Exuperantius was not Sarus’ only problem. The Avars had seized their chance while Roman armies were absent on the frontier. In 564 they had dealt a series of staggering blows to the Gepids. Most Gepids joined up with the Avars wholesale. Many of the rest flooded south into Roman Thrace, engaging in the usual banditry and pillage. With Exuperantius in control of the Dalmatian coast, there was nothing to prevent the Avars from destroying most of the Roman military bases in Pannonia and Moesia, which they began to do with frightening efficiency. Sarus was forced to relegate Exuperantius to the back burner for the time being while he scraped together troops to deal with the crisis in the eastern Balkans. Lagodius, in command of other troops, would have to bar the door into Italy itself and deal with the Avars as best he could.
Here was where Sarus’ Gothic connections came in handy. During the autumn of 565, Gothic auxiliaries arrived in Greece and Thrace, effectively aiding the Romans in their attempts to manage the Gepid migrants. With Gothic troops helping hold the line further east, Sarus managed to gather enough soldiers to make a surprise winter assault on the island of Brattia in Dalmatia, which succeeded in wresting it from Exuperantine hands. From Brattia, imperialist ships could blockade Exuperantius’ capital of Salona and even assault the harbor. The Roman fleet couldn’t assault the city until spring arrived, and by then an Avar army had reached Salona. Exuperantius ordered his fleet to make a forlorn-hope attack on Brattia, which failed. He then decided to try to negotiate with the Avars and use them as his vehicle back to power, relying on his connections from his previous control of the Pannonian army. To forestall this, some of his officials assassinated him and handed the city over to Sarus’ men in the hope that they would save it from the Avars. With the help of the imperial troops, the Salonans successfully resisted Avar assaults until the Avar army was forced to retire into the Illyrian hinterland.
As Sarus slowly restored equilibrium in the east, the brief scare in the west sputtered out. The Vascones were persistent, but without any support from any other like-minded groups, they were slowly ground down by attrition until they reshuffled their leadership and came to terms with the imperial authorities and were returned to their former haunts on the Cantabrian coast. As for Theodosiolus, he was more than willing to work with Probus’ government, and soon the whole Iberian situation returned to a semblance of normality.
The civil war had been exceptionally bloody as far as fratricidal contests go, but at least it had been mercifully short – at least, compared to earlier civil wars. The only real security breach had been in the Balkans, and they weren’t really worth much anyway, especially the parts that the Avars had overrun. Roman troops still held the coastline of Dalmatia, the vital pass at Iulia Æmona, and the territories south of the Haimos Mountains. What had been lost was strategic depth, and that could be recovered with vigorous campaigning, especially against an enemy like the Avars that could not easily hold territory in rough terrain where Roman comitatensian heavy infantry was dominant. Already the Romans were learning from Avar technical advantages, copying even the most minor of devices, like the stirrup that made it easier to mount heavy cavalry and which improved lateral stability. Piece of cake…right?
Egypt had, unlike the Avars, failed to make capital out of Rome’s temporary insanity. Also unlike the Avar qagan, Taurinos didn’t really want to, either. It wasn’t as though Roman power was really holding the Egyptians back from a war on, say, the Ġassānids – it was the Ġassānids themselves who were doing that, along with Egypt’s interests elsewhere. And what could be gained from a direct attack on Rome anyway? Of course, none of these arguments made much of an impression on the Egyptian army, which mutinied at Rinokoloura in 565 out of impotent rage at Taurinos’ persistent refusal to do anything about the Roman civil war. The mutiny was put down, but it helped to indicate how shaky Taurinos’ throne really was. Without martial victory to help cement his prestige, his image remained that of the war-shy usurper, dabbling in useless nonsense in the far south. The war with Qays and his adherents failed to capture the imagination of the Egyptian educated classes and military, especially since Aksumite soldiers were doing most of the fighting (on the Egyptian payroll!) and gaining most of the treasure.
Nevertheless, with the rebellion put down, Egypt’s power in the southern seas continued to grow. After the war in Himyar was concluded in 567, Egyptian fleets constructed at Berenikē and Leukos Limēn began making appearances in other parts of the Erythraian littoral. During the 560s, they had a relatively easy job of it, since they could coast on Aksumite naval support. By the 570s, Egypt’s fleets were powerful enough to handle most opponents in the area, and started making their presence felt. Many of the larger tribal agglomerations in the Hijaz began to break up around this time; whether Egyptian military intervention was the main catalyst or merely a secondary one is still hotly debated among people who have time to do that sort of thing.
