As Themel prepared the Holy Mystery a messager burst into the church to announce that Muslim raiders had been spotted marching toward the village. 
Many came as mercenary warrior bands looking for employment. These were enrolled within the military and given regular pay & orders under the watchful eye of Byzantine officers. 
The men explained to the Emperor that they were Rhos, and subjects of a Khagan who ruled the river lands north of the Black Sea. Their way home had been blocked by steppe nomads and they asked for his help in traveling back. 
By the end of the 800s AD Charlemagne’s Empire had collapsed into a mess of squabbling warlords. Vikings overran England, besieged Paris. Magyars trampled over the fertile interior. Muslim raiders reached the walls of Rome itself. These attacks degraded central control further 
With most of the Caliphate’s fleet now charred flotsam in the Sea of Marmara, Leo III took advantage of his enemy’s weakness. In the same year of his victory at Constantinople a fleet was dispatched to Latakia, the main naval base of the Caliphate. 
In the decade of chaos following the battle of Manzikert, Byzantine rule in Anatolia was swept aside as the imperial government convulsed in coups & rebellions. The largely demilitarized population of W. Anatolia surrendered as resistance continued in the better-prepared East. 
“I rained destruction upon them. I scattered their corpses far and wide, filled the face of the desolate plain with their widespreading armies. With weapons I made their blood to flow down the valleys of the land. The plain was too small to let their bodies fall, the wide countryside was used up in burying them. With their bodies I spanned the Arantu as with a bridge. In that battle I took from them their chariots, their cavalry, their horses, broken to the yoke.”
Primarily found throughout the Fertile Crescent, tells rise from the flat floodplains like small mesas, distinct for their low sloping sides and flat tops. The first residents of these places lived in agricultural communities & towns at the same level as the surrounding area. 
A Norse Khagan ruling on the gateway to the steppes, ranging at the head of an armada across the open seas instead of the grass oceans of Eurasia seems too curious to be true & although still shrouded in mystery, the Rus Khaganate is not without precedence. 
In the 3rd Century BC, the dominant Carthaginians & the rising Roman Republic fought a series of wars for control of the Western Mediterranean. This titanic struggle, named The Punic Wars, spanned decades & set Rome on the path to superpower status. 
Jules Brunet was born in Alsace, France in 1838. His father was a veterinary doctor in the army. Jules followed in his father’s footsteps & joined the French Army in 1855, attending the prestigious Saint-Cyr & École Polytechnique. 
Luxurious, proud, untrue to his king, a hard master to the peasantry who paid him toll and tribute. Religious persecution was not rare, & Andalusia could count many martyrs; the accusation of having blasphemed the name of Mohammed always stirred the Moslem crowd to sudden cruelty 
In the preceding decades the armies of Islam had swept across North Africa meeting little resistance. The Amazigh population readily adopted this new faith, the Bedouin ethos meshing well with that of the hill tribes of the Atlas Mountains & herders of the scrublands. 
With the fading of Arab raids in the 10th century, the Byzantines conquered the Muslim Emirates near their borders. This was a strategic imperative to make the core of the empire safe & now possible with the breakdown of the Caliphate. 
People first came down from their troglodyte villages & resettled the productive plains. Some paleoenvironmental evidence is now emerging regarding this process in Cappadocia specifically. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
Toynbee mentions that many of those under the Assyrian yoke survived better than their erstwhile masters. Shelley’s Ozymandias really captures the desolate remains of this vanished empire. 
After crushing the Byzantines at Pliska, killing Emperor Nikephoros I, & famously turning his skull into a chalice, Khan Krum extended his Empire south into Byzantine territory. Integrating these Byzantines into the Bulgarian state was a key priority for the Khan. 
An earlier thread talked about how the Punic Wars kicked off a vicious cycle of slave labor, military professionalization, and the impoverishment of citizens but the economic model that made this possible could have also been a poisoned chalice from Carthage herself.
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