Eurasia to 615.
Actually, 615 is a fantastic year to snapshot Eurasia, so it will be duly taken. To start, the Britannic Isles were, thus far, still torn apart with deadly conflict. The pagan king Aethelfrith, lord of Bernicia and Deira, was tearing up central Britannia; he had smashed most of his rivals thus far, and was as of 615 busy preparing for further campaigns in the south, having driven away his rival Edwin, contestant for the throne of Deira, and also having scored an impressive victory over the Dál Riatans at Degsastan in 603. Edwin, however, had taken refuge with King Cearl of Mercia, who in an effort to break the increasingly strong hold of the Bernician king had not only married Edwin to his daughter but also come to ask Raedwald of the East Angles for aid. Raedwald, indeed, had his eye on the position of bretwalda, or lord of the isle (albeit a largely useless position, it was somewhat prestigious), and saw a chance in opposing the designs of the aging Aethelfrith to secure that power for himself. In the south of the isles, Jutish Cantware was entering the twilight of its golden age as the great king Aethelbert, the current bretwalda, slipped closer towards death. Elsewhere in the island, the Anglo-Saxon invaders continued to fight against the Romano-British and Celts with great success there as well; Wessex continued to grow stronger under Cynegils, while Sussex was generally beaten up by its larger neighbors, and Essex was undergoing something of a weak Christianization by the king, Saebert, who while converting to the rite of the Cross retained many pagan practices, and indeed stood idly by while his sons forced the Bishop of Londinium out of his see. While the Germanic invaders were strengthening, though, the Brythonic kingdoms of the west were not idle; despite the loss of Atrebatia and Elmet to the Germans, the King of Powys, Selyf ap Cynan, was marshaling a coalition to defend the western coast from the still power-hungry Aethelfrith.
Gaul and Germania had seen much turmoil in the last three decades, and things were finally beginning to settle down in 615. Following the extremely mediocre Frankish performance in the Gothic civil war of the 550s, Chlothar, sole Merovingian king, was at least able to consolidate his power over Aquitania, Burgundia, Austrasia, and Neustria, along with his vassals in Germania, namely the Thuringii and Alamanni; when he died (561) his lands were divided amongst his sons, namely Chram, Chilperic, Guntram, Sigebert, and Charibert, who quickly fell to civil war. Internal conflict dominated the 560s, and it was only in 568 with the deaths of Guntram and Chilperic (the former due to assassination by agents of Charibert, and the latter falling in battle to Chram's army at Lutetia) that things settled down somewhat; Sigebert was left with Austrasia and the vassal kingdoms of Thuringia and Alemannia, while his ally Charibert received Aquitania and Burgundia and Chram established suzerainty over Neustria. While the fiction of a united Frankish kingdom remained, after 568 the three portions of the country were increasingly divided; this was exacerbated, of course, by the crisis of the early eighties. After the disastrous defeat of 581, the Lombard tribes were forced to flee their former lands north of the Danuvius by the Bulgar Khagan Zabergan. After about two years the disparate clans coalesced again under the leadership of the young chief Authari, and moved west, into the lands of the Austrasian vassals. After smashing an Alamannic army in 584 at Rhedintovinum, the Lombards swept into Austrasia proper, and met up against Sigebert himself at the head of a Thuringian and Frankish army. Initially, the experienced Sigebert had the better of the Lombards, and landed defeats on them at Galaegia and Calancorum in 585. However, at Stragona the next year, deep within the wilds beyond the Austrasian frontier, Sigebert's army was unexpectedly smashed by Authari, who led a forlorn hope charge down from the ridgetop where the Lombards were camped. This took the Franks by surprise; Sigebert survived and rallied pieces of his army, but the irresistible Lombard charge had shattered most of the Merovingian force and separated Sigebert from his vassals. In 587, the Thuringian chieftain Gozbert switched sides and allied with Authari's Lombards, and the end became nigh. Sigebert was barely able to put up any resistance at all at the Battle of the Adrana River, where his scanty forces were swept up by the Lombard and Thuringian hordes. With the destruction of the Austrasian army, Sigebert's lands rapidly fell under Lombard control, and in 591 the siege of his capital, Divodurum, ended in his suicide and a Lombard victory.
