I have just returned to AARland and stumbled into this masterpiece. Just finished reading the Prefaces. Excellent work!
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All the earth will fear at the mention of his name!
Where there's a whip, there's a way!Pretty much. Religious pluralism isn't exactly high on the priority list.
To the east be the glory and prestige, like Alexander, but hopefully not like Julian the Apostate!
Thank you SCORPIONMIRO! It's always nice to know that people aren't turned off from 23+ pages and text-heavy updates to take the time to read!
And a springboard into the second half of Volume II and Volume III!
At least with what's planned...
I feel somewhat slighted to announce that I’m putting this on hold, primarily due to an exhaustion of the time and writing this AAR demands. I think interest may have tampered off a bit, so I don’t think it is otherwise that egregious of me in putting on hold a project that has a lot of constant commentators.
Naturally, as I’m sure everyone knows who is following this, I have actual academic projects to attend, and a recent compendium of personal works ongoing, including the final editing and reviewing process of two papers I have written on Byzantine historiography and Byzantine iconography and symbolism. As a result, I have little desire to write “historical fiction” on a topic that I often find myself immersed in the literature thereof and writing about semi-professionally. In addition, I’ve lost myself in a flood of books and articles that I am using to compile another ongoing project that will be taking away much of my free time, presumably for the next year or so. And since I've expended the pre-written updates, I'm just not moved to spend the time to write the updates for this as we speak.
The game, is, or was, completed sometime in April. In effect, it’s just a matter of taking the time to finish writing the AAR. Hey, it took Edward Gibbon 13 years to complete his magisterial history, so I’m pretty sure I have him beat thus far! Plus, I need to revisit my French and Greek language competency for purposes of continuing post-graduate work, which, I’ll admit, I’m very rusty on and am not really looking forward too. And that’s probably my fault for not keeping these languages up to par with my Latin and German.
Thanks for understanding!
On an additional note, who is still actually interested in this? Because if I deem interest to be low, I'm not going to continue this due to ongoing commitment elsewhere, especially with the knowledge that only a few would like to see this continue to the end. The opportunity cost is otherwise not great enough for me to devote serious spare time to continue writing this project with only a small turnout.
I ask, again, largely because when I'm anticipating more availability, which projects on hold, or ongoing, I would devote such spare time in continuing or bringing back up to speed?
Adieu
I ask, again, largely because when I'm anticipating more availability, which projects on hold, or ongoing, I would devote such spare time in continuing or bringing back up to speed?
Adieu
I'm still very much interested in this, volks. I'm more into the Austria/USA AARs right now, but interest for me at least is still high.
I'm more into the Austria/USA AARs right now, but interest for me at least is still high.
I'm still interested in this aar, and I expect this will not change in the near future.
I would be interested in seeing this come back when you have time, but do what's best for your own time and sanity.
I can't believe I haven't commented here yet! Shame on me for lurking all this time. I agree with Idhrendur: trying to force an AAR when you aren't interested in doing it or can't find time for it is not the way to go. We'll be here when you get back, if you need to take a break.
By all means continue on, Ihaven't commented because I've been quite busy with family crisis after family crisis...
But I enjoy it and would like to see you complete it...but if you're getting exhausted you could always slow the pace down a bit more...that's just a suggestion, I know you write a lot and study a lot as a profession and to entertain us, so I would understand if your decision is to say no more.
Has been a great AAR though need to catch up to the last chapter...keep falling behind.
But I enjoy it and would like to see you complete it...but if you're getting exhausted you could always slow the pace down a bit more...that's just a suggestion, I know you write a lot and study a lot as a profession and to entertain us, so I would understand if your decision is to say no more.
Has been a great AAR though need to catch up to the last chapter...keep falling behind.
I haven't been able in the last weeks to make the comments this AAR deserves but I continue to be interested and I'd love if you continued it after pausing for a bit.
I can go either way on this. If you do decide to update again, that's great. If you decide not to, I understand.
I found this AAR a week or two ago and have been absolutely hooked since! While I'd love to see it continued, I don't blame you for wanting to focus on your studies, the fact that you've managed to write such a professional and detailed series of historical fiction on top of University is itself very impressive.
