- the Qurʼān, 27:16
Like I said in my previous Crusader Kings II post, there have been so many changes to the game since I last played that I need to figure it all out again. When I finished my teaching last fall, it felt like a good time to do just that. One of my lecture courses was on the Cold War, and I talked about the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. He reckoned himself part of a dynasty reaching all the way back to the Biblical King Solomon. How am I supposed to not think about Crusader Kings? I tried playing as a tribal ruler in Africa before, and it didn't go great. Maybe I should try being a successor of King Solomon?
I set the start date to 769, found the Solomonid King of Abyssinia, and got started. The goal in this game is going to be very simple: survive. In reality, the Solomonids made it to 1975, when Emperor Haile Selassie was murdered by communists. In Crusader Kings, this isn't very easy to do; the defensive advantages of the Ethiopian Highlands aren't that great in the game, and the Prophet's alleged command to his followers to leave the Abyssinians in peace is nowhere to be found. Allegedly, the Prophet sent his daughter Ruqayyah and her husband ʿUthmān, the future Rāšidūn caliph, to safety in Abyssinia when the Quraysh were still opposed to Islam, and in gratitude commanded his followers to respect the Abyssinians' Christian faith. In Crusader Kings at least, the Abbasid caliphate is already firmly established and not particularly well-disposed toward Abyssinia, and I'm not sure if there's a lot I can do to stop being swallowed up by them. I'm just going to have to hope they have better things to do - and that the Catholics invent crusades soon.
In the game, the Solomonids are miaphysites, which may well have been the case if they actually ruled as far back as then. I'm planning a series of lectures on the Crusades, and I think much of, if not all of the first one is going to have to be dedicated to Christology, because it's very difficult to understand the Middle East before the Crusades without understanding the Christological debates that split Christianity into so many different sects long before the east-west divide.
To make a long and complicated story very short, the issue is the physis (φύσις) or nature of Jesus. Early theologians believed that Jesus was both divine and human, but how did that work in practice? By the time the Gospel of John came to be written, Christianity was already being expressed in the language of Greek philosophy: in the beginning, there was the logos (λόγος). While this made Christianity a lot easier to sell in the Hellenic world, it also gave rise to several intractable theological problems. By associating Jesus's divinity with the Platonic ideal of the logos, it creates an issue with Jesus's actions and experiences because the logos resides in the perfect and unchanging realm of ideas. If he is the logos, then he must be perfect, and implicit in the Platonic definition of perfect is that a perfect thing cannot change. If Jesus cannot experience change, can he be said to have actually suffered on the cross? And if he didn't suffer, did he really redeem mankind?
The official opinion of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and indeed Anglican and most Protestant churches is duophysitism, as defined as the Council of Chalcedon in 451: Christ is fully human and fully divine, having two natures (hence duophysitism) which cannot be separated from each other. An opposing view was championed by Cyril of Alexandria, a complete villain and vicious antisemite, whose thugs murdered the philosopher Hypatia: Cyril maintained that Christ had only one nature, which united the divine and human. This position came to be called miaphysitism, and became the creed of the Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Coptic church of Egypt and the church of Ethiopia. Hence Crusader Kings II models miaphysitism as a branch of Christianity with a Coptic pope resident in Alexandria but mostly practiced in Abyssinia.
A more extreme formulation of the same idea is monophysitism, a doctrine that maintains Christ had only one nature, in which the divine and human were not united, but the divine nature of Christ effectively replaced some parts of the human nature. Apollinarism, named after Apollinaris of Laodicea, maintained that Jesus had a human nature, but his soul had been effectively replaced by his divinity. I've always thought of it as saying that Jesus was, in a sense, a man possessed by god. The even more extreme doctrine of Eutychianism maintains that Jesus's human nature was dissolved into his divinity, and therefore Jesus really only had a divine nature. Monophysitism is condemned as a heresy, and is modelled as a heresy of miaphysitism in Crusader Kings II.
In the first century or so of my campaign, monophysitism is key. It's apparently a popular heresy along the upper Nile, and we used this to our advantage early on: an independent province or duchy would experience a monophysite revolt, convert, and we'd declare holy war and conquer the heretics. After some heresy-driven consolidation, we ended up at a rough strategic balance at the uppermost reaches of the Nile on the game map: the miaphysite realms of Abyssinia, Makuria and Alodia, all miaphysite and all approximately as strong. We and the Makurians were under pressure from the Muslims to the north and east, the Alodians from the pagans to the west.
The first dramatic change to this balance was when Alodia converted to monophysitism, which led to several serious wars over the exact nature of the divine person of Christ. The second was when the Abbasids swallowed up almost half of Makuria and all of Alodia.
The Abbasid expansion made life a little bit more complicated for us. Luckily, the caliph's attention was elsewhere, but we still had to fight off several holy wars from minor Abbasid rulers. We defeated an invasion from Yemen, but the sultan of Egypt then invaded with a far superior force. Our only chance was to defeat his two armies separately, and we were rewarded with a tremendous stroke of luck.
Soon thereafter, King Rema Armah was succeeded by his son, but we don't talk about him.
King Rema Armah's grandson Kifle Solomonid died at the young age of 34; the stress of defending the kingdom and trying to keep Makuria standing got to him. He was succeeded by his son, King Benaim (859-921), and that's when things really started to get interesting.
In 879, the Abbasids exploded.