Neustria was not idle, however. In fact, Chram saw an excellent opportunity for the aggrandizement of his own little kingdom; Sigebert, his late, unlamented brother, had been allying with Charibert to restrain Neustrian power since the end of the civil war, and with this restriction gone the king at Lutetia decided to take this unexpected opportunity and gain not only an ally but also hegemony in Francia itself. The short-lived kingdom of Aquitaine, now ruled by Charibert's illegitimate son Clovis II, was smashed by a series of vicious attacks from not only Chram's kingdom of Neustria and the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania, joined by an expeditionary force sent by the Western Emperor. Chram split Aquitaine with the Visigoths, seizing the northern half (i.e. everything north of the Carantomus River) and yielding the south to the Visigothic king Liuva III; he did the same thing with his nephew's Burgundian claims, awarding the southern portion to the Western Empire and taking everything north of the fortress of Bibracte. Thus, by 615 the Frankish lands were reunited under Chram's branch of the Merovingian dynasty, which was still torn apart by civil war between his sons Childeric and Dagobert; Childeric managed to win fairly quickly, though, and was duly crowned sole king as Childeric II. Childeric II, while somewhat less energetic than his father, did conduct campaigns against the Lombards, who had largely colonized Austrasia and were in the process of being converted to Christianity. The short, sharp wars he fought were largely inconclusive, and by 615 a rivalry was definitely developing between the two countries. Meanwhile, on their lonely peninsula, Britannic Armorica was still sticking it out, and developing their own little variant of the Romano-Celtic tongue out of range of Neustrian attack.
Visigothic Hispania had somewhat revived since its fall from the height of power it had once held during the reign of Clovis II. Athanagild, surprisingly enough, managed to maintain a semblance of peace and order, using the Chalcedonian Suevi (who had only recently converted en masse) as a common enemy around which to rally the Visigoths. By 580 he and his successor Liuva had crushed the little Gallaecian kingdom and consolidated their rule; by 600 the Visigoths had successfully intervened in the mess that was Gaul, seizing much of their former holdings in Aquitania. Good relations were hard to maintain with the Western Empire in the wake of the 550s civil war, though, until King Liuva II converted to Chalcedonian Christianity in 586 and thus allowed a significant measure of rapport with the similarly-Chalcedonian Goths in Italy. Arian holdouts did exist, as they had in Italy, but Liuva was able to crush these uprisings better than Athalaric, and they barely were able to make a move at all during the brief Aquitanian intervention. By 615, King Gundobar was able to rule a relatively peaceful, somewhat powerful kingdom with internal and religious tranquility, especially as the Visigothic ruling class slowly was subsumed by the native Ibero-Romans, although this process, which had been going since the fifth century, was extremely slow.
The Vandal Kingdom of North Africa was still alive, though its list of allies was growing thin. While still a preeminent sea power in the Mediterranean, it was only able to crush one of its opponents (Visigoths, Western Empire, or Eastern Empire), not two or three at once. The staunch Arianism of the ruling Vandals, who refused to intermix with the native Romano-Africans, made internal peace impossible as well, and frequently Vandal kings were absorbed in crushing revolts. The excellent agricultural production of Byzacena and Africa Proconsularis continued, though, and the Vandals were at least relatively self-sufficient. Vandal Kings relied primarily on piracy to gain wealth, as they were somewhat leery of risking open conflict; this gained them further enemies, although until 615 they were distracted by other foreign policy directions. King Suintila feared a crushing alliance of the Roman Empires and the Visigoths, which while still not official was increasingly apparent. As of 615, Vandal Africa may not have a very long time to live.
The Western Roman Empire had developed admirably since its bloody beginning during the Gothic civil war. Athalaric had had his son baptized as "Claudius", and he took the throne as the Third of that name upon his father's peaceful death in 567. Claudius III, surnamed "Gothicus" as had been the second (somewhat ironically, for they were for opposite reasons), continued to assert the imperial prerogative over the former Gothic nobles, most of whom had been slaughtered as Arians during the civil war (making the job significantly easier). Many of the old imperial positions were restored, whether they had any real significance or not; therefore, the Italians were given a Senate, to which both Goths and native Romans belonged, as well as a slowly developing bureaucratic system which with the support of the imperial army took over many of the functions that the former imperial bureaucracy had held. His army, modeled after that of the Eastern Empire, performed admirably in repulsing Bulgar invasions after the collapse of the Lombard state (albeit much of the work had been done by the Eastern navy, which secured the Danuvius easily). Claudius III continued the tradition of Latin names when when he had his son christened Tiberius II, who ascended to the purple in 589 and who was almost immediately forced to intervene in the Gallic mess. Fortunately, due primarily to his able magister militum Ildibad, who personally led the imperial army to victory over the already overwhelmed Aquitanian army at Ariolica. In any event, Tiberius was free to rot away of boredom and booze while his ministers ran things, although after Ildibad's death in 602 Bulgar raids began to worsen, some getting significant distances through Pannonia, even burning Aquincum on one occasion (in 607). Meanwhile, to deal with the Vandals, a medium-sized but respectable navy had been developed, along typical lines, but without the harpaces in order to avoid the very formidable danger of fireships (of which the Vandals were quite fond).
