbid emirs of Sicily. Holding their reign over the island in the name of Shia Islam appeared far too precarious to stick.

The arrival of a large body of Tunisian Berbers under Zawi ibn Ziri, freshly driven out of Ifriqiya by a power struggle within the Emirate, added a new dimension to the ongoing fracturing of power in Sicily. These Berbers, a band of skilled warriors hardened by battle, were welcomed in by Emir Jafar II; they largely settled in the west of the island, not far from the capital at Palermo.

Not long after the arrival of the Zawids, in 1012,[1] an uprising against Jafar occurred, mostly fuelled by local settled Berbers protesting their treatment. The rebellion was hastily put down, and though the Zawids seem to have sided with Jafar, it's questionable how much fighting Zawi and his followers were involved in. Nevertheless the Zawids were entrenched on the side of Jafar, with Zawi himself given authority over the town of al-Qamuq,[2] not far from the Emir's seat at Palermo.

A common occurrence in Muslim Iberia was for imported Berbers to grow discontent with the urban decadence of their new homeland. Such seemed to be the case with Ziri, who stood by Jafar initially, but otherwise grew uncomfortable with the luxury of the Kalbid court as compared to the rougher life in Ifriqiya. Soon enough he reconciled with his kin in Ifriqiya, but died in 1020 before he could return home. Leadership of the Zawid clan fell to his nephew, Tashfin[3] ibn Makhsan, who stayed with the tribe in Sicily.

Ziri's death followed Jafar's; the emir perished in 1018, likely murdered in a palace coup given the death's suddenness and his replacement with his brother al-Akhal rather than a son or some other, more expected successor. In any case, al-Akhal proved to be a reasonably good Emir, bringing some semblance of centralization to an island riven by factionalism and prone to the rising of regional lords. But Sicily continued to stick to the same old problems faced in al-Andalus, namely the racial divisions between the ruling caste of Arabo-Sicilians and the lower classes of Sicilan Berbers.

Relations between al-Akhal and Tashfin were never strong - Tashfin seems to have been skeptical of the new emir, and generally discontent with how his people were treated on the island. His sympathies gradually came to lie with the Sicilian Berbers. Some Zawids returned to Tunis; most lingered on the island, accumulating power, taking raiding jobs from the Emir but continuing to grow discontent along with most of the island.

Things came to a head in 1031, with the sudden revolt of a Berber faction based around the central Sicilian city of Enna. History disagrees on who actually led the faction at the outset - evidently a relatively obscure native Berber commander - but though the Kalbid Emir moved against this uprising through 1032, the uprising soon gained the support of Tashfin and the Zawids. It also gained the support of the Zirids, who dispatched an army of 4,000 men to bolster the natives, seemingly eager to see a fellow Sanhaja Berber dynasty into power. By 1033, al-Akhal had been killed; by 1034, his son, Jafar III, had been driven out of Palermo, and the Emirate fell to Tashfin, who moved into the palace and took charge.

The sudden upheaval triggered an immense backlash from Arabo-Sicilian factions on the island. A nasty war broke out between Ibrahim, the self-styled emir of Syracuse, and the Zawid-Zirid faction, with supporters of Jafar III lining up behind the eastern faction. The island was effectively split in two as the conflict dragged on into 1035 and 1036, with the Arabic faction failing in their siege of Palermo but the Berbers failing to dislodge Ibrahim and Jafar from Catania later in the year.

With both sides locked in a bloody stalemate, the Kalbid faction attempted to bring in a band of Bulgarian mercenaries. The band, fleeing the Byzantine reconquest of Dioclea, bolstered the Kalbid faction awhile as Saqaliba and successfully defeated a Berber army outside Enna, but failed to turn the tide of the conflict. By 1038, Ibrahim was killed during a pitched battle outside Adrano, and the Kalbid faction struggled to coalesce around a new leader. Ultimately another Kalbid descendant, Abd-Allah, took command of the armies, but his bravado was matched only by his ineptitude, and by 1039 the Berber forces had stormed Syracuse and captured Jafar.

Tashfin settled into Palermo with a great deal of moral authority among the largely Berber commons, but with a body of Arabo-Sicilians among the nobility still upset with him and still owning land. While these nobles largely swore fealty to him, the early Zawid years in Sicily were rough and troubled, and Tashfin was obligated to put down a number of small local risings and shake down a number of balky tax collectors as he worked to assert Zawid authority on the island. Sicily at this time functioned as effectively a province of Zirid Ifriqiya, though this state of affairs wouldn't last. More importantly, Tashfin's authority was still troubled by the fundamental flaw of Fatimid overlordship: The ruling class of the island were Shi'ites, while most of the common people were Sunni. Meanwhile, the Fatimids were still too distant - and by this point, well en route to their own collapse - to make vassalage to them all that good of a deal.

The island was ripe for conquest in this unstable state, and indeed it would seem that some of the lingering Arabo-Sicilian landlords did extend entreaties to the envoys of Roman Emperor Constantine IX Maleinos, hoping to enlist the Roman forces within the empire's Catepanate of Italy on their side. Indeed, it would seem that an army did arrive in 1040 and take Messina, but the Maleinos emperors' tendency to appoint loyalists over men of talent left the Romans' armies in the non-central regions largely staffed by generals of mediocre ability at best, and the Zawids quickly pushed the Greek intruders back into their ships.

In any case, the Eastern Roman Empire had more pressing concerns to deal with; indeed, Constantine IX's reign saw a gradual decline in the authority of the Empire in Italy, with the lords of southern Italy beginning to hire up mercenaries[4] and enlist the aid of the Holy Roman Empire in their internecine bickering with the Greeks. The Empire's Italian presence had taken a dire hit in the loss in 1031 of Naples and the surrounding territory to the Principality of Capua, which also extended its control to Amalfi and came into conflict with neighbouring Salerno. This reduced the Greeks to effective control of Calabria and Apulia but little more, with the southern Italian states continuing to vie for supremacy.

With matters nigh to coming to a head at the toe and heel of the boot, the various principalities in the area took to scrounging for mercenaries to fill the immediate need for troops. It would appear that a number of Berbers from Sicily contracted with Salerno at one point or another in a series of attacks on Calabria, while a foray backed by Tashfin itself seized Reggio and a number of smaller ports in 1044, only to lose all but Reggio three years later to the same band of Bulgarian mercenaries hired during the fighting on the island, this time under contract to Salerno.

The gradual decline in the fortunes of the Roman Empire kept the Sicilian Emirate largely shielded from invasion, giving it a window to breathe - though, with the southern principalities grappling for land and the Papacy eyeing the island, Sicily's future was still grim as the 1050s rolled around.


[1] OTL it happened in 1015!
[2] Alcamo.
[3] Not Habbus this time. Butterflies, butterflies.
[4] Note: No Normans. The POD is early enough that Norman pilgrims never get to stop at the shrines of Italy, nor direct fellow Normans there. The mercenaries being drawn on are somewhat more local. As for the Normans, there's plenty for them to do as Francia deals with Guilhem's War over in Aquitaine.

SUMMARY:
1012: Jafar II, Emir of Sicily, puts down a Berber revolt.
1031: A second Berber revolt breaks out in Sicily. This time it gains the support of Tashfin ibn Makhsan, head of the Zawid branch of the Zirids.
1031: The Principality of Capua completes the seizing of Naples from the Eastern Roman Empire. The city of Amalfi follows not long thereafter.
1033: Tashfin ibn Makhsan evicts the young Kalbid Emir, Jafar III, from Palermo and moves in. The Kalbid Emirate becomes the Zawid Emirate, but conflicts continue as Arabo-Sicilian factions continue to resist the Berber takeover. Sicily functions at this point as an extension of Zirid Ifriqiya.
1044: A Sicilian attempt to seize Calabria from the flagging Romans is pushed back by Bulgarian mercenaries under contract to Salerno. The Sicilian Berbers are pushed back to a tenuous hold on Reggio, aborting any further hope of Zawid expansion into Italy.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Crying Survivor: Last Centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire - Yunus Pagonis, International Scholastic Press, AD 2008

- Chapter 6 -
OUTSIDE CONTEXT PROBLEMS​

With the death of Constantine IX Maleinos in 1044, felled by liver failure after years of hard drinking and large living, the crown skipped over his firstborn son and landed instead upon the brow of the son he fathered a few years after his ascension the purple. This young man ascended the throne as Eustathios Porphyrogenitus at the age of just seventeen, and he proved every bit the venal spender his father was, albeit somewhat more engaged in the affairs of running the empire.

On the surface, most of the Roman Empire's challenges seemed to be internal. What Eustathios missed were problems any ruler may have missed, occurring as they were well beyond the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire - and in many cases, beyond seas and across vast grasslands. And yet it was the Maleinos dynasty which laid the foundations for some of these problems, particularly those in the north.

Broadly, the future of the Empire was decided by the migrations of two distinct peoples.

In the north, across the Black Sea, the inevitable migration west of the northernmost tribes of the Turkic and Tungusic peoples resulted in a new wave of men moving into the western Pontic steppe: The Cumans, westernmost of the Kipchak peoples. While these people are well-attested in history, their actual ethnogenesis is fairly unclear, and they seem to have had no real central government. Nevertheless, the Cumans began to move into the North Caucasus in the early 11th century, and into the Dnieper region around the 1030s and 1040s, largely following the Black Sea.

These interactions inevitably pushed another Turkic group - the Pechenegs. Stung by a series of defeats at the hands of the Cumans and the expanding Kievan Rus', the Pechenegs hurtled westwards, off the steppe and into the funnel of terrain between the Black Sea and the eastern Carpathians, and from there into the trough between the Carpathians and the Danube. They left the Cumans to trifle with the southern Rus', giving the Orthodox world even more problems.

It may be wondered what may have happened if the Bulgarian kingdom had been fully subjugated and annexed, and the Empire had extended itself to the Danube once more. As the greater remnant of the Pechenegs migrated to the Danube, they did not encounter Roman troops and Roman lands; rather, they instead migrated into lands nominally subject to the Bulgars, yet with the Empire badly beaten by the Greeks, the lands north of the Danube were left effectively unpoliced.

The land appears to have been peopled at that time largely by the ethnic group known as the Vlachs. Evidence beginning from the early 11th century turns up signs of stirrups and horseshoes in the Turkic style, novel in the area at the time - it attests to the gradual establishment of Pecheneg settlements in the lands of the Vlachs. Indeed, the modern city of Batas, at the confluence of the Olt with the Danube, seems to date from around this time, established as a long-term encampment for a group of Pechenegs fleeing deeper into Vlach territory.

This blending of ethnicities in the land then called Patzinakia by the Greeks would lay the foundations of what the lands between the Danube and the Carpathians would one day become. History refers to it today as the Vlacho-Pecheneg State, a place where the Pecheneg and Vlach populations began to blend together and experience cultural mixing - but the gradual adoption of the proto-Vlach language of the region by the Pechenegs would take time and generations of interbreeding.[1]

While some of the Pechenegs settled immediately and seem to have begun to take wives from among the native population, other groups crossed the Danube and began to raid into Bulgaria. Still recovering from the losses suffered against the Eastern Roman Empire, the Bulgars struggled to adequately respond to the redoubling of the familiar Pecheneg threat, with the raiders now coming with increased desperation.

The arrival of these raiders came during the tsardom of Presian II. The Tsar's initial expeditions to quell the raids proved ineffective; a Bulgar force was defeated outside of Constantiana in the mid-1040s as the Pechenegs struck cities and towns along the coast, mostly carrying away food and prisoners. Presian seems to have been massing for a counterattack in 1046, but some factions within the court advocated for a more conciliatory approach, viewing the intruders as potential help. The next year, Presian died under suspicious circumstances, said to have been found with his throat slit; the throne seemed ready to pass to his son, Peter, but instead a contender arose in the form of Troian, Presian's younger brother, backed by a noble faction with support from Pecheneg mercenaries.

With public sentiment generally leaning towards shame at Bulgaria's humiliation by the Greeks a decade or two prior, the commons and the nobility generally sided with Troian, who overcame Peter's armies on the field and imprisoned him. Troian took the throne as Tsar in 1048 and set to work settling Pechenegs on the south side of the Danube, and making inroads in the north with those tribes settling south of the Carpathians.

The growing alliance between the rump Pechenegs and the Bulgar Tsar - more in the nature at first of the nascent Vlacho-Pecheneg State acknowledging Bulgar suzerainty - would mark the first step in salvaging the fates of two peoples. The Bulgars, humbled at Byzantine hands, would gain an ally they could march back to power with - and the Pechenegs would escape becoming a mere footnote in history. Instead they became one of the most important cultures in Eurasian history.

-

The second migration of note came from farther afield and is somewhat harder to trace the origins of, yet much more spectacular in their journey. The Kizik Turks[2] represent one of the most intriguing stories in medieval history.


[1] OTL, the Pechenegs are basically a footnote after the Cumans come in and stomp them; they lost their national identity. Here, they settle in Wallachia for reasons outlined in the narrative. What you'll see out of this is a sort of Turco-Bulgar-Romance culture with a unique Eastern Romance language which takes not only from Slavic, but from the Oghuz Turkic language the Pechenegs spoke.
[2] The Kizik are a tribe of the Oghuz Yabgu - the tribe from whence came the descendants of Seljuk, himself a member of the Kinik tribe. OTL, these guys are apparently part of the great big Oghuz confederation who came along with the Seljuks, and we know little about them save that they were one of the tribes. Little changes! Little changes. But you'll see more soon.

SUMMARY:
1030s: Badly beaten in conflicts with the Cuman-Kipchak Khaganate and an expanding Kievan Rus', the Pechenegs migrate off the Pontic Steppe and head for the Danube. They begin to settle among the Vlachs between the river and the Carpathian Mountains
1044: The Bulgars are defeated in a major Pecheneg raid on Constantiana. The ailing empire is split on how best to deal with them.
1046-48: Tsar Presian II of Bulgaria is killed. His son Peter is overthrown by Presian's brother and Peter's uncle, Troian, who hires Pecheneg mercenaries and invites them to settle along the Danube. The Pechenegs align with Bulgaria.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Medieval Papacy and the History of Europa - Pierluigi Diodati, International Scholastic Press, AD 2007

The Latter Theophylacti
John XVIII and Beyond​

While some in the halls of power at the Lateran chafed at the appointment of Bernward of Hildesheim as Pope Sergius V, feeling him to be a patsy for a boy emperor, most generally came around to viewing him at least neutrally if not positively. That said, he had ruffled the feathers of traditionalists with his learned ways, and some in the public alleged that he possessed a wheel of fortune, invoked pagan gods, consorted with demons and worshipped Beelzebub. Thus it was with some relief among the Roman public that the death of Sergius was met in 1023, evidently of natural causes.

Sergius lived just long enough to see Otto IV onto the throne as Holy Roman Emperor, crowning the boy in 1022. The young emperor, raised by his mother, the Empress Dowager Zoe, was nothing like his father. Otto III had been a brilliant man, yet one prone to twisted acts of tyranny and ruthlessness.

By contrast, our portrait of Otto IV - largely drawn from the writings of Pandolfo, Bishop of Mantua, Otto's contemporary - paints the young emperor as a man of an artistic mindset and a conciliatory demeanor, packaged along with a touch of naïveté. He was viewed as well as somewhat Greek in his mannerisms, with the consequence that histories of the time often deride him as unmanly or otherwise questionably Saxon. The young monarch came to the throne surrounded by vassals skeptical of him and the Roman populace uneasy about him, though at least relieved that he did not seem to be a tyrant.

