Alfgeir I, the Chaste, Eirikrsson af Munsö - Part 2
Lived: 957-999
King of Egypt, Africa and Nubia: 961-999
King of Abyssinia: 973-999
Head of House af Munsö: 961-999
The period from 980 until the death of King Alfgeir was punctuated by a period of near constant warfare between the Arab Caliphate (during the period ruled by the Bukmalid dynasty – the Abbasids having been overthrown the previous decade) and the Christian of Byzantium and Egypt. These conflicts were to bring a final and complete end the dominance of Arab power in the Middle East that had reined for three centuries.
In 980 the Byzantines invaded Azerbaijan, calling upon Alfgeir to join them in war against the Muslims and receiving his unquestioning support. In the opening moves of the war the Arabs looked to strike first and strike hard by overwhelming the Byzantine border defences in Armenia – threatening Byzantine control over its Eastern provinces. This effectively abandoned Palestine to Egyptian occupation. However, in the Autumn of that first year of war a huge Arab army arrived from the depths of Persia and Mesopotamia and moved to annihilate the Egyptians – crushing an army of 15,000 men near Ascalon before pursuing it to its destruction along the Palestinian coastline. As the Arabs divided their army, some troops being needed further North, 20,000 Arabs began to cross the Sinai Desert – their destination was Egypt, a land that had already lost half its army in the preceding months.
The initial victories of the Arabs were to be reversed during the fateful spring and summer of 981. In the North the Byzantines brought up the full brunt of their war machine to force the Arabs from Armenia and then advance into the Caliphate’s territory itself. Meanwhile, in Egypt the Arabs faced heavy losses in the crossing of the Sinai Desert – allowed to advance deep into Egyptian territory they finally faced battle near Fustat in July 981 where they were badly mauled by Alfgeir. After the Battle of Memphis, the Arabs would never again threaten the Nile.
Following the crucial turning point of 981 the Arabs were largely broken, the Christians moved forward with Egyptian troops entering Yemen and Palestine and the Byzantines making strong advances – this despite the invasion of the Cumans in 983. At the same time as the Greeks faced the Cuman threat Alfgeir had a problem of his own as his vassal, the Muslim Jarl ruling in Algeria, rebelled against his rule. It would not be until after peace was signed in 984, with Azerbaijan passing over to the Byzantines, that Alfgeir was able to deal with this internal threat – the rebellion being pacified in 985 with the Jarl forcibly converted to Christianity, along with his entire household and commanded to spread the Gospel amongst his solidly Muslim Jarldom.
Alfgeir was long troubled by an internal problem that he believed directly threatened the stability and the moral authority of Egypt – that problem was the persistence of Norse Paganism. Although his predecessors had taken moves against the Pagan population (which as late as the latter 10th century was believed to still numbered in the low tens of thousands), Alfgeir would reach a new level of religious persecution. By the 980s few in the elite still held sympathy with Paganism and its continued existence, primarily amongst Norse soldiery and more recently arrived migrants from Scandinavia, was a black stain against them which reminded the local populace of their barbarous origins and prolonged the distrust of the locals towards their rulers. Alfgeir therefore sought to wipe out Paganism in Egypt once and for all. The practise was already illegal, but Alfgeir made it an offense punishable by either death or forced conversion to Christianity. Yet the militant policy of the state seemed to encourage the population into overenthusiasm – as the Arabs had advanced into Egypt in 981 the Nile Valley exploded into a series of pogroms directed against Pagans and suspected Pagans during which many thousands were killed and chaos reigned the cities. Following the end of the war Alfgeir looked to end the Pagan problem once and for all, calling for the expulsion of the Pagan population from Egypt.