Why I thank you for such a nice complement! Yeah, unfortunately, as someone who is trying to build his credentials in preparation for obtaining a PhD in Late Antiquity/Medieval Studies, with a particular focus on the Late Roman Empire and the Byzantines, naturally working on 3 papers, 2 of which are long article-essays, take precedent over 'fun' hobbies. Frankly, having written 100 pages of Byzantine historical scholarship; with only 2 of the papers under review and the third still undergoing construction and editing. And, as you mentioned, on top of my historical and occasional work in political philosophy and meta ethics (I actually just submitted one such paper a week ago for review), I still have my regular studies as I'm working towards a M.A. in Theology and my M.A. Thesis. :ninja:
And then after all that is done, it's off to a graduate program in Late Antiquity/Medieval Studies! The joys of the next 10 years of my life!
Chapter XX
The Italian Wars was a seminal moment in the evolution of European warfare, as it marked the beginning of the decline of hand-to-hand combat with the ascendency of musketry and cannons. Although the majority of combatants would still, frequently, fight with swords, pikes, and spears, even arrows—a growing number of soldiers in the armies of Europe had begun to adopt firearms and use them en masse. While the Italian Wars, by the time of John’s involvement, had been raging for nearly 20 years between the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire and Valois France and her allies, namely the Republic of Venice for hegemony over Northern Italy, the House of Habsburg found a powerful and important ally in the House of Palaiologos and John’s ambitions to confront the Venetians for further domination of the eastern half of the Mediterranean, which remained a battlefield for three states seeking domination of the seas: Venice, Constantinople, and the Egyptian Mamluks.
The memory and stain of the stinging Fourth Crusade had never fully evaporated from the minds of the Italians or the Romans. Indeed, many of the great palaces and buildings in Venice were being donned with artifacts and architectural structures stolen during the rapture of the sublime city in 1204. Yet, the Romans themselves are not fully to be acquitted of this debacle that had befallen them. Naturally, civil war had prompted the Roman exile Alexios IV to seek Venetian aid as the Italians and other Europeans were answering the call for the crusade to recapture Jerusalem. Alexios had, in a fitting mark of being byzantine, organized the Venetians to allow him to recapture his throne and repay the Venetians for their help. They did so, and Alexios became emperor with the backing of the Venetian army at the gates of the city. However, he later renegaded on his promises and refused to pay the Europeans. Venetian conspirators, who had the most to lose, and now without the funds to travel to the Holy Lands, had Alexios murdered and the new emperor Alexios V was not any better. He too, refused to pay the Europeans and naturally, with a long list of grievances against the feeble princes of Constantinople, sacked the city and made away with some of the great treasures of the city—the “Horses of Saint Mark” and the Statue of the Tetrarchs being the most famous.
The Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs, the infamous statue commissioned by Diocletian to symbolize his reforms, taken from Constantinople in 1204, part of Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice.
For Emperor John, this was a stinging embarrassment to the Roman legacy, another chapter in the humiliation of; supposedly, the most civilized and cultivated people against the Barbarians from central Europe, another sacking of the eternal city for all intents and purposes. There was, of course, a more pragmatic means for the coming conflict. As Habsburg Austria and Valois France began to jockey for supremacy over Italy and the Upper Rhine, John found himself an ally to the Habsburgs while the most serene Republic was an ally to France—this might also allow for the final consummation of a renewed Roman eastern Mediterranean, although, Egypt still possessed the largest fleet in the world at the time. The constant struggle for shipping lanes had already sparked a brief struggle between Constantinople and Venice, and the inability of either side to score a decisive victory had both sides itching to claw one another apart. Lastly, several Greek islands that were properly seen as being part of the traditional lands of the Roman Empire were in the hands of the barbaric Italians.
In the manner of a chronological history of the Roman state, and of the emperor John X, you must forgive me by skipping forthright to the Italian Wars. In part, this era of war and reform is far more important to his being than his adventures in the near east between 1509-1515. Although I shall endeavor to cover the “New Alexander” and his spirit of adventurism and conquest in the hinterlands of Armenia, Northern Mesopotamia, and Persia, his thrust back to the west in the four year campaign of the Second Italian War is more important to the history of the Roman state, the narrative of this work, and the cosmic struggle between west and east. I should also bring forth the important realization that John, who was a much a warrior as he was a philosopher-king, had left a detailed account of his campaigns in some of his own private letters, but also from the writings of George Opsaras, John’s court historian after the death of Evagrius. His own account, The Late Period Empire, is the primary account of the “late period” empire by which I borrow from his great work.