Muslim dynasties in Crusader Kings II can suffer from decadence. If their decadence gets high enough, they can get Howardianly invaded by a more virile nomad tribe, which usurps the dynasty and shatters their realm. In our case, the Abbasids were overthrown by the Muhallabids, and all of a sudden the map looks very different!
In the year 900, appropriately enough while we were still in the middle of a holy war, the Catholics invented crusading. Apparently the Umayyads of al-Andalus expanded far enough into France to trigger the crusades, which works for us.
Now that crusades are a thing, in 903 King Benaim founded the Miaphysite holy order, the Order of Saint Anthony. Apparently there was never any such chivalric order in Ethiopia, but many westerners thought it existed and it was in fact created by the Ethiopian monarchy in exile in the 1980s, so hey, why not. In the game, they provide a tremendously useful force of heavy cavalry that's available for free when defending against a holy war. This is an excellent investment for us, and I for one am delighted that the Umayyads were so interested in France.
Eventually, the Abbasids recovered the caliphate, but not their territories in Persia and beyond. King Benaim was able to take advantage of the chaos to conquer the Horn of Africa and even grab Socotra, where we founded a vassal merchant republic of our own.
With that additional income in the royal pockets, it was time to start construction on my first ever great work: the Great Library of Aksum. One of the (frankly ahistorical) downsides of starting in Abyssinia is the abysmally low technology level, and I feel like we need to do everything we can to change that. A Great University would be even better, but we don't have the tech for it, and anyway the Great Library was always my favorite wonder in Civilization.
**
As the story has it, the historical empire of Aksum was destroyed by Queen Judith of the Jewish kingdom of Semien. My Abyssinian kingdom was spared a Judith, but that's not to say they didn't try. Semien had tried to stab us in the back several times, launching a holy war when we were distracted somewhere else, but we'd managed to hold them off. After King Benaim's death, they made another attempt.
Instead of a Judith, they had a King Pirkoi, who was pretty much a military genius. When my idiot vassals decided to start a rebellion for more council power, Pirkoi launched a holy war and managed to conquer Aksum. The morons and their council cost us the heart of the kingdom. I had the ringleader executed, and damn near quit the whole game there and then.
Things looked great for King Pirkoi. He'd conquered Aksum, humiliated the dynasty of Solomon, and was now the proud owner of the Great Library of Aksum. Empires have been started with less, by lesser men. It would be a real shame if something happened to him.
A key part of the success of our plot was the enthusiastic participation of his wife. Pirkoi was succeeded by his son, who was still a child when we retook Aksum in a holy war. The second holy war saw an invasion of Semien itself, the capture of the young king, and the extinguishing of his kingdom.
While all this was going on, we also made an unusual addition to the royal treasury.
Ever since the Hermetic Order was founded, I've tried to get my kings to be members. The Learning boosts really help with developing technology, and I've also started a collection of magnum opuses. The stat bonuses they offer are simply too good to pass up.
Meanwhile, we've also worked to develop tolerance so we can advance the status of women in Abyssinia. While I like that you can work to change the gender laws in Crusader Kings II, I'm also disappointed that the default "traditional" model everywhere is maximum misogyny, when we don't actually know that was necessarily the case at all. Still, at least the game makes the most basic argument for gender equality: full status of women doubles the amount of available commanders.
In 974 we got a whole new kind of challenge: the plague. The royal family survived in seclusion, with food threatening to run out when the pandemic moved on, but the destruction was almost complete.
By the millenium, the Muhallabids had returned to the throne again, and their empire stretched from Spain to Afghanistan. In 1008, they won a jihad against Byzantium for the kingdom of Anatolia.
This is how things stood in 1024. Eastern Europe was dominated by the pagan realms of Serbia and Novgorod; Catholic Sweden had risen to a surprising stature with lands all the way down to the Adriatic; and a Nenets noble had founded the Holy Roman Empire in Italy. Dominating the Middle East and Africa is the Muhallabid empire.
Facing this massive Abbasid/Muhallabid blob, there's not a lot I can do except strengthen my realm, hope they stay busy elsewhere and bide my time. In other words, try to survive. We've almost made it to the starting date of the vanilla game, after all, with a strong kingdom, a flourishing dynasty and several great works to our name.
**
Finally, some thoughts.
In the past, I've tried to get my realm to primogeniture succession as fast as possible, but over this campaign I've actually become very fond of feudal elective succession. Of course, you need the right circumstances for it, but if you can manage to have at least most of the significant electors be from your dynasty, the risk of game over is very low, and I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. You can pick the person best suited to be king, instead of being saddled with potentially useless children, and since the electors will rarely pick minors, inconvenient regencies are very rare. When you can avoid the risk of the title passing to another dynasty, I feel like feudal elective is a really good system. Best of all, it has no technology requirements, so you can move straight from gavelkind to feudal elective.
It does come with some surprises, though. For instance, one duke who was elected king turned out to have founded a mercenary company, which is not something I'd have done in our current situation. I couldn't figure out how much money I was making out of it, and I wanted my troops back, and had a hell of a time catching the company between jobs so I could disband it. Seeing as how that seemed to make next to no difference to my economy, it didn't seem like a great deal. Although I did get the achievement!
Also, in these post-Monks and Mystics days, you're guaranteed at least one surprise Satanist per dynasty, and maybe more with feudal elective. Still, I think it's worth the occasional werewolf.
**
Next time: a new millenium.
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