And, of course, the Church was resubordinated to imperial rule; after the death of the Bishop of Rome during the civil war, Athalaric and his predecessors had begun to reassert the imperial supremacy in that arena as well, forcing the Bishop to be approved by the Emperor upon the death of a prior one. Indeed, in 611, Tiberius presided over an ecumenical council at Aquileia, also called the Quinisext Council, that declared Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople to be equal patriarchal sees, creating the pentarchical system. This pentarchy was to preside at ecumenical councils, and given the odd number of Patriarchs would be able to, by a vote amongst themselves, solve any particular crisis. In reality, though, the Constantinopolitan Patriarch often got his way, for the Western Empire had but one Patriarch and the Eastern had four, which often voted in a bloc, although sometimes the Patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria would disrupt the status quo, especially in the earlier days, when the monophysite heresy was still strong in those parts (causing cooperation between the Chalcedonian Patriarchs, i.e. those of Constantinople, Rome, and Antioch...but that, and the later fate of the pentarchy, is another story.
The Bulgar Khaganate consolidated and managed to survive as a non-transient state during this period, and while achieving nothing close to the success of the Avars of Persia, it still retained significant power along the eastern Danuvius and frequently raided across that river into Western and Eastern Roman territory, especially as the imperial navies declined early in the seventh century. Much intermixing took place between the Bulgars and the Slavs, who were once again free to spread out throughout Eastern Europe, although no large-scale migration was able to occur beyond the Danuvius due to the still extant and still significant imperial power.
Priscus' rule in Eastern Rome had not been a particularly happy one; his continuing penury brought him hatred from the people of the capital, while his staunch Chalcedonianism and monophysite persecution caused revolts in the Levant and Egypt, which he spent much of his reign trying to quell with significant success (although of course hatred all around). A compromise with the monophysites became increasingly distant, while the imperial power itself was somewhat compromised. However, fortunately the Avars were involved in their own troubles to the east, and so the fortification of Mesopotamia was sufficient to hold them at bay, while barbarian migrations through the Caucasus failed due to the power of Lazica and Iberia, which were dynastically united by Dachi III. Doubtless the united Caucasian state (named Colchis) would have still succumbed to a migration of more than a few tribes, but the latent energy of the steppe was still held in check by the Gokturk Empire, which was undergoing its own interesting little crisis. In any event, upon Priscus' death by assassination in 604 his successor had few external problems to deal with, but the domestic situation was frightful. That Emperor, Anastasius II, had been the ringleader of the conspiracy that had not only unseated his predecessor, and within the next year worked to clean out the highest offices of Priscus supporters, including the Patriarch of Constantinople, the diehard Chalcedonian Maximianus II, and the magister militum per Orientem John of Paphlagonia. This bloodletting paved the way for the installation of moderates, such as the Patriarch Anatolius II of Constantinople and Flavian IV of Antioch. However, the current Roman Patriarch, Honorius, refused to even consider any sort of reconciliation with the Monophysitic Patriarchs, and a three-way quasi-schism ensued, which was not really solved as of 615. In the meantime, Anastasius remained at peace, and his reign to 615 was largely uneventful, save for the attempts to limit military actions against monophysite rebels in the southern Levant.