Yet, it also comes to no one’s surprise that he sees his emperor in a divine light, so much in the tradition of Eusebius that one might be marred to march through his own love affair with his young emperor to find fact from myth. Even so, the Second Italian War, as detailed by Opsaras, is one of the only accounts remaining of the conflict in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Although the main fighting would be between Austria and France, principally fighting along the Upper Rhine and Northern Italy, the war itself was, as mentioned, the first major European conflict in which firearms were widely used.
This had important ramifications for the evolution of European warfare and culture, a new carnage that would fill the heart and soul of mankind to put to use the scientific revolution for nothing more than a more effective and deadly means to kill their fellow man. This would also mark the high watermark of John’s reign as emperor. As a Roman army would set out for Venice, besiege the city, surely as John and his forces rampaged through the city of canals he must have thought himself, properly perhaps, as the true vicar of Christ on earth. His subjects also, likely found him to be the incarnate God on the earth, the Second Coming of Christ as a warrior to slay the enemies of the divine empire. While such hyperbole is certainly reflective of the ignorance of the peasantry, some of whom did, as I have mentioned prior, view their emperor as the gatekeeper to the Garden of Eden until the return of Jesus of Nazareth, the Church never endorsed this fantastical view of the empire and divine cosmology ever since the publication of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei contra Paganos, the City of God Against the Pagans, interestingly enough, one of the first works of secularism in human history.[1]
For the first time since Belisarious, the eternal city—Rome, also felt the fear of the man who claimed to be the inheritor of the claims of Augustus. As a Roman army posed to march south, the Papal States, which had come under the thumb of the Valois kings of France, also had the nervous anxiousness of being the next target of John’s campaigns.
In late 1520, when conflict erupted in Europe, eventually bringing the Roman Empire into conflict with France, Venice, and their allies—Roman forces almost immediately began besieging Corfu, Naxos, and Crete. The outstretched Venetian forces, and navy, had little opportunity to stop the quick offensive of the Roman armies into the Venetian Greek colonies. On December 23, a joint Venetian-Aragonese squadron of 34 warships and 70 smaller vessels moved to relieve the siege of the isle of Crete. Demetrios Phocas, the Roman admiral, quickly maneuvered south from Thessaly to intercept the opposing squadron with 32 warships and 65 smaller vessels. Among the ships in the Romans possession was the new carrack, Hades, a massive ship armed with as many as 50 cannons.
Off the coast of Crete, a three day battle erupted. The “Miracle of Our Lady of Victory”, as the Romans would recall it, believed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them to proclaim their victory of the apostate Latins. After the three day battle, with a single day of ceasefire for Christmas, the Latin fleet retired after suffering heavy losses. 8 warships, including 4 carracks were lost, one of which was captured by a Roman galley in one of the most heroic events of the battle. The Roman galley, under the full broadside of an Aragonese galley, charged the ship, ramming her hull and sending her marines through the lower and upper decks of ship, eventually capturing the great naval prize. An additional 20 smaller ships were lost in the battle. The Romans by contrast, had lost only 11 smaller vessels and no proper warships, although about a dozen of the galley-arm was severely crippled in the fighting. With the Latin fleet crushed, the islands of Corfu, Naxos, and Crete would all fall by summer of 1521. The swift early victory allowed for John to reassemble the army, and prepare for his defense of Albania and afterward, his invasion up the Adriatic to the city of Venice itself.
The Battle off the Coast of Crete, as seen by the Roman soldiers (foreground) watching the unfolding naval battle (background).
[1] Secularism is not, as many people erroneously believe, "irreligion." Secularism, in philosophy, is the separation between the temporal (or material) realm and the possible ream of the divine. You can consult Dr. Charles Taylor's work, A Secular Age (2007), the most prolific and magisterial historical accounts of the evolution of secularism, Dr. James J. O'Donnell's commentary on Augustine's City of God, (those of you in the Historiography Group might recognize his name as the author of The Ruin of the Roman Empire) or Sayyid Qutb's 30 volume commentary on the Qur'an, In the Shade of the Qur'an, in which he explicitly voices his dissatisfaction with the "Judeo-Christian" tradition begetting secularism. In actuality, the first book of Genesis is the earliest secular text, since the Abrahamic God creates the temporal world apart from himself, contrasting with the Greco-Roman-Mesopotamian creation stories, in which the gods and creation are eternal. You can also consult James Hannom's God's Philosophers (2009) and Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (2012).
