Six Hundred Years of History - From 867 to 1453 with (Almost) Only Historical Characters - A Semi-Historical CK3 AAR

[SaitoHawkeye]

Six Hundred Years of History - From 867 to 1453 with (Almost) Only Historical Characters - A Semi-Historical CK3 AAR​

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Part 1 - Ivar the Boneless | 867-930​

Part 2 - Egil Skallagrímsson | 930-985​

Part 3 - Alhazen | 985-1068​

Part 4 - Omar Khayyam | 1068-1155​

Part 4.5 - Political + Religious + Cultural Update | 1155​

With the release of the Road to Power pack, we got a lot of cool stuff, but one of my favorite additions was the 101 Historical Characters Paradox added, and after recruiting a few in regular games, and trying out their adventures with a few others, I got an idea - could I play the entire game, 867 to 1453, using *only* historical characters? I set a couple of rules for myself beforehand - I would try to switch characters before I died or, at a minimum, one heir later. I would not set my new Historic adventurer up with anything other than the collected books of wisdom that you get from writing a Travels of So-and-So decision, so I did get some huge lifestyle boosts but I didn't give my new character land, titles, marriages, or much of anything else other than occasionally hosting a tournament right before I switched. I played with Achievements On, snagging a few, but not Ironman because I wanted to test a few things.

A couple of things to note about the way switching works in this game:

• You must control (though not necessarily own) the barony in which the character is meant to spawn right around January 1 on the first year listed in the Wiki; so for example to get the choice to play as Marco Polo, you most control Venice on January 1, 1270 AD.
• When the screen pops up it pauses the game so you can take interactions with the character you're switching to before you take control, so you could try to befriend them, learn their language, imprison them, etc.
• As a result, I spent a lot of the game working up the resources to become landed or a Conqueror as an adventurer, and then in my character's aging years I would try to seize the correct part of the map for the character I wanted to play - so Egil headed toward Basra so he could take over Ibn-al Haytham (Alhazen), Al-Hazen's dynasty moved toward Khorasan to live on as Omar Khayyam, etc.

Enough background, let's hear the adventures!

Ivar the Boneless, 867-930

You can't start as Historical Adventurer in 867, so I went with a personal favorite and a man who's convenient for the next guy I was looking to play: Ivar the Boneless, before heading even farther north to take the role of the legendary Egill Skallagrímsson, the subject of the Icelandic epic Egil's Saga.

Blood dripping from his axe as he stared out over the battlefields of Mercia and Northumberland, Ivar set out to do the two most important things a son of Ragnar can do - avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon fiends, and found a pirate kingdom in the Isle of Mann.

Eager for land and greedy for vengeance, Ivar didn't immediately ally with my brothers Sigurdr and Hvitserk, but raced them to capture as much of Northumbria as he could and made a blood eagle of the worthless King Ælla after his very first battle on the fields of Dunholm Victory over the Northumbrians followed soon after, allowing Ivar to secure the Scottish border and then establish an alliance with his brother Hvitserk in Jorvik.

The next few years passed as they often have for the Danes - a combination of reaving the Norman and British coasts, fighting bloody wars of conquest in Kent and Surrey, and generally making life hell for any Christians living along the coast of the North Sea. Treasure, slaves, concubines and famous artifacts flowed in a steady stream back to Ivar's new capital city in Edinburgh, and more and more of southern England fell under the Danish yoke as the sons of Ragnarr pressed in from all sides.

Ivar kept a steady eye on his goal - to build up fame, fortune and blood to declare himself and his heirs the Pirate Kings of Mann and the Isles in the early 900s.

After the sudden and unexplained death in her sleep of his wife and love Freydis in her late 40s, Ivar secured the alliance with the English by marrying his great-niece Þórunn, the daughter of Ragnarr Halfdansson. After she was swept away in a wave of Typhus that ravaged the British Isles, he settled down with an Umayyad beauty who had been captured raiding the coast of Portugal.