Most of that Egyptian influence and power was focused on the north-central Hijazi town of Yaṯrib in the 570s. Yaṯrib, home to several large Jewish families, was ruled by the Banū Qurayẓa, who were already trying to reinforce their tenuous grip on dominance in the region by reemphasizing religious unity. At the same time, the Qurayẓa were attempting to play a double game between the Ġassānids and Egyptians. It was essentially the perfect situation for a jolly war; whether it came about because of the religious differences (as the aforementioned Bishop of Boubastos would say) or because of the geopolitical issues at stake. (Not that it really had to be one or the other. You get it.) In 571, the Banū Kilab, a Qurayẓa client, attacked and annihilated a small group of the Banū Ġatafan while they were meeting with Egyptian emissaries. This turned the indirect political struggle into a very direct military one. The War of Yaṯrib, fought mostly by various Hijazi tribes on each side, dragged on for eight years, until the Egyptians finally committed a few thousand professional troops to the struggle and successfully sacked the town in 579. In the wake of the victory, some of the Egyptian-allied tribes settled on the site.
Probus II’s Rome spent most of the 560s recovering shaken stability. The arrangement with Sarus ended up proving to have been universally successful. After successfully holding the line against the Avars and recovering some territory in the Dalmatian hinterland, Sarus himself died in 568, removing a potential threat to the Emperor’s power. There appears to have been no suspicion of foul play at the time, and Sarus’ daughter,
Augusta Anastasia, seems not to have held her father’s death against her husband either. Unlike Serena, Probus had legal heirs that survived childhood, the eldest of whom, Constantius, was born perhaps a year after Exuperantius’ defeat. This too helped to contribute to a general sense of stability. In something of a revival of the Procopian age, a new series of buildings sprang up in Roman Italy, the beneficiaries of state monies. Probus also constructed a palace in Arelate in an effort to make nice to the Gallic interests that had made his career. He barely spent any time there, but it was the thought that counted.
Gaul was heating up in the late 560s and early 570s as Roman-Thuringian disputes took center stage. Badereiks, the first generally recognized Thuringian king, had been quite willing to work together with the Romans, especially with Probus, who had gained the assistance of Thuringian auxiliaries in the civil war. Not so with Badereiks’ son Pisen, who had a more confrontational view of the Roman-Thuringian relationship and soon began maneuvering for control. He sparked a border war with Rome in 571 when he conquered the Saxons of Armorica and installed a subking to rule them. The fighting ended with the Roman-Thuringian borders essentially at the
status quo ante bellum, but it was only a taste of things to come. More fighting in the 570s resulted in Thuringian arms subduing more Armorican territory from local
bacaudæ. Pisen also campaigned beyond the Rhine. In 576 he won a major battle against a group of allied kings in what the Romans called
Germania Magna and extended his theoretical overlordship to the Elbe. A second victory, recorded as being over the Danes, was won the following year, although the circumstances of this last contest are not well known. Yet no all-out conflict ensued between the Thuringians and Rome. For one thing, the Romans were simply too busy with Avars and Mauri to deal with an apocalyptic struggle in northern Gaul. Pisen himself shied away from a knock-down fight because, frankly, there were easier targets elsewhere.
Probus II died of the dropsy after an unusual binge drinking session in Mediolanum in 578, and the throne passed to his young son Constantius IV. Constantius was still several years away from being old enough to reign, and as per his father’s will, his mother Anastasia assumed regency powers. Perhaps she felt as though it would be relatively easy for her to stay on top of things, with the legitimate emperor in hand and with the recent example of Serena as a long-lasting sole female ruler to ward off complaints. She did not reckon with the armies of the Latin West, led by commanders who thought Probus himself had been all right but considered his Greekling wife to be an unwelcome limit on their power. Anastasia lacked allies, and was forced to step down within three months by the
magister militum præsentalis, Candidianus, who replaced her as regent. The general wasn’t quite sure what to do with the
Augusta herself, and eventually decided to keep her around in Ravenna, but to limit her access to her son.
Candidianus was faced with a major eastern crisis at the very start. The Sāsānians had been unusually quiet for the balance of the 560s and much of the 570s. Šāh-an-šāh Ardašīr III, despite his age, had led victorious campaigns out into the wastes of Central Asia for impressive gains. The Hayāṭila cadaver had been raided for manpower and plunder, the newcomer Tiele had been taught a lesson in Xvārazm, and Iranian control had been extended to the Syr Darya. Yet even then, he was more than willing to get his hands dirty in Syria and Anatolia after a poorly understood incident on the Euphrates that sparked a war between Goths and Sāsānians in 580. The wily
ērān-spāhbed Hormizd of the Ispahbudhān led an army across the Euphrates the following year and annihilated a Gothic army at Hierapolis, where battle-hardened Iranian
dehkāns rode roughshod over the Gotho-Roman infantry. Sāsānian troops were there to stay this time, too, as they ground Gothic resistance down by besieging and capturing fortress after Syrian fortress. In 583 they captured Antiocheia, two days after Ardašīr III died peacefully in his sleep at his retreat near Dastkart. His son and successor, Yazdgard IV, made it clear that he would stay the course.