Not long after the coronation of Otto, Sergius V died, evidently of natural causes. At the time, Otto had returned home to see to a dispute in the newly-incorporated Duchy of Bohemia, leaving affairs in Rome comparatively neglected. As such, upon the occasion of Sergius's passing, the curia met swiftly, where they elected Alberic, the younger brother of Theophylact II, then the Count of Tusculum.[1] Theophylact himself had been one of the engineers behind Sergius's election, seeking to place his own candidate on the throne before veering his support behind Sergius; he had inherited the fief of Tusculum some time thereafter, but still enjoyed immense support among the Roman nobility and clergy, enough to engineer Alberic onto the throne.

Alberic received the consent of the bishops and took the name of John XVIII, but without immediate sanction from Otto, who was engaged in Bohemia at the time. Upon hearing word of the ascension of a Pope without his sanction, the young Emperor quickly sent an emissary to Rome in the form of a relatively loyal noble-ecclesiast in the form of Ulrich, Prince-Bishop of Passau, and a small body of troops.

The situation never came to bloodshed; catching wind of Ulrich's approach to Rome, John left the city and headed north to parley with him at Modena, where the pontiff acknowledged the supremacy of the Holy Roman Emperor and appealed for his sanction. A mollified Ulrich carried word to Otto at Magdeburg, and the young ruler, seemingly taking John at his word, agreed to confirm him as Pope. The confirmation took place in 1024.

While John publicly espoused allegiance to Otto, he proved to be a canny man with a keen political mind and a strong ambition. He quickly identified the doubts many in the Empire had about Otto, and the weakness of the Empire in Italy, with many nominal Holy Roman vassals there still uneasy over their treatment at the hands of Otto III. The latter situation he attempted to address through personal diplomacy, seeking to improve his own family's position as well as that of the Emperor.

As to Otto's weakness, John rectified that in the north soon enough, though opportunity seems to have come knocking. Since 982, the Bishopric of Brandenburg had been effectively titular following the site's near-obliteration by Polabian Slavs dwelling between the Elbe and the Oder. Bishops continued to be appointed, but ruled from Magdeburg. This held true until 1028, when the newly-appointed Bishop Dietmar sought to restore Brandenburg to its physical see. Hiring an army of German and Norman mercenaries, he set forth to Brandenburg to attempt to rein in the Slavs in the area.

Dietmar's expedition proved disastrous. While he seems to have initially retaken Brandenburg from the Slavs of the Hevelli tribe, his campaign quickly bogged down, and his force was ultimately ambushed in the northern forests by a Pagan army. Dietmar himself was dragged from his horse and killed in what seems to have been an especially brutal fashion, but a number of churchmen fled back to Brandenburg along with the remnants of the army. They did not stay for long: The Slavs quickly overran the bishopric again and razed the camp there, with raiding parties pursuing the Germans back to Magdeburg.

Tales of the death of Bishop Dietmar spread in Magdeburg, a traditional power base of the Ottonians. Sensing an opportunity, Pope John travelled into Germany to meet the young Otto IV. In a meeting at Mainz, the pontiff urged Otto to rein in the violence of the Slavs and "spread the word of the Lord unto them." The Emperor seems to have warmed to the idea when John spoke of it as a coming "Adventus Christi" - the long-awaited "Arrival in Christ" for the pagans dwelling between the two rivers. Otto took to the idea with greater gusto, and John again preached the idea of "Adventus Christi," this time from the pulpit, calling upon the German nobles to support Otto in dealing with the Slavs and bringing the word of God to them in earnest.

It is thus John XVIII to whom we owe the idea of Adventures. The initial Adventure - the so-called Adventure of Otto - was a comparatively limited venture, though large for its day, with Otto massing his forces with those of a number of his nobles and wheeling north.

The Adventure was a bloody affair, with the Holy Roman armies retaking Brandenburg against stiff opposition and then clawing their way towards the lands of the Obotrites, where the Adventure stalled out. The armies spent some years pacifying the countryside around Brandenburg, with more than a few forcible baptisms of pagan Slavs and a chain of murders, rapes and atrocities.[2]

While the Adventure cost the Empire a great deal of effort, it did achieve a number of things. Most directly, it established German control over the Havelland; Brandenburg would remain firmly ensconced within the Holy Roman Empire's de facto control henceforth, and would serve as a forward base for future actions against the Slavs, some more successful than others. The Adventure also helped to secure Otto's popularity among his vassals. His focus on northern affairs and spreading the Gospel to the Slavs helped to downplay the sense of him as "too Greek-like" in his ways, and established him as a fighting man and a man of God.

The Adventure had longer-reaching consequences, though - namely, they increased the influence of the Theophylacti within Italy as Pope John and Count Theophylact increasingly took on the roles of the Emperor's men in the south. They also brought to prominence Hermann IV, Duke of Swabia, who distinguished himself during the Adventure as a brilliant military commander and gained acclaim for both his dynamism and his piety. Hermann, of the Conradine line, would go on to become a pivotal figure in Holy Roman history going forward.

John XVIII did not long outlast the Adventure; he perished of dysentery in 1036. His death promptly threw the Papacy into crisis as a group of Italian bishops backed Octavianus, John XVIII's younger brother, to succeed him as Pope, while Otto sought to appoint a German bishop, Eberhard of Worms. And yet a third candidate emerged as a growing opposition party, resentful of the Emperor's control of the Papacy and seeking to assert the sovereignty of the Pope over temporal rulers, backed Ranerius, the Bishop of Lucera, an ardent reformer and supporter of papal supremacy.


[1] Theophylact is OTL Pope Benedict VIII; he was born a couple years after the POD, but before the butterflies really migrated beyond France. He either gets in just under the wire or just over it. Either way, he's a different man here in terms of the life he led, rather more political than religious. While OTL Theophylact did have a brother named Alberic, this Alberic is also a completely different man - in this case genetically and in terms of his life. OTL, Alberic never became Pope; ITTL he's the Tusculan candidate because Theophylact has already inherited Tusculum.
[2] An Adventure is not quite the Crusades; it's much smaller in scale and rather more localized. At this point it represents the Holy Roman Empire taking a firmer hand in stomping down the Great Slav Rising, mostly so that the Pope can have a free hand in Italy.

SUMMARY:
1023: Pope Sergius V dies. Alderic, brother of Count Theophylact II of Tusculum, is elevated to the Papaxy as John XVIII, receiving a delayed approval from Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV.
1028-29: Dietmar, Bishop of Brandenburg, attempts to retake the See of Brandenburg from the Hevelii tribe of the Slavs. His expedition ends in disaster, with Dietmar himself being killed brutally and Brandenburg being quickly retaken.
1029-30: The Adventure of Otto begins. Urged by Pope John XVIII to bring Christ to the Slavs living near the Elbe, Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV begins a brutal campaign in the north.
1034: The Adventure of Otto succeeds in cementing Holy Roman control of Brandenburg and de facto control over the Havelland.
1036: Pope John XVIII dies of dysentery. A papal succession struggle ensues between German candidate Bishop Eberhard of Worms, Octavianus of Tusculum, and an Italian reform candidate, Bishop Ranerius of Lucera.

 

[Planet of Hats]

I just realised no one has asked about poland. How are they? Will they get into space?
Edit has something happened to the map? It appears on my phone with an x through it.

As far as Poland goes, by the by, our POD hits about ten years after the baptism of Mieszko I, and the butterflies took a few years to proliferate across the continent, so for the first few years things went much as they did OTL. The biggest change was in the mid-990s; Adalbert of Prague never returned to Prussia, instead maintaining his diocese at Gniezno for a time at the urging of Boleslaus I. Some missionary activity did take place, but in general was at a lower key.

Boleslaus I himself grew up to be a somewhat softer man, as opposed to his neighbour, the more-tyrannical-than-in-life Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. The resulting interplay between the two resulted in Boleslaus being too anxious about Otto's intentions to truly assert the independence of Poland, and the Polish continued to pay tribute, with the Diocese of Gniezno continually under the thumb of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg.

The death of Otto left the HRE under the thumb of a regency council for the infant Otto IV, largely steered by his mother, the Empress Dowager Zoe. With an armed succession struggle breaking out as Duke Hermann II of Swabia made a bid for the imperial crown, the Empire's eye was taken off the Duchy of Poland, and Boleslaus began moving to assert some degree of independence. Pope John XVII, an anti-Ottonian, sanctified the Diocese of Wroclaw as an independent Polish bishopric answerable to the Holy See rather than subordinating it to Gniezno, giving Poland its first truly independent arm of the church. This status was upheld by Pope Sergius IV in 1010, and while he was soon succeeded by an Ottonian candidate as Sergius V, Wroclaw was left alone. From here Poland acted as a tributary duchy of the Holy Roman Empire, semi-independent but still looking towards Germany.

Here, as in life, the Christianization of Poland was difficult, and hindered by Boleslaus's struggles to centralize his authority. While the Polish dukes were Christian, much of the populace remained skeptical, especially in Pomerania, where Polish authority was scant. Seeking to strengthen his position, Boleslaus appealed to Sergius V to crown him a King, but the German pontiff demurred, particularly with Otto IV still not yet crowned. All the while, Poland was troubled by regular revolts in the countryside, particularly in the north, as the pagans of the land chafed against Christianity.

Boleslaus died in 1029 and left things to his son, Casimir, an ambitious man with big plans who also counted Otto IV as a friend. Eager to pursue his father's dream of a kingship, he joined Otto IV on his Adventure into the Havelland. This paid off: As a reward for his service in the Adventure, Otto crowned Casimir King of Poland in 1035.

Meanwhile, back home, the frequency of rebellions against the Polish nobles was increasing, and the landholders met word of Casimir's coronation with skepticism, fearing a loss of their own authority. Tensions ran high, especially with Casimir taking his sweet time to get home: He stopped at Rome to be confirmed as King by Pope John XVIII in early 1036, not long before John's death.

As Casimir returned home, the mounting heat boiled over and erupted into a massive pagan rebellion. The new King arrived back in Gniezno only to find mobs of angry villagers rampaging across the countryside, sacking castles and villages and burning churches. The Diocese of Wroclaw was torched in 1037 as the rebellion gained steam. Casimir laboured mightily to rein it in, but his nobles in some cases worked at cross purposes to him, many seeking to protect their own fiefdoms not only from the pagans, but from him. An attempt on Casimir's life was made in 1038; the king was slashed in the face and would carry a deep scar for the rest of his life. The assassin was traced back to his brother Boleslaus, supported by a group of landholders opposed to Casimir. Men were sent to capture Boleslaus from a castle outside Poznan; while they successfully reduced the castle and captured the prince, the small army was set upon by pagan rebels en route back to Gniezno and scattered.

As in life, chaos reigned in Poland in the late 1030s; however, with Poland a smaller, weaker nation tied more closely and virtually tributary to the Holy Roman Empire, Casimir - in it up to his neck - was able to appeal to his friend, Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, for aid. From there the appeal went on to the Pope, leading to the Polish Adventure - a German attempt to put down the pagan rebellion in Poland with military force and convert the rebels to Christianity by the sword, sending men to the aid of Casimir. Most prominent among them was a descendant of Otto IV's old nemesis: Hermann IV, the energetic young Duke of Swabia.

Hermann was the son of Hermann III, who had died in his early thirties after ruling from 1014 to 1026. That had put Hermann IV on the throne at the tender age of 13. He'd rounded into an excellent military leader with a religious zeal that shone through with a crystal-clear light, and he jumped at the opportunity to spread the word of God. The rebellion in Poland gave the young Duke of Swabia - still in his twenties, and barely a man at the time of his sterling performance in the Adventure of Otto - yet another occasion to shine, and to grow his reputation within Christendom.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Forever Young: Adalbert, King of the Franks - Reinhard Folkner, Barentholtz Books, 2004

-8-
William's War​

The matter of Aquitaine came to a head in 1029 following the death of Duke William V of that great duchy. Fearing the accession of Aquitaine into the hands of William VI, the 15-year-old half-Basque son of the Queen of Pamplona, a troubled King Adalbert resolved to keep the Duchy within Francia. Upon the death of William V, Adalbert proclaimed his own son, Henry, as Duke of Aquitaine, and marched his levies south to Aquitaine to make good his decree.

Initially the war seemed to lean in the direction of the Frankish monarch. Aquitaine and Pamplona had both spent the past few years mired in war with the Moors of al-Andalus, with running battles between Zaragoza and Viguera gradually wearying both sides of combat. And William had been assured of the support of Richard III, Duke of Normandy.

However, Norman support for Adalbert would never come. Instead, joined by some of his vassals, most notable among them the Count of Vermandois, Adalbert marched south to find that, even without the aid of Richard, he nevertheless had near-total mastery of the battlefield. With William struggling to muster his wounded armies north from the Pyrenees, Adalbert, accompanied by his cousin Count Guy of Vermandois, quickly launched an assault on the unready defenses of Issoudun, finding the city garrison wholly unprepared for an attack. The city was quickly taken, but not without escapees; a monk named Adenulf is said to have escaped on horseback, flying ahead of the Frankish column and making haste to Deols. When Adalbert and Guy moved on, they found the city preparing for them.

Again Adalbert simply moved against the city, storming it and capturing it in a short time. In the fighting, the great Benedictine abbey of Our Lady of Deols was damaged, and Adalbert is said to have donated what he could to repair it, otherwise giving his troops run of the town for a time. Soon enough, he moved on, pressing westward in the hopes of launching a lightning strike against Poitiers, aiming to wrest the seat of William's power from him and install his own son upon the ducal throne.

Word quickly reached William's regent, Queen Sancha of Pamplona, of the situation in the north. Entrusting Geoffrey, Count of Angouleme with the campaign, Sancha set up a regency council to guide William, then sent rider north in search of allies.

Adalbert and Guy seem to have found Poitiers fortified and ready to fight, and settled in to try and choke off the city, issuing repeated demands for the gates to be opened for the rightful Duke. The gates, however, remained closed, and the Frankish army settled into a waiting game, hoping to starve out the city before William could arrive.

Geoffrey made better time than Adalbert expected. Informed of the approach of the Aquitanian host by his scouts, Adalbert seems to have decided that time had run out. He ordered an assault on the city, but found himself bickering with Count Guy over the decision, Guy evidently seeing the folly in trying to storm a city on a promontory, as old Poitiers was at the time. The two came to a stalemate, and Adalbert retired to his tent, leaving Guy unsure what to do. The army held outside the city for a time, but by the time Adalbert woke the next morning and decided to pull out, it was too late, and Geoffrey's forces were already entering the theatre of battle.

Though somewhat weary of marching and outnumbered by three men for every two by the Frankish army, Geoffrey's force had the advantage of consisting mostly of veterans of the Aquitanian-Andalusian War, battle-hardened survivors who had seen combat against the Moors and lived to tell about it. Adalbert's army was composed mostly of raw recruits drawn from his significantly smaller estates at the heart of France, bolstered by a few mercenaries and some troops from Burgundy and Vermandois. The Aquitanian army, with Geoffrey in the van, swept in to find the Frankish army in the process of an orderly withdrawal. Catching Adalbert's force by surprise, Geoffrey fell upon the Frankish left and smashed it fairly easily but encountered stiffer resistance as Guy's core forces managed to regroup and reinforce their formation. Nevertheless, the sudden attack left many of the less experienced Frankish men antsy, and a number broke and fled, leaving Guy and Adalbert with a diminished force.

A couple of strong cavalry charges broke the Frankish lines and caused havoc, and Guy was wounded in the thigh by an errant spear; Adalbert quickly called the retreat. Pursued east by Geoffrey, Adalbert retreated to Deols and secured himself there, managing to repulse an initial attempt to dislodge him and holding out long enough to receive reinforcements from Duke Fulk of Anjou, an old enemy of William's father. However, Fulk's reinforcement of Adalbert was half-hearted at best, the line of Ingelger having its own ambitions upon the Francian throne.

