Part IIX: Theodoric ‘the Holy’
The court of Caliph Hafiz II (823-824) in a manuscript by Al-Wasiti (11th century)
834
The shadows around every corner of Al-Ukhaidir seemed to jump and spit like demons, clever ones that went inert when viewed directly and melted away into the dark. Many courtiers already had fled for safer estates, and it seemed only a matter of time before the royal family did the same. Guards patrolled every corridor in a strict and exacting schedule, and did far more than their due diligence, scanning the walls as they walked like a thief might be hiding in the setting between two stones. A great reward was offered to anyone who caught an assassin and could prove his deadly intent, and the royal guards had taken this bounty seriously. That, or the execution of Guard Captain Al-rahman had instilled their new diligence in them. Either way, carrot or stick, it was unlikely anyone could enter the fortress-palace unseen, nor could they expect to speak long without being heard.
This unsettling suspicion had extended outwards over all Iraq, though few outside of the Caliph and his most trusted retainers understood why, exactly, soldiers were guarding the roads and accosting travelers. The death of Caliph Hafiz II was, officially, an accident, and those responsible for it had already been caught and punished. It didn’t take a genius to know that this was not the case.
The only travellers that could move safely through the Caliphate were the soldiers themselves, who streamed in endless numbers towards Parthia. Among them was a man named Nesteryas, a dark-skinned Indo-Goth Hindu. In the Caliphate, however, he went by Ahmad. He had killed Caliph Hafiz by riddling him with arrows as he left Ukhaidir for a procession through Karbala. Of a party of six that had carried out the attack, Nesteryas was the only one left. Each night, he whispered the other assassins’ names to himself, and prayed to Yama to judge them fairly.
It was a long journey from Karbala to Herat, where Nesteryas was ostensibly headed with a band of mercenaries to join the Abbasid army. After the murder of the Caliph, he and two more of the assassins fled to Baghdad. The other three had attempted to flee west on horseback through the desert, but the word was that the Caliph’s Bedouins had ridden them down and killed them. Nesteryas and the other two conspirators hid in the Baghdad slums for a few days to devise a plan, but failed to do so before the Caliph’s men tracked them down. Nesteryas was lucky enough to have slipped out to a tavern just before, and when he returned to the Caliph’s men ransacking the hideout, he went back to the tavern and joined a mercenary officer there who was loudly recruiting prospects.
Nesteryas ingratiated himself with the mercenaries as best he could, and claimed to have come from western Ifriqya, where a different dialect was spoken, to explain his strangely-accented Arabic. He drank rarely despite his inclinations, and prayed towards Mecca with the other Muslims. It was another lucky stroke that mercenaries, generally a vulgar bunch, could not tell his play-acting of Islam from the real thing. Only when he was alone in the dead of night, when the others all slept, did Nesteryas pray to his true Gods, and especially Vishnu, to protect him and deliver him back to his benefactor. Sometimes during the long journey he felt a swell of pride at his part in defeating the Muslims in Herat, which would help to defeat them in Sindh and Punjab as well. Surely, he thought, the Gods smile on me.
It was early 835 when Nesteryas and the mercenaries arrived in Herat to find the Abbasids had already won.
835
The news about the loss of Parthia came while King Theodoric was campaigning in Kosala against his vassal Theodosios. Without the support of the Bactrians, Parthia could hardly put up a fight against the Abbasids, who outnumbered them nearly 10-to-1 with an invading force of 29,000 men to the Parthians’ 3,000. It was a disappointment, but Theodoric had lost nothing and gained a better understanding of the strength and stability of the Caliphate. Not only that, but he’d struck a blow against them as well by assassinating Hafiz II, a skilled ruler, replacing him as a rival with his son, who was competent at most.
In the Indo-Goth world, the usurpation of the Abbasid Empire by the Muhallabids had been a quiet happening in the war for Herat, of little relevance considering the vast holdings of the Muhallabids made them no weaker than their forebears. In the Islamic world, this was of great significance. Ifriqya had been brought under the sovereignty of the empire because of it, and the cause of the Shia muslims seemed all the more hopeless. If there was any competition in Europe for the most powerful empire of the day, the Muhallabid succession put an end to the debate.
With the power of the empire behind him, Jibril hardly needed to be a strategic genius to end the war in Parthia once and for all. After the conquest of Herat, the Caliph turned his eyes to the breakaway Indo-Goths in Zabulistan. Isolated from the rest of their kind, it seemed inevitable that they would fall to the rising might of the Arabs.