Ivar's reign wasn't just plunder and pillage, however. The great respect he was able to garner from Asatru faithful across the North Sea and the legend he spread was able to unite the British Isles and peacefully make vassals of my Halfdan's descendants in Mercia, creating a new, Norse Empire of Britannia that spanned Scotland, England, Mann and Cornwall.

Ivar's later adventures took him to the coasts of Frisia and northern Germany, sparring with King Ludwig "the Younger" of Germany, a brave but troubled heir to Charlemagne. After securing conquests from Frisia to Paderborn and peacefully annexing most of the Norwegian coastline, Ivar was able to complete his life's final triumph - the unification and reformation of the Norse Asatru faith, and the reorientation of its tenets to both spur expansion and to ease settlements in the next field of battle and conquest - the Islamic World.

Right on cue, in 930 AD amidst the frozen volcanoes and glaciers of Iceland, we meet our first Historical Adventurer...

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Egil Skallagrímsson: 930-985

The subject of Egil's Saga revealed his presence to the Fyklirate in 930 on the dot in the Northwestern-most corner of the known world: Vestisland.

Already a famed Viking and berserker, Egil was brave, wrathful and loved a drink - pretty much the Platonic ideal of a roving Norse warrior. He's about to do a lot of both those things - fight and travel. Ivar died shortly after Egil's journeys began, immediately bringing chaotic succession to the British isles. Still...political conflict means potential profits, especially for a roving mercenary company manned by hard-bitten veterans of the Varangian Guard.

By his early 40s, Egil was a famed and ubiquitous presence on the battlefields of Britain, France and Germany. With his wife Ulfhildr - a peasant prodigy and his second-in-command - by his side, Egil garnered fame and fortune supporting the heirs of Ivar, Sigurdr and Halfdan and later secured alliances with both the Danish and British sons of Ragnar through subsequent marriages to their youngest daughters, Glöð and Ástríðr. A particularly gruesome incident in the great Catholic Crusade for Germany saw an axe embedded in Egil's thick skull, but he survived for decades after while remaining particularly disfigured by the incident(fun fact - this actually happened, more or less ).

The combined might of Christendom was enough to evict the Norse invaders from the Rhine valley....for now.

Always leading from the front, by 958, despite Egil's best efforts on the battlefield, the Ivaring Empire of Britannia had dissolved into an English Kingdom of Hvitserk and a Sigurdr Kingdom of Denmark. Weary of endless conflict, bitter cold, and constant demands from his erstwhile brothers-in-law to help quash their endless peasant revolts and noble uprisings, Egil sought a warmer climate and softer land.

The band of Skallagrímsson's Sky spent nearly a year in the longboats, stopping along the coast of Iberia, Sardinia, and Italy to replenish their stores and conduct a little light raiding, before finally landing in the cradle of civilization - Mesopotamia.

Even in the far-flung Islamic courts of Baghdad and Basra, the legend of Skallagrímsson preceded him, and the warring heirs of Muhammad would prove to be easy pickings for an aging but iron-hard Viking warrior. With the help of his huscarls and Varangians, Egil didn't find it difficult to carve a small Mesopotamian Kingdom out of the decaying corpse of the Abbasid Caliphate.

In the waning years of his life, a 75-year-old Egil, now dubbed the Wolf-slayer after saving his retinue from a rampaging pack of wolves, made a last push to conquer the city of Basra from the Empire of Arabia in 984 AD, dragged on by fate and a relent;less compulsion even the old Viking could not explain. As the year 985 dawned, word reached Egil of a new luminary dawning in the port of Basra, by the name of...

 

[Koweth]

Very ambitious goal! While Ivar certainly was successful, I can't help but appreciate the exploits of Egil more.

Also, welcome to AARland! I hope you enjoy your stay here.

 

[jak7139]

Welcome to AARland! This is a very ineresting premise and I'll follow along.

Also for your post in the Inkwell, you can't post links until you've interacted a bit on the forum. It's to make sure you're real.

 

[StrategyGameEnthusiast]

Welcome to AARland! The Ivaring Empire didn't last long at all, AI incompetence may make this a theme.

 

[Chac1]

Definitely love the premise of this AAR. Any AAR that starts with Ivar the Boneless has my initial support.

