An Age of Miracles III: The Romans Endure
- Thread starter Basileus444
- Start date
I dont. Expain please.
Anyway the question is whether the tourmarched will quit now? After all a war in the east means the Latins might act. Also whether this is enough to break their power
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oh. my. god. Couldn't go any worse. Maybe the speed of the sh*t hitting the fan could a blessing in disguise for the Romans? The Ottomans stand to gain quite a lot with minimum losses so far, they could be in a good mood at the negotiating table.
Not sure the roman leaders are smart enough to end this clusterf*ck as soon as they can. Good riddance.
Not sure the roman leaders are smart enough to end this clusterf*ck as soon as they can. Good riddance.
That's fair and I'm not trying to bother you.
Could you at least post the map of the Theodosian and Hereklaian Walls? Their geography is mentioned big in the story and I'd like to be able to reference it. Is the latter like the Anastasian wall or closer to Constantinople itself?
Additionally, the tourmarches can be blamed by everyone involved for what happens here.
First let me say that I kind of walked away from this for about a year and binged the last 30+ posts in the last week and damn do I enjoy this story.
I wonder if the current events and Athena's plans will lead to any kind of change in the rules of succession in Constantinople or create some process for removal of an emperor. We've had plenty of historical examples of bad emperors who everyone could tell would be a bad emperor. The Sideroi seem to be by and large genre savvy enough to understand that this is going to happen again at some point.
I wonder if the current events and Athena's plans will lead to any kind of change in the rules of succession in Constantinople or create some process for removal of an emperor. We've had plenty of historical examples of bad emperors who everyone could tell would be a bad emperor. The Sideroi seem to be by and large genre savvy enough to understand that this is going to happen again at some point.
I read all the comments but can't respond to the bits about political/military ramifications much because spoilers.
Keraunos: It is a reference to Ptolemy Keraunos, Ptolemy 'the Thunderbolt', who was a character even by early Hellenistic standards (which is saying a lot). Managed to scheme and assassinate his way into becoming King of Macedon, just in time to get stabbed in the face by a Celtic army, some of whom would go on to become the Galatians. (Did I mention the early Hellenistic period was weird?)
The red is my eyeballing roughly where the Theodosian Walls are, with the purple being the Herakleian Walls.
Northern Mesopotamia is majority Turkish with large minorities, central Mesopotamia is mixed but with a large Turkish population, and southern Mesopotamia is majority Arab with Turkish minority. The Middle East and Eastern Europe IOTL in the early modern period were massive hodgepodges of different ethnic/linguistic/religious groups with any generalization necessarily being a simplification, and TTL is the same.
Keraunos: It is a reference to Ptolemy Keraunos, Ptolemy 'the Thunderbolt', who was a character even by early Hellenistic standards (which is saying a lot). Managed to scheme and assassinate his way into becoming King of Macedon, just in time to get stabbed in the face by a Celtic army, some of whom would go on to become the Galatians. (Did I mention the early Hellenistic period was weird?)
The red is my eyeballing roughly where the Theodosian Walls are, with the purple being the Herakleian Walls.
My plan is that this whole mess with eventually lead to some changes. But not changes in the rules of succession. Switching to de jure primogeniture means playing the genetic lottery, hardly a good way to avoid a dud. But adding ways to limit the power and authority of the Emperor, so a dud can't do so much damage, and providing a peaceful and legal means of removing one, besides the historical method of 'contender marches on capital and hopes somebody opens a gate'.
Rhomania's General Crisis, Part 7.2: The Winter of 1660/61
Rhomania’s General Crisis, part 7.2-The Winter of 1660-61:
When the Emperor and his entourage initially encounter the Patriarchal refusal to let them into the Hagia Sophia, they respond with outrage and argumentation, but decide that creating a rather public scene in the streets of Constantinople is a bad idea. They withdraw back to the White Palace, with services in the great church proceeding as if everything was normal. The Patriarch has made a point but doesn’t want to rub it in; he hopes the public rebuke will be enough.
Herakleios III though is not about to give up his mistress. The Tourmarches also are, unsurprisingly, not willing to back down either. Their plan, for now, is to just pretend that this embarrassing affair did not happen. Once news of Roman victory arrives from the east, the Patriarch’s opposition to the war will look rather silly. In the meantime, Herakleios goes hunting to the northwest, with his absence from the capital making his absence from services in the Hagia Sophia much less glaring.
