Filip Eirikrsson af Munsö
Lived: 1671-1745
Emperor of Egypt: 1700-1745
Khagan of Bavaria: 1700-1745
Archduke of Modena: 1700-1722
Head of House af Munsö: 1700-1745
During the reign of Emperor Filip, whom the Filipine Islands themselves were named after, the af Munsö monarchy reached the absolute pinnacle of its power – its outward power reaching new heights whilst within Egypt itself the absolute monarchy grew ever stronger. Despite its magnificent appearance, the Egyptian Empire would eventually become engulfed in a series of conflicts starting from the 1720s that threaten the very existence of the Egypto-Norse realm.
The growth of the monarchy’s power continued unabated under Filip. By 1722 Egypt could boast the largest army on earth, the highest tax revenues of any state, limitless wealth from trade, agriculture and industry (primarily in Egypt proper and the Levantine Coast) and the most aggressively centralised regime on earth. This was the apex of absolutism, however the ideology of the regime would take a distinct new turn in the early 18th century as fears of internal dissent began to subside (despite the growing alienation of vast sections of the Empire’s population from the regime) the inward looking monarchy of Eirikr X’s began to be replaced by an ambition to place Egypt’s Imperial monarchy not merely at the head of its own Empire, but the entire world.
The chief theorist of this new ideology that began to assume dominance at court was the aristocratic philosopher Alfgeir Markusson af Negev-Munsö. Having witnessed the peaceful flourishing of Egyptian prosperity from Eirikr’s assumption of supreme power in the early 1670s Negev-Munsö saw a stark contrast with the rest of the world. He claimed that if the absolutist system functioning in Egypt could be expanded into a universal monarchy, encompassing the entire world, then war, instability and hardship would become a thing of the past. Egypt, combining agricultural riches, mercantile dominance and immense productive capacity, was seen to be uniquely positioned to assume the role of the universal monarchy.
Negev-Munsö’s ideas fascinated the Emperor and many of his leading courtiers, although not as bold as Negev-Munsö in their beliefs that world peace could be established, the court universal monarchists believed that if Egypt were able to exert hegemonic power over the Mediterranean it would be strong enough to prevent any future major conflict – Britain being unable to face the combined might of the Mediterranean world and no other power being able to compete with Egypt. With these ideas holding a strong grip at the Egyptian court at the Björn Palace, they would forever be in the thoughts of the government as they plunged Egypt into the cataclysmic Italian Wars.
The trigger that would set off the Italian Wars was the attempt of Filip to integrate the Archduchy of Modena into the Egyptian Empire in 1722, in a similar manner to how his father had brought the Principality of Urbino directly under Egyptian rule. The moves to bring Modena directly under Egyptian control were wildly unpopular across the country – a large rebellion breaking out in Tuscany in opposition to the move. With the rebels offering a serious threat to Egyptian power the Byzantines and British joined together to declare war upon Egypt – hoping to break their stranglehold over the Italian peninsula.
The combined forces of the Italian rebels, the Byzantines and the British initially proved far too much for Egyptian defences in Italy – the Egyptians quickly being sent into a rapid retreat into the extreme South of the peninsula, even as their armies predictably overran Anatolia. As Egypt looked to recruit an enormous army from its almost limitless population and transport it across the sea to Italy, the Empire’s fortunes took a distinctly positive turn on the international stage. The involvement of Britain, far more despised than Egypt by many, in a conflict of this scale had enticed both the Russian and the Shia into attacking the hated Northern Empire. From late 1723 the conflict turned in Egypt’s favour.
The war would last for well over a decade. After the turning point in 1723 the Egyptians began to make steady gains as the advanced towards the Alps whilst in the Mediterranean the British were forced to cede control in the face of the combined Shia-Egyptian navy. Following the fall of Constantinople in 1725 the Byzantines withdrew from the conflict – abandoning Sicily – allowing for a string of Egyptian victories over the straining British armies left defending Italy. The conflict took another interesting turn in 1727, with the confident Egyptians deciding to expand the conflict by occupying independent Sardinia and Corsica the Russians and Shia made a truce with the British with the Shia joining with their former enemy in declaring war on Egypt.
