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357: Julian starts a campaign against the Salian Franks. He started by leading a legion into lower germania. At around this time Constantius II, falls ill, and names Julian his regent. Even though the two are rivals, and hate each other for their religion, Constantius realizes Julian is the best successor to ensure his empire lives on. Julian makes extremely reckless, unpopular, and downright stupid choices, however these choices by some mean of luck turn out to save the empire. Julian settles, the salian franks, into britain, and negotiates, a treaty with the Angles, Visogoths, and saxons, to settle them into roman britain, and keep the territory, in exchange for coming to the roman's defense whenever needed, and eradicating the celtic pirates from hibernia. Constantius falls even more severely ill, and gives control of the empire, completely to Julian. Julian immediately stops, money from going to churches, and orders his armies to loot, and burn down the churchs. In their place he rebuilds the temple. However he learned that persecution was not going to work, and refrains from going on a Theodosius style massacre of christians. Julian is an extreme populist, and the poor, and unfortunate loved him. He took a few pages out of the christian book, and changed the roman religion. However he refrained from instituting a state religion, and called for a separation of church and state. However his new religious policies were somewhat popular in the west, only 10% christian, it faced massive backlash in the east, 50% christian. He knew he would not be loved in the east, unless he did something drastic. He named a christian co-emperor of the east. This was yet another decision stupid at the time, but that would end up saving the empire.
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