So far, well played and your goals are admirable. Great to see what has been added in the new DLC (especially as I still only play CK2).

Echoing the sentiments of others: welcome to AARland. Good to see your initial question answered by @jak7139 . If you have any questions, this initial reading group is quite knowledgeable. Ask away. Great to see you posting in the Inkwell. When you are ready there are other features to AARland that we can reveal (and for those who are inquisitive and like exploring they are easy to find).

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Part 3: Alhazen | 985-1068

The man who would become known as "Alhazen" or Master al-Haytham was born to a family of Bantu merchants* in an enclave within the port city of Basra, a key trading route between the Abbasids and the silks, spices, slaves, coffee and ivory of India, Zanzibar and Yemen. Some 80 years before his birth, the Zanj Rebellion** - led by peasant leaders in the countryside and freedmen in the city of Basra - had carved out a small emirate on the Persian Gulf coast during a period of weakness and anarchy at the Abbasid capital in Samarra.

* Historical note - in actuality, Hasan ibn al-Haytham was descended from an Arab or Persian family; there's no historical suggestion he had African descent but because of the peasant rebellion that seized Basra in the 870s or so the game converted Basra into an East Bantu cultural center; a culture which actually appears nowhere else on the map because the Bantu people come from further south than the map depicts! There is still an Afro-Iraqi population in Basra and surrounding regions to this day, speaking both Arabic and Swahili and tracing their lineage back to the Zanj.​

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** The Zanj rebellion IS a real and widely documented historical event (it's also depicted in Assassin's Creed: Mirage). Historically, it was put down by the Abbasids after much struggle and the loss of lands in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. While it was long done with by the time Alhazen shows up. it's interesting that the game actually modeled this!​

He received education from a wide range of scholars, merchants and polymaths during what some would later dub a "Golden Age" of intellectual fervor, commerce, and religious exploration. Hasan ibn al-Haytham not only learned the principles of Euclidean and Ptolemaic mathematics and philosophy; amongst the court intrigues of the Caliph and his viziers and flunkies, al-Haytham would also learn to observe and record the schemes and designs of men in search of power, wealth and vice.

It was a cold and rainy evening in Basra, the day before prayer, and the call of the Maghrib from the city's minarets clashed with the sound of drunken revelry from the Northmen mercenaries and armed men who for the last few months had made their homes among the taverns, souks and coffee houses of the port city. Hasan ibn al-Haytham was huddled for warm and shelter beneath the awning of a qahwa, sipping a potent brew of Yemeni coffee and local anise liquor.

The clash of mail and loud thump startled Hasan out of his thoughts and he sprawled back from the cushions he lay on, staring up at the hulking Northman who now stood before him, a heavy leather-bound tome clasped in one mailed gauntlet, the other palm-down on the table before him.

"You are the one they call Alhazen? The young 'philosopher?'" Still in shock, Hasan nodded mutely. The Northmen dropped the book on the table. "For you. The king said it was to be given to 'seekers for the truth.' Whatever the fuck that means." He grabbed Hasan's cup and drained it in a single gulp, then grunted. "Not mead, but not bad. Take care of that tome; it's worth more than your head. The King will be hosting a grand tournament and carnival this autumn; if you have learned the words of that book by then, come to Baghdad and you will be received."

With that, the Northman was gone and Hasan was left stunned, puzzled, his ears still ringing. He lifted the book and thumbed through its vellum pages, each covered in a scrawling mass of runes. With a groan, he realized he'd need to find a translator - or a tutor.

The Seekers

Though he did not know it that day, the book - and the King's tournament - would change the course of Hasan's life and the future of the whole Islamic world. Hasan devoted his next 9 months to study and observation, traveling the length and breadth of King Egil Wolfslayer's kingdom in Iraq to learn Norse, meet other "Seekers" and make his fortune. He gathered to him a band of rogues, heretics and escaped slaves and criminals, like his camel driver Murad the Ill-Tempered and his second-in-command Mas'ud, a disgraced scion of the Abbasids who could nevertheless trace his lineage back to the Prophet's uncle.

