[BTS] [RFC/DoC] The Legacy of Byzance: An Eastern Roman Tale

1.7 - The Hierocleiad​

Perhaps one of the greatest literary pieces remaining from the time of the Apokavkoi are the accounts of Hierokles the Easterner. So-named both for his Armenian heritage and for his voyages, Hierokles is remembered as a near-legendary figure in modern Rhomanian culture. Born to Armenian parents in Constantinople ca. 840, Hierokles spent his formative years in the monasteries of the capital city. There reading about history and the sciences, Hierokles grew tired of monastic life and stole away from the Church of the Chora at the age of 20 to live in the affluent merchants' district.

The young man, though he showed a penchant for the mercantile arts, soon too grew dissatisfied with the day-to-day ordeals of the markets, and conceived of another, far grander notion - to conduct an overland trade mission to the Orient.

Although widely ridiculed for his grandiose ideas, he nonetheless found interested benefactors who provided him with the necessary funds to assemble an unprecedented procession of trade caravans, chroniclers, and various hangers-on for the journey. The merchant departed Constantinople with his retinue in 864, and by the end of the year had reached Mesopotamia - he was 24 years old.

The trading mission stopped in Baghdad in the winter of that year, bringing to us invaluable accounts of the Caliphate's capital under the aging Rashidun dynasty, as recorded by Styliane, Hierokles' sister: [1]

[Baghdad] is a city which... holds all the splendors of the world... The towers of the great mosques pointing towards the heavens seem to show how this metropolis, once the citadel of the [Sassanid] Persians, strives to move ever upward until it touches the belly of the Kingdom [of Heaven] itself.
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Hierokles' retinue was soon ejected from the city, upon the (correct) suspicions of Arab officials that the Roman visitors were taking note of the city's defenses. Hierokles made haste east, crossing the Iranian Plateau. Here they stayed at length, bringing much-needed corrections to maps and texts back home which hadn't been revised since the fall of the Sassanid Empire two and a half centuries earlier.

When at last Hierokles reached the legendary city of Qandahar at the eastern extremity of Iran, it was 872.

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Making failed overtures to the Caliphate officials in this eastern frontier for some years to proceed along the fabled Silk Road (the Arabs didn't like the idea of the Romans trading directly with China without the Caliphate in the middle to fleece the merchants out of valuable gold and spices), the ever-stubborn Hierokles at last relented, deciding to take a somewhat unproven route - directly east through India.

In 880, Hierokles and company became the first Greeks to cross the Indus since the time of Alexander the Great, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by the gleeful Romans.

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The Romans were impressed first and foremost with the abundance of valuable trade goods of the Indian subcontinent, but the expedition also took fairly detailed reports of the curious religious practices of the locals. Styliane notes the presence of Zoroastrians in the west of the country (recorded as 'Parsis') and, to the surprise of the Romans, numerous communities of Nestorian Christians. [2]

The names of local objects of worship, too, were passed on for posterity, and it's after the expedition that names like Shiva, Vishnos, and Vouddas appear in Roman accounts for the first time. These were to pass into obscurity in Constantinople's libraries until modern times, but nonetheless show the fastidiousness with which the Romans of the expedition. recorded their journeys and discoveries.

The Romans bounced back and forth all over the subcontinent for the better part of a decade, before reaching their final destination in Delhi. Delhi was, at the time, the capital of the Pala Empire, a kingdom on the decline after having controlled most of India for centuries. Despite the wilting of the empire, the capital itself was still an impressive sight for the Romans.

The expedition's cited goal of reaching far Cathay was cut short, however, when Hierokles took ill while the party rested in Delhi. For a year he attempted to regain his strength, but ultimately a tertial fever [3] overcame him. He died in Delhi in 888, at the age of 48. The expedition returned far more quickly than it came, returning to Constantinople in 896 CE. The records they left were to shape western understanding of Persia and the East for centuries to come, and later arose to great importance during the great Roman reconquests...

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[1] - Styliane's account, The Hierocleiad, is considered one of the great works of Medieval Roman literature.

[2] - The Hierocleiad boastfully informs us of a circuitous detour to Mylapore, called 'Meilaporos' by the Romans, after which the party hosted an opulent feast in the honor of St. Thomas the Apostle, much to the bemusement of the locals. Thomas, said to be one of the 12 disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, is supposed to have spread the Gospel in India, and died in the city ca. 72 CE.

[3] - Probably malaria.
 
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Always nice to see a story come back to life, especially a Gruekiller story.
 