Sancha and William, meanwhile, received word in 1030 of the support of Richard III of Normandy, combining two of the most powerful of Francia's vassals against the King. Adalbert suffered a series of defeats through the year and into 1031, though notably repulsing another attempt to take Deols, while an army under Guy of Vermandois successfully pushed back a Norman bid to restore their control of Dreux. The war became something of a massive cipher for the various feudal dukes of Francia, with virtually everyone being sucked in on various sides as a pretext to press their own petty disputes against one another.

By 1032, William had reached the age of eighteen, though some evidence suggests he was ruling by 1031. Influenced by his mother, William grew up an ambitious, aggressive man with a tactical flair and a love of learning, but his defiant character ensured that he would clash with Adalbert no matter what.

The Aquitanian dispute was far from forgotten. In 1034, upon receipt of another demand that he relinquish his duchy to Henry, William sent back a letter to Adalbert, signing himself as "Duke and mayhap King by Right over Aquitaine, and Gascogne, and protector of Navarre." The title of King of Aquitaine had long since slipped into a nominal status, little more than a meaningless titular title; William's claiming of it raised a few eyebrows, and some of his allies reconsidered their support. The war ground down into a stalemate; William pushed back a bid by Anjou to seize Thouars, and while he successfully retook Deols in 1034, Adalbert took it back in 1035.

Finally, however, the fighting wound down as relief forces from Pamplona began to join the fighting, the war against al-Andalus long since concluded at the expense of the petty kingdom of Viguera. With the dynamic presence of Queen Sancha in the diplomatic picture, overtures began to mediate between William and Adalbert. A conference was held at Bourges, William demanding the acknowledgment of his overlordship over Aquitaine and the return of the county of Berry to his control, from Deols on northward. Adalbert, meanwhile, seems to have mishandled the negotiations, agreeing to return the territory only if William abdicated.

The summit resulted in a grudging truce, but no agreement. William marched home, and Adalbert continued to occupy Deols and Issoudun as Frankish territories, continuing to claim Aquitaine for his son.

Furious and expecting an attack from Francia again, William seems to have surrendered any pretense of loyalty to a crown he felt betrayed him. He refused to pay taxes or tribute to the King of Francia, then moved swiftly to wed Almodis, the younger daughter of William III, Count of Toulouse.[1] The marriage sealed an alliance between two of the preeminent nobles in the South of France, though it would not bring Toulouse under Aquitainian control by any means. Nevertheless, historians consider the Aquitaine-Toulouse alliance following William's War the effective end of Adalbert's ability to exercise control south of Anjou.

Francia settled into an uneasy peace over the next decade, with William moving to consolidate his position within Aquitaine and strengthen his kingdom. However, Adalbert struggled with the fallout of the war, with his vassals realizing he was something of a paper tiger. By 1044, Adalbert, forever known as the Young, would be dead of poison, with contemporaries suspecting it to be on the orders of the Count of Blois.

William seems to have lobbied for kingship of Francia following Adalbert's death. Nevertheless, he was not seriously considered, and his pursuit was shuttled aside in favour of the bid of Fulk IV, Count of Anjou[2] at the time. Buying support from a number of northern landholders, Fulk was elevated to the throne in Paris as King Fulk I, beginning the reign of the House of Ingelger over a weakened Francia and ensuring border tensions with Aquitaine would continue, given the designs of Anjou upon William's holdings.


[1] William Taillefer was born in 970 - just before the POD. He had a few more kids here than in OTL.
[2] Not Geoffrey Martel - different name, different man.

SUMMARY:
1029: William's War. Adalbert the Young, King of Francia, attempts to install his son as Duke of Aquitaine in the hopes of preventing the realm from passing into the control of the Basque monarchs of Pamplona. A general rout grips Francia for the next few years as virtually every landholder uses the excuse to settle their own petty disputes.
1036: William's War ends in a grudging truce, with Aquitaine nominally still "part of France" but de facto independent.
1044: King Adalbert the Young is killed. The resulting succession struggle brings the Count of Anjou to the throne as King Fulk I. The rule of the House of Ingelger over Francia begins. Aquitaine ceases to consider itself a nominal part of France as tensions mount between the two old rival houses.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Sources for the Fatimid Caliphate - Saud al-Bikri, International Scholastic Press, AD 2004

6. One "Mad" Caliph and a Decent Caliph​

Serious historiography dismisses the supposition that Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was a "Mad Caliph." While his reign was certainly erratic and marked by overwhelming paranoia and an excess of decapitations, from the standpoint of history, al-Hakim strengthened the hand of Shia Islam in the Middle East while also leaving the Fatimid Caliphase in a stronger position relative to its neighbours. However, his reign also exascerbated internal tensions within the Caliphate and directly led to his removal from power.

While the succession struggles within the Eastern Roman Empire would no doubt have provided al-Hakim with ample opportunity to make territorial gains, for the most part his will was set against the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimids' neighbour in the Middle East and perennial religious rival, albeit then under the lordship of the Buyid dynasty of Persia. The Abbasids infamously denounced al-Hakim from mosques across their dominion at every opportunity; with the young Fatimid Caliph rumoured to be the son of a Christian woman and reputed to bear sympathy towards Christians, he was tarred with this transgression at every opportunity.

More than that, however, al-Hakim faced intense internal competition, particularly between Berbers, Turks and Daylamites in the Fatimid military and at court. Al-Hakim assumed the Caliphate at just nine years old, in 994,[1] finding himself caught between these striving factions. As he grew into a man, observing the often-bloody struggles between these groups, he seems to have increasingly grown to realize that he would never truly be able to assert himself with so many schemers around him. The appellation "the Mad" seems to have come from within his own court, particularly among old Kutama Berbers, not long after he came of age.

Upon reaching his majority, al-Hakim seems to have ordered a sweeping purge of his court's inner circle, imprisoning and executing key leaders and their supporters among the Berber and Turk factions and filling their offices with new leadership personally loyal to him. In contrast to future trends elsewhere, particularly among the Abbasids where real power lay in the hands of the Buyid shahanshahs, power in Fustat if anything became more centralized and autocratic under al-Hakim, who took a dim view towards striving men and kept his executioner busy beheading plotters and schemers throughout his reign.

In contrast to his internal attitude at court, al-Hakim cut a relatively peaceful course towards the Eastern Roman Empire. While he did secure lordship over Aleppo through earning the fealty of the landholders there, he never launched a military campaign against the scattered Romans, preferring instead to clash with the Buyids - and obligated instead to stave off regular Qarmatian attacks along the Arabian frontiers of his empire.

Hard of heart toward striving men as he was, al-Hakim also had time to produce some hardships for religious minorities under his rule, notably outlawing all sale of wine, including by Christians and Jews who used it in their religious rituals.[2] The decisions provoked unrest in the Levant but seem to have served as a means for al-Hakim to separate himself from the scurrilous rumours of his sympathy for Christianity, which continued to haunt him in mosques across the Abbasid realm. A minor revolt in Jerusalem was brutally put down in 1008 over the issue but al-Hakim otherwise left it to his local landholders to deal with these affairs, focusing instead on rooting out perceived traitors within his own realm.

Over the years of his reign, al-Hakim's nature as an obsessive paranoiac led to his court becoming a sparsely-populated place notable mainly for its high turnover. His propensity to simply murder his rivals in cold blood led him to put his own son under the headsman's blade in 1015 on the suspicion that the boy, barely twelve, was being propped up as a replacement by a court faction. Along with the boy came a vast purge of the Turk faction at court, with their most recent wave of leaders thinned out. Open fighting broke out in the streets of Fustat as the Turk elements of the military attempted to revolt, only to be put down by the Kutama Berber faction.

And yet it would be the Kutamas who engineered the death of al-Hakim in late 1017; it would appear that court leaders under the Berber leader Salih ibn Jaysh[3] finally engineered a successful attempt on al-Hakam's life. The assassin, a white eunuch by the name of Fahid, seems to have been a trusted servant of al-Hakam, but ultimately used that trust to get close enough to the Caliph to stab him seven times and throw him out a window.

In the ensuing succession struggle, Salih seems to have become the key figure at court, propping up the second of al-Hakim's four sons, just eight years old, and given the regnal name of al-Musta'in Bi'llah.[4] The young man, son of al-Hakim and an Arab woman, was under the control of a Berber-dominated regency council for the first few years of his life but displayed a steadiness and dignity his father lacked - and a willingness to trust to a degree.

Emerging from the court intrigue of a regency council largely controlled by Berbers, and with the Turks in the military grumbling and leaderless, al-Musta'in took the reins in 1025 with some skepticism among many segments of society, with some hoping he wouldn't be the erratic paranoiac his father was. He proved to be the first of three good Caliphs who solidified the Fatimid position against long odds.

While not the most assertive of men, al-Musta'in seems to have been an excellent conciliator, enough so that he was able to restore some lost privileges to the Turks and mollify them enough to quell some of the infighting between Turks, Berbers and Daylamites in the military. His personal style favoured conflict resolution and compromise, and he developed a reputation for fairness and justice. His treatment of religious minorities was moderate, with Christians and Jews once more restored to the ability to purchase and utilize wine in their religious ceremonies, quieting some of the grumbling out of the Holy Land.

Moreover, al-Musta'in turned his focus outward moreso than his father did, recognizing the opportunities in the relative weakness of the Buyid dynasty at the time, under the overlordship of a somewhat hapless Baha' al-Dawla.[5] Seeking to maintain peace with the Byzantine Emperor of the time, the freshly-enthroned Constantine IX Maleinos, al-Musta'in turned his attention on solidifying his affairs in Mesopotamia, with the intent of eventually making a play for Baghdad and unifying the Muslim world under one caliphate - his own. His outreach to the 'Uqaylids brought the lords of Mosul towards the Fatimid camp, the Shi'a lords there being rather more inclined to recognize one of their own than to stand at the mercies of the Buyids and Abbasids, while a rebellion in Aleppo was put down with application of copious numbers of Berber horsemen. Over the next decade or so, al-Musta'in clashed with the Buyids and extended Fatimid hegemony into the upper Euphrates, drawing closer to Baghdad but never quite getting there.

A new wrinkle in the constant struggles in the centre of the Arab world came around the time of the beginning of these campaigns, in the 1020s, in the form of a migration of a large number of Oghuz Turks to the region. These Turks, the first wave of nomads fleeing oppressive taxation within the Oghuz Yabgu state around the Aral and Caspian Seas, came mostly from the Yuregir clan and had been expelled following their defeat at the hands of the dominant clans. Some several thousand Turks migrated into Tabaristan, then under the control of the nominally autonomous Ziyarids, and settled around the city of Rasht, effectively taking it over.

The Yuregir - simply called "Turkmen" at the time - were largely pagan upon their arrival, though under the leadership of the military leader Togtekin, many among them converted to Sunni Islam; a large number of Nestorians were also among them. Their arrival deeply unsettled the balance of power in Tabaristan and led to an increasing dominance of Turks in their affairs. More to the point, it put a large body of well-trained Sunni horsemen in play as mercenaries.

A bid by al-Musta'in in 1034 to push down the Euphrates to Baghdad proved abortive; the Buyids reached out to the north and brought in a number of Yuregir Turkmens from Rasht, and the steppe horsemen proved fearsomely effective against the Fatimid army, tipping the balance in battle and driving the Shia back up the river. By that time, the Buyid leader, Baha' al-Dawla, had finally died, replaced by his grandson, who took the moniker of al-Majid al-Dawla.

Around 1033, meanwhile, the westernmost elements of the Fatimid Caliphate - those of the Central Maghreb - renounced Shia Islam and swore fealty to the Abbasid Caliph, coming into their own as the Qaidid Emirate under Qaid ibn Hammad. This betrayal, together with the ensconcement of the Zawids in Sicily that same year, marked the commencement of a slow decline in Fatimid authority in North Africa, though for the time, the Zirids of Ifriqiya maintained their allegiance to Fustat.

With his eye largely on the Middle East and Egypt at this point, al-Musta'in dispatched a body of Sanhaja horsemen west to Mahdia with the authority to support the Zirid claim over the central Maghreb. In practice, little came of it, and the two west African groups settled into a sort of uneasy truce, though both remained oblivious to the growing fervency within the nearby Ibadi communities in the desert - tensions which would begin to boil over in the years to come.

The 1040s were largely a peaceful decade for al-Musta'in, though a raid by the Qarmatians of Bahrein was put down abruptly. For the most part the Caliph focused his energies on building and saving, levying new taxes on pilgrims to fill his coffers, much to the grumbling of Christian visitors to the Holy Land. These improvements went into building mosques and forts across the land as the Fatimids attempted to consolidate their hold on the Middle East and in Aleppo.

The decades ahead would test that preparation.[6]


[1] Al-Aziz Billah bites the dust a couple years earlier.
[2] Al-Hakim is somewhat less erratic towards Christians and Jews ITTL simply because he's so preoccupied chopping off the heads of his courtiers. That said, he's still taking some time out to give them grief. No razing of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this time.
[3] A son of Jaysh ibn Samsam, once governor of Tripoli - ITTL one of the people al-Hakim took the ol' choppy-choppy sword to.
[4] Al-Hakim got a little busier in this timeline in terms of his number of offspring.
[5] ITTL, this man died at 41, in 1012. Here he's getting into his late 50s and isn't much better at defending his borders.
[6] That's the last interlude piece this time around. Let's get back to al-Andalus and the Chapter 3 update. Map coming!

SUMMARY:
1015: Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim beheads his first son, along with a number of Mamluks, on the suspicion that they were plotting to overthrow him. The resulting revolt and wave of factional violence temporarily pulls the teeth of the Turkish faction at court.
1017: Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim is stabbed repeatedly and thrown out a window by a conspirator working with a court faction of Kutama Berbers. They prop up his eight-year-old son as his successor, al-Musta'in.
1023: A group of some few thousand Oghuz Turks, of the Yuregir clan, migrate to Tabaristan and settle en masse around Rasht and other cities. While most arrive as pagans or Nestorians, a large number under the general Togtekin begin to convert to Sunni Islam.
1034: Fatimid Caliph al-Musta'in, having extended his control to much of the upper Euphrates, makes a play for Baghdad. He is thwarted then the Buyids of Baghdad bring in Turkic mercenaries from Rasht to bolster their forces. The Yuregir horsemen turn the tide of the battle and the Fatimids are repelled.

 

[Planet of Hats]

SOMEWHERE OVER THE WORLD SEA
1322 HOURS LOCAL TIME


Ripping low over the waters of the Atlas Ocean, a long, gleaming shape rocketed, resplendent in snowy white with a regal green stripe down either side.

In the modern world, hydrocraft[1] were the fastest way to travel between the planet's only two continents - the Eastern World and the Algarves.[2] It made the journey almost impossibly fast without the dangers of high-altitude flight. The commercial hydroliner made good time, streaming over the water, its broad, short winglets not touching the waves, yet the sheer force streaming beneath them from the liner's hammerhead-like banks of six heavy thruster pods kicked up the water into a double fantail of white spray.

Through the line of heavy windows along the side of the hydrocraft, Iqal watched the ocean blur past. His seat was far enough forward that he avoided the common hydroliner complaint of looking out the window and only seeing the spray. Instead he was just above the wing root, and high, above the thruster stream - enough so to give him a clear view out over the ocean.

In the distance, he was pretty sure he could see a whale breaching. It lasted about a second before the hydroliner sailed onward, the insistent whine of thrust outside muted inside the cabin to ensure that all he heard was the most subtle of thrums through the deck. A comfortable ride.

