Saint Eirikr II, the Pious, Björnsson af Munsö - Part 2
Lived: 879-946
King of Egypt: 910-946
King of Nubia: 910-946
King of Africa: 930-946
Head of House af Munsö: 910-946
As fear gripped the Nile following the Caliph’s declaration of war, Eirikr hurriedly called up every man who could hold a spear in Egypt in desperate hope that the Caliph could be stopped. Battle was avoided for as long as possible, but as the Abbasids threatened to enter Egypt Eirikr was forced into action – facing the Arabs at Fatama (far West of Sinai), where his outnumbered army was promptly brushed aside. From there the Arabs advanced into the Nile Delta and began to besiege the bastions of the Upper Nile, Eirikr again going on a recruiting drive so that he might muster enough men to drive the Arabs out of Egypt, just as his great grandfather had 50 years before.
Yet Egypt’s salvation came not from its people, nor from its King, but from the outbreak of war on the Eastern frontier of the Abbasid Caliphate – the Persians were invading. Faced with the prospect of a Persian army advancing through the West of Iran and into Mesopotamia, where Baghdad itself would be under threat, the Caliph panicked. Without the troops committed to Egypt the Persians could cause real devastation in the East of his realm, but any significant reduction could tip the balance of the conflict in favour of the Norse. The Arabs chose to settle and came to Eirikr with terms he had no choice but to accept – the price for peace was the Sinai Peninsula. Being amongst the poorest parts of the Kingdom, and one in which the Miaphysite presence was by far weakest, its loss did not unduly weaken the Kingdom. However, the value of the Sinai was much more obvious in its strategic dimension – it offered the owner a buffer zone between his holdings (for the Abbasids Palestine, for Egypt, the Nile Valley) and his enemy, the Arab triumph now left Egypt’s greatest foe perched only a short distance from its core lands.
With Egypt at its lowest ebb under Eirikr II the great Pope Simeon passed away, being succeeded by the first Coptic Pope of Norse heritage in Athansios III. The loss of Simeon was a personal one for the King and Egypt’s Christian community at the same time – for Eirikr he had been his most trusted advisors, upon whose ideas the entire course of the Kingdom’s history had been changed, and for the Coptic Christians he was their spiritual saviour who conquered the Paganism of the Norse through spiritual power alone.
Still mourning the death of Simeon, Eirikr decided to look to his cultural roots for an antidote for loss looked overseas in search of conquest. Invading the remnants of the Aghalabid Sultanate around Tunis in 929, he set sail from Alexandria, meeting up with an army raised in Tripolitania just south of the African capital, destroying the Muslim army, before swiftly capturing Tunis itself. The Aghalabids were soon forced into submission and Eirikr had himself crowned King of Africa in the recently captured city of Tunis – which soon rose to become Egypt’s second city after Alexandria. The Egyptians would later take advantage of instability on their Western border to complete the conquest of the Jarldom of Tunis with the captures of Medjerda (933) and Bizerta (937). It is interesting to note that whilst elsewhere the Norse had always looked to supplant the local Muslim nobility with a Norse (and since Eirikr’s ascension, Christian) one – at Medjerda the local Sheik accepted Egyptian authority, thus keeping his lands and his faith.
The first half of the 940s marks one of the great turning points in history. In 940 itself the Abbasids reached the pinnacle of their 10th century power with the conquest of Eastern Persia – giving them control over all Arabia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine and firmly establishing themselves as the single greatest power on earth. Then in 941 a major rebellion broke out in Abyssinia and the following year the Abbasids invaded Armenia.
This great conflict to further the Abbasid revival was to draw in Egypt, and establish a dynamic in the Middle East that would last for nearly a century. The reasons for Egypt’s entrance into the war and subsequent alliance with the Byzantines against the Arabs were both religious and geopolitical. The two main theatres of the war – Abyssinia and Armenia were the two places outside of Egypt with Churches in communion with the Coptic Church, making up the rest of Oriental Orthodoxy. On top of this the Byzantines themselves were obviously Christian brethren, who could not hope to stand up against the assault of the Arab Muslims without Egyptian aid. Beyond this the Abbasids were a very real and genuine threat to Egypt – encircling them from the South, East (and with their fellow Muslims lying to the West) whilst Byzantium simply was not. Moreover, defeat of Byzantium now risked tipping the balance of power permanently in the favour of the Arabs. Egypt had to act, and Eirikr was not one to shirk the greatest of stages.
The initial moves of the Egyptians were aggressive. With 2,500 sent South in aid of the Abyssinian Christian rebellion, the troops drawn from the Nile were sent to overrun the Sinai and then move on to besiege the coastal bastions of Palestine, at the same time troops from the West of Egypt were brought by ship towards the Levantine front. With minimal Arab resistance, all seemed to be going well for the Egyptians, that was until a large Abbasid army, 20,000 strong and battle hardened from the war in Armenia, began to make its way down the Palestinian coast.
The Egyptians withdrew back to Egypt itself, grouping all available troops together Eirikr rode out to meet the Arabs, having allowed them to wear themselves down whilst crossing the Sinai Deseret, not far from where he had been defeated a decade before. The Battle of Seyan was the most decisive of the war, and amongst the most celebrated in the history of the Egypto-Norse. As almost 20,000 men lay dead on the field at the battle’s end the remnants of the Arab army were chased into the desert and utterly annihilated. With the Egyptians once more advancing into Palestine, the rebellion in Abyssinia continuing to grow in strength and losses being suffered in Armenia the Arabs came to the negotiating table in the summer of 945.
The Peace of 945 saw the defeat of 927 corrected as the Sinai was returned to Egypt, meanwhile the Arabs agreed to surrender their claim to Armenia, but the Egyptians were also forced to agree to a withdrawal from Abyssinia that left the local rebellion to its fate (the Arabs spending 3 further years before finally defeating them). It is also notable that whilst the eyes of the world focussed Eastwardly in the tussle between the Muslims and Christians in the Middle East and Africa, the tiny Sheikdom of Medjerda had gone out to conquer the Emirate of Kabilya in Algeria, creating a large, Muslim, Jarldom on Egypt’s Western border. With that the core lands of the Egypto-Norse realm were now firmly under control – future expansions of the Kingdom would assume a character closer to appendages rather than becoming integral parts of the Kingdom in the same way that the African territories did.
At the height of his power in 946 Saint Eirikr II, the Pious, passed away at the grand old age of 66. He left behind a Christian Kingdom and one of four Great Powers in the Mediterranean world – along with the Abbasids of the Middle East, Byzantines and Umayyads of Al Andalus - although admittedly the weakest of the four. Although making the transition towards becoming a sedentary Empire, Egypt still maintained the Norse warrior spirit and thirst for conquest of old, the Traditionalist faction having transformed itself from a religious grouping into a sort of militarist lobby of the nobility. This faction would face a new great enemy as an effeminate, deeply Christian, King rose to power – Birger, the Monk.