Chapter XX: The Italian Wars
The Italian Wars was a seminal moment in the evolution of European warfare, as it marked the beginning of the decline of hand-to-hand combat with the ascendency of musketry and cannons. Although the majority of combatants would still, frequently, fight with swords, pikes, and spears, even arrows—a growing number of soldiers in the armies of Europe had begun to adopt firearms and use them en masse. While the Italian Wars, by the time of John’s involvement, had been raging for nearly 20 years between the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire and Valois France and her allies, namely the Republic of Venice for hegemony over Northern Italy, the House of Habsburg found a powerful and important ally in the House of Palaiologos and John’s ambitions to confront the Venetians for further domination of the eastern half of the Mediterranean, which remained a battlefield for three states seeking domination of the seas: Venice, Constantinople, and the Egyptian Mamluks.
The memory and stain of the stinging Fourth Crusade had never fully evaporated from the minds of the Italians or the Romans. Indeed, many of the great palaces and buildings in Venice were being donned with artifacts and architectural structures stolen during the rapture of the sublime city in 1204. Yet, the Romans themselves are not fully to be acquitted of this debacle that had befallen them. Naturally, civil war had prompted the Roman exile Alexios IV to seek Venetian aid as the Italians and other Europeans were answering the call for the crusade to recapture Jerusalem. Alexios had, in a fitting mark of being byzantine, organized the Venetians to allow him to recapture his throne and repay the Venetians for their help. They did so, and Alexios became emperor with the backing of the Venetian army at the gates of the city. However, he later renegaded on his promises and refused to pay the Europeans. Venetian conspirators, who had the most to lose, and now without the funds to travel to the Holy Lands, had Alexios murdered and the new emperor Alexios V was not any better. He too, refused to pay the Europeans and naturally, with a long list of grievances against the feeble princes of Constantinople, sacked the city and made away with some of the great treasures of the city—the “Horses of Saint Mark” and the Statue of the Tetrarchs being the most famous.
The Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs, the infamous statue commissioned by Diocletian to symbolize his reforms, taken from Constantinople in 1204, part of Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice.
For Emperor John, this was a stinging embarrassment to the Roman legacy, another chapter in the humiliation of; supposedly, the most civilized and cultivated people against the Barbarians from central Europe, another sacking of the eternal city for all intents and purposes. There was, of course, a more pragmatic means for the coming conflict. As Habsburg Austria and Valois France began to jockey for supremacy over Italy and the Upper Rhine, John found himself an ally to the Habsburgs while the most serene Republic was an ally to France—this might also allow for the final consummation of a renewed Roman eastern Mediterranean, although, Egypt still possessed the largest fleet in the world at the time. The constant struggle for shipping lanes had already sparked a brief struggle between Constantinople and Venice, and the inability of either side to score a decisive victory had both sides itching to claw one another apart. Lastly, several Greek islands that were properly seen as being part of the traditional lands of the Roman Empire were in the hands of the barbaric Italians.
In the manner of a chronological history of the Roman state, and of the emperor John X, you must forgive me by skipping forthright to the Italian Wars. In part, this era of war and reform is far more important to his being than his adventures in the near east between 1509-1515. Although I shall endeavor to cover the “New Alexander” and his spirit of adventurism and conquest in the hinterlands of Armenia, Northern Mesopotamia, and Persia, his thrust back to the west in the four year campaign of the Second Italian War is more important to the history of the Roman state, the narrative of this work, and the cosmic struggle between west and east. I should also bring forth the important realization that John, who was a much a warrior as he was a philosopher-king, had left a detailed account of his campaigns in some of his own private letters, but also from the writings of George Opsaras, John’s court historian after the death of Evagrius. His own account, The Late Period Empire, is the primary account of the “late period” empire by which I borrow from his great work.