He dipped a hand into his pocket, coming out with his portable commie.[3] A quick check of the screen popped up a time. Close to 13:30. Still a few hours left.

"The more you check it, the longer it's going to take, you know," murmured Feyik from the seat to Iqal's left, cracking an eye open and shifting his hands in his lap.

Iqal shook his head, keeping his voice quiet. "Thought you were gonna sleep."

"I'm workin' on it." Feyik closed his eyes again and exhaled slowly through his nose. "Hard to do when you're anticipating, right?"

"You've got hours to anticipate. We won't arrive in Lishbuna for awhile," Iqal pointed out.

"True."

With a smirk, Iqal reached down to the small pack he'd brought along, leaving it at his feet. He came out with a notebook, tapping it against his opposite palm. "See, should've brought something to read or write. Guess that's why I'm the smart one."

"Ugh, please, jam it in a little harder, why don't you." Feyik curled his lips for a moment, but it gave way to a wry smile. "You're really anticipating this too, huh."

"Yeah." Expression falling serious again, Iqal flipped his notebook open, resting his hands on the pages. "I've honestly never been to Andalus," he admitted. "It feels like getting in touch with a part of myself I never knew about. If it is a part."

Feyik shrugged easily, folding his hands in his lap once more. "Just take it for what it is. It's academics, sure, but it's also fun. Go see the sights. Take in the beaches."

Nodding once, Iqal turned the pages of the notebook, flipping through towards the most recent pages he'd been working on. "Guess until then I'll catch up on my notes," he mused quietly, trying not to let his eagerness show all that much.

He'd never left the Algarves in his life. Going back felt like retracing the steps of ancestors he barely knew.

~​

ACT THE THIRD

"WEST AND EAST"
or
"SWINGING PENDULUM"

THE MATTERS OF MUSLIM IBERIA AND THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE


~​

Notes, Iqal Alnamany, Away Week 2017: Dr. Mirza, as you asked, I've broken down the map of the world as of 1053 with some run-downs of "current affairs" at the time.

1. Umayyad Caliphate: As per our current readings. Al-Muntasir has just passed and left as his heir Muhammad II.

2. Aquitaine and Pamplona: The term Navarre starts to come into use around this time. Still in an uneasy truce with France. Queen Sancha of Pamplona is in her waning days, and William stands to inherit the Navarrese crown.

3. Holy Roman Empire and Poland: The Polish Adventure ended the pagan uprising but resulted in a weak Poland heavily under the thumb of the Holy Roman Emperors. Otto IV's reign continues, along with his preoccupation with getting a handle on paganism along his borders. His concern with converting the heathens has taken his eye off of affairs in Italy.

4. Hungary: Well into the reign of King Emeric at this point.[4] Seems to have taken care of a pagan uprising sometime in the 1030s and 40s.

5. Croatia: Holding its own under the reign of Svetoslav II. Reasonably close to the Eastern Roman Empire at this point and hanging on to its territory; Svetoslav himself is effectively the ERE's man in the region and was confirmed as the king of the Dalmatian territories, though relations with Hungary are a little questionable.

6. Angland: Cnut the Rich inherited Denmark after the death of a sibling in the late 1030s, but when he died in his own right in the 1040s he split his realm between them, with Sweyn II gaining Angland and Cnut IV taking over Denmark. At this point Sweyn II is busy poking irritably at the Brythons and the Irish and occasionally sniping back and forth with his brother. Apparently he and Cnut hate each other just about equally.

7. Kievan Rus': Holding together after the ugly succession wars in the early 1020s resulted in Sviatopolk the Devil[5] murdering most of his brothers in cold blood to secure the high principate of Kiev for himself. He's been dead for about a decade now, though his eldest son, Vladimir II, lasted about a year and a half as his successor before Sviatopolk's second son, Mstislav, has his throat slit and usurped his title. Currently getting some grief from a tidal wave of migrating Cumans beginning to hit his southern lands.

8. Eastern Roman Empire: Constantine IX Maleinos died in 1044, likely of a massive stroke. Reports of his being found dead surrounded by a half-eaten feast are probably propaganda, but his second son succeeded him as Eustathios I "the Purple-Born" at just 17 and proved to be somewhat less of a venal money-grubber than his dad, though that's still part of his character. After putting down a coup attempt by his older brother Niketas, he set to work spending money on public works projects. At the moment he's trying to crack down on Turkmen raiders coming in through Armenia, but not having much luck. Bulgars also beginning to give him grief again, and a lack of qualified generals from his father's days is getting in the way of his ability to do much.

9. Yemen: Jattab was a slave-soldier from somewhere in the Horn of Africa who overthrew the Ziyadids in roughly the mid-1030s.[6] At the moment his regime is tentatively cooperative with the Fatimids, but it's not the closest relationship despite both of them being Ismaili Shia.

10. Ghaznavids: Peaceful but soft under the reign of Mahmud II, great-grandson of Sabuktigin. Mahmud is a nice man but not particularly impressive, and most of his subjects don't respect him, but tolerate him because he lets them do as they please so long as they nod politely and pay tribute. Beginning to have problems with Oghuz Turks.

11. Awkar (Ghana): Still chipping along, trading salt and slaves up the Sahara.

12. Cumans and Kipchaks: They're coming.


[1] Ground-effect vehicles - gigantic things that look sort of like planes but really just fly at low altitude and high speed, using ground effect to keep in the air. ITTL, air travel exists, but most trans-oceanic travel is done this way. Who needs airships when you can have ekranoplans?
[2] Eurasia and the Americas respectively.
[3] As previously established, telephones ITTL are referred to as commies.
[4] Name's the same as the ill-fated son of Stephen I, but being born well after the POD, Emeric is a different man, more of a Perfectly Acceptable Monarch.
[5] Same guy. The butterflies hadn't quite gotten that far yet.
[6] See also the Najahids.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Most Unlikely Palm: How Medieval Andalus Survived and Thrived - Ibrahim Alquti, Falconbird Press, AD 2012

BIG MAN, SMALL MAN
The Transition from al-Muntasir to Muhammad II​

The transition of power from Caliph Hayyan "al-Muntasir" to his son, Muhammad II "ar-Rashid," presented al-Andalus with a serious challenge. Yet the nature of the new challenge was in many ways utterly systemic; even under the reign of al-Muntasir, a widely-respected caliph with a strong martial reputation and the support of a loyal hajib with exceptional fiscal and diplomatic gifts, the same old core issues of medieval al-Andalus had never gone away.

The root of the struggles al-Andalus would face in the mid-to-late 11th century lay in the transition of power from a strong man to a weaker man in a system which demanded a strong man.

This is not to say that Muhammad II was a bad man - only that he had large shoes to fill and could not possibly have been up to the task of filling them. Taking the throne at 31, ahead of his older brother Abdallah, Muhammad is said to have won his father's favour for his brace of fine personal attributes. A smart and pious man known for his personal charity and humility, he came to power with little by way of a reputation as a fighting man, but with the general goodwill of the court and the continuing support of his uncle, al-Azraq, as his hajib - though in point of fact most of the day-to-day management of the polity was in the hands of al-Azraq at this point.

And yet even during the latter years of the reign of al-Muntasir, issues had begun to percolate, not only at court but particularly in the military. The primary reserve of manpower al-Andalus traditionally drew upon for matters military had long been - and still remained - the Maghreb, from which various caliphs would import Berber groups from various clans as a semi-professional fighting force. Since the reign of Abd ar-Rahman III, however, the trend of buying in Saqaliba as slave-soldiers had begun a steady escalation, an approach embraced by Abd ar-Rahman's grandson, Hisham II, and his regent al-Mughira, then continued by al-Muntasir. By 1053, Saqaliba - many of them increasingly Arabized, the vast majority of them raised Muslim - made up a strong core of the military, particularly notable for the heavy cavalry dimension the Guard had adopted during the war in Navarre.

The other primary core consisted of Berbers of various tribes, with the dominant faction in the Maghreb being the Ifrinids - the Banu Ifran. Other Berbers had come over during the initial invasion of Iberia and remained, settling particularly in the north and west. These "Old Berbers" formed a powerful bloc in society, many of them at least semi-Arabized. Less numerous were the "New Berbers" like the conservative Ifrinids being more regularly employed these days Both factions looked at each other somewhat askance but clashed more regularly with the Saqaliba, whom they viewed as an inferior caste; conversely, the Saqaliba tended to view the Berbers as suspect and more loyal to their tribes than to the caliph.

Finally, the militaries employed by the various caliphs tended to incorporate varying numbers of Christian mercenaries, mostly hired men from the north, or in some cases locals. These men owed no particular loyalty to anyone save a paycheque.

Upon taking the throne, Muhammad II was faced with immediate grumbling between the Saqaliba and Berber factions, saying nothing of some discontent among the ruling minority of Arabo-Andalusians, some of whom had begun to view al-Muntasir as ceding too much power to the Saqaliba. Thus it was with that the first chalenge to Muhammad's rule came from within the Arabo-Andalusian ranks, almost before he could ascend the throne.

A Berber assassin is said to have attempted to ambush the Caliph-to-be outside the great mosque, where he had gone to worship; however, he was beaten there by Wahb, a Siqlabi within the service of al-Azraq, in the company of an armed body of men, and they took him back to the Madinat az-Zahra a jump ahead of a group of Sanhaja tribesmen in the service of another claimant, one al-Muhsin ibn Marwan, descended from Abd ar-Rahman III through his son Ubayd Allah. This man, a faris of minor repute, had been given the nickname of al-Ash'ab[1] at some point, and had strong relations among some of the more established families.

In any case, the attempt seems to have proven abortive, and Muhammad rose to the Caliphate with little opposition but a great deal of quiet grumbling. While his father's more dynamic and proactive personality - and the active personal charms of al-Azraq - had proven sufficient to keep wayward landholders and courtiers in line, by this point al-Azraq was in his sixties and growing weary, with more responsibilities falling into the hands of other palace functionaries. More to the point, the landholders found Muhammad to be a more passive personality than his father, and his authority over al-Andalus was significantly less as a result of it.

Not helping the cause was the time Muhammad had to spend in his first year or two tamping down palace conspiracies and attempts on his life. In the spring of 1053 he had his brother Abdallah placed under house arrest after the caliphal guard captured a poisoner in the kitchen; while the evidence connecting the two was not decisive, Muhammad seems to have thought it prudent to move swiftly to account for his sibling. Later in the year, an attempt was made on the life of the hajib, but the assassin - attempting to catch al-Azraq alone in the garden - was instead intercepted by one of the guard.

Seeking to raise his stature with those men still unsure or opposed to him, Muhammad called for a major campaign against the neighbouring Christians. Raids back and forth between Navarre and the semi-independent Tujibids of Saraqusta, with the newly-ensconced Usamids of the Ebro valley and Viguera continuing to be an object of mutual tension and Navarrese avarice, while the local lords in areas like Badajoz had similarly begun to take matters into their own hands to a greater degree than usual. Muhammad's campaign, while in the theme of the usual summer campaigns by the Andalusian caliphs held in the name of solidifying their legitimacy, would be rather larger, one of the largest since the conflict with Aquitaine.

Mustering thousands of men, Muhammad made a concession to the courtly faction by turning command of the army over to Ahmad ibn Abu-Bakr, a young member of the tribe of the Banu Qays and an Arabo-Andalusian. The young man found himself working overtime to keep down bickering between the Saqaliba and the Berber elements of the army, ultimately offsetting them with a healthy block of Christian mercenaries under Lucio Ramirez de Viseu out of the County of Portucale.

The raiding party crossed the Duero in the summer and attacked settlements mostly within the Spanish March, at the time ruled over by the Count of Barcelona and Urgell. With Francia still in a splintered state as the southern dukes spurned the authority of the newly-elected Ingelger monarchs, Count Borrell III found himself more or less left to his own devices as the Andalusi contingent sacked Barcelona itself, coming away with significant riches, a church bell, and a number of fixtures from the monastery of Sant Pau.[2] Borrell's letters to the King of Francia went without reply, and the raid is traditionally considered the effective end of the March's reliance on Francia for just about anything, though they nominally considered themselves Frankish vassals.

The successful raid quieted some of the murmurings at court, and 1053 passed into 1054 with no further attempts on Muhammad's life. While outlying landholders still tended towards their own affairs and the authority of Córdoba was much softer in those days, Muhammad had at least won himself some peace and quiet. However, the bickering between the Berber and Saqaliba elements of the army which had been such a concern during the campaign remained a sticky issue.

Yet the biggest challenge to Muhammad would come not from within the army, but at the hands of a man named Harun ibn Qays.


[1] Broad-Shoulders.
[2] Today's St. Paul of the Countryside.

SUMMARY:
1053: Caliph Muhammad II puts his brother under house arrest as he dodges a number of assassination attempts.
1053: Seeking to solidify his position, Caliph Muhammad II orders a major campaign for the summer's annual raids against the Christians around al-Andalus. The subsequent raid on Barcelona, led by Ahmad the Syrian, is successful enough to quiet Muhammad's doubters temporarily.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Most Unlikely Palm: How Medieval Andalus Survived and Thrived - Ibrahim Alquti, Falconbird Press, AD 2012


For someone of supposedly obscure origins, we know a surprising amount about the man known in Córdoban circles as Harun ibn Qays, sometimes known as al-Quti.[1]

The son of one Qays ibn Mus'ab, a local landholder along the south coast in the vicinity of Qadis, Harun claimed direct descent from Ilyan, Count of Sabta, the noble said to have provided the ships which ferried the party of Tariq ibn Ziyad to Gothic Iberia in the first place.[2] In fact it is unlikely that Harun's descent went back that far, and indeed it is likely that Harun's genealogy is only accurate back to about his grandfather's time. It had long been in vogue among muwallad citizens of higher means to forge genealogies for themselves, and it would seem that ibn Qays was no stranger to that trend.

Most likely, Harun chose to make the genealogical tie to Ilyan for deliberate reasons. Whatever the historical truth is about Ilyan, histories dating from the ninth and tenth centuries had already begun to describe him as the Christian lord who had lent his boats to Tariq to make the arrival of the Muslims in Iberia possible. We know that ibn Qays was a man of relatively excellent education who was highly literate and exceptionally well-read. Scholarly consensus has drifted towards the notion that ibn Qays adopted the Ilyan al-Sabti narrative as a political move, positioning himself as the descendant of someone not only present before Islam, but who was reputed to have invited Islam in.

More concrete facts about ibn Qays are somewhat more clear. He seems to have been born in the late 1010s or thereabouts, spending much of his early life on his family's lands outside Qadis before travelling to Córdoba to pursue higher learning. He's believed to have come into his education there. However, things seem to have gone sour on him: A couple mentions of an individual of the same name appear in some of the more obscure chapters of Palm of the West, referring to a man being judged in a dispute with a peer over some manner of theft.

Whatever the reality of the dispute was, the historical record suggests that ibn Qays was accused of stealing dinars from a colleague of Arabo-Andalusian descent, and that an order was handed down to detain. Joseph ibn Abram notes that ibn Qays then fled Córdoba in disgrace and was considered a fugitive

Some of ibn Qays' own writings exist in fragments; enough remains to determine that he took his treatment in Córdoba as an injustice, believing that he had been falsely accused by a jealous rival. In any case, he fled the city and seems to have gone into exile for a few years before resurfacing as a minor name involved in the petty disputes between some of the more prominent Arab and muwallad families in Qadis. Eventually, though, he turned to a similar path to Umar ibn Hafsun in years prior, joining up with outlaws discontent with the treatment muwalladun received at the hands of their Umayyad overlords.