This strategy becomes rather less tenable once the news of how the campaign panned out arrives in Constantinople. It is impossible to suppress, with Antioch newspaper accounts of disasters along the Tigris being carried by the Antioch mail packet to the Queen of Cities and then eagerly snatched up by the residents.
The Tourmarches though continue the strategy. Herakleios remains outside the capital although moving closer to the city, with someone going to him if his signature is required on something. He takes services in private, which in itself isn’t that unusual; it was his regular practice on extended hunting trips when he was away from an established church.
While the Emperor is outside the capital, every Sunday the Patriarch and his supporters stand before the Hagia Sophia, symbolically blocking the way as if the Emperor were there. The act does help to keep the memory alive even while the Emperor is not in the city, but the repetition also has the effect of dulling the effect. After a few months, when it becomes clear Herakleios has no attention of changing his ways, Patriarch Adam does criticize the Basileus’ behavior in sermons in the Hagia Sophia, but beyond that he is unwilling to escalate. Excommunicating the Emperor, or at least the war hawks, would seem to be the next step, but also a dangerous one.
Such a step would be less risky if Adam II had a united church behind him but he doesn’t. While many bishops are critical of Herakleios III’s behaviors regarding his marriage, they think the Patriarch has no business criticizing foreign policy. Moral behavior falls under the Patriarch’s bailiwick; matters of state do not. This disagreement thus clouds the issue for many. There are also other clerics, including the Patriarch of Antioch, who are currently looking at the mess on the eastern frontier and don’t want any destabilization that will hamper efforts to fix things. (There are some in this group who are critical of the war hawks for creating the circumstances for this mess, but they are countered by the sentiment of ‘it’s unwise to try and change horses midstream’.)
The war hawks do score a victory in February when Herakleios III visits Athyra in a public relations exercise organized by Strategos Plytos. Athyra is one of the larger and more prosperous satellite towns of Constantinople, with a new hospital commissioned by Demetrios III. It is also the see of Bishop Grozes, one of the closest supporters of the Patriarch. Herakleios visits the town to announce a large donation to create an extension of his grandfather’s hospital, as well as a new orphanage and some infrastructure improvements.
While in the town, Herakleios wishes to worship in the local church. Bishop Grozes is not there but in the capital, as is usual. The resident priest briefly considers trying to bar Herakleios, but overawed by the presence of the Emperor as well as the local crowd, who currently think quite highly of the Basileus, he gives way. Another factor is that Anastasia Laskarina is not present. She has been with the Emperor while he has been outside Constantinople, but for this event she has stayed outside Athyra. The biggest example of Herakleios’s sin, and justification for keeping him out of the church, is thus off-screen. Service proceeds normally with Herakleios prominent in attendance, looking like a faithful and accepted son of the Orthodox Church.
In short, the Patriarch’s action does succeed in raising the temperature of the water, but is not, by itself, enough to make the pot boil over. Father Hadjipapandreou tries to convince Adam to escalate to excommunication, but here his powers of persuasion run out. The Tourmarches recognize the priest’s importance in all this and put him under close surveillance, but make no moves against him. Their hopes are that an improved war situation will make the Patriarch’s opposition look silly, and Adam’s health is poor. He may die rather soon, which would be a rather convenient way of replacing the Athena-appointed Adam with a more cooperative candidate. But they need to keep things from boiling until then. Displays of public charity, such as new soup kitchens and enlargements of the bread dole, are useful means to cool the air in the capital.
Lady Athena is frustrated by all this. She considers the gesture to be foolish. As part of a wider wave of dissatisfaction, it could’ve been powerful, but by itself it has been empty. It has made the Tourmarches more wary and suspicious, hampering her own efforts, which frustrate her. But that said, it hasn’t been a total waste from her perspective. The Patriarch’s stance has convinced some to come over to her side of things, with the Patriarch’s disapproval of Herakleios III’s actions helping to sugarcoat the traitorous taint.
One new supporter is the new Despot of Sicily, Andreas III. (To make things confusing, the Emperor Andreas III had been Despot Andreas II of Sicily.) One of the clerics to come out in support of Patriarch Adam’s actions was the Orthodox Patriarch of Rome, the head of all Orthodox churches in Italy. The Despot had been reluctant to weigh in on politics in Constantinople, given how touchy many war hawks were on the matter of Sicily, but the Patriarch of Rome had swayed him. Although not apparent at the time, an important factor of Sicilian support is that it gives Athena and her supporters naval strength in the form of the Sicilian fleet, which they had been lacking.