At the autumn tournament, the old wolf Egil was endlessly entertained by Hasan's recital in mixed Arabic/Norse verse and his dashing performance in the horse race. Meeting the young scholar after the festivities, the two shared several glasses of coffee and mead, though through the silver and gold mask that covered Egil's face, the best pronunciation he could master of his new friend's name was "Alhazen," the name by which he'd be known for decades more. Alhazen would also meet his wife at the tourney; a Welsh beauty in her thirties with a teenage daughter who'd been previously married to a Welsh mercenary in the area. Fflur handed her favor to Alhazen, a lock of her crimson her wrapped in silk, across the lines before a race. It marked the beginning of a tumultuous 30-year romance between al-Hazen and Fflur.

For the next 15 years Alhazen and his seekers traipsed from Basra to Byzantion and Cairo to Khorasan, taking whatever work best suited their fancies - whether or not it was within the law. Egil died and Alhazen befriended his successor Augustin "the Bastard," the product of a drunken night shared by Egil and one of his shieldmaidens.

They made enemies, too - most memorably, Alhazen found himself fleeing across the rooftops of Medina on a moonlight night, carrying away the beautiful Turkish concubine Mansure and pursued by the guards of old Emir Abdullah's harem. The old lecher of the Hejaz would carry his hatred of Alhazen to his grave, and Fflur never forgave him for absconding with the young Turk, later dying of a broken heart.

Over time Alhazen's schemes and plots gathered around him a formidable, but motley crew - armored Kataphraktoi horsemen and Mubarizun desert warriors who left their divisions in search of pay and plunder, siege engineers rescued from the dungeons deep beneath the Theodosian walls and a motley horde of archers, spearmen and pikes drawn from the gutters, docks, and gaols of every city between Athens and Samarkand. The Seekers were now in truth in army, blooded relieving the Basileus during multiple sieges, in service of the Caliph during an uprising, and putting down a revolt of Persian mercenaries for Egil's grandson Folkmar. Indeed, the Seekers spent so much time among the cities and war camps of the Eastern Romans that Alhazen himself adopted many Greek customs and took not one but two Greek wives, who set aside their objections to polygamy after he rescued them from bandits.

The eagles of Alamut were crying from their mountain eyries on a moonlit night when Alhazen, now a grizzled warrior in his 50s, a wolfskin cloak draped around his shoulders and special lenses of his own manufacture perched on his nose to correct his vision, had his revelation while staring into the campfires arrayed below. Though he'd ridden the length and breath of the Ummah, he'd never fulfilled one the pillars of Islam - the hajj. With his wife Mansure and sons Bahir and Abu-Bakr, he resolved to set out for Mecca the next morning. They rode day and knight across the great rivers, past the battlefields of Syria and Lebanon, and to the gates of Mecca, Alhazen came to a realization - despite his own manifold sins, there was NO ruler in the world who lived up to the principles of the Prophet or of Islam. Late at night in a caravansarai on the outskirts of Mecca, Alhazen met with a secretive group of scholars calling themselves "Azariqas," who traced their lineage back to early guerilla fighters who resisted the first Caliphs.

The Sultanate

Charged with new religious belief , Alhazen publicly repented of his banditry and immoral living before Kabaa and ritually shaved his head. His ranks bolstered by a swell of new believers, the Seekers marched north out of Arabia, harried by agents of the Caliph. For a time they wandered among the lands of Folkmar, but in the sprawling halls of his Baghdadi palace Egil's grandson increasingly lost his way to drink and intemperate outbursts.

Weary of the corruption of court and the thick miasma - both physical and spiritual - between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Alhazen and the Seekers headed for the mountains. At the age of 70, a still hale and healthy Alhazen sat atop his charger flanked by his sons and loyal lieutenants, peering through a spyglass of his own design at the oasis metropolis of Merv. With a wordless sweep of the burning sun banner, Abu-Bakr motioned forward ten regiments of cavalry and infantry, lining the ridge with the sun glinting off speartips and scale armor. A hundred war cries burst from ten thousand throats in Arabic, Greek, Turkish and a dozen other tongues as Alhazen lifted his ancient Sassanian sword and charged forward in the vanguard.