In Bactria, the Kosala rebellion had come to a head in the siege of the temple-compound of Bithor. Theodosios’ army had been swept from the field already, leaving the Bactrians free to attack the capital, where Theodosios and the Queen had hidden themselves away. Bithor made a poor fortress, and Theodoric’s men had overtaken it before the end of the year.
Theodosios was returned to Helios- that is, burned at the stake. Theodora would remain imprisoned for the rest of her life.
Peace reigned in Bactria once more, and King Theodoric turned his eyes towards religious matters. Two opposing schools of thought were forming in the Temple, and despite the more obvious reasons for Theodosios’ rebellion - his affair with the queen, for instance - some in the Temple thought that the conflicting doctrines of these schools had played a part. The Prometheans believed in a conservative orthodoxy according to the Hellenic ideals and cosmology that made up the foundation of the Olympian faith. They rejected any similarities with Hinduism or Buddhism as superficial, and desired a Diafotistis who was more active in the Temple and less active in worldly affairs. The more radical amongst them thought the Diafotistis should be barred from holding a landed title at all. Opposed to the Prometheans were the Dharmaoi, who argued Olympianism was an elevated faith that, while built upon Old Hellenism, encompassed most of the same ideas and beliefs as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Theodosios was a prominent Dharmaoi, and was said to have argued strongly that there should be no Diafotistis at all. Some of the Dharmaoi supported him in this, but they were generally less unified in thought than the Prometheans, being unified more in the spirit of doctrinal freedom and the importance of works in the material world than by any one specific tenet.
Considering his brashness in wading into the realm of theology around his accession, few in the Heirety were surprised that Theodoric sought to do so again. In 835 he assembled a council of Archeirei, philosophers, and notable Sarmanes (Buddhists, Jainists, Hindus, etc) at the old palace at Profiteya, for an inaugural dialogue called the Sokratea, to be held in the 2nd week of March every four years.
The audience for the dialogues themselves was restricted to the participants themselves and a select group of prominent nobles, priests, or otherwise important figures. The festival outside the dialogues was open to all, and drew visitors from all over the kingdom and outside it to celebrate and encourage rational debate.
Within the hall of the Sokration, the two Olympian camps split into three. The Prometheans were clearly the largest of those in the dialogue, followed by the Dharmaoi. A protest faction formed opposite them, calling themselves the Sarmanes, in honor of their friends who were not allowed to speak, and were silent in solidarity with them.
The Sokratea was a great success by Theodoric’s standards. As moderator, he had refused to take a side, but the work he undertook afterwards made it clear that he favored the Prometheans. Hesiod’s Works and Days was standardized and made part of the canon alongside the Legends. Theodoric broke with the Promethean Heierety on the topic of restricting translations, however. With the help of Kashmiri and Punjabi Heirei, designated official translations to be disseminated among those populations, as well as officially sanctioning Heirei to preach in those languages.
Near the end of the year, the rebellion in Sogdia drew to a close, as King Antoninos’ last keep fell to the rebels. Theodoric was declared king in a ceremony in early 836.
Save for an intervention into a rebellion in Parthia, Bactria saw an unprecedented decade of peace and stability starting in 836. King Theodoric’s efforts were focused on reigning in and centralizing the Heirety and balancing the power of the factions against each other. At the 839 Sokratea, to undercut the Prometheans and Dharmaoi, a minority group of Sarmanes were allowed to join the dialogue. They would persist as a faction in the Heirety in the years after, and advocated a greater degree of syncretism than the Dharmaoi. The two combined would succeed in petitioning Theodoric to canonize Menander I into the Legends. His conversion to Buddhism was not mentioned, but the Sarmanes still viewed it as a victory. The Prometheans harbored greater and greater fears about the syncretism creeping into the Temple, seemingly with Theodoric’s blessing, but there was little they could do about it. Outside of Bactria, the Temple was far less centralised. Believers in Hellas and Anatolia passively accepted the decrees of Theodoric, but there was little will to enforce or resist them. The passage of ideas along the Silk Road was easiest seen in Nikaea, where a new form of Tragedy, called a Heroiko, emerged in the early 840s. In a Heroiko play, a mythical hero from the west- Hellas, Anatolia, the Pontic Steppe - would be drawn to the East, where they would overcome a great challenge and find enlightenment, only to be stricken down because of a flaw in their character.
By 846, Theodoric was patronizing Heroikos in Delhi and Mathura. The wealth of Bactria had reached its greatest height yet, the treasury was full, new construction was underway throughout the royal quarters of Delhi and Profiteya, and the sons of rich and poor men alike grew anxious to strike out and take new lands for their own. Theodoric was averse to starting any more wars himself, and was keen to let his vassals conquer new lands for the kingdom in his stead, until an opportunity arose that was too good to miss.