The entrance of the Shia into the conflict provided a lifeline for the British. Although the defeat of a large Shia army near Tripoli in early 1728 ensured that there would be no collapse, the shift of the Shia against Egypt changed the balance of power in the Mediterranean significantly – Egypt’s enemies threatening to cut Italy off from the larger part of the Empire. None the less, the exhaustion of the opposing armies in the Italian peninsula ensured that Egypt’s enemies were finally forced to accept a crushing peace treaty in 1731, bringing an end to the Italian Wars.
Egypt at its territorial peak following the signing of the Treaty of Barcelona in 1731
The Treaty of Barcelona guaranteed Egyptian rule over all of Italy – asserting Egypt’s domination of the Mediterranean world and going a long way towards raising the Empire to the hegemonic role sought by the universal monarchists. The Treaty also saw firm agreements between the British and Shia on the limits of their territorial power in the Americas with the British agreeing to confine themselves to the Eastern Half of North America.
For Egypt, victory had come at an extremely heavy cost. The state was all but bankrupt – the costs of war having overwhelmed public coffers. Naval blockade in the Mediterranean and rampant, British sponsored, piracy in the Indian Ocean had ravaged the bountiful Egyptian trade network – leaving its mercantile elite in a precarious position whilst also driving a large part of Nile and Levantine industry into oblivion. Egypt had also seen the disturbing force of Hakamidism spread rapidly – its anti-Absolutist politics and intense spiritualism making it highly attractive at a time when faith in the Emperor was being severely questioned.
For some, Egypt’s budgetary difficulties appeared to be the gravest threat Egyptian Absolutism had ever faced. It appeared that so long as the crown’s financial situation remained so hazardous it would be forced into looking to the Empire’s elites for ever greater levels of financial support – inevitably leading to the undermining of the absolute power of the monarchy and the gradual collapse of the political system that had ensured internal peace. Such a prospect was intolerable. Instead, Filip’s Chief Minister, Johan Johansson af Kolbar, proposed the most dramatic assertion of the monarchy’s power as a means of ridding the state of its fiscal woes and making clear the immovable nature of its power. Kolbar proposed a default on all loans. In 1739 the Imperial government announced that all the state’s debts were now null and void, such was the regime’s power that this move could not be prevented despite the anger of the regime’s main creditors – aristocratic individuals, powerful mercantile companies and ancient banking institutions. Although achieving Kolbar’s aims the default set of one of the world’s earliest and most catastrophic financial crises – as lenders who had been relying upon the repayment of their loans to the state in turn being forced into a bankruptcy several large trading companies, at least half of the country’s banking institutions and dozens of nobles. The devastation of the elite was widespread, and most importantly blamed squarely on the Imperial system.
If the situation in the Imperial core was concerning, in Italy things were desperate. The Italian Wars, as their title might suggest, saw the heaviest fighting take place in Italy – leaving a trail of desolation from North to South. Following the wars a series of famines wracked the peninsula, the damage done to agricultural infrastructure in the previous century playing a large part in leaving Italy in constant danger of poor harvests, carrying away a substantial part of the population. The 1739 default also hit Italy harder than any other region of the Egyptian Empire – the vast and powerful banking and mercantile networks that had played such a prominent role in Italian history from the Dark Ages being left on the brink of their final demise. Finally the Egyptian government had been involved in foolhardy attempts to break the long held independence of Latin Rite Orthodoxy.
Ever since the Egypto-Norse first began to make inroads into Italy in the 11th century the Italian converts to the Egyptian variant of Christianity had been allowed to retain a substantial level of autonomy. The Roman Patriarchate had remained powerful; the liturgical language was not Coptic but Latin – indeed, after the religious reform of the 15th century (which saw Greek Orthodoxy and Egyptian Oriental Orthodoxy fused together) the Latin Orthodox Church, under the Patriarch of Rome, had enjoyed equal and autonomous status alongside the Coptic Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Churches. Understandably, the efforts of the Egyptian Imperial government and the Alexandrine Papacy to effectively annex the Latin Orthodox Church – encouraging the adoption of Coptic as the liturgical language and forcing subservience to Alexandria – caused a major stir within the followers of Latin Rite Orthodoxy in Bavaria, Germany and most strikingly Italy.