Soon enough, ibn Qays - evidently a highly eloquent man with a swift mind and a noble bearing - rose to a leadership position among that band of rebels operating in the general vicinity of the southern reach of al-Andalus. These rebels were largely native conversos furious with their lot in al-Andalus, gradually began to pick up momentum.

In 1055, ibn Qays exploded onto the political scene when his band of muwallad agitators sparked off an uprising in the town of Shaluqah,[3] not far outside Qadis. Ibn Qays proved to be highly potent at rallying disaffected muwalladun to his cause, and his ranks swelled quickly, with the group able to mount a surprise raid on Qadis itself and capture the city, largely from within, given its exceptionally defensible position. It would become the revolt's power base in the years ahead.

Troubled as he was by infighting within the military and his own difficulties in asserting his primacy, Caliph Muhammad II was slow to respond, but was able to mount a summer campaign against ibn Qays in 1056, dispatching hired Berbers to attempt to break down Qadis. But the Berbers could not count on the same ability to capture the city from within so richly exploited by ibn Qays, and his group held the city over the course of the year, resupplying by ship and slowly expanding their influence northwest along the coast.

Part of the success of ibn Qays in the early going came from his refusal to repeat the mistake of the last truly serious muwallad rebel. In the late 9th century, Umar ibn Hafsun - while more territorially successful than ibn Qays - had converted back to Christianity during the course of his reign. Ibn Qays did not, positioning himself as not only a native son but also as a devout Muslim. More than that, he seems to have arrived on the scene at just the right time to tap into the new wave of the shu'ubiyya movement in al-Andalus, at a time when muwalladun were seeing increasing roles in some corners of society but still yearning for equal treatment from the Arabo-Andalusian superminority.

More than that, he brought a strong personal charisma and a compelling story to the political scene, one which many native Muslims were likely to listen to. Positioning himself as a descendant of Ilyan of Sabta allowed him to argue that because it was his ancestors who brought the Muslims to al-Andalus, surely they were just as much the inheritors of the land as those whose ancestors came from beyond the shore. His argument was one of a strong local stake - that muwalladun had a right to the same rights and treatment, if not better, than that received by Arabo-Andalusians, or even Arabo-Berbers. A powerful speaker with a tendency to play on the emotions of his listeners, ibn Qays seems to have used that narrative to effectively talk his way into ownership of a burgeoning muwallad army.

Given all that, it is still unlikely that ibn Qays could have succeeded. His army consisted largely of an angry mob of muwalladun, roughly organized into a sort of fledgling urban militia, and while they drilled with a few experienced officers and gained increasing confidence as time went on, they were not the equal of their opposition, whether it be the tribally-bound, highly-seasoned Berber clans of the Maghreb or the highly-trained Saqaliba of the Royal Guard and the house guards of various rich families. While ibn Qays was a major inconvenience through the 1050s, he was nevertheless still an inconvenience, capable of expanding outside of Qadis into smaller towns and forts but not of mounting a serious campaign against Córdoba itself.

What he did successfully in the early years, though, was hold fortresses and tie up Córdoba's attention long enough for other pots to boil over. Another did so in 1058, when the ever-restive Ghomara Berbers centred in the Rif, still under the influence of Badis ibn Yusuf, began to agitate against Córdoba again.

Badis, a staunch rigorist, had been denouncing the Umayyad Caliphs since the 1040s as decadent and full of sin. While al-Muntasir had set back his movement significantly in 1047, the Ghomaras of the Banu Zejel continued to feud with the nearby Ifrinids and the Zenata clans. By the time of their resurgence, however, Badis had found a focal point: He aligned himself with another agitator, 'Ubayd Allah ibn Ali by name. This man, the son of Ali ibn Hammud,[4] was an Idrisid and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) through Fatima, but like the rest of the Idrisid line he was fully Berber in his ways. Badis found in 'Ubayd Allah a man who agreed broadly with his rigorist theology, while 'Ubayd Allah found in Badis a man who insisted that he was morally and familially better suited to be caliph than any Umayyad.

In 1059, the hajib of Córdoba, al-Azraq, fell gravely ill. The duties of hajib fell to his nominal deputy, Wahb ibn Safyatuslaf,[5] a Siqlabi of some talent but viewed with distrust by many at court. An uncertain Muhammad II continued to mount campaigns against both thorns in his side, managing to keep ibn Qays contained, but discontent at court continued to grow.


[1] The Goth.
[2] Julian, Count of Ceuta. This individual's history and even his identity are disputed, and there are a couple of different theories out there about him, but not much concrete. However, his historicity isn't important to Harun, who claims him as an ancestor in keeping with the fine Andalusi tradition of forging Gothic genealogies. It's sort of like how there may or may not have been a real Count Cassius from whom the Banu Qasi descended, or how Umar ibn Hafsun probably made up all the genealogy before his grandpa.
[3] Today's Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
[4] A real dude. 'Ubayd Allah is a Hammudid.
[5] "Son of Sviatoslav" - Wahb is a Siqlabi of Rus' origin.

SUMMARY:
1055: A major Muladi revolt breaks out in Shaluqah. The mob, led by the charismatic and aggrieved Harun ibn Qays, seizes Qadis by year's end and holds it through the next year against a Berber relief column.
1058: The Ghomara Berbers begin to agitate again in the Maghreb, clashing with the Banu Ifran. They support the cause of 'Ubayd Allah ibn Ali, a Hammudid propped up by the rigorist preacher Badis as a potential pro-Berber Caliph.
1059: Al-Azraq, the right-hand man of Muhammad II and effective micromanager of al-Andalus, falls ill and is left bedridden and in no condition to administrate much of anything, leaving his nephew the Caliph to face down two pesky rebellions at once. The Muladi rebellion of ibn Qays continues to dig in along the southwestern seaboard.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Fractured Cross: The Kingdoms of Northern Iberia - Leona Mondeforo, Falconbird Press, AD 2011

12. The Protectors of St. James​

An often-asked question when discussing al-Andalus in the 11th century is why the kingdoms of Northern Iberia failed to capitalize at a time when the Caliphate stood primed to explode.

Over the course of the early 11th century, the Kingdom of Leon finalized the reconquest of Gallaecia after decades of rebellion. That unification began to fray after 1029, when Ordono V, King of Leon, passed away and divided his realm between his two sons, Alfonso VI of Leon and Ramiro IV of Gallaecia. Relations between the two brothers were not poor, with Ramiro effectively acting as the subordinate king, but both struggled to rein in restive vassals, namely the Counts of Portucale and Castile, and experienced regular raids from the south as well as attention from Vikings and even occasional Normans.

The good relations were not to last. While the two brothers coexisted peacefully for about eight years, things changed soon enough in 1037, when Ramiro suddenly died at age 28 or 29 with no obvious male heir. A promiscuous young man, Ramiro fathered a dozen male children, all of them bastards; his only legitimate children were his infant daughters Muniadona and Jimena, ages nine and seven at the time of their father's death. A brief interregnum followed in which Ramiro's wife Urraca and a small cabal of advisors propped up Muniadona as heir apparent, managing affairs in Gallaecia through a regency council.

Soon enough, however, a faction of prominent landholders propped up Ramiro's oldest bastard - the future Ordono VI, then just twelve years old, fathered when Ramiro was just sixteen in a fling with a courtier apparently named Ermesinda. Muniadona and Urraca were set aside by a group led by Suero, the lord of Santiago de Compostela, who took charge of Ordono and arranged a hasty coronation at the old pre-Romanesque Cathedral, making some show of giving the young boy the sanction of Saint James himself.

The coronation of the boy who would go down in history as Ordono the Bastard was vehemently opposed by Alfonso from the throne of Leon, but the Gallaecian nobility largely insisted on the bastard's legitimacy, refusing to bend the knee to Alfonso again. The early 1040s were marred by a reopening of hostilities as Leonese men-at-arms launched a series of attacks into Gallaecia aimed to break the will of the nobility, but the attacks mainly served to bring the rebel Counts of Portugalia tentatively on side with the Bastard's faction - though Count Munio Gonzales seemed intent on winning Ordono's tacit acknowledgment of Portugalia's independence.

The reopening of hostilities coincided with a gradual increase in the number of pilgrims following the Way of Saint James. Visitors beyond the Pyrenees began to follow the route in earnest early in the 11th century during the period of calm after Ordono V's conquests. The traditional route[1] followed through much of the disputed territories, including Burgos, Leon, Astorga and ultimately ending at Santiago de Compostela, where pilgrims carrying scallop shells and pilgrim's staves would arrive to venerate the remains of Saint James the Great. The renewal of hostilities in Gallaecia, however, along with the restive nature of matters in Castile towards Leonese authority, resulted in significant disruptions of the pilgrimage route in the early 1040s. Reports began to arise of pilgrims being waylaid by bandits or caught up in battles and skirmishes, with some being hurt or killed.

These disruptions would introduce a vital new element into Northern Iberia in 1041, when a party heading west from Astorga was set upon by bandits. In the party, however, was a group of Norman pilgrims led by one Gilbert of Carteret, the third son of Guillaume, Lord of Carteret at the time. Gilbert, with no hope of inheriting his father's lands, had made a name for himself as a pious man and a fine warrior, and he put those skills to good use in routing the bandits with help from a group of comrades, mostly Normans from the Cotentin Peninsula. Also among them seems to have been Baldwin of Valognes, another young man who stood to be cut out of his family's inheritance by virtue of the order of his birth, but who would go on to bigger things.

Gilbert's party arrived in Astorga hailed by the pilgrims as heroes. Word quickly filtered up to Bishop Francisco of Astorga, who showered Gilbert with praise and even a monetary reward. It's unclear who made the proposal - Gilbert or Francisco - but the outcome was that Gilbert and his party accepted payment from the bishop to escort the pilgrims safely home.

Upon returning to Normandy, Gilbert and his party seem to have spread their tale far and wide, while back in Astorga and other cities along the routes, pilgrims spread the tale too. Over the next few years, churchmen along the route began to hire Norman pilgrims, mainly in small groups. Money flowed from churches and bishoprics and into the pockets of young, ambitious Norman knights, who made a fair penny shepherding shell-carrying faithful along the Way of Saint James and keeping bandits and brigands at bay all the while. Most of these knights came from the towns and villages within the lands of the the Counts of Mortain.[2]

By the late 1040s, Ordono the Bastard - by then viewed as too weak to hold Gallaecia free of Leonese influence - had been thrown into the gaol and replaced by another bastard son of Ramiro, 13-year-old Garcia III. Bermudo lasted about a month and a half before his throat was slit and a grandson of the late Bermudo II came to the throne as Bermudo III, but the 22-year-old, while a driven man eager to solve his kingdom's problems and keep the line of Leon off the throne, found himself struggling to raise enough of an army to present a credible defense against his eastern neighbour, saying nothing of Andalusian raids and agitation from Portugalia. While many of the local landholders did back Bermudo, the turmoil of the past decade had left the Gallaecia of 1049 unstable and highly skeptical of monarchical claimants, with many willing to voice support for Bermudo in theory but few willing to back it up with men-at-arms. Much of eastern Gallaecia paid tribute to Leon at this point, and the kingdom found itself once more in danger of being swallowed up.

What Bermudo did have at his disposal was the royal treasury and an idea. Hearing tell of pilgrims arriving in Santiago well-escorted by skilled knights, Bermudo opened his treasury to groups of Normans. Those knights who arrived down the route of pilgrimage were offered work as a sort of royal guard starting in about 1050, but by 1053, seeing the advantage even small numbers of Normans provided in reining in the countryside, Bermudo urged two of the more prominent young men who had arrived as pilgrims - a pair of brothers, Tancred and Geoffrey of Lessay - to return with a sizable body of men.

Tancred and Geoffrey, sons of a lord in Lessay who stood too far down in the line of succession to inherit much of anything, saw the opportunity to earn wealth and prestige in the service of Bermudo. The two returned to Normandy, recruiting a sizable body of men, most of them from the Cotentin region. Among them were Gilbert of Carteret and his son Odo, along with the veteran Baldwin of Valognes. Another key commander arriving with Tancred and Geoffrey's party was a young man named Guy of Hauteville.[3]

The arrival of Tancred and Geoffrey's party proved to be a shock to the status quo in Iberia. Quickly the Norman mercenaries set to work securing the east of Galicia, bringing it firmly back under Bermudo's control. The Battle of Sobradelo in 1057 stands out: A body of Normans under Gilbert and Baldwin defeated a numerically superior Leonese host decisively. The Norman party consisted of better-equipped knights drawn from the ranks of landholders, many of them bored nobles with little better to do than sell their swords for money; they simply proved better than the army they faced, many of them peasant levies.

By the end of the 1050s, Norman raiding parties were making inroads into Leon, even raiding the city itself - even as other Normans shepherded pilgrims along on their way. All the while, though, anxiety built among the Gallaecian noble classes about the influence Norman mercenaries were beginning to have in Iberia, particularly their continuing to hold a number of towns and forts they'd taken in 1058.


[1] The route was a Roman trade road long before the Christian tradition arrived.
[2] Western Normandy - basically this is a bunch of bored young noblemen from the Cotentin region - Cherbourg and such - finding jobs in Iberia thanks to the church needing some muscle. Of course, we all know what happens when you hire bored Normans.
[3] Yes, those Hautevilles.

SUMMARY:
1037: Ramiro IV of Gallaecia dies before his time, leaving behind two infant daughters and a whole crop of bastards. His eldest bastard is propped up as a puppet king, sparking hostilities from Ramiro's brother, Alfonso VI of Leon.
1041: The first known example of Norman mercenary activity along the Way of Saint James pilgrimage road. After receiving financial reward for protecting pilgrims in a chaotic northern Iberia, Gilbert of Carteret takes the story back to Normandy with him.
1047: Ramiro IV of Gallaecia is jailed and deposed by a faction backing his bastard brother, Garcia III. Garcia is soon murdered and replaced by a grandson of Bermudo II - Bermudo III.
1053: After a few years of experimenting with Norman mercenaries as raiders and bodyguards, Bermudo III of Galicia hires in Tancred de Lessay and his brother Geoffrey with a large body of Norman men-at-arms, intending to use these mercenaries to prove his independence upon Leon.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Allah! There is no deity but Him, the Alive, the Eternal.
Neither slumber nor sleep overtaketh Him.
Unto Him belongeth whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth.
Who is he that intercedeth with Him save by His leave?
He knoweth that which is in front of them and that which is behind them,
while they encompass nothing of His knowledge save what He wills.
His throne includeth the heavens and the earth,
and He is never weary of preserving them.
He is the Sublime, the Tremendous.
- Āyat al-Kursī‎, transcribed


​

Excerpt: Andalusi History Through Artifacts - Prof. Peire-Raimond Raspail, University of Lacoide Department of History, Acatian Scholastic Press, 1987


The artifact known as the Blessed Egg of Córdoba is a curious but imagination-sparking relic. The original Egg has been damaged by the passage of time and the deterioration of its base materials; the display set up in the National Museum of Culture attempts to replicate the authentic original appearance. The Egg was about the size of an ostrich egg and covered largely with ivory and rows of peridot gemstones, with the Āyat al-Kursī‎ transcribed in rows circling the surface of the egg.

The Egg sits on a podium of similar material. The original podium survives; an inscription on the foot of it identifies the Egg as belonging to 'Ali ibn Mujahid, one of the most prominent men in 11th-century al-Andalus. 'Ali, the son of Mujahid, a commander under Caliph al-Muntasir, was one of the Saqaliba - men and women from Eastern and Southern Europe, imported to al-Andalus as slaves in a variety of roles, particularly in the 10th century. By the 11th century they had gained enormous influence in Andalusian society, though their increasingly strong role resulted in increasing ethnic strife and even major uprisings in the 1050s and '60s.