1.8 - The Thirty Years' Anarchy and the Rise of the Doukids​

The reign of the Apokavkoi Dynasty is, paradoxically, at once one of the longest and one of the least notorious lines to rule the Roman Empire. The dynasty lasted very nearly 150 years, but is remembered only for theological controversy and societal stagnation. Though the first of the dynasty, Theodoros I, is at least remembered as a fairly good emperor who normalized the standing of the gold nomisma in the Roman economy (though in his day criticized for failing to protect Roman interests in the Aegean), his successors were middling at best and catastrophic, at worst.

After his death in 760, his young son Ioannes II Apokavkos took the throne, puttering about for two decades before being deposed after a disastrous attempt to recapture Cyprus from the Arabs. His son Leo III Apokavkos took the throne. A competent administrator, he managed to stall the economic collapse resulting from the indemnity imposed by the Caliphate, but much of his rule was paralyzed by the in-fighting amongst the aristocracy in the early-mid 9th Century.

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The fortress of Kantara, briefly seized by the Romans, is retaken by the Arabs during the failed invasion of Cyprus.
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The next emperor, Anastasios III, took to the throne in 840. Like Alexandros over a century before, Anastasios' primary concern was ecclesiastical policy. However, Anastasios' policies would entirely reverse those set in place by the Gnunian emperor, ending the period of Iconoclasm in the empire. His iconophilic leanings saw his assassination just four years later in Constantinople, upon which his 4-year-old son Isaakios I Apokavkos became nominal Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans.

The accession of a toddler to the throne saw the beginning of the 30 Years' Anarchy, a period of almost total political chaos in the Empire.

Even after the age of majority, Isaakios was overshadowed by the various palace stewards and generals jockeying for the throne, and was himself murdered by a eunuch in the Blachernae Palace in 864. His young son, also named Isaakios, fled the city. For ten years, Iosephos I Bardas, a usurper, held the throne, leading a series of brutal massacres of political opponents throughout the Empire.

In 876, the Romans encountered for the first time the people called the Rus', in the form of an invading army.

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In a shocking turn of events, the Imperial army was taken by surprise, and the capital subjected to a brutal sacking. The Rus' pilfered the suburbs of Constantinople for ten days before sailing back to the north, leaving behind a shattered aristocracy and a dead emperor.

Isaakios returned later that month with the Army of the East, and Apokavkoi rule returned to the city. It took almost a decade for the damage to be repaired, but Isaakios looked on the bright side of the matter - all of the blue-bloods who had made the atmosphere at the palace so poisonous in recent decades were dead or had fled the City, and he had the opportunity to replace them with more reliable characters [1]. In 882, Isaakios' only issue, a daughter named Theodora, was wed to an influential noble from Paphlagonia named Thomas Doukas. The couple soon celebrated the birth of their first child, a boy named Constantine.

When Isaakios died in 895 without male issue, the Apokavkoi dynasty came to an end. Thomas Doukas, as his son-in-law, rose to the throne as Thomas I Doukas, marking the beginning of the (Western) Doukid Dynasty. For his fifteen years on the throne, Thomas spent most of his time campaigning in South Italy against the Arabs and Langobards, dying in 910 and leaving the throne to his 27-year-old son, Constantine IV Doukas. Remembered as quiet and scholarly, Constantine's long reluctance to sire an heir sparked rampant rumors of his homosexuality [2], but eventually a son, named Michael, was born. Constantine's latter rule was spent translating portions of the Justinian Code to Greek and reforming the infrastructure of the Balkans.

Upon Constantine's death in 931, Michael I Doukas became Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans. His reign, paradoxically would be the greatest of his line - and the last.

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Michael I Doukas.
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Only 18 at his accession to the throne, Michael eschewed the influence of the stewards left for him by his father and other palatial officials. Famous for his impetuousness and his hot-headed manner, even at his young age the emperor had the mark of greatness upon him. He led his first military campaign in 936 at the age of 22, protecting the northern provinces of Dacia from the encroachments of the Magyars [3].

His reign, however, was balanced between affairs of military and affairs of state - his greatest and most lasting achievement was a much-needed reform of the themes of the Empire in 948. The themata, military and administrative districts of the Empire, were still based on two-century-old census data. Michael, among the most competent administrators in the history of the Empire, saw the potential dangers for Asia Minor if this was left unrectified.

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The themata of Asia Minor in 950 CE.
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With the infrastructure of the Empire in a more functional state than it had been since before the Arab conquests, Michael turned east for further conquests. At the passing of the king of Georgia, David II Bagrationi, Michael laid claim to the throne of the tiny mountain kingdom through the late king's marriage to one of his distant cousins - a spurious claim at best, but all the Emperor needed as an excuse to extend the reach of the Empire.

In a decidedly one-sided battle at the Georgian capital of Artanuji, Michael and his army defeated the Georgian host, occupying the whole of the country.