Whilst a small community of Nordic Pagans would be tolerated in the Libyan Desert for another couple of decades, the majority of Pagans followed the man they called Sweyn the Wise into the Sinai Desert. The man known as the ‘Norse Moses’ had brought new life into Egypt’s Pagan community with an evangelist revival of the Norse faith, some 7,000 followed him into the Desert as the Pagan were expelled in 985. Eventually arriving at Eilat – a tiny port on the Eastern edge of the Sinai, surrounded by Desert. Sweyn’s followers expelled the local population and set about creating the longest lasting Pagan community in Egypt. Pagan Eilat would last undisturbed for almost two centuries and Egyptian governments simply lacked the will or the means to exert their authority in the Sinai.
In 986 the Arabs, taking advantage of the descent of Byzantium into Civil War, invaded Egypt with the aim of reconquering Abyssinia. This was the last great opportunity of the Arab Caliphate to restore itself to dominance in the region, with Byzantium out of action their could muster far more men than Egypt and felt confident that victory could be won. Alfgeir, learning from his mistakes in the previous war, played defensively with his armies in Egypt proper simply holding back just West of the Sinai – where they crushed an Arab army that had exhausted itself in crossing the Desert in 987, whilst in Abyssinia the war was a case of cat and mouse as the Egyptians avoided battle for years before finally amassing their forces to defeat the Arabs at Akordat. The following year the revolts sprang up across Syria and Mesopotamia as a large swathe of the Arab nobility looked to bring down the failed Bukmalids and restore the Abbasids to the Caliphate. With this instability the Arabs made peace, abandoning their last Abyssinian territories to fend for themselves, they were in turn gobbled up by Egypt later in the year.
The year 991 was one of crisis in Egypt due to the figure of Folki af Munsö, Folki was a scion of the ruling house, but had been shorn of any inheritance by virtue of being his father’s third son. Rather than accept this he had travelled to the West and raised a large army with promises of immense wealth and his supposed web of contacts amongst dissatisfied nobles within Egypt. He arrived near Damietta in 991 and proceeded to begin the siege of the city, hoping to use it as a base from where his war against Alfgeir could be waged. As the King gathered his armies Folki was struck down by an assassin just a couple of months after his arrival – with just a single blade Alfgeir had saved thousands of lives from a potentially brutal war as Folki’s host soon disbanded rather than face a far numerically superior Egyptian army.
In 992 the Byzantines brought to an end 364 years of Muslim rule over the Holy City of Jerusalem as they took advantage of the instability in the Arab Caliphate to seize Acre and a stretch of land extending to Jerusalem itself. The following year the Egyptians joined their Christian cousins in the dissection of Palestine as they seized the coastline running from Sinai up to Byzantine ruled Acre – thus protecting Jerusalem’s Western and Southern flanks. Meanwhile the two great Christian Empires’ unquenchable thirst for expansion was far from satisfied as the Byzantines conquered the rich island city of Venice and the Egyptians took advantage of Civil War in the Andalucian Caliphate to conquer the Balearic Islands as well as a small stretch of territory in Algeria.
As Alfgeir I reached the final days of his life he could look back upon his accomplishments with great satisfaction. More than any other, even the Byzantine Emperor, he had been the one who had broken the power of the Arab Caliphate – forcing it out of Africa and winning a great many victories that contributed greatly to its instability. He had banished Paganism to the wilderness, reaffirmed the alliance between Alexandria and Constantinople and eliminated all threats to his rule.
In 999 Alfgeir I died at the age of 41. The pious King, he had gone so far as to embrace celibacy in the final decade of his life and spent upwards of two hours each day in contemplative prayer, had been a strong believer in the millennial cult that claimed that the world would end in the year 1000. The fall of Jerusalem to the Byzantines in 992 made Alfgeir certain that the final defeat of Islam and Paganism would soon be won – thus bringing an end to the mortal world, nonetheless his death just prior to that year caused a folk panic as a clear sign that a rather more disastrous end than the King had imagined was coming. Eirikr IV therefore came to power in a strange situation in which a not insubstantial part of his people believed that they were living in the end of days.