Merv fell swiftly, and the Mervshah's vassals crumbled soon after, and by the automn of 1035 the entire Khorasan province swore fealty to its new Emir Alhazen. Yet amidst the celebrations and revels, tragedy struck: two of Alhazen's wives and three grandchildren were struck down by measles, a daughter died in childbirth, and worst of all, his beloved youngest daughter Asha was imprisoned by her husband, Emir Hakkam Tayyid on false charges and brutally tortured to death.

The shock rendered al-Hakam speechless and he took to his chambers for weeks. Some said he remained motionless for hours, staring at the far away mountains from the palace minaret, while others rumored that he lost himself in a haze of hashish and liquor. When he finally emerged, gaunt and with sunken eyes behind his smoked glass spectacles, he was forever changed. Though his physical strength had begun to fail him in his seventh decade of life, his mind remained as sharp as the edge of a shamshir.

From chambers deep within the fortress of Merv, surrounded by strange experiments involving mirrors, colored smoke and lenses, Alhazen issued orders to a growing army of agents and Fedayeen. They spread both the Alhazen Sultanate's political boundaries - for indeed, his sons now styled themselves the heirs of Sultan Alhazen - and darker aims. Every member of the Tayyid clan now walked in fear even in broad daylight, for even across the mountains and rivers into the deserts of Arabia, the agents of Alhazen could appear at any moment, bringing death - or worse. The fedayeen eventually brought Asha's torturer Hakam himself, who lost his eyes, his manhood, and, finally, to the careful ministrations of a now octogenerian Alhazen.

At his death - paradoxically quiet, in his sleep - Alhazen had outlived half his children and a quarter of his grandchildren, stood at the head of a clan of more than 40 descendants, a Sultanate stretching from Khorasan nearly to the Indian Ocean, and a growing populace who followed his Azariqa creed high in the desert and mountain fastnesses.

The throne passsed to Bardas, a comely but irritable lad born to Abu-Bakr of the flaming hair and Egil's granddaughter. Under the reign of Bardas, the Alhazen Sultanate would expand north and east, reaffirming its alliance with another to Engeltraud, the daughter of Folkmar, and with an expansion of culure, places of healing, and caravansarais along the burgeoning Silk Road.

It was in one of these caravansarais where Bardas and his men would encounter...

 

[StrategyGameEnthusiast]

So Mesopotamia didn't collapse after Egil died. That's good. Hopefully Bardas and his heirs can keep this Sultanate together.

 

[Chac1]

Quite the tale! So does the new DLC have all of the flavor that we see in this chapter? Can you play a mercenary leader who is part of a group of what appears to be something like the Hermetic Society? What was the mechanism to decide to create a landed holding for this mercenary?

I think you probably could have written an entire AAR about the adventures of just this character. However, waiting to see which historic character comes next in this parade.

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Quite the tale! So does the new DLC have all of the flavor that we see in this chapter? Can you play a mercenary leader who is part of a group of what appears to be something like the Hermetic Society? What was the mechanism to decide to create a landed holding for this mercenary?

I think you probably could have written an entire AAR about the adventures of just this character. However, waiting to see which historic character comes next in this parade.

It's not quite the Hermetic society but yes, the flavor is basically all there in the new DLC! You can choose to become a Landless Adventurer through a variety of ways: starting or creating one, taking a Decision as a count or duke with certain personal or cultural traits, becoming dispossessed in a war or, as I did, by controlling a specific county when one of Paradox's 101 Historical Characters spawns.

That's all new with the DLC, and there's a whole new gameplay structure built around adventuring, taking contracts, writing manuscripts, creating artifacts, becoming a mercenary, and then eventually if you want to settling down by building a holding or claiming lands. It's a pretty cool addition, definitely pumped a lot of new life into the game for me!

 

[jak7139]

Alhazen lived quite the life! And there are more adventures to come.