In the summer of 846, the Muhallabid Caliphate erupted into a violent civil war. Despite the power in wealth and manpower held by the Caliph, the edges of the empire had been chipped away over the last two decades, including the reconquest of much of Iraq by the Shia. The victory over Parthia was one of the last great ones for the Arabs; in 838, Jabril had passed away from stress without any sons, leaving the throne to his brother Al-Mughirah. A drunkard and layabout, Mughirah could hardly be called incompetent; it was more accurate to say he was absent. The wealth and manpower available to him went to waste, until a coalition of vassals united to demand his cousin, King Khaireddin of Arabia and Persia, be granted the empire.
Even in the midst of the rebellion, in spite of his own vices and widely-reviled status, the Caliph could still call many thousands of men to his banners. But between him and the Parthian holdings was the entirety of defiant Persia. Supposing he marched his men hundreds of miles through hostile terrain, Mughirah would still have to defeat the Bactrians, whose commanders, drawn from the craftiest steppe mercenaries and descendants of great conquerors, were among the best in the world, and their men highly-motivated to retake Parthia for Olympos.
Theodoric felt that to dismiss such an opportunity would surely invite the ire of the Gods. In early 847, the peace was ended, and the army of Bactria marched once again to war.
Against Theodoric’s logic, Al-Mughirah sent nearly half of his forces to meet the Bactrians, splitting his men between his wars. Even together, the enemies of the Caliph were outnumbered, and the territories involved so vast, it was unlikely any side involved would defeat the other decisively and quickly. But King Theodoric had no intention of spending years bogged down in Parthia again, fighting off wave after wave of disciplined Arabic troops. If the alliance with Parthia were still active, the scales would be tipped, but Queen Adriane had passed in 840, leaving the throne to her son Hektorios, who declined a continuation of the alliance. He would have no interest in re-securing the other half of his kingdom under a different king. The steppe Goths, while still powerful, had divided into a dozen independent tribes, none of which could offer much aid even if they could march their host through Muhallabid-controlled Dihistan.
But there was still one empire in the world which could challenge the Muhallabids. In fact, their power and splendor was rumored to eclipse anything ever seen in Europe. Theodoric, controlling so long a stretch of the Silk Road as he did, had even re-established the relations with them his grandfather had founded half a century before. A delegation was dispatched shortly, with a favorable proposition, gold and trinkets, and a talented steward. A few months later, the delegates returned, their saddle bags emptied and refilled with white porcelain pottery, jade statuettes, and bolts of elegant silk. The steward had remained behind to serve as a court eunuch, and in his place, a princess was brought to Bactria.
The Tang Emperor couldn’t commit his forces over something so inconsequential to him as Parthia. But as part of the negotiations, he had gifted Theodoric a writ of favor to a mercenary company called the Fire Dragons. The 6,000 of them had joined the Bactrian delegation in Nepal and marched to Delhi with them, before joining the Bactrian forces marching west.
While Theodoric was politicking, Al-Mughirah’s forces had marched into western Sogdia, where they had presumed fortifications would be lighter, and attempted to siege the citadel of Urgench. Eventually they won, the but the constant strife in Sogdia under the Kappadokis had strengthened the resolve of the people against invaders. The Muhallabids had only just forced the surrender at Urgench in 848 when the Bactrians and their Chinese allies closed in, cornering them near the temple at Nukus. What followed was less a battle and more a slaughter.
Despite having had no contact with them, Theodoric’s agents in the Muhallabid court had been busy in the years since their success in killing Hafiz II. The crushing defeat at Nukus had provided the support they needed to finally engineer Al-Mugharid’s death as well.
His son, Mukhtar, inherited the Caliphate. Despite having not technically sanctioned the killing, King Theodoric was still widely named as the conspirator behind it. At first glance, it was a mistake to kill Jabril, because his death ended the rebellion against him. However, his death had sapped the will of the armies of Muhallabids to resist the Bactrians, and it seemed unlikely that Mukhtar would avoid a similar uprising against him before he came of age.
By November of 849, Muhallabid Parthia had fallen, and Mukhtar’s regent sued for peace. As part of his victory declaration in Delhi, and to make the kingdom easier to manage, he also crowned his brother Eugenios, from whom he had usurped a kingdom three decades before, as the new King of Sogdia.
This would be one of Theodoric’s last acts. In September of 850, his servants found Theodoric dead in his quarters, hands clutching at his chest in pain.
King Theodoric was dead. Long live King Alaricos!