Axum having already been examined, we can skip over to the Avar Persian empire. While Bayan was Khagan, the Avars had become somewhat integrated with the Persian populace at large. The fact that there weren't actually all that many Persians themselves to control didn't hurt; the loss of most of the critical Mesopotamia population centers had, as mentioned, turned any possible Persian state into a rump one. In any event, under Bayan's rule the Avars had established themselves as a significant demographical element of the Persian society, and strife was largely prevented by the Avars' decision to yield on some critical domestic issues, such as religion (had the followers of Zarathustra been persecuted, the whole country would have risen up en masse). By and large, the Avar state, with the Khagan/Shahanshah at its head, consolidated during these years, although repeated raids on Roman territory and Axumite Hormirzad (increasingly becoming unprofitable and pointless, as any trade with Avar Persia was outweighed by the horrendous costs in defending the outpost) did occur. After Bayan's death a year after the conclusion of the Mesopotamian conflict (596, for those who don't pay attention), the Avars began embarking on policies clearly aimed at war with the Romans…were it not for the Gokturk Khaganate, which nearly imploded . To that point, there had been a clear succession of Gokturk khagans, beginning with their original leader Istämi and his son Tardu. Tardu's death, though, nearly precipitated a dynastic crisis, for he had no children but many cousins, all of whom wanted the throne. The next few years were dominated by major struggles between the various claimants, sending the khaganate careering into civil war and allowing interventions from numerous outside powers, including the Chinese and the Avars. Eventually, Shelun, the contestant who had control of the capital, Ötüken, secured the allegiance of one of the Chinese armies and annihilated all of his opponents in the east, though he could not destroy his brother's forces, supported by the Avars, in the west. That brother, Viro, met with Shelun after over a decade of conflict and in 608 confirmed the Gokturks' split into eastern and western khaganates, aligned generally with the Avars and the Chinese respectively. Relative peace returned to the steppes, though constant low-level warfare between the two brothers continued.
That, of course, brings us to the Chinese themselves. The existence of the Gokturk khaganate had somewhat halted the constant barbarian attacks on China's periphery, allowing the southern and northern halves of the empire to savagely attack each other once more. The period of southern and northern dynasties was beginning to come to an end, though, as the southern dynasty of Liang was seriously weakened and eventually succumbed to a generals' revolt that established the Chen dynasty. In the meantime, to the north, the Western Wei, having smashed the Rouran with Gokturk assistance, were also destroyed from the inside out, with another army coup resulting in the creation of the northern Zhou dynasty. These Northern Zhou, while not the most powerful of the Chinese states, were ruled (at least at first) by capable emperors. After one of the legitimate emperors, Wu, crushed the power behind the throne, one Yuwen Hu, in 572, he began to build up an impressive military. He was greatly aided in his aim of reuniting China by the death of the great Northern Qi general Hulü Guang, who perished as a victim of court intrigue. Wu's attacks on Qi, which had earlier been stymied by his able opponent, finally broke the back of enemy resistance at the Alesia-like Battle of Pingyang, where the Qi army under Emperor Gao Wei himself was disastrously defeated. After Pingyang, the remaining years of Emperor Wu's life were taken up by crushing the last vestiges of Qi resistance and ensuring stable Zhou control over the entire north. Within two years, though, he was embroiled in a two-front war with the Chen in the south and the Gokturks to the north, and upon his death not long afterward yielded an increasingly dangerous situation to his son, Emperor Xuan, who during his own brief reign was embroiled in court intrigue and who died of a mysterious illness in 580. The stage was now set for the competent general Yang Jian to walk on; he assumed the position of regent for Xuan's successor Jing, but within a year discarded that arrangement in favor of Jing's abdication to the post of duke of Jie, and his own ascension to the throne as Emperor Wen of Sui. After wiping out every last vestige of the royal family of Northern Zhou (originally confined to just the Duke of Jie's relatives, but eventually the former emperor himself was slaughtered), Wen was secure enough to finally reunite China.
Of course, no new dynasty would be complete without some reforms at the beginning, and Wen duly enacted them: Zhou's "six departments" bureaucracy was discarded and a new one, the "five bureaus" system, replaced it. He also improved central authority by another mean, that is to say he allowed his immediate subordinates, the imperial princes, greater authority and eliminated much of the army's former autonomy. The remainder of that autonomy was taken away when he "discovered treachery" by several key military commanders and had this "Three Dukes" conspiracy crushed with their execution. Wen turned even more away from the old Legalist punishments by altering the penal code and decreasing its severity. He improved the capital, as well, enlarging Chang'an by building a vast new suburb, Daxing, and moving the instruments of State there. Of course, public works of a more practical nature weren't neglected either, because the new emperor decided to build a new canal to bypass the treacherous Wei River to improve trade.