 

[Chac1]

Just as a suggestion to make it easier on new readers @SaitoHawkeye , now that you can link to items and you are past your trial period, you might want to add the contents page from your Inkwell listing to the very first post. You might also consider using the threadmarks. Either or both will make it easier for new readers to find the main content in your AAR. Nice start. Looking forward to the next chapter.

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Just as a suggestion to make it easier on new readers @SaitoHawkeye , now that you can link to items and you are past your trial period, you might want to add the contents page from your Inkwell listing to the very first post. You might also consider using the threadmarks. Either or both will make it easier for new readers to find the main content in your AAR. Nice start. Looking forward to the next chapter.

Thanks, that's good advice!

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Part 4: Omar Khayyam | 1068-1156

The prestigious Persian polymath Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur to a Persian family; in our timeline, Khayyam was famous for his mathematic, scientific, and poetic contributions, as well as to his distinctly un-dogmatic love of wine, women and song. He served as vizier to the third Seljuq Sultan, Malik-Shah, who was later killed by the Assassins, completed the hajj (possibly to allay concerns about his unorthodox beliefs or practices, reformed the Persian calendar, and advanced the contemporary study of algebra.

We meet our Omar in the year 1068 in the city of Khorasan, already known in the city's scholarly and intellectual circles for his poetry and courtly writings,. He was perhaps as well known in the souks and cafes of the Haytham Sultanate for his habit of gathering with other young scholars to drink wine and loudly debate philosophy, love, and the nature of the universe from sundown until the adhan rang out from the minarets and the cocks crowed in the fields beyond the city walls.

It was during one of these raucous salons that Omar Khayyam spied an unusual sight: A woman, in her 20s or perhaps early 30s, seated in the corner of the tavern at a table lit by a pair of heavy wax candles. Her garb was simple, blue and white cotton dress, and she clearly hailed from a faraway land, with her golden hair tied back in a row upon row of elaborate braids that ended in small silver bells. Before her on the table was an unruly pile of scrolls, another oddity. She'd fixed her gaze upon him for the last half hour, a piercing blue-eyed stare that both intrigued and unsettled him.

Begging his companions' pardon, Omar made his way to her table and lowered himself - a tad unsteadily - to sit cross-legged before her. As he opened his mouth to introduce himself, she spoke first, in thickly accented Turkish, "You are incorrect, Master Khayyam." The statement startled Omar into silence for a moment.

"About what?" he replied?

The woman did not speak but grabbed a quill and quickly dashed out a series of figures on a scrap of paper before her. "If you look at the intersection of the triangles within the cone..." she continued.

The rest of the night flew by in an impassioned exchange of rhetoric, reasoning and later on, as the sun rose over the oasis city, the intersection of a different sort of figures. It was not until the next day that Khayyam would realize that the woman who had argued with, then bedded him, was none other than the widow of the old Sultan Alhazen, and a descendant of the infamous Northerner-turned-Mesopotamian King, Dorothea Skallgrimmson.

Over the next few years Omar and Dorothea worked diligently on problems both philosophical and practical, honing their intellectual blades while also acquiring more practical skills. Dorothea had in her possession two tomes that fascinated Omar - a roughly crafted Northman memoir of the travels, battles and discoveries of her ancestor Egil Skallgrimmson and a mysterious encoded volume written in a thin, spidery hand detailing the schemes and travels of Sultan Alhazen. The shifting and dissolving political lines of both the Haytham Sultanate, the fracturing of Egil's Norse Persian adventures, and the rise of new sects and creeds within the 'Ummah created both opportunities and fault lines.

After some years, those fault lines led to tragedies. With his fatalistic and cynical nature, and his penchant for late nights, revelry, and heresy, Khayyam didn't practice just his intellectual sparring - increasingly, he had to practice with the blade as well, fending off the attacks of angry guards, enraged imams, and aggrieved husbands. Nearly 15 years his senior, Dorothea was a politically savvy operator and a devoted wife to the young scholar Khayyam - while bearing him four sons - she understood the ways of men and the world and didn't mind most of his eccentricities.