Fantastic origin stories abound regarding the Egg. The most commonly repeated is the story that 'Ali, a major commander of the Caliph's house guard, owned a herd of swans. As the story goes, one of the swans came to 'Ali on the first day of spring and laid a single great egg, which emerged pure and bearing the verse of the Quran upon its face. The story tells that 'Ali immediately fell on his face and praised God, and kept the Egg with him and treasured it.

In fact, it's likely that 'Ali simply had the means to have the egg made for him by artisans, or that it was given to him as a gift by another, possibly by his father, Mujahid. The egg likely has no supernatural origin, but rather represents a trend which came along with the large influx of Saqaliba into Andalusian society.

Archaeological exploration has uncovered a small number of preserved eggs with the remnants of elaborate designs across their faces. Most of these survivors are ceramics, though original eggs are presumed to exist. Many of these eggs are chicken-sized eggs; a few of the more elaborate survivors are ostrich eggs, representing the wide availability of ostrich eggs as luxury items throughout the Mediterranean world and their association with new life and protection from the evil eye.

However, the specific proliferation of decorated eggs seems to coincide with the arrival of the Saqaliba. The decorating of eggs was an old pagan tradition in many of the origin cultures of these slave-soldiers. In many of these cultures, decorated eggs, particularly those with spiral motifs, were thought to protect households from evil spirits. The prominence of decorated eggs found its way syncretically into Christian culture in regions such as Poland, where egg decorating continues among ethnic Polish people to this day. However, it seems to have syncretized with Andalusian culture among at least some of the Saqaliba, many of whom were sold into Andalusian service as children who followed pagan beliefs before being taught the ways of Islam as adults.

There is some indication of this practice in surviving scraps of literature, and indeed, it would seem that it was frowned upon by the jurists of the day, who viewed the decorating of eggs as bid'ah,[2] with no basis in the Quran or the Sunnah. Scholarly belief tends towards the idea that some of the more prominent Saqaliba kept these eggs in secret, most of them decorated with Islamic motifs, particularly calligraphic verses from the Quran. On those ceramic eggs which survive, the Takbir and the Shahada appear most often; the Āyat al-Kursī‎ is also well-represented.

In any case, the practice of decorating eggs seems to have been primarily and 11th- and 12th-century phenomenon, which has not survived into present-day Andalusian culture. It represents an element of a transitional period in which Muslims of Slavic background were beginning to gain comfort and power in Andalusian society, speaking to an awareness of themselves as distinct from Arabity yet still Muslim in their ways - yet contributing something new to the society in which they lived.

That transitional period would prove to be utterly formative in Andalusian history - particularly during the power struggle known as the Fitna of al-Andalus.

~​

"I shall rely on you in this matter," Caliph Muhammad II assured the tall, sandy-haired man standing before him. He reached out to pat 'Ali firmly on the shoulder. "My patience with the rebels grows thin. Bring them to heel and end this nonsense."

'Ali inclined his head slowly, closing his eyes. "I will go with the men at dawn. You have my word that we will end this as soon as possible."

Muhammad nodded slowly. "Good. Continue to serve well, 'Ali. You will be rewarded."

Following the usual exchange of pleasantries, the Caliph and his royal guardsman parted ways, leaving Muhammad alone with only a bodyguard as he made his way through the Madinat az-Zahra and back to his room. There, he left the guard outside the door and retired.

On the table waiting for him was a simple goblet. Smiling, Muhammad drew forth a bottle of the wine he'd had brought in for him. The finest product of local grapes - and never opened between the vineyard and his cup. Perfect. Popping the cork loose, he poured himself rather too rich of a cup, cradling it in his hand as he settled into a chair not far from his bed.

Muhammad picked up the book beside it; he pulled back the green strip of silk marking his place, smiling indulgently as he sipped at his wine and resumed his reading. A book of love poems - a tome drawn from some of the most talented poets the city and the land could offer. These simple things were far more comfortable to him than the stresses of managing a rebellion and of trying to win the loyalty of clans who only sought after the satisfaction of their own rank greed and lust for power.

It had become harder with his uncle lying incapacitated in bed. True, al-Azraq was still alive, and Wahb had served well in filling his uncle's place in the interim. Hope still remained that the hajib would recover, even as Wahb stood ready to serve as a more than adequate replacement. But it emphasized for Muhammad just how much al-Azraq actually did around here, from managing the budget to serving as a buffer between the old families and the Caliph.

It drove home for him that his father had never truly ruled - and even his own experiences were reduced from what he might have expected. So much of the power lay in the hands of the hajib now. But then, much the same had been the case for his grandfather, too. Perhaps it would be the same for his own son 'Abd-Allah, though the boy was just fifteen now - hardly in a position to have to worry about it.

Muhammad sighed and forced his mind away from temporal issues. He sipped his wine. He turned the page, then one more. He smiled behind his beard as his eyes traced the love-sotten verses elegantly stencilled across the page.

Until his lips twitched. He blinked a couple of times; winced as his neck jerked, head popping to the side for a moment. A dreadful feeling began to wash over him. Something was wrong - his breaths suddenly seemed inadequate.

A shock of light blistered across his eyes. With a gasp, he jerked again; his lips peeled back involuntarily. His breaths grew shorter. The book fell to the ground at his feet as he bolted forward, raising his hands to try and steady his head. It didn't work; his head twitched again, shoulders jerking. He felt his toes beginning to curl and his shoulders to twitch and shudder.[3]

A horrifying thought suddenly occurred to him as he began to slide out of his chair: It was poisoned. The wine was poisoned. I should have known. But how could it have been? From the moment it was bottled, and brought to me by my dear younger brother Abd al-Malik, no one had touched it--

Muhammad twitched forward - and buried his face in his palms with a pained, frustrated groan.

Oh, God, he realized as his body began to fail him. I am such an idiot.


[1] The birthday of the Prophet.
[2] Innovation.
[3] Should've employed a more thorough wine taster, Muhammad.

SUMMARY:
1060: Caliph Muhammad II dies suddenly at age 38, leaving behind a couple of sons, the eldest - 'Abd-Allah - being just 15. While Muhammad is believed in his time to have succumbed naturally to an illness, in fact he was poisoned at the hands of al-Muntasir's youngest son, Abd al-Malik.

 

[Planet of Hats]

(OOC: Please pardon the long delay between installments here. I took a week's vacation only to come back to find myself extremely sick, and I've been playing catch-up ever since.)


Excerpt: The Rise and the Fall of the Mohammedan Caliphs of al-Andalus - Muhallab ibn Jalil al-Dani, AH 1056 (AD 1646)


The demise of the Caliph Muhammad (the second to be so named) was a sudden one, and the court at the Madinat az-Zahra was thrown into confusion even at a time when such confusion could be ill-afforded.

Now the sons of Muhammad were Abdullah, a boy of perhaps fifteen years at the time, and his younger brother Abd ar-Rahman, who was a boy of a scant eight years. There were no other children of a male aspect, though Muhammad had sired a number of daughters upon his harem. So young and unready was Abd ar-Rahman that no thought was given to him, but instead to Abdullah, who was taken into the protection of the Saqaliba straight away, for fear that the politics of the court would take his life.

It must be said of Abdullah that he could not have possessed the multiplicity of virtues required to rule, for his education was incomplete. Now he was the son of Muhammad by one of his wives, Mustazraf by name, who was said to have come from the lands of the King of the Saqaliba.[1] Moreso than any of the Umayyads of al-Andalus to date, the streak of Arabity did not breed strongly through in him. The appearance of him was startling to the court, for while many of his predecessors had been fair and dyed their hair to conceal this, Abdullah was so fair as to barely appear Arab, with pale blonde hair and striking green-blue eyes, and he did not dye his hair to conceal it.

Indeed Abdullah was not quite such a rarity at the court of Córdoba. In truth the Arabs who had come to the Andalus in years past had been few in number, and had fathered children upon non-Arab women for generation upon generation, until their blood had become more Iberian and Sclavonian than truly Arab. And yet the ties of family remained strong, and the old families looked askance upon the young man, ignorant of their own hypocrisy.

Still struggling with his illness, the old hajib, al-Azraq, gathered the court in his sick-chambers and declared that Abdullah would be Caliph, and inheritor to the Andalus and its people. Plans were laid to enthrone him in ceremony, and the young man was fitted for the caliphal regalia, with arrangements made for Wahb ibn Safyatuslaf to act as the representative of al-Azraq in day-to-day affairs until such time as the hajib recovered or perished. However, while many in the court proclaimed their acceptance, many voices among the old families conspired in silence.

Histories of the time tell us that there was a gathering of some few noble men in the gardens, in confidence. Among them were men of noble families who were among the middling officials at the court, and one of them was Mutarrif ibn Tayyib, who was descended from the Banu Bukht.[2] Now at the gathering, Mutarrif is said to have said to the men, "Shall we truly allow this young man to be placed upon the throne, when he is as callow as a newborn kitten and so fair? Look upon him!, for there is no more a drop of Arabity in him than there is in a mongrel dog. Is he not more slave than man?"

And spake Jalaf Allah ibn Abd al-Karim, of the Banu Fadl of ar-Rusafa,[3] saying, "What is it that must be done? Truly we can see that he is more Saqaliba than not, and that he is a mere child. And yet, who shall stand in his stead?"

And Mutarrif said, "Surely the blood runs thicker in some! Look, there is the brother of his father - there is Abd al-Malik ibn al-Muntasir, who is a man of greater years and seasoning, and he has both wisdom and piety. And you can see clearly that his blood is rich with blessing. Shall we not seek a greater man to lead us?"

Thus in agreement did Mutarrif and Jalaf Allah and some others bring their case to the chambers of al-Azraq, who lay weakened by his illness. And they roused him from his slumber and beseeched him: "Surely the hajib can see that there is nothing in the boy which readies him to be caliph. Come, see the wisdom of choosing instead your nephew Abd al-Malik, that we may remain strong and well-governed."

But al-Azraq did rise in his bed and rebuke them calmly, saying, "What foolishness is this, that you come to me seeking such things? Shall we not honour the choice of my nephew, the fallen Muhammad? Abdullah shall be caliph; take your foolishness from this place and speak of it no more."

So incensed were Mutarrif and Jalaf Allah that they did curse the name of al-Azraq, and there in the sick-chambers did Mutarrif strike him strongly, and the hajib fell to his bed and was grievously wounded. Thinking al-Azraq slain, the two left him where he lay and called for the court to convene, and there spoke to them, saying, "It is consensus that Abdullah is yet too young to reign. Thus, we must turn instead to Abd al-Malik to lead us." And many among the old families raised their voices in agreement, and men were sent to Abd al-Malik's home to retrieve him.

Now as the men made their move, Wahb ibn Safyatuslaf did go to the chamber of al-Azraq to tend to him. And there did he discover the hajib in dire circumstances, clinging to consciousness. There, al-Azraq did beseech Wahb: "Do not allow them to rob Abdullah of his birthright, for order demands no less."

Knowing the plot of the old families was afoot, Wahb went straightaway to 'Ali ibn Mujahid, a commander of the Sclavonian Guard. Quickly the Guard was assembled, and the guards around the chamber of Abdullah redoubled. Men were dispatched to the home of Abd al-Malik, but found it already empty. Mobilizing quickly, 'Ali and Wahb sought throughout the city for Abd al-Malik and his companions, and found them on their way to the Madinat az-Zahra with a small party of armed Africans. There, the Sclavonian Guard did greet them.

In the ensuing confrontation, violence broke out quickly, and the Berbers who came with the party of Abd al-Malik were overcome by the better-prepared army of the Saqaliba. Soon Jalaf Allah was taken prisoner, but Mutarrif fled on horseback with Abd al-Malik, and fled the city ahead of a column of horse. Once in the countryside, the two eluded capture and rode hard for the north, and sought to bring themselves to safety.

With the immediate danger past, 'Ali and the servants of al-Azraq quickly turned their attention to that meeting in the garden. Many in the bureaucracy were detained and placed under arrest, and locked in chains until such time as their innocence could be attained. In truth many of them, including scions of the old families, would never again see the light of day. Dinars flowed to placate those of the nobility angered by the current situation. Wahb was placed in the position of regent, forming a council along with the African, al-Murbaytari, who commanded some respect among the Berber men at court, and a supporting member of the old families, the Syrian, Hamza ibn al-Muhsin, of the Banu Abi Alaqa. Abdullah was placed upon the throne and took for himself the laqab of al-Mansur-bi'llah.

While the council ostensibly brought together all of the parties in union around Abdullah al-Mansur, in fact the Saqaliba had gained ascendancy at court and it was not lost on the old families. Within a week of the coronation, al-Azraq was dead of his injuries, and Wahb took his place as hajib and effective power at court, with he and ibn al-Muhsin quickly forming an axis with 'Ali ibn Mujahid to ensure the proper education of Abdullah the caliph.

Yet it was to the surprise of few that word soon came that Mutarrif and Abd al-Malik had resurfaced in Saraqusta, among the Banu Tujibi. There, they issued a document denouncing Abdullah as a false caliph, and they proclaimed Abd al-Malik as the rightful caliph over all the Andalusians, with the laqab of al-Siddiq.[4] While his claim did not appear at first to travel far, neither also did the pronunciations of Córdoba, for the authority of Abdullah al-Mansur did not extend far beyond the walls of the city. Thus was al-Andalus divided against itself, puppet against pretender, even as the revolt of ibn Qays raged on.


[1] The name Saqaliba was used pretty broadly, and not just for Slavs - the Volga Bulgars, for instance, were considered Saqaliba. In fact Mustazraf is a Mordvin who would've been captured, transported and sold in Andalusia via the Volga trade route.
[2] A family associated with a number of Umayyad bureaucrats.
[3] Ar-Rusafa in Syria, not ar-Rusafa the garden in Córdoba.
[4] The Truthful.

SUMMARY:
1060: In the wake of Caliph Muhammad II's death, an Arabo-Andalusian court faction attempts to install Abd al-Malik ibn al-Muntasir as Caliph ahead of Muhammad II's son, Abdullah. The faction's leaders fatally wound the already dying hajib, al-Azraq, before being driven into the wilderness by the Sclavonian Guard. Abdullah, age 15, is enthroned as Caliph Abdullah II al-Mansur under a regency council dominated by the Saqaliba, while Abd al-Malik is proclaimed a pretender caliph in Saraqusta. The Fitna of al-Andalus begins.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The Most Unlikely Palm: How Medieval Andalus Survived and Thrived - Ibrahim Alquti, Falconbird Press, AD 2012


Broadly speaking, the Fitna of al-Andalus is considered the starting point of the period known as the Saqlabid Amirate - a period in which politics in Iberia was dominated by the slave-soldier caste known as the Saqaliba.

The Fitna was largely a north-south affair, with battle lines drawn based on support for two Umayyad claimants: Abdullah II al-Mansur, the son of Caliph Muhammad II, or Abdullah's uncle, Abd al-Malik. A faction of Arabo-Berber nobility lined up behind Abd al-Malik, while the Saqaliba and a separate court faction lined up behind 15-year-old Abdullah.

Working against the pro-Abdullah faction was the ambivalence of the Arabo-Andalusian nobility towards Muhammad's son. While maps tend to depict the south of al-Andalus as a single pro-Abdullah bloc, in fact many of the lords of Gharb al-Andalus sat on their hands throughout the war and refused to provide troops to Abdullah, even as they looked upon Abd al-Malik as a brat given to excessive coziness with rebellious Berbers. For the most part, the lords west of Isbili spent the early Fitna concentrating on their own affairs, steadfastly refusing to answer the call of Abdullah.