Tensions within Italy came to a head in 1741 when Filip attempted to break the power of the Latin clergy once and for all by directly appointing the successor to the recently deceased Roman Patriarch – choosing a Bavarian, pro-Coptic reformer. The Italian clergy took this as a step too far –rejecting the Imperial candidate they instead proclaiming a new Pope in Milan (effectively announcing their independence from the Orthodox Communion entirely).
The clerical rebellion was soon supported on the ground by a vast army as anti-Egyptian fervour and a patriotic Italian sentiment aroused thousands to war. In the space of six months the rebels defeated a Bavarian army near Bergamo and captured a full 26,000 Egyptian soldiers in Naples bringing Egyptian power in Italy to the brink of collapse for the second time in twenty years.
With Filip’s authority cracking in Egypt, the historic Hakamid-Conciliarist tradition was roused in the East of the Empire with a coalition of Mesopotamian, Syrian and Arabian leaders organising the 2nd Basran League demanding religious renewal, the overthrow of Filip and the af Munsö dynasty and the election of a new King. Beating the drum of anti-Absolutism once more the 2nd Basran League quickly organised a large army under the command of Ibrahim ibn Eirikr af Rashid – the duality of Arabic and Egypto-Norse in his name a common feature of the Hakamid rejection of cultural norms amongst the elite.
The threats to Filip’s regime were hardly limited to the Italian and Hakamid-Conciliarist revolts. In the Nile valley itself, the very heart of the Empire, heavy handed efforts at forcible recruitment, and the exaction of a heavy war tax sparked off a class war as the peasantry rose in revolt. Finally, in East Africa a ‘King of Abyssinia’ proclaimed the region’s autonomy – a desire to avoid involvement in the coming Civil War being the primary motivations for the East African elite in breaking free.
Orange Line – Western Limit of 2nd Basran League Power 1742
Blue Line – Northern Border of ‘Kingdom of Abyssinia’
Yellow Dot – Italian Revolt
Brown Dot – Egyptian Peasant Revolt
As by the start of 1742 Filip was faced with a Civil War on an even grander scale than that faced by his father in the 1660s and 1670s. Although the threats were greater, so too were the resources possessed by the regime – all alternate sources of power to the Imperial crown having been massively curbed over the course of the rule of Filip and his father. Filip was therefore able to field much larger, better trained and equipped armies than his opponents. Through 1742 the Imperial armies were able to crush the peasant insurrection in Egypt proper, providing a much needed and substantial boost to the Emperor’s prestige, his armies then proceeding to defeat the Basran Leagues invasion of Palestine before pushing into Syria and the Hedjaz.
As the battles raged in the Old World a much quieter revolution took place in the East Indies. The rich provinces of the East Indies had a strong 17th century tradition of autonomy and a very substantial white settler population that strongly opposed the interference from the mainland that had typified the absolutist period. In 1743 a group of merchants and landholders formed an East Indian parliament in Jakarta, in part inspired by the Basran League; they proclaimed a Republic and overthrew the local governor. With the Egyptian military garrison in Java quickly swearing loyalty to the new Republic (recruited mostly from the settler population as it was) the Javan based Republic rapidly expanded. By the end of the year lands as far away as Australia had sworn loyalty to Jakarta whilst the East Indians were slowly expanding their influence Westward.
Back in the Middle East, Filip’s attempts to advance into the Hedjaz and Syria galvanised the Basran League – seeing the rebels become increasingly puritanical in their faith even as they mobilised ever larger numbers of men. By late 1743 Filip’s advance had been ground to a halt and his forces were already slowly retreating back to Palestine.
Then the Shia Caliphate, perhaps belatedly, made its entrance into the conflict. Seeing the Egyptian Empire about to shatter the Caliph did everything it could to ensure that Egypt would never again be a threat to the Shia. Occupying the Cape and New Egypt, Shia armies poured into North Africa and Italy where they supported anti-Imperial forces. As the Imperial armies attempted to divide their strength between fronts in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy they faced defeat everywhere. In 1745 Ibrahim ibn Eirikr af Rashid entered Cairo and shortly thereafter captured the Emperor who was attempting to regroup the remains of his armies near Alexandria.