Disaster struck, however, when Khayyam met a young, beautiful, and whip-smart young bride by the name of Shirin, the wife of a minor Khazar noble. After a long festival week in which Omar and Shirin dined on nothing but pomegranates, wine and each other, they eloped and fled by sea, arguing all the while about whether the soul had a physical component.

Omar and Shirin's love was genuine, as was his devotion to his first wife Dorothea, but the two got on as oil and water. Shirin's deceptive and paranoid nature led her to see slights and plots at every turn, while Dorothea could not forgive her husband for finding a younger woman who rivaled not only her beauty, but her intellectual aspirations. On a journey to meet the new Norse King of Persia - a lad of just 9, who inherited after one claimant to the throne executed the previous king by blood eagle - the bickering and tensions came to a head as Dorothea and Shirin fiercely debated whether women had more rights and responsibilities under Norse or Islamic tradition.

During a hunt, Shirin set a snare that snapped Dorothea's leg with a bloody crack, then fired an arrow from atop the nearby hillock. Rushing to her fellow wife's side, she cried loudly for help, but even as Omar and his companions came running, remorse flooded through her. They found her sobbing and frantically trying to pull the arrow from Dorothea's still pulsating throat, her ice-blue eyes fixed on the young Khazar, tears and blood running down her cheeks.

Omar carried a nearly senseless Shirin back to the tents, but the tragedy - as so many do - ground on with the cold indifference of the tides. Within a fortnight Shirin would step out of her tent, walk quietly to the horselines, saddle her favorite mare...and, by all accounts, fall cold and dead at its feet, a bare, bloodless knife in one hand and a blank piece of parchment in the other. It was never discovered what she intended with these tools, or the mare - she simply died, some said of a broken heart, others of her own implacable nature.

The loss of both wives in a single week brought a cold, mercenary side out in Haytham, who turned ever more from intellectual pursuits to warlike ones. Blaming religious dogma and strife, social constructions, and his own foolishness alike, he increasingly found himself drawn to the pure, violent zealotry of the Azariqas whom Haytham had brought to Merv. His band of "Truthseekers" became less a troupe of scholars and more army of the disaffected and the outcast, their ranks swelled by soldiers fleeing the collapse of the Norse Persian kingdom and political conflict in Egypt and India. He married twice more, including a political alliance to Sultana Sophia*, the sister and heir to Bardas' Sultanate of Khorasan after his death.

* Game/historical note: a key thing to remember with the Azariqas is that they are one of the only Muslim sects that, at least in CK3, to practice gender equality and with 4 spouses on both, things get wonky FAST. No, I don't think this is particularly historical)

In the year 1111, after helping Sophia put down a revolt, Omar marched his men to the shores of the Tigris and before a growing crowd of pilgrims and peasants, proclaimed a new, radical Imamate that would sweep away the cobwebs and corruption of the Shaybanids, now stewards of the old Abbasid regime. Within four years Khayyam had swept away the old regime and claimed land from the Euphrates to Mecca and held most of Islam's holiest sites, though Damascus remained under the Byzantine yoke and Cairo was held by a Coptic Christian dynasty of Nubian extraction.

Spending nights dashing off new treatises and pamphlets on the violent but egalitarian creed of the Azariqas, the new Imam Omar - as he called himself, or "the Avenger," as he was known to allies and foes alike" led a series of successful military campaigns against enemies foreign and domestic. His armies also routinely ventured to the defense of his personal and political ally and wife, Sophia, and he did much to help her retain her throne against both pretenders and peasant uprisings.

He was not just a warlike leader, however; forever the scholar, he saw the suffering caused by poverty and plague across his empire and sought to alleviate it through intensive building campaigns and the employment of a massive bureaucratic court filled with intellectuals, physicians, surgeons and mathematicians.

By the time of his death at 85, the Khayyam Imamate controlled all the land between Alexandria and Basra, Kurdistan to San'aa, and much of it followed Azariqa Islam; only on the high steppes or the far mountains of Yemen did Sunni faithful remain. The doctrines of equality between the sexes and the righteousness of spilling blood in political conflicts would lead to vast social upheavals across the realm, but politically, the Imamate would continue to thrive and expand, building hospices and places of learning in all its major urban centers and expanding new outposts in the Makran, Sicily, Sardinia and even the Moorish stronghold of Qurtubah.