The centre of power for the pro-Abdullah faction lay largely in the southeast, along the Mediterranean coast in the region typically known as Xarq al-Andalus, most heavily in those areas where al-Muntasir - and before him, Hisham II - had settled larger groups of Saqaliba in the prior decades. In many of these areas, individual Saqaliba had been invested with higher authority, particularly in cities such as Deniyya and Balansiyya, where they had begun to accumulate their own power bases in the form of civic militias and owned slaves of their own. From this southeastern quarter, Abdullah's faction was able to draw a good-sized army centred on the Caliphal home guard established under al-Muntasir - the Sclavonian Guard and its near-cataphracts.

The other central areas of Saqaliba support for Abdullah came in the form of garrison cities largely under the control of Saqaliba house armies. These included the garrison at Madinat Salih, north of Saraqusta, and at Batalyaws.[2]

The other unlikely source of allies for the loyalist faction was the Usamid dynasty, the Arabo-Andalusian faction placed in control of Viguera (now Biqrah) by al-Muntasir following the Aquitanian-Andalusian War. Despite being cut off from other allies and a relatively small power with few men to their name, the lord of Viguera, Hussayn ibn Ubayd Allah - the third Usamid ruler, fifth son of Ubayd Allah ibn Usama, al-Muntasir's man in the north - recognized Abdullah as the rightful Caliph and bent the knee to him.

The Malikid faction was strongest in the northern reaches of al-Andalus, particularly in the March territories - the Tujibids of Saraqusta played a central role in this respect, harbouring Abd al-Malik himself along with his family, but they were supported by other families, among them the locally-settled Hudids[1]. Their cause was quickly supported by two Berber tribes with a grudge - the Banu Qasim, expelled from Alpuente after a revolt during al-Muntasir's reign, and the roaming Banu Hawarah of the Central Meseta - longtime rivals of the Saqaliba garrison at Denia, and in fact the reason that garrison was established by Hisham II and al-Mughira in the first place.[3]

They were joined by others in the north, particularly 'Abd-Allah ibn Muhammad, at that point the lord over Toledo, and several clans of Miknasa Berbers who had settled north of Córdoba not long after the arrival of Islam.[4] Several Arabo-Andalusian patrician families also fled Córdoba to side with the Malikid faction, among them a number of prominent sons of the Banu Ziyad and the Banu Yahsub, and a few Arabized Berber of the bureaucracy, from the clan of the Banu Shuhayd.

They also gained moral support from the defection of another Abdullah, namely Abdullah ibn al-Muntasir, Abd al-Malik's older brother and Abdullah al-Mansur's uncle - the second son of al-Muntasir, who had been passed over by his father as unfit to rule.

The immediate contrast between the two factions was evident: The Malikid faction was immediately numerically superior in the field, able to draw on well-trained and well-equipped Berber cavalry as well as the personal armies and garrisons of a number of prominent cities. The Malikids also "enjoyed" the skeptical support of several Zenata clans from the central Maghreb, as well as the Ghomaras under Badis ibn Yusuf, who saw the war as their opportunity to sweep away the worst excesses against Islam in Andalusi society. Berber raids against cities with lords loyal to Abdullah started quickly and easily, with the agility and group cohesion of small tribal groups of Berbers quickly putting the loyalist faction back on its heels.

Conversely, while the Saqaliba fielded a strong core of extremely well-equipped, well-trained and standardized cavalry and infantry, supported by at least part of the old Syrian junds consisting largely of trained infantry, including crossbowmen, they initially struggled to raise a strong native army beyond that core. The loyalist faction rapidly moved to supplement its forces with the city militias trained in Deniyya and Batalyaws, though these forces were less well-trained than the junds. The loyalist faction could also rely on troops from the Banu Ifran, who remained loyal to Abdullah - or at least Abdullah's money.

The early disparity seems to have been emphasized in 1061, early in the conflict, when an army of mostly-Berber infantry and cavalry moved to confront the garrison at Madinat Salih. The much more agile Berbers struggled to overcome the garrison's physical defenses, but made swift work of surrounding towns and settlements and aggressively raided farms and caravans, cutting the outnumbered garrison off from resupply. When the commander at Madinat Salih did sally against the Berbers, the Saqaliba performed well, but against superior numbers they were ultimately defeated.

By the end of the summer, Madinat Salih had fallen under the control of the Tujibids, and a small garrison was placed there. The Malikid faction continued to raid and harass with impunity. Meanwhile, the loyalists were forced to divide their attention between managing the raids and containing the rebellion of Ibn Qays, which continued to spread towards Gharb al-Andalus.

However, the first year of the conflict would also reveal some systemic differences between the loyalists and the Malikid faction:

• The loyalist faction had a massive economic and production advantage. Córdoba effectively was the economy of al-Andalus, and the city itself was somewhat removed from the fighting and well-protected, with the loyalists keeping many of their regular troops stationed there. By the end of the first year, Abdullah and Wahb had leveraged that money to hire more men and give them more weapons. Among the first hires was the Gallaecian, Lucio de Viseu, and a large cadre of Christian mercenaries from the region around Porto. Beyond that, Córdoba produced most of the food, had most of the artisans and had the largest population. The loyalists could afford to pay more men, feed them more food, give them more weapons and furnish them with better training. They could also afford to buy more Saqaliba from slavers, with the result that the slave trade thrived during the war.
  
  
• The loyalists were more open than the Malikids to spending their gold on unconventional sources of mercenaries, particularly one: Muladies. By the end of 1061, Wahb had brought into service a troop of paid men under the Siqlabi commander Yujamir, staffed mostly by Muladies from Xarq al-Andalus. The willingness of the Saqaliba to extend new privileges to the Muladies would open them to opportunities for détente absent to the Malikids.
  
  
• The loyalists were unified around one candidate, with a single objective. Conversely, the Malikids were only nominally unified around Abd al-Malik; many of their members joined Abd al-Malik's core supporters for their own purposes. Most glaring here was the support they gained from the Ghomara Berbers and many other Zenatas from the Maghreb, many of whom found their ways incompatible with Andalusi ways and who preferred the Berber, 'Ubayd Allah of the Hammudid line, as a potential ruler, but who fought with the Malikids mainly to break the old order. But even outside that fracture, the Arabo-Andalusians in the coalition were outnumbered by the Old Berber elements and clashed regularly. By early 1062, Mutarrif ibn Tayyib had been imprisoned, and tensions had begun to flare in Saraqusta as the Banu Hawarah increasingly asserted themselves. Similarly, the goal of the Banu Qasim seemed merely to be a land grab - they notably stopped taking part in raids or joining offensives after temporarily seizing Alpuente in 1061.
  
  
• The loyalists had a more organized military command structure. The military of Abdullah's faction could be broken down into tiers: The Sclavonian Guard, consisting of well-trained Saqaliba with a strong esprit de corps; the junds, consisting of the landed troops of the Caliph and the emirs as well as the enlisted volunteers known as the hushud; and the hasham, foreign mercenaries such as the Ifrinids and Christians. While some of these classes existed among the loyalists, armies tended to be broken up by tribal divisions, with elements within each army often not getting along very well. The result is that, once they recovered from the ground lost in the firt year, the loyalists were fielding organized armies with a more combined-arms approach.

By early 1062, the loyalists were able to begin rolling back some of their losses, namely retaking Alpuente from the Tujibids with little loss of life and beginning to push into the north more aggressively. The action in Alpuente took a dire toll on the Banu Qasim; many of their warriors were killed or captured, the remainder of the clan being scattered to the four winds.


[1] Basically "all the prominent Arabo-Andalusians in the Zaragoza area."
[2] Medinaceli and Badajoz respectively.
[3] You may remember these guys backed Ibn Abi Aamir back around the POD. You might know them better as the Dhunnunids, OTL of the Taifa of Toledo.
[4] The OTL Aftasids came from this bunch. However, the historical record suggests the actual Ibn al-Aftas was a nobody who rose from a family of no social status as a soldier in the army of Sabur, the Siqlabi commander who took over Badajoz during the OTL taifa period. Thus the Aftasids never exist in this TL as anyone of consequence.

SUMMARY:
1061: The Malikid faction in the Fitna of al-Andalus seizes Medinaceli from the loyalists. They begin to advance towards Córdoba, taking Alpuente along the way. Towards the end of the year, however, the loyalist faction begins to mount a more serious defense.
1062: The loyalist faction recaptures Alpuente from the Malikids, shattering the Banu Qasim.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: Steppe Thunder: How the Turks Smashed the Greek World - Sabbas Aslan, Rasht Academy Press, AD 2004

3.
THE RIBBON AND THE WAVE​

Pictured: The Alborz Mountains and the forests of Hyrcania, now Daylam.​

As we've discussed, the Oghuz Turks came to the Islamic world in two waves of exiles from the Oghuz Yabgu state, each driven out during decades of internecine war. We know shockingly little about the details; the Oghuz left virtually no records. But most scholars agree that the instability was driven in part by both internal tensions - disputes between the ruling clans of the Oghuz Yabgu and their weaker tributary clans, and disputes with the neighbouring Kipchaks and Kara-Khanids. As parties' fortunes fell in these wars, clans driven off their lands would simply move on, sometimes migrating elsewhere, sometimes collapsing into more triumphant clans.

Less glamorous a cause came from climatic factors. Between the years 950 to 1300, the world experienced what scholars refer to as the Millennial Warming.[1] Science is still divided on the causes of the Warming, but during these years, much of the northern part of the world experienced a period of warmer-than-average temperatures. The effects of this period are well-known in terms of the melting of sea ice and increasing rainfall. But the temperature increases also seem to have affected the steppes of Central Asia, driving feuds over grazing lands and triggering a new wave of migrations.

Pop historiography tends to brand these climate migrants of the early to mid 11th century as "the Turkmen invaders" or "the Uzes," depicting them as a monolithic horde demolishing everything in their path. Today we know that these racist conceits are complete nonsense, and that the Oghuz waves arrived independently from one another, decades apart - and that the first wave consisted of a clan called Yuregir.

*​

The Yuregir arrived under the leadership of a nomadic chieftain named Togtekin, a Sunni Muslim supported by heavyweight warriors who were also Muslim; however, at the time of their arrival the majority of the Yuregir were pagans who followed the ways of the sky god Tengri, while a few more were Nestorians and even Jews. Evidently Togtekin's faction had been ejected from their lands somewhere west of the Aral Sea in an internal war and had made their way out of the lands of the Oghuz Turks, following the Caspian Sea towards the mountains of Persia.

Togtekin is recorded in history as being in his thirties by the time he arrived, somewhere before 1024, in the northernmost area of Persia - that area historically referred to as Hyrcania by the Greeks and Tabaristan following the arrival of the Arabs, and today broadly referred to as Daylam.[2] Histories inevitably describe him as a skilled warrior, a pious Muslim convert who had embraced the faith while fighting as a mercenary in the armies of the Ghaznavids, and above all a man deeply concerned with finding a home for his people. He found it in Hyrcania.

Persia, by and large, isn't known for its wealth of fantastic growing land. Hyrcania was an entirely different world compared to anything Togtekin and the Yuregir had ever experienced. The region was one of the very last holdouts of Zoroastrianism following the Muslim conquests, maintaining a distinct, semi-autonomous culture - and a distinct, inviting environment. Even today, the area is defined by the Great Hyrcanian Forest[3] and the associated forest steppe between the lowland woods and the heights of the Alborz Mountains. The region presented the arriving Yuregir not only with lush green forests and verdant grasslands where their cattle could graze, it presented them with relatively well-developed farming lands, where rice, cotton, sugarcane and tea grew in the lowlands and wheat and barley grew in the highlands.

All in all, Togtekin - riding at the head of a great host of Yuregir outcast from the arid steppes of their homeland - looked at Hyrcania and saw in it a place to settle down.

At the time, the region was controlled by the nominally independent Ziyarids, a Sunni dynasty from Gilan. This group had initially enjoyed the support of the Shia Buyid dynasty of Daylam, who held authority over the rump Abbasid Caliphate, but by the time the Yuregir arrived, the Ziyarids were a bit player in regional politics, indulging in petty feuds with the Ghaznavids and the Buyids without anything truly happening. At the time, the ruler of the area - Manuchihr, son of Qabus[4] - held an uneasy relationship with the neighbouring Ghaznavids, paying them tribute but hoping to wiggle his way out from under their thumb.

Instead, Manuchihr found himself on the receiving end of an entirely different type of invader. The Yuregir swept into Hyrcania and soon clashed with local herders and farmers, developing a reputation as troublemakers and raiders. Manuchihr moved to try and parley with Togtekin; the two reached an accord to allow the Yuregir to transit the lands, and the host of Oghuz decamped near the Ziyarid capital at Gurgan. Tempers quickly flared, though; the agreement broke down within a few weeks, and Manuchihr seems to have taken steps to try and remove Togtekin and his host.

The subsequent Battle of Gurgan (1025) proved a humiliation for the Ziyarids. The Daylamite troops dispatched to battle the Turks were roundly defeated by the Yuregir's veteran cavalry and their mastery of warfare against a wide range of opponents. Manuchihr himself fled westward to Amol, and the Yuregir extracted punitive concessions from the bureaucrats remaining in Gurgan. While they left most of the Daylamite nobility intact, they demanded tribute in cash, food and weapons; Togtekin himself extracted tribute in the form of Daylamite concubines. They did not, however, stop in Gurgan; over the next couple of years, the Yuregir steadily pushed westward across Hyrcania, raiding villages and cities and extracting tribute. Manuchihr himself was captured at Amol in 1026 and executed; ultimately his son Farhad capitulated to the Yuregir in roughly 1028, agreeing to pay an enormous tribute to Togtekin and his tribe.

Togtekin continued to push on west, and by 1030 had overrun the western part of Hyrcania, becoming suzerains to the Justanids of Gilan. By that point, Togtekin had set up a base of operations at Rasht, a lowland city in Gilan not far from the fish-rich Sefid-Rud river. The river itself is particularly important: It has cut a gap through the Alborz Mountains and the Talesh Hills, and following the river and its headwater tributaries provides a major travel route from Hyrcania up into the Zagros Mountains and beyond. The gap is effectively a natural doorway into the greater Islamic world and the Greek world - it opens into al-Jazira, and from there allows access to Armenia, Anatolia, greater Persia, the Mesopotamian river system and ultimately the broader Levant.

The arrival of the Yuregir on the scene tipped the balance of power in the region. Initially dubious of the new power in the north, the Buyids - by then reigning from Baghdad - soon made parley with Togtekin and began to hire in groups of Yuregir as mercenaries. Their influence was made most prominent in 1034, at the Battle of Hit; with the Fatimid Caliphate's forces attempting a push towards Baghdad, the Buyids met them with an army of Arabs and Daylamites supported by Turkish cavalry. The Yuregir tipped the scales decisively for the Buyids, inflicting dreadful casualties on the less prepared and less coordinated Fatimid unit, then pursuing their fleeing army into the desert and slaughtering any stragglers they caught up with. The battle hardly crippled the Fatimids, of course, but it proved a major setback, and it would be the last time the Fatimids would prove able to make a play outside of the Levant.

Through the 1030s, the Yuregir clashed with the Ghaznavids - who made an unsuccessful bid to restore their hegemony over Hyrcania - and raided into Armenia, stirring up trouble in the Eastern Roman Empire. However, much of their host preferred to settle in the green ribbon along the southern coast along the Caspian Sea, settling into their new role as regional hegemons and beginning to partake of the most inviting land in Persia. More and more of them began to adopt Islam, predominantly Sunni; many took Daylamite and Arab brides. By the 1040s, Daylamite culture was beginning to take hold among the Yuregir.