The Goths had been bleating for assistance since 581, but it was only after the fall of Antiocheia that Candidianus’ government took action. A scratch force comprised of detachments from the eastern and Pannonian armies under the command of one Priscus marched east from Nikomēdeia to bolster the Goths defending the Taurus passes. At the same time, the Ġassānids were supposed to attack Syria from the south. But surprisingly, the Laḫmid ruler Na’mān ibn ‘Amr led a massive raid on Ġassānid Palæstina and won a major battlefield victory near Gerasa, making a Ġassānid expedition against Sāsānian Syria impossible. (The Greek chronicler Pantaleon claims that the news of the defeat killed the Ġassānid king al-Mundhir, but a more recent analysis places al-Mundhir’s death a year later.) At any rate, for the time being, the Ġassānids were out of the game, and the Romano-Gothic army was alone.
Despite numerical inferiority, Priscus and the Gothic
comes Orientis Wittereiks won the first round against the Iranian armies, successfully isolating a reconnaissance in force at Adata in 584. Bad weather halted other Sāsānian attempts to crack the Taurus range that year. But during the intervening winter, the Gotho-Roman armies were suddenly faced with impending disaster. The Pontic warlord Kōnstas had been roughly handled years before by Gothic troops, but his successor Nikētas was a more formidable war leader, and more importantly, was able to capitalize on Gothic distraction. In the early spring of 585, Pontic troops swarmed out of northern Anatolia and overran Roman Bithynia, which had been denuded of troops to fight the Sāsānians and Avars. Wittereiks led his troops northward in an effort to save his capital, Pessinous, but was defeated and killed by Nikētas on the Sangarios River in June.
Meanwhile, Priscus was overwhelmed by simultaneous Sāsānian attacks through several passes. His army fell back and regrouped at Tyana, where Priscus learned of the severe Gothic defeats in the north. Confronted with a choice between losing Gothic Anatolia and losing his army, Priscus opted to fall back to Ionia and the coast, abandoning the Goths to their fate. But instead of heading to the southern coast, where his army could easily take ship and reach western Anatolia with time to spare, Priscus marched his army directly across the Anatolian plateau. Unusually poor weather delayed the march even further, allowing Pontic troops to catch up and begin harassing the strung-out Roman infantry. Near Synnada, Nikētas contrived an ambush that eviscerated Priscus’ exhausted troops. A second battle at Apameia a few weeks later finished the Romans off. Priscus himself narrowly escaped with a few thousand troops to try to direct the defense of Ionia.
At the same time as these Anatolian disasters, Roman arms suffered a series of defeats in the Balkans, as well. Candidianus had, it will be remembered, pulled troops from Pannonia and Thrace to bolster the Goths’ defenses. Without that extra manpower, the Romans’ extended outposts in the mountains were isolated and vulnerable. Worse, Rome’s ability to manage the frontier was in serious jeopardy. Movements of peoples that could be easily managed by Roman troops in times of relative strength suddenly became threats to Roman security. It was in the context of the general Roman manpower hemorrhage of the 580s that the great Sclavenian migrations first became noticeable. It has been cogently argued that the initial disturbance of the Avars on the Pannonian Plain was what first stirred up Sclavene migration, although others locate it in the context of economic developments in their supposed heartland (which is an ideological football anyway) or in “pull” factors relating to depopulation in other regions. But even with these factors contributing to migratory developments, Roman troops in the Balkans were able to manage the migrations, kill Sclavene raiders, and settle the rest in such a way as to minimize their ability to remain politically cohesive. When those troops left for various reasons, the door was opened to the Sclavenian migrants. Their numbers will never be calculated, and could range from less than ten thousand overall to nearly a hundred thousand people, but either way they were a joker in the deck, an additional complicating factor for any effort by Roman authorities to restore control.
By 586, Candidianus’ government was extremely shaky, and the actual Emperor, Constantius IV, was more than ready to seize power. He had an excellent relationship with the
comes domesticorum, Saturninus, and with several officers in the præsental army; the
magister officiorum, Petrus Iunius Palladius, was also close to him. In April, news of a defeat against the Mauri in Africa reached Ravenna, and Constantius acted. After a climactic verbal confrontation with Candidianus, imperial troops arrested the regent and imprisoned him; he died in prison under highly suspicious circumstances a few weeks later. His fall left the young Constantius in sole rule of a tottering empire. Defenses in the Balkans were collapsing, the Sāsānians and Nikētas were conquering the East, and by the end of the year a pro-Candidianus rebellion had erupted in Gaul and Iberia. Rome was on the brink of financial, political, and military collapse. No matter what Constantius accomplished during his reign, the hegemony that Serena had established over
Mare Nostrum had ended.
OOC: I have been waiting to post this update for a long time. That probably shows, since it kind jumps all over the place. Hopefully it’s still readable. Comments and constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated!
Or very lucky.