In fact, it's in Qurtubah that we'll meet....

 

[StrategyGameEnthusiast]

* Game/historical note: a key thing to remember with the Azariqas is that they are one of the only Muslim sects that, at least in CK3, to practice gender equality and with 4 spouses on both, things get wonky FAST. No, I don't think this is particularly historical)

That isn't overpowered at all, you can't get easy alliances as a female ruler with that!

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

That isn't overpowered at all, you can't get easy alliances as a female ruler with that!

Oh, I definitely don't think it's OP; as you say it makes your daughters less effective alliance generators, and dynastic succession gets weird. You can get weird situations however like happened here, where Khayyam is the Sultana's second or third husband while being his second wife at times.

 

[jak7139]

That was a sad episode between Sharin and Dorothea. Omar just couldn't cope.

Spain looks fractured. A perfect place for many fun adventures!

 

[Chac1]

Thanks for this latest chapter. Interesting to see that Omar's grief propelled him into seizing his kingdom. This is keeping the world quite interesting.

 

[SaitoHawkeye]

Part 4.5: Political and Cultural Update
With all the hopping around between realms, characters, and dynasties I thought it might be interesting to get a quick update on the political, religious and cultural state of the world circa 1150, just about halfway through the game's timeline.

First off, a general overview:

As you can see, after Omar Khayyam's death the Khayyam emirate briefly passed to his son Omar II before being handed down to his eldest surviving daughter, Awa. The Byzantines are thriving, holding a slice of Sicily, North Africa, most of their de jure terrritory and a significant chunk of the Caucasus, the Holy Land, a fair bit of the clay north of the Danube. Administrative rule's been good to them!
Ghana is consolidating power in West Africa, the Mongolians are beginning to flex their power in the northeastern corner, and most of Northern and Western Europe is now firmly under the control of the Northmen. Let's take a closer look:

As we can see, the Sigurdr dynasty has a strong hold on Britannia, Germany and of course the empire of Scandinavia, and the Asatru Flykirate holds sway over the souls of England and Northern France + Germany as well as its home territories. However, the Fylkirate itself passed from Ivaring succesion to the main Sigurdr branch with the death of Haraldr I "Longshanks," whose children seemed to have created a cadet Sirgudr-Johnston dynasty. Catholicism remains strong in central and Southern Europe while Orthodoxy prevails under the Byzantine yoke..

Further South, Egypt is still dominated by a Coptic Christian faith spread by Nubian conquerors, while the Islamic world is largely Azariqa (under the Khayyam Imamate) with some Imami and Zayidi faith persisting in the Steppes and a few Ash'ari loyalists in the deep desert of Arabia. The Al-Haytham dynasty has split intwo, with the Northern half being held under the name of the Khorasan Sulanate and the Southern fraction bordering the Khayyams after losing some vassals to independence squabbles.

In the Mediterranean, a brutal giant from the Unrochinger dynasty of the Alps has spread Italian power across Tunisia and Algeria, while the Maghreb remains fairly stable. Spain, as usual, is a complete mess of Christian and Moorish kingdoms with no resolution in sight.

One interesting note is that while much of Spain and Europe is fractured politically, it is actually fairly unified dynastically; the Umayyads control most of Spain even if themselves are not one nation, while almost every Christian nation from Estonia to Burgundy is some flavor of Karling, with the exception of Pomerania and Poland.

The Chenopoulos family, meanwhile, has held control of Byzantium pretty steadily since the fall of the Makedons shortly after the 867 start date.

Culture remains an absolute mish-mash, though it's interesting that Britain remains staunchly Anglo-Saxon despite being Asatru and Spain is almost entirely Andalusian.

Anyway, I'll be posting the next narrative chapter soon but I thought this would be an interesting view of the proceedings!

 

[jak7139]

Very good background. Thank you!