In foreign relations, too, Emperor Wen showed no small acumen. The Gokturks had been fighting an endemic war with the Zhou and Sui both, although its intensity was extremely low, much lower than had been the Rouran norm. However, that threatened to change when the Gokturk Khagan, Tardu, was angered by the destruction of Zhou's royal family, mostly because his daughter was among the dead. He threatened to escalate the usual raiding warfare into an all out campaign against the Sui, but Wen preempted him by first stirring up some dynastic problems with his many cousins (this of course led to the later civil war upon Tardu's death fifteen years later) and then launching his own attack, briefly establishing an ascendancy over the confused Gokturks and forcing Tardu to submit and end the raids. With the north secure from the Gokturks, Wen was free to dabble in the south, preparatory to a campaign to shatter the Chen; he freed up an army by ensuring that his vassal, the Western Liang emperor Jing, wouldn't support any of the military and noble conspiracies currently going around and instead would dispatch an army to aid in the destruction of Chen. In 589, within a few months, four Sui armies crossed the Yangtze and attacked the capital Jiankang. The Chen emperor Shubao, degenerate as he was, had let the army slip into a dangerously weak state, and only token resistance was put up to the Sui reconquest of the entire country. The following year, all resistance ceased, and the Middle Kingdom was once more one under the Sui aegis.
The next decade was largely taken up by consolidation of Sui's new southern lands; the application of the Sui legal and governmental systems to former Chen territory didn't go over well and a revolt nearly had to be crushed, but the people were generally fobbed off later on by public works and conciliatory programs such as tax reduction for the famine-stricken south. However, in his later days, he relegated much war-making power to the imperial princes, the scions of the central government (which held more and more power as private citizens were forbidden from carrying any weapons), briefly intervening in the steppes in support of his ally/vassal (the relationship changed frequently) Khagan Tardu, and later, when the Gokturk Khaganate imploded, Sui armies were sent into the steppes to assist Shelun's claim to the throne. The resulting split between the two Gokturk khaganates left the Eastern one largely an ally and near-vassal of the Sui. The Eastern Gokturks greatly assisted in the crisis that came a few years later, in the late 590s, when the irksome Goguryeo king Yeongyang, after refusing to recognize the Sui emperor as his overlord, sent emissaries to the tribes along the Sui northern frontier. Old Tardu had the emissaries slain and ended the possibility of any attacks on the Sui northern frontier, while forcing the tribes of the Mohe to ignore Goguryeo emissaries as well; the Goguryeo continued to refuse to submit until 602, when Emperor Wen, near death, sent a missive demanding that the Goguryeo stop the border raids and acknowledge the Sui as overlords, although in reality it would be purely nominal. With threats from Baekje, one of the other three kingdoms of the Korean peninsula, to help him along, Yeongyang grudgingly submitted to nominal authority. With no foreign threats and a relatively stable internal situation, Wen's son Yang was able to ascend to the throne with little fuss in 603 and continue the public works system. By 615, Sui's rule seemed fairly firmly established, although of course there were domestic issues, primarily dealing with dissent at having to do all this bloody work and still some complaints from the army about it being firmly under the imperial thumb.
Finally, we turn to India, which after the destruction of the Gupta Empire and the Hephthalite kingdoms that succeeded it, was balkanized into several small republics and kingdoms. Easily the most powerful of these were the two great Deccan empires, those of the Chalukya and the Pallavas. The former was larger and somewhat more militarily powerful, but the Pallavas, despite generally being blocked off by Chalukya expansion and also being somewhat more decentralized, were able to stave off any invasions of their territory with reasonable success, while being somewhat more accomplished in the non-military spheres, such as that of architecture. The petty republics and kingdoms that ruled the north, including Malwa, Thanesar, Kalinga, and Magadha, were absolutely terrified of the southerners' power, and it would take only a slight change in the balance of power to push them into each others' hands and create a grand alliance. India, too, looked sure to blow up as 615 approached.
In any event, the world system that had to some extent been damaged in the past century was beginning to restabilize again, and a chance of recovering former glories in both East and West was glimpsed by great leaders on both sides. All it would take for all these dreams to come crashing down was one small push, in the form of one man. In 615 this one man would make his appearance on the world stage; Eurasia would never be the same.
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I realize that it's certainly not proven that the Rouran and the Avars were one and the same; however, it's used in most of the books I have (admittedly, none are Chinese in authorship), and it sort of works for what I have in mind, much better than them being different anyway. After all, a large chunk of this period is unsourced or very cursorily so.
I also realize that some of the names may seem...ahistorical or at least early. This is not a mistake; Dis' complaints about the same people being rather unlikely this far down the line have not fallen on deaf ears. If they were born after the PoD, then they probably don't exist. In this earlier period, I was sort of generous about historical personages remaining in this time flow, but later will be a lot different.
utterly routed him when he attacked. And yet here, they also have the support of Rome (at least enough that Rome later recognizes the defeat of Armenia as their own defeat), and yet fail. Edit: If I remember correctly, it took the assasination of the king of Armenia and the resultant chaos for the Sassanids to finally defeat Armenia
, perfetc.