In a conflict filled with iconic, world changing, moments the regicide of Emperor Filip Eirikrsson af Munsö was amongst the most visceral. Seeking to purge the poisonous legacy of Absolutism, the Emperor was declared a tyrant and sentenced to death – an action that, despite the despair of crowned heads across the world, would see the brutal conflict over the Egyptian Empire come to an end as anti-Basran forces quickly melted away following the death of their leader in 1745. Just a few months after Filip’s execution a peace treaty between the Basrans, Shia and various rebel groups would cement the post-af Munsö, post-Egypto-Norse order in the Mediterranean.
With the Shia establishing client states in New Egypt and the Cape, they directly annexed large parts of the Western Mediterranean and sponsored the creation of independent regimes in Italy and North Africa – strongly under their influence. In the East the Byzantines, late entrants into the conflict, annexed the long lusted over Greek speaking provinces of Rhodes, Crete and Achaia whilst the independence of Abyssinia was assured. With the Basran League unable and unwilling to challenge the East Indian Republic for the old colonial Empire the Hakamids instead settled for a guarantee of their control over Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria – establishing a realm known as ‘the Five Kingdoms’. With af Munsö rule in Egypt coming to an end after an astonishing 870 years the history of the Egypto-Norse was, disputably over.
In Africa, New Egypt and the Cape historic social structures remained in place whilst Egypto-Norse speaking elites continued to rule over Egypto-Norse speaking populations, even if these regimes were dominated by the Imperial control of the Shia.
In Italy all Egyptian heritage was explicitly rejected as a distinctively Italian nation, and Latin Church, came to rule over a peninsula that was also, quite clearly, within the Shia sphere of influence.
To the North, Bavaria actually retained an af Munsö monarch, Filip eldest son, Eirikr, becoming the new Khagan upon the death of his father in Egypt. However, the melting pot culture of Bavaria where Mongol-Tartaric, German, Greek, Egypto-Norse and Italian influences all met could hardly be regarded as anything more than an indirect successor to the Egypto-Norse legacy.
In Abyssinia and the East Indian Republic the ruling elites remained Egypto-Norse, yet they were racially, culturally and to varying degrees linguistically distinct. Although elsewhere dramatic changes in religion were taking place, in these states pre-Revolutionary Coptic Orthodoxy remained in place as there remained a great degree of continuity within society.
The Five Kingdoms appears the most obvious successor to the Egypto-Norse legacy – ruling over the heartland of the old Empire and retaining a vast Egypto-Norse speaking population - yet the new regime appeared to explicitly reject every aspect of the old regime. The Five Kingdoms appear a bizarre historical anomaly with historians unable to agree whether they represent a restoration of a ‘purer’ form of Early Medieval Feudalism or a proto-Republican form of quasi-democratic federalism. Each individual Kingdom (Egypt, Syria, Jerusalem, Mesopotamia and Arabia) maintained their own parliaments, laws, courts and governing institutions with the monarch, now elected by agreement of the five parliaments with Ibrahim ibn Eirikr af Rashid becoming the first king, retained executive power in balance with the localities. With the capital moved to Damascus, a city seen to be much closer to the centre of the new realm, as well as possessing a mixed Egypto-Norse, Arabic population, there were also deep reforms to religious life, the Hakamids effectively implementing a reformation of the Coptic Church within the Five Kingdoms. The Alexandrine Papacy and the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem were abolished outright (a Papacy in exile being born in Abyssinia) as every aspect of the ruling Church faced structural reform. The regime that emerged from 1740s so alien to any Egyptian regime that had preceded it that it is very difficult to see its history as anything other than a totally separate chapter in the region’s development.
The universal monarchists of early 18th century Egypt had, ironically, achieved their goal of creating a hegemonic power capable of dominating the Mediterranean world and standing against the British. But that power was the Shia Caliphate, and the regime they believed would usher in world peace had instead shattered the Egyptian Empire and brought an end to nine centuries of af Munsö rule over Egypt. The Serpents of the Nile had finally been banished, although the impact they had upon the region and the world more generally would never be forgotten.
End of Part Two
These updates were very fun to read, and I notice quite a bit of foreshadowing, which makes me really want to read on. 