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Roman Georgia.
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The next year, the Emperor departed the harbor at Attaleia with a host of twenty thousand men, doing what Ioannes II could not in executing a successful invasion of Cyprus. After a campaign of ten weeks, the island was back under Roman control for the first time in almost three hundred years, and the Arabs were forced to pay enormous economic concessions.

In 953, Michael returned home to the City to jubilant crowds, hailed as a new Justinian by the Patriarch and almost immediately he was referred to by the appellation 'the Great'.

It came as a great shock a year later when Michael, at the age of 39, died without issue.

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[1] - Mostly Doukid relations of his new son-in-law.

[2] - Modern scholarship notes, however, that Thomas' wife, Ariadne Doukina, was astonishingly hard on the eyes.

[3] - The people who would, soon thereafter, move west and found the Kingdom of Hungary.
 
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Good grief! :eek::eek::eek:
 
1.9 - Trouble Across the Sea and Dynastic Upheaval​

The shock in the City was all-pervasive. Michael had seemed youthful and vivacious for a middle-aged man, and indeed, 39 was a relatively young age to die, even in so hazardous an occupation as Emperor of the Romans. Investigation showed that he had died of a lingering illness from a poorly-treated wound, probably sustained while on campaign in Cyprus two years prior. Proud to the last, Michael had refused to appear weak before his people, and it had been the death of him.

The matter of his untimely demise aside, the more immediate threat to the stability of the Empire was that Michael had died without an heir to ascend to the throne. He had never married [1], leaving only distant relations to take up the helm he had left behind.

The good news was that there were many Doukids to claim the spot. Unfortunately, this also happened to be the bad news.

Transplanted to Constantinople three generations prior after the Rus' raid on the City, Michael's closest relatives made up a healthy portion of the City's aristocracy, and so were sometimes identified as the Constantinopolitan or Western Doukids. Those who had remained behind in Asia Minor, remaining the masters of great Anatolian estates, were by contrast called the Paphlagonian or Eastern Doukids. The distinction, minor at best, had grown through Michael's reign, to the point that the two halves of the Doukas name were practically different aristocratic families altogether.

And if there was one thing which aristocratic families of the Roman Empire did well, it was to fight amongst themselves.

As the Constantinopolitans squabbled over which of their number was worthy of that most august of titles, Constantine Doukas, senior among the landed manor-holders of the Paphlagonian faction, had already departed for the City. A tall, powerful man in the middle of his life, Constantine's impressive stature and domineering demeanor set him apart from the rest of the clan as a man meant to rule. The Constantinopolitan faction was helpless to stop him from making his way to the capital and being crowned Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans by the Patriarch. Some minor rioting wracked the city for a few days, but Constantine was not deterred from his new position.

For his part, Constantine, now Constantine V Doukas, was magnanimous to his estranged cousins in the City, placating them with promises of money and land in the Balkans. The initial grumbling died down within the first year or so. Although some scholars and laypeople prefer to think of the Doukid Dynasty as an unbroken continuum, this event marks, in most histories, the end of the earlier Western Doukid Dynasty and the beginning of the Eastern Doukid Dynasty. The latter was to surpass the former in a myriad of ways, not the least of which was in sheer number of emperors.

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Constantine V Doukas enters Constantinople in triumph.
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Constantine spent his reign suppressing Armenian and Georgian revolts in the Caucasus, as well as fortifying the border with the Caliphate against possible retaliatory attacks. He sought a major expansion of the navy for the purpose of stopping Saracen [2] piracy in the Aegean, as well as preventing strikes against Cyprus. Thankfully, the struggling Rashidun dynasty was in no position to invade the Empire at the time, and continued to pay its indemnity to the Romans.

Not exactly a young man upon taking the throne, Constantine reigned for fifteen years, dying in 969 at the age of 70. His son took the throne as Leo IV Doukas. In contrast to his father's stoic and serious manner, Leo was a young man, well known among the Paphlagonian estates as a womanizer and somewhat of a ne'er-do-well. At the beginning of his reign he possessed a full head of curly, black hair which would be characteristic of the early East Doukid emperors, giving him a bit of a wild appearance. Like his distant cousin Michael there was a hint of dering-do to him, but the young and impetuous Leo lacked the wisdom or the wit to apply it properly.

He was, in short, exactly the wrong man to lead the Empire.

The former Roman province of Egypt had been under Muslim control for over three hundred years, but as the Rashidun Caliphate continued to decline, the Egyptians began to chafe under their rule. In 968, a general revolt broke out under the guidance of a little-known political clan called the Fatimids, [3] who, despite being Maghrebi immigrants in Egyptian society, managed to rally the Egyptians, both Christian and Muslim, under a single banner for an independence struggle against the Iraq-based Caliphate. Constantine had taken little notice, his health declining in the year before his death, but Leo saw opportunity.