The Despotate though is suffering social problems of its own. The realm of Sicily has long been a mix of Catholic and Orthodox, of various locals (Italians is often used as shorthand, but none thought of themselves as such), Hellenized locals, and Greek immigrants. Eastern Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria are mostly Greek or Hellenized, western Sicily is mixed, while the rest of the realm is mostly Catholic and Italian.
Neither side could dominate the other. The Orthodox Greek component was more prevalent in the upper and commercial classes, but that was clearly not the case in most of peninsular Sicily outside of Apulia and Calabria. Numerically the Catholics had a substantial edge, but it did skew towards the poor peasantry. As a whole, sixty percent of Sicily was Catholic Italian, thirty five percent Greek Orthodox, and the rest taken up mostly by Jews with some Muslims, usually slaves. In the Sicilian equivalents of dynatoi and mesoi, the Catholic and Orthodox ratios flipped.
There had been a rough equilibrium between the two sides since the end of the Time of Troubles, but events of the last two decades have destabilized that equilibrium. The treatment of Sicilian concerns and interests in ‘the matter of Italy’ at the end of the War of the Roman Succession by the Romans had been considered cursory, arrogant, and rude by even many Romanophile Sicilians, who resented being treated as a mindless meat shield. This had weakened the Greek Orthodox faction while simultaneously Sicilian expansion had brought a great many more Italian Catholics into the Sicilian realm.
Catholics in Sicily thus by 1660 wanted more power and influence than they had been getting. This was combined with local unrest caused by harvest failures, which could take on a religious tinge. When Bari, an Orthodox city, takes priority for emergency shipments of Bulgarian grain over Catholic Naples, despite the latter being nearly three times as large, it is unsurprising people draw some nasty conclusions.
Naples in particular is becoming a hotbed. Although it is the second-largest city on the Italian peninsula with 150,000 in 1650 (Milan, the biggest, is nearly twice as big), its economy has been lackluster compared to much smaller but more prosperous Messina, Palermo, and Bari. Mostly it is an export market for the agricultural products of Campania, produced on massive estates and plantations owned by Catholic landowners and worked by tenants and slaves. Much of Naples’ population is very poor, living alongside elegant townhouses while they scrape a living from odd jobs and charity. Bad times in the countryside has worsened their lot while simultaneously swelling their numbers, while the Catholic-Orthodox issue further muddies the waters. The great country landowners have little in common with the urban poor of Naples, but they speak a common language and share a common faith, which is not Greek or Orthodox.
It is doubtful Athena has much knowledge or interest in the rumblings in Neapolitan alleys; her focus is in the opposite direction. As 1660 turns into 1661, Domestikos of the East Manuel Doukas is in a bad mood. His summer surgery has not been as big of a success as he had hoped, which he blames on his curtailed recuperation. He is in a lot of pain and has a big military mess on the Mesopotamian frontier, and he blames a certain clique in Constantinople.
Therefore, he is open to Athena’s overtures in a way he was not some months earlier. He is willing to back Athena against the Tourmarches, who he now views as illegitimate; their possession of the signature of Herakleios III is irrelevant. As Sophia, Athena’s daughter and Herakleios’s spouse, would later put it: “Incompetency voids any legitimacy.”
Athena would like him to move on the Tourmarches, in cooperation with Michael Pirokolos from the opposite direction, as soon as the winter snows clear and large-scale travel through the Empire becomes feasible. But Manuel is not willing to do that. He will deal with the Tourmarches, but first, he insists, there is the matter of the war in Mesopotamia. Only once that is resolved will he move.
Methinks southern Italy is going to be in for some serious political turmoil later on. Constantinople could consider getting the Catholics to leave for their colonies though I highly doubt they want Catholics in them.
Meanwhile, if things get really bad in southern Italy, someone might make a bid for the whole peninsula.
Meanwhile, if things get really bad in southern Italy, someone might make a bid for the whole peninsula.
Going to assume that if the war is to be resolved - it’ll be a short limited engagement to try and maintain the status quo now that Baghdad was a disaster?
Otherwise the Tourmarches will be too entrenched if it drags out.
Would that even really help? The core economic issue is now not solved and you have just exported the problem to places where you have less control over and power in. All that is also leaving out the logistics of this btw.