Yet, it also comes to no one’s surprise that he sees his emperor in a divine light, so much in the tradition of Eusebius that one might be marred to march through his own love affair with his young emperor to find fact from myth. Even so, the Second Italian War, as detailed by Opsaras, is one of the only accounts remaining of the conflict in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Although the main fighting would be between Austria and France, principally fighting along the Upper Rhine and Northern Italy, the war itself was, as mentioned, the first major European conflict in which firearms were widely used.
This had important ramifications for the evolution of European warfare and culture, a new carnage that would fill the heart and soul of mankind to put to use the scientific revolution for nothing more than a more effective and deadly means to kill their fellow man. This would also mark the high watermark of John’s reign as emperor. As a Roman army would set out for Venice, besiege the city, surely as John and his forces rampaged through the city of canals he must have thought himself, properly perhaps, as the true vicar of Christ on earth. His subjects also, likely found him to be the incarnate God on the earth, the Second Coming of Christ as a warrior to slay the enemies of the divine empire. While such hyperbole is certainly reflective of the ignorance of the peasantry, some of whom did, as I have mentioned prior, view their emperor as the gatekeeper to the Garden of Eden until the return of Jesus of Nazareth, the Church never endorsed this fantastical view of the empire and divine cosmology ever since the publication of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei contra Paganos, the City of God Against the Pagans, interestingly enough, one of the first works of secularism in human history.[1]
For the first time since Belisarious, the eternal city—Rome, also felt the fear of the man who claimed to be the inheritor of the claims of Augustus. As a Roman army posed to march south, the Papal States, which had come under the thumb of the Valois kings of France, also had the nervous anxiousness of being the next target of John’s campaigns.
In late 1520, when conflict erupted in Europe, eventually bringing the Roman Empire into conflict with France, Venice, and their allies—Roman forces almost immediately began besieging Corfu, Naxos, and Crete. The outstretched Venetian forces, and navy, had little opportunity to stop the quick offensive of the Roman armies into the Venetian Greek colonies. On December 23, a joint Venetian-Aragonese squadron of 34 warships and 70 smaller vessels moved to relieve the siege of the isle of Crete. Demetrios Phocas, the Roman admiral, quickly maneuvered south from Thessaly to intercept the opposing squadron with 32 warships and 65 smaller vessels. Among the ships in the Romans possession was the new carrack, Hades, a massive ship armed with as many as 50 cannons.
Off the coast of Crete, a three day battle erupted. The “Miracle of Our Lady of Victory”, as the Romans would recall it, believed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them to proclaim their victory of the apostate Latins. After the three day battle, with a single day of ceasefire for Christmas, the Latin fleet retired after suffering heavy losses. 8 warships, including 4 carracks were lost, one of which was captured by a Roman galley in one of the most heroic events of the battle. The Roman galley, under the full broadside of an Aragonese galley, charged the ship, ramming her hull and sending her marines through the lower and upper decks of ship, eventually capturing the great naval prize. An additional 20 smaller ships were lost in the battle. The Romans by contrast, had lost only 11 smaller vessels and no proper warships, although about a dozen of the galley-arm was severely crippled in the fighting. With the Latin fleet crushed, the islands of Corfu, Naxos, and Crete would all fall by summer of 1521. The swift early victory allowed for John to reassemble the army, and prepare for his defense of Albania and afterward, his invasion up the Adriatic to the city of Venice itself.
The Battle off the Coast of Crete, as seen by the Roman soldiers (foreground) watching the unfolding naval battle (background).
[1] Secularism is not, as many people erroneously believe, "irreligion." Secularism, in philosophy, is the separation between the temporal (or material) realm and the possible ream of the divine. You can consult Dr. Charles Taylor's work, A Secular Age (2007), the most prolific and magisterial historical accounts of the evolution of secularism, Dr. James J. O'Donnell's commentary on Augustine's City of God, (those of you in the Historiography Group might recognize his name as the author of The Ruin of the Roman Empire) or Sayyid Qutb's 30 volume commentary on the Qur'an, In the Shade of the Qur'an, in which he explicitly voices his dissatisfaction with the "Judeo-Christian" tradition begetting secularism. In actuality, the first book of Genesis is the earliest secular text, since the Abrahamic God creates the temporal world apart from himself, contrasting with the Greco-Roman-Mesopotamian creation stories, in which the gods and creation are eternal. You can also consult James Hannom's God's Philosophers (2009) and Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (2012).
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