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Convinced that this was the time to attempt to reassert Roman dominance in Egypt, Leo threw all of his backing behind the Egyptians, greatly angering the Caliphate. The confidence of his youth faded when the years passed and the Fatimids made little progress against the Caliphate. In 988 Alexandria, the largest city of the region, was retaken by the Caliphate. Leo, devastated, retreated into a drunken stupor for the remainder of his life, realizing that he had simply bet on the wrong horse.

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Four years later Leo died, probably of cirrhosis, leaving his three children to vie for the throne of an Empire tottering perilously close to war with the Caliphate.

The eldest of the three was Zoe Doukina, so named for her paternal grandmother. Described as soft-spoken and fair-haired, her mild-mannered appearance seems to have belied a cunning mind - her successes show us plainly that Zoe was equal parts diplomat and strategist, and that she had no intention of letting the inconvenient fact of her gender get between her and the throne.

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Zoe I Doukina.
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The elder of her two brothers, Alexandros, perished in a "tragic hunting accident" outside of Heraclea weeks after Leo's death, and her other sibling Michael was quietly sequestered in one of the capital's many monasteries, leaving Zoe the sole legitimate heir to the throne of Rome. Despite protests, largely from the Patriarch, Zoe's charm had won over most of her credible adversaries in city politics. And so in December of 992, a woman for the first time became Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans.

Her first accomplishment was to offer a cessation to indemnities the Empire had charged the Caliphate since the reign of Michael. This seemed to placate the caliph, who was poised on the brink of attacking the Empire - a war which would surely have had terrible effects on eastern Asia Minor. Retracting its support, the Empire was content to watch the Fatimid Revolt from a distance.

The second diplomatic coup achieved by Zoe I Doukina was to draw Russia into the Roman sphere of influence. Since the attack on Constantinople in 876, the Rus' had settled around the Dnieper at the city of Kiev, turning to organized society and opening diplomatic relations with the Romans. Sending missionaries to the heart of Kievan Rus', Zoe succeeded in bringing the princes of the Rus' to Roman Christendom. It is noteworthy that at around this date, the Russians began using the Roman alphabet and calendar.

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With Zoe's death in 1023 came the second succession crisis in three decades. The empress, tragically, had proven unable to bear children. Accordingly, after deliberation (and rioting) in the capital, the throne passed to her younger brother, Michael II Doukas, who was released from the monastery at Chora. Michael, referred to as 'the Simple' in the rather insensitive language common of past centuries, was clearly not in possession of the mental faculties necessary to govern the Empire, and so his uncle Constantine, younger brother of former emperor Leo, largely ruled in his stead.

After seven years of Michael's reign, he was shunted off back to Chora again by his uncle, and disappears from the historical record. Constantine VI Doukas took the throne in 1030, presiding over the Empire for only seven years before passing away. The only truly noteworthy event during Constantine's reign, apart from normal affairs of state and administration, was the end of the Fatimid Revolt. In 1033, with the capture of Cairo, the Egyptians submitted to the Caliphate in exchange for increased autonomy over home affairs. Though none knew it at the time, this was the first nail in the coffin for the Caliphate, and the trumpet call for the disasters which it would encounter in the next decade.

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This event, however, does not concern the Empire directly, and so it can be said that Constantine's reign passed without much incident. The throne passed to his only son, Ioannes, who was crowned Ioannes III Doukas in 1037 at the Hagia Sophia. At first considered unremarkable so far as Imperial heirs go, Ioannes soon showed an aptitude for strategy and combat which rivalled that of his 8th-Century namesake [4].

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Ioannes III Doukas.
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The first six years of his reign, in any case, didn't allow him to truly shine, but the arrival of an alien threat on the fringes of the Anatolian frontier spelled a chance for Ioannes to prove himself - and doom for the Caliphate.

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The Seljuks.​

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[1] - He was often heard to say, "My only true love is Nike [Greek goddess of victory]."

[2] - 'Sarakenoi' was a blanket term for all infidels at the time, but here it is used only to refer to Muslim sea pirates, and occasionally raiding parties like the later Ghazis.

[3] - So-named after Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

[4] - Ioannes the Bold, not the miserably unsuccessful Ioannes II.
 
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I cannot wait for the next update.

I hope that you will kick some Turkish ass.
 
Very good. If you ever need help with the greek transliterations just ask me.
 
Gruekiller said:
Yep! I intend to keep spamming updates like this until it's done, and then I'll start kicking Cahokia into high gear.
Click to expand...

That makes me more happy than I can imagine.
 
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