*​

If the Oghuz migrations had stopped there, the history of the world would have been quite different. However, the Yuregir were only the first wave of exiles from the ranks of the Oghuz to enter the broader Muslim world.

In the 1030s and 1040s, under increasing pressure from the expanding Kara-Khanids, the Oghuz experienced another spasm of internal and external war. Out of this fighting came another large clan - the Kizik Turks. Unlike the Yuregir, this clan had evidently settled lands roughly in Transoxiana, gaining some power under Tutush, a highly ambitious chieftain with designs on leadership. However, Tutush and his clan were ultimately defeated by an alliance of internal tribal groups, and Tutush himself was killed.

The Kizik were quickly forced off their lands by the great weight of the other nomadic tribes. Some few of them remained and were assimilated by the other clans, but more began to migrate southward, trickling into Khorasan in dribs and drabs. The largest body followed Tutush's younger brother, Kutay, into today's Qohistan; they flooded into the western reaches of the Ghaznavid Empire in a wave of angry, dispossessed nomads, scoring a few key military victories over the next few years. Before long, much of the eastern reach of Persia was under the nominal suzerainty of the Kizik, though they were very much absentee landlords, not settling so much as exacting tribute and roaming onward in an ill-disciplined mob of raider bands and war parties.

By the late 1040s, the Kizik had begun to push into Mesopotamia, raiding the possessions of the Buyids. These Turks generally had little regard for Islam; most of them were pagans, including Kutay himself, and showed little interest in converting, but instead in seizing treasure, food, cattle and loot. The Buyids quickly tried to cut the same sort of deal with the Kizik that they did with the Yuregir, but found themselves stymied by Kutay's inability to control most of the tribe beyond his own party. While they did bribe Kutay himself off, bands of Kizik continued to raid the countryside, pushing through into the Levant and Armenia in a scattered but potent wave, leaving chaos in their wake.

Rather than settling in the green ribbon, the Kizik hit the interface between Islam and Christianity like an orbital penetrator - fast and hard, creating havoc and leaving local lords on the defensive. It was the pressure of the Kizik above all which sparked the events which would lead directly to the apex of what Roman historians call the Crisis of the 11th Century in the Eastern Roman Empire.


[1] The Medieval Warm Period.
[2] Roughly today's Iranian provinces of Mazandaran and Gilan.
[3] The Caspian Hyrcanian Mixed Forest.
[4] Same guy as OTL - the butterflies took about a dozen years to get here.

SUMMARY:
1024: The Yuregir Turks, an Oghuz clan fleeing internecine wars in the Aral region, arrive in Hyrcania.
1025: The Battle of Gurgan. The Yuregir Turks, under the general/chieftain Togtekin, defeat the armies of the Ziyarid Emirate outside Gurgan. They begin to move west through Hyrcania, exacting tribute as they go.
1030: With most of Hyrcania subjugated, Togtekin and the Yuregir Turks settle in Hyrcania, making Rasht their capital. Many of them become sellswords.
1034: The Battle of Hit. The Buyids beat back a Fatimid bid to take Baghdad, largely thanks to Turkish mercenaries from Rasht.
1043: The Kizik Turks, another Oghuz clan, arrive in Khorasan and begin to bite off chunks of the Ghaznavid Empire. They arrive in scattered dribs and drabs but the main war band is settled around a strong chieftain, Kutay.
1048: The Kizik Turks begin to raid indiscriminately throughout the Levant, Armenia and Anatolia, creating widespread havoc.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Now these are the circumstances which led to the Crisis of the 11th Century.

In al-Andalus, Hisham II rose as Caliph with his regent being al-Mughira, not al-Mansur. Because al-Mughira was less aggressive than al-Mansur, al-Andalus did not attack Barcelona in the 980s.

Because al-Andalus did not raid Barcelona, Hugh Capet had a harder time selling his son as co-monarch in the absence of a threat from the south. In the ensuing chain of events in Francia, Gerbert of Aurillac was given the pallium, then driven into exile.

Because Gerbert of Aurillac was driven into exile, Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire was robbed of his wise counsel and learning in his formative years. The resulting Otto grew up to be cruel, decisive and highly ruthless. He lived a different life, and lived long enough to marry Zoe, a princess of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Because Zoe went off to marry Otto, Basil II experienced a different set of life circumstances. He talked to different people, pursued similar battle tactics and made broadly similar decisions. But war is always chancy, and the course of his altered routines led him into the path of a Bulgar axe.

Because Basil II died young and Zoe was off in Germany, Theodora became empress far earlier than anyone expected, with the nobles of Byzantium jockeying for position. Because of their jockeying, an opening emerged for an outside faction to unite the dynatoi around their shared greed and the restoration of privileges Basil had stripped from them. That opening produced Constantine IX Maleinos.

Because Constantine IX Maleinos was the Emperor, we are here, on the precipice of disaster for the Eastern Roman Empire.

~​

Excerpt: Crying Survivor: Last Centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire - Yunus Pagonis, International Scholastic Press, AD 2008

- Chapter 7 -
THE TURK'S BARGAIN​

By 1043, it was well-known in the Eastern Roman Empire that Constantine IX Maleinos would not see another two years.

Years of hard drinking and venal living had left the usurper-emperor afflicted with any number of ailments. Sources tell us that his weight ballooned dramatically in the last years of his life, and he suffered from bouts of paranoia and anxiety. While Constantine had the support of most of the Empire's upper class, having effectively bought them to his side with lavish gifts and concessions and the right to purchase public village and town land for themselves, he saw shadows and threats everywhere, particularly in the military hierarchy.

In the last decade or so of Constantine's reign, the Emperor seems to have conducted a wide-reaching purge of the military hierarchy. Among the prominent casualties was the general George Maniakes, who initially eluded capture and fled to join his troops on the Syrian border.[1] The rebellion kicked off in 1038 and saw Maniakes' army inflict a significant loss on a larger Roman force at Tarsos, humiliating Constantine and prompting him to turn to outside measures.

It was Constantine who first began the practice of hiring mercenaries in large numbers, particularly Turkmens, Normans and Iberian Christians. Among these were a number of men of the Yuregir tribe of Oghuz Turks, settled around Rasht but selling their muscle to the highest bidder even as many of their fellows raided throughout Armenia and the Muslim world. Among the mercenaries to sign on with Constantine was Artuk, the first son of Togtekin and his father's designated successor.

Artuk and his men - along with a contingent of Normans under Guy of Quetteville - were paired up with Constantine's most trusted general, Andronikos Tarchaneiotes, a man from a wealthy family who showed some talent in the field. The resulting force reversed much of Maniakes' control of the hinterland before meeting his army at the Battle of Caesarea in July 1039. That battle would prove pivotal in a number of ways: Artuk was killed in a cavalry charge, leaving his own son Mahmud in the care of Togtekin, while Guy distinguished himself on the field, his men successfully capturing Maniakes. The surviving Turks pursued the remnants of Maniakes' army and butchered those they captured.

The revolt of Maniakes seems to have fueled Constantine IX's fear of a military uprising, giving him cause to thin out the ranks of the leadership even more. Military power was distributed to generals chosen for their loyalty to the Maniakes family, mainly rich men from aristocratic families. Generals such as Tarchaneiotes, Nikephoros Synadenos and Michael Dalassenos[2] were quickly appointed to replace the more competent and doubting men purged in the last years of Constantine's reign. Wary of generals going into business for themselves, Constantine increasingly began to turn the military over to the aristocratic class, granting them honours and cuts of local tax revenue in exchange for military contributions. Little by little, he began to fracture the military in the hopes of preventing any one general from becoming powerful or ambitious enough to challenge him, while keeping his most loyal generals close at hand.

The effect of this - by the time Constantine died in 1044 - was to leave his son, Eustathios Porphyrogenitos, with a class of loyal officers and aristocrats ruling over a much weaker empire. The landowners appointed by the Maleinos Emperors would often use their cuts of the tax revenue to bolster their local manpower with mercenaries - and in the east, that largely took the form of the very Turkmens who were busily raiding into Armenia at the time.

The early years of Eustathios' reign were surprisingly quiet ones, aside from Turkmen raids in the east rapidly destabilizing the kingdoms of Armenia. Eustathios seems to have given little thought to this, concerned instead with domestic affairs. Our sources on him suggest Eustathios was a less decadent man than his father and a much more intelligent one, but also an indecisive ruler given to bouts of deep worry and anxiety. He continued to lean on the dynatoi to support his position and continued the practice of farming out the military to local lords.

In Italy, this practice served mainly to fracture the few remaining Roman holdings in the south, at the expense of the Princes of Salerno, Capua and Benevento. More and more local landlords gradually fell under the sway of these powers, with Roman influence gradually reduced to Apulia and Calabria and the "arch" of the boot being a series of cities and towns answerable de facto to their own lords, paying lip service to the Catepan of Italy or the Prince of Salerno at any given time. Much of this can be attributed to the sheer incompetence of Constantine IX's last chosen catepan, Andronikos Tornikios, who despite being in place between 1044 and 1047 nevertheless managed to lose ground by hiring in Italian mercenaries who proved more than willing to take the land and gold and go into business for themselves. Between these losses and the frequency of Saracen raids out of Sicily and North Africa, Roman affairs in Sicily continued to slip away from Constantinople's grasp.

Things began to turn for the worse on Eustathios in the late 1040s, when the Kizik Turks arrived with all the force of an oceanic cyclone on the Sea of Pearls.[3] The introduction of a large wave of poorly-organized Turkmens raiding throughout the Eastern Roman world presented the Maleinos emperors' system of local military benefactors with the challenge of actually stopping these raiders with what forces they could muster. Turkmen raiders, mostly of the Kizik persuasion, swept through the kingdoms of Vaspurakan and Armenia, rapidly depleting these kingdoms' manpower. Pleas for help to Constantinople were met with concern on the part of Eustathios, though he ultimately decided that the raids were a local affair.

The Kizik came less as conquerors than as raiders. While the King of Vaspurakan did reach an agreement to pay tribute to Kutay, the most powerful of the Kizik warlords, other bands of mounted nomads continued to plague the countryside. The Armenian landlords found themselves pouring out their treasury to try and bribe off band after band of Turkmens, or pouring out even more of their treasury to pay militias or hire mercenaries. Much of this money went into the lands nominally controlled by the Sallarids of Albania,[4] where many of the Kizik war bands had settled. Still more gold flowed into Rasht as some landowners hired Yuregir mercenaries. It is hard to tell which Turkmens represented which clan, as most Roman histories couldn't distinguish between one Turkmen and another, though in general the Yuregir were Muslim and the Kizik were pagans.

By the mid-1050s, with the Armenian kingdoms effectively depleted of manpower and wealth and paying what tribute they could scrounge up to the Kizik, raiding into Anatolia had begun to reach a fever pitch, with bands of Turkmens looting towns and cities and carrying away wealth and women. The crisis point came in 1055, when Kutay and his followers successfully drove the last King of Vaspurakan, Atom Artsruni (known as the Usurper for dethroning his nephew at a time of crisis), out of his palace, annexing Van. The Turkmens rapidly began to move west, raiding the interior of Anatolia. As more and more Kizik bands began to coalesce around Van, Kutay's control over the clan increased, and he adopted the airs of a king, styling himself Khan over Armenia and taking one of Atom's daughters as his concubine.

With the rest of Armenia rapidly falling under Turkmen suzerainty, war bands pushed into the east of the Empire assertively, drawing a response from Eustathios. He dispatched his father's loyal men, Nikephoros Synadenos and Michael Dalassenos, eastward with an army composed of troops drawn up from his system of local lords and bolstered by Varangians, plus a large column of Turkmen mercenaries and another of Christian Pechenegs. Their goal was to rein in the Turkmen incursions in Anatolia.

The Maleinos' choice of generals proved unfortunate - Synadenos and Dalassenos had been selected more for their loyalty and connections than their talent, and they lacked experience in dealing with the highly mobile, loosely-organized forces which the Turkmens represented. The Roman army floundered through central Anatolia, struggling to catch up with individual war parties. Finally the two split their forces, with Synadenos leading his men to Romanopolis and fortifying it against Turkmen incursions, while Dalassenos went north towards Theodosiopolis[5], intent on fortifying the city, which had been comparatively neglected since its incorporation into the empire.

The presence of the two armies somewhat constrained Kizik depredations, but raids continued throughout the smaller towns and villages, and local landlords continued to cry out to the armies and the Emperor for help. While Synadenos and Dalassenos proved capable of fortifying their cities, they utterly failed to protect the hinterlands, with their troops largely relegated to showing up after the fact to cities long since looted and sacked by Turkmens operating with impunity. Eustathios, struggling for a military solution more permanent than running around putting out fires, did the only thing he could think of.

He opened the treaury and bought the Kizik.[6]

In 1059, Eustathios traveled to Theodosiopolis and met with Kutay and his eldest son Tutush in a florid ceremony, where Kutay acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman Emperor and converted to Christianity, adopting the Christian name of Michael. Less publicized was a vast transfer of gold and treasure from the Roman vaults into Turkmen hands and the proliferation of Kizik bands throughout the Roman army. Raids by bands outside Kutay's control continued, but increasingly met opposition from Turkmens loyal to Kutay and the Armenian settler contingent.

In the eyes of Eustathios, he'd just bought a permanent peace and an expansion of both the Empire and its army. In fact, Kutay's conversion was nominal, and he continued to openly put on pagan airs and worship pagan gods, while continuing to covet Roman gold. More cash flowed into the hands of Kizik raiders as they integrated into the local forces of the landlords Eustathios and his father empowered. While Kutay's third son, "George" Anushtakin, would wholeheartedly adopt Christianity, his eldest two sons, Tutush and the soon-to-be-famous Mizraq Arslan, would not take up the way of the cross at all.

Eustathios had not bought peace; instead he'd incorporated the fox into the defensive framework of the henhouse. To this day, the racist epithet "Turk's bargain" is still used to describe a deal where one party double-crosses the other in the end.


[1] Maniakes didn't live long enough to go to Sicily, much to Sicily's loss.
[2] Son of Romanos.
[3] The Caribbean, so named because of the comparison of the Caribbean island chain to a string of pearls by ?????.
[4] Azerbaijan.
[5] Modern Erzurum.
[6] No Manzikert this time. Thought about it, but this time around, Eustrathios makes a dumb.

SUMMARY:
1039: An army of Greeks, Turkmens and Normans under Andronikos Tarchaneiotes defeats the rebel George Maniakes at the Battle of Caesarea. The rebellion gives a paranoid Constantine IX Maleinos pretense to further purge the officer ranks of the Eastern Roman Empire, semi-decentralizing the military and turning command over to men chosen more for loyalty than talent.
1044: Constantine IX Maleinos dies of liver failure. His son, Eustathios Porphyrogenitos, succeeds him.
1055: After years of raiding, Kutay, most prominent of the Kizik Turks, displaces the last King of Vaspurakan and overruns Van. He styles himself a Khan. Turkmen raids into central Anatolia increase catastrophically over the next few years despite two Roman generals fortifying a couple of major cities in the area.
1059: Roman Emperor Eustathios Maleinos buys the supplication of Kutay and the greater part of the Kizik Turkmens. Kutay makes a big show of converting to Christianity and taking on the name Michael, and the Kizik follow Eustathios's gold into the greater part of the Empire, integrating as auxiliary troops and mercenaries. In fact, Kutay continues to worship as a Tengri pagan, and the Kizik are loyal to Eustathios